Tories prove adept at passing the buck

by Warren Kinsella

It’s never the break-in. It’s always the cover-up. In politics, that Watergate-era aphorism has come to describe a well-established principle: Voters will often forgive the first sin. But they’ll rarely forgive repeated lies about the sin. The burgeoning Robocon scandal is a classic example of that. Had the Harper regime reacted to the first allegations of vote suppression with calm and clarity, they’d be in better shape right about now.

They’d be happier if they had simply said, “We are very concerned about what the media is reporting, and we pledge to co-operate with Elections Canada on their independent investigation.” Read more…

Sorry, robots didn’t highjack the election

by Ezra Levant

The NSM – ­that stands for the non-Sun Media – ­thinks robots stole the last election for Stephen Harper by calling up Liberals and using their robotic powers to convince them not to vote.

The NSM is caught up in this conspiracy theory. It’s become a mania. They’ve whipped each other up. It’s a study in the madness of crowds, of pack thinking.

It’s like the NSM’s other bizarre obsessions. Like the long-form census that the Tories made voluntary. Or the NSM’s obsession with unfounded rumours about our soldiers’ treatment of Taliban prisoners; or the fake freak out over a common parliamentary procedure called prorogation; or, more recently, the fake freak out over the right to have gay divorces in Canada for gay marriages performed in other countries.

What all these fake scandalettes have in common is the NSM deciding, all together, that they’ve found some Watergate moment that will make them heroes and bring down the hated Conservatives. So any facts that contradict their central theory are discarded. Read more…