Dearest Justin: Occupied Wellington Street

The main Ottawa artery may be unclogged, but the emergency still exists and there's much more to do before this disease can be removed from the body politic. I can't do much to help the beleaguered general fight the biggest boss battle of his career, but what little I can do is to send him moral support...

. . .

I haven't posted one of my open letters to the Prime Minister in awhile, but I just now sent an email to his office letting him know that I have his back. Times look really, really tough right now and they're only going to get tougher. For there are enemies at the gates, and a lot of them would like to go full Romanov on not only our man in Ottawa but his beautiful wife, loving mother, and adorable children. 

 

 

And there have been incidents like this in the past when even his staunchest supporters (even me!) have wondered, if maybe there are just too many "friendly sausage makers" who have made a political movement out of wanting to make mince meat out of the PM. If what (or who) doesn't kill a man really makes him stronger. If maybe the time is right for him to pack up the missus and the kiddies and head into exile for his own good. Let somebody else wear the rap and take the flak.

The answer so far: Not a chance.

See, that's not a man who's thinking of hanging up the gloves anytime soon. That's a power walk of determination, dammit, and not one of "resignation" (in more than one sense of the word) let alone shame. That's a man who knows what he's up against and what's circling around him. That's also a man who shows no signs of giving up but is only even more hell-bent on doubling down.

So I sent him some fan mail, some war correspondence, as he heads to work to fight another day.

To fight the forces of evil, as he once told his own hero Barack Obama, with a smile on his face.

And this is what I said to encourage the happy warrior to keep fighting until the good guys win.

Dear Prime Minister Trudeau:

I have written to you on a number of occasions expressing my support during difficult times for you and your government. At present, the siege of your country by the so-called "Freedom Convoy" (or, more fittingly, "Ottawa Occupation") is probably the most troubling situation that you and your team have ever dealt with during your time in office. As an American, I am sending not only my support but my sincerest apologies for my country's involvement in this attack upon one of our closest allies. Canada is a friend, and Canadians are a peaceful people who do not deserve this.

I recall I had written to you in the past, most recently at the peak of the outrage coming from opposition parties and media pundits over the (ridiculously overblown) WE Charity saga. Around that same time, an unhinged person poisoned by conspiracy theories -- much of it coming from the discourse surrounding these kind of manufactured political controversies -- had violently breached the security at your home on the grounds of Rideau Hall in Ottawa. At that time, as the saga dragged on, and the level of artificially-generated anger over an artificially-generated issue directed at you and your family did not seem to abate, I had written that, if only for the sake of you and your family's safety, it would be wise to consider leaving public office for a life outside the "swamp" of the political realm.

I still worry about your safety and well-being, Prime Minister, and that of your loved ones. I hope you, your children, and your wife Sophie, are feeling better after having had COVID-19. I hope your mother Margaret is in good spirits as well. But I trust that there are highly trained people keeping watch over you and your family to protect them. And even though times are very, very chaotic right now -- in fact, *because* they are very, very chaotic right now, not just in Canada but globally, particularly with war brewing in Ukraine -- I want to say now that I hope you will stick around as PM for awhile longer and not leave the Liberal leadership to someone else.

I know there has been chatter in the media that a departure is imminent, but I hope those rumors are not true, and are merely the projected wishes of bored pundits looking for something to write about. Right now, Prime Minister, I truly believe you're the last hope we have in North America for the survival of liberal democracy. I know you said back in December after the election that you would be running for a fourth term, and I hope that is still the case. (I also hope, even more so, that you will win!)

Please don't leave, Prime Minister. It would be the ultimate capitulation to the demands of these terrorists. You've never been one to back down from a fight, and these dark forces need to be soundly defeated in a way that I know only you can. Canadians, and even some Americans, are putting their trust in you to keep the light of democracy alive as it slowly becomes extinguished throughout an ever-changing world.

Thank you for all that you've done so far and all you continue to do. I wish all the best to you and your family. I truly hope you'll read this message and that you'll keep fighting the good fight for many years to come.

I Stand With Trudeau. 

 

Cynics and trolls may call it a cliché or the mantra of a cult of personality, but none of that matters to me. So much so that I decided to completely tune out anyone who wishes to sow FUD in the capabilities of this man to demonstrate courage and leadership, amid unprecedented circumstances and outright sabotage from within.

I'm scared right now for the shape that the world is taking. Justin Trudeau may very well be incredibly worried about it all himself. But it hasn't stopped him and it won't stop him.

This is his fight song. This is our fight song. Our fight against an occupation of evil.

 

But I truly believe that he will defeat them... with a smile on his face.

Weekend Coffee Talk Feb. 18, 2022: Debate Me, Bro

Gather in for some good reading this President's Day weekend (hey, I'm American, remember?) as shit starts to finally go down at the Ottawa Occupation. Justin declares an emergency, and the cons need someone to call the waaaaambulance. An emergency if necessary, but not necessarily an emergency?

. . .

Be sure to tune into Pop-Up Video — er, the CPAC YouTube channel — to watch all the "heated" exchanges back and forth as the Emergencies Act comes up for debate. ICYMI: Our man in Ottawa really had no choice but to repeat the decaf version of the act his father invoked five decades earlier, but instead of soldiers in the streets, the harshest penalties are going to come from accountants in suits.

A commentary on the media: Much of the Canadian coverage has been meh to really bad as usual. Some has been an improvement. But the international coverage  has been abysmal, even worse than Canada's, and I'm really taken aback to see and to say that, because Canadian media

 

 

The Old Grey Lady ain't what she used to be; the Boston Globe is doing a wickid lousy jawb, and the Economist has really gone mask-off (in more ways that one). Fox News, of course, is stochastically stoking this chaos as usual and deserves to be banned (even despite the unintentional gallows-humour hilarity of Tucker Tyranny memes).

 

But there are some bright spots amid the muck.

• Justin Ling, freelancer, has been stellar on this file and deserves a maple Pulitzer when all this is said and done. Read his coverage at The Guardian and be sure to follow his latest updates on the birdie app.

• You're missing the best on-the-ground reporting with a healthy touch of snark if you're not following Caryma Sa'd.

• Want real-time video and in-depth analysis of the far-right's infiltration into so-called friendly Canada? Follow the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, Tony of Yellow Vests Exposed, Caroline Orr Bueno (one of very few Americans talking about the threat of the mainstreaming of the Canadian far right), and Kurt Phillips of the Anti-Racist Collective. For a NatSec perspective be sure to read Stephanie Carvin, Amarnath Amarasingham, Mubin Shaikh, Steve Saideman, and Jess Marin Davis.

• Judy Trinh and David Reevely are right now the two best sources for local Ottawa reporting.
  

• "There will be blood": A foreboding warning from John M. Smith, the son of the late human rights activist Harry Leslie Smith, at Harry's Last Stand.

• Amid chaos at the Ottawa city council and the resignation of the city's embattled police chief, here's the Star's Heather Mallick on the abject failures at the local level in Canada's national capital. Her characterization of the prime minister as someone continually let down by his faith in the decency of people is spot-on but also very sad.

• Also at the Star, contributor John Lorinc calls for the inevitable post-incident inquiry to encompass those localized failures, rather than just pointing fingers at the feds (who have the least responsibility in all of this and yet took the reins when no one else would do their job).

• In that same paper, EKOS pollster (and late-night Twitter DJ) Frank Graves and colleague Michael Valpy have a personality profile of Canada's own basket of deplorables and why, just like Trump's fanatics south of the 49th, as clownish and uncouth as they are, they still shouldn't be dismissed as a flash in the pan.

• Meanwhile, John Michael McGrath at TV Ontario joins the chorus excoriating Dougie Do-Wrong for abdicating responsibility and passing the buck-a-beer to the feds to protect his deplorable base in an election year.
  

• Aaron Wherry at CBC confirms that the Emergencies Act is no sledgehammer, but the government and its foes will still have to pick up the pieces of this mess in the aftermath. Well, no, it may not be a sledgehammer (in fact it's an instrument of surgical precision), but hopefully it'll be effective enough to clear out all the piss-poor Lloyd Dobler cosplayers blasting their boomboxes on Solsbury Parliament Hill. ("Dude! You must chill!")

• Finally, iPolitics has a take on how repellent is the pigeon, that famed doughnut courier of Nazi truck nuts nationwide. (How repellent is he? So repellent he now shares a viewpoint with Mahmoud Ahmadickhead, former dicktator of Iran.) Be sure to tune into Puerile Poilievre's still-in-the-works current affairs program, Covidiots in Convoys Getting Coffee.
  
  

Meanwhile, outside of Canada don't miss Foreign Affairs magazine sounding the alarm about the newly(?) emboldened "paranoid style of Canadian politics" (a nod to Richard Hofstadter's lament about the American tin foil psyche). Paul Mason at New Statesman argues that Justin Trudeau has both the opportunity and the obligation to turn this moment into a rallying cry to build a more robust social democracy that can withstand the onslaught of 21st-century fascism. Is he up to it? Just watch him.

By the way: Apparently in looking all of this up, I... broke Reddit. Ah well. Get better soon, Snoo.

Dribs and drabs:

 

The Conservative Party's defilement of Parliament as a Jerry Springer stage showcasing their bigotry, abject lying, and other bad behaviour continues. And with the leadership race gearing up and the pigeon all but assured a coronation, it's only going to get worse.

• On Wednesday, a lesbian Jewish MP, Melissa Lantsman, exploited her identity to accuse Justin Trudeau of being offensive by calling out her party for standing with those who wave swastika flags. Then she went and complained to Laura Ingraham, who hates gay people (including her own brother) and is most likely a Nazi. Wordle of the day is "kapo." Can you say "kapo"? I knew you could.
  

• On Thursday, Candice Bergen aka Murphy Brownshirt spewed racist venom at Jagmeet Singh, who is a dunce and a saboteur Bernie Bro but in no way deserves the kind of crap coming from, well, the CRAP coalition of Canada. This as certifiable subhuman and certified "convoy organizer" Pat King launches a vicious tirade on Facebook (where else?) against the hapless NDP leader, and was found to have made another tirade against Sikh truckers supposedly "taking over" at the expense of the Aryan disaster race. Gee, maybe this will cause Jagmeet to think twice about pushing the lie to his ignorant followers that the Liberals are just cons with red ties? 🤷
  

• More QAnonsense is sure to come, as the cons just can't seem to stop generating bloopers for the Liberal war room. House Leader Mark Holland has proposed three days of all-day debate (literally, from the crack of dawn until midnight) on the Emergencies Act, with a vote to be held Monday night.

Developments in the realm of absurdity:

• Elon Musk may be a mad scientist but he's also a moron. Justin Trudeau isn't Hitler. Full stop.

• Media outlets and everyday tweeps have begun parsing through the leaked donor database from "Christian" grifter website Give Send Go. For some reason, the hackers invoked uh, Frozen in the process of naming and shaming. (Oh, it's because their bank accounts are being frozen and it's time to let it go. Their grievances, and also... their cash.) Want to see if your MP or local neighbourhood sausage maker coughed up some loonies to fund terrorists? Have at it. Click here to read the phone book.

• From the cover of the Rolling Stone, we find a salute to the rowdy Ram Ranch Resistance, and the gay cowboy anthem ordinary folks are using to disrupt the covidiot convoy's line of communication. Wait a sec, wasn't there a movie about Roy Rogers in his sequin shirt shouting yippie kai yay over the CB radio? Gee, whodathunkit that the next sequel to Die Hard would be a campy reboot of Canadian Bacon?
  

• Those aren't pillows: Mike Lindell is involved for, uh, some reason. Ironically he wasn't able to bring his camera crew into Canada (or himself) because (wait for it...) there's a rule that says you have to be vaxxed to come over the border. He still wants to ship his crappy pillows to the truckers who plan on staying for the long haul, but this time he says he's going to ship them by... parachute. Dumbest revamp of the Berlin Air Lift ever.

• This man. Hero. Big Howard Beale vibes.

• The Bouncy Castle has fallen! Long live our King in the North for his siege upon the fortress! 

• "This is the beginning of the end for the CPC." Your tweets to St. Pierre's ears, man.
  

• This was never about mandates, you know that, right?

 

Some encouraging analysis on political winds and recent polling on the invocation of the Act and Canadians' disgust with Trumpism, from our friend Apollo Chow and an anonymous conversant:

 

 

In closing: Other than the convoy being cleared out (we hope), this promises to be a mostly uneventful weekend and rest of the month otherwise. I honestly don't think there's been anything else going on that this might have been a deliberately engineered distraction from. Or am I missing something........?

 

 

Weekend Coffee Talk, Feb. 5, 2022: Truck Around and Find Out

The weekly roundup is back! Talk amongst yourselves; I'll give you a topic. Schmucks in trucks, the return of the Fanta Menace, and... is that a helicopter hovering over that convoy? Also, check me out on Twitter @MsFuddleDuddle. I finally signed up for the bird app to fight against the incoming pigeon...

. . .

• Sandy Garossino pinpoints the dirty little secret of filthy lucre coming from the swamp encircling Mar-a-Lago, as Trump calls Trudeau a "far-left lunatic" (the NDP only wishes), the brave denizens of Ottawa file a lawsuit (just watch them!) and Go Fund Me tells the covidiots to go truck themselves. Read her top-notch analysis of MAGA infiltration in Canada, published in the National Observer.

• Security analysts Stephanie Carvin and Jess Marin Davis have more on how the covidiot convoy is being funded, and the Pandora's box of national security concerns that's been opened in this age of anonymous online grifting. Listen to a very smart discussion at the Intrepid Podcast.

• "What happened in Ottawa was an assault on democracy." And a classic example of a white tantrum being treated with kid gloves where a peaceful protest by marginalized peoples would face the battering ram. Read the perspective from Omar Aziz in The Globe & Mail.
  

• End of the road: Say goodbye to Dumbfuck O'Toole, who seemed poised to make an Olympic sport out of straddling a splintering fence. Now that he's been disqualified with so many wood chips in his rear end (and replaced for the time being with Canada's equivalent of Lauren Boebert), what does the Covidiot Convoy signal about where the GOP North is headed next? Read Stephanie Taylor's inside peek in the Toronto Star.
  

• Con Airheads: Send in the clowns and let the games begin, as the race to the bottom for the next Tory Trumpster to make a fool of himself on The Masked Singer has already begun. All eyes are on whether or not the cons go to their Skippy place, but could Masochist MacKay be making a dark horse bid from the wrong end of the horse? Get to the choppa and read Stephanie Levitz's preview of the gold-medal losers' competition in the Toronto Star.

• "Already, it looks like no Conservative will be able to challenge Pierre Poilievre." That may well be true, but the feathers flying will be fun to watch nonetheless. Read Campbell Clark's preview of the "Pigeons Are Liars" campaign, in The Globe & Mail.
  

• Conspiracy theorists are perpetually atwitter about Justin and Sophie Trudeau's personal life, but it's more likely that the shotgun marriage between the once Progressive Conservatives and the Rebel Alliance is a match made in hell, a 20-year unworkable relationship doomed to a fate of unreconcilable differences. What Peter MacKay brought together, let... uh, Peter MacKay set asunder? Anyway, read Thomas Walkom's take in the Toronto Star and even Terence Corcoran (from the con side) arguing for le divorce in the Financial Post.

• Susan Delacourt seems to finally be rousing the sleepy pundit bubble that there's a storm of far-right radicalism on the horizon, and the violent anti-Trudeau animus of last summer's election was a shot across the bow. Can Canada withstand the onslaught even as the supposedly "mainstream" Tories seek to embrace the MAGA disease? Read her take in the Toronto Star.

• Political scientist Steve Saideman has a pessimistic view of the direction the Tories, and Canadian political discourse in general, could end up taking, based upon his study of what he calls "outbidding" — that is, a dangerous game of one-upmanship among political extremists — in other countries. Read his warning at his blog, published before O'Toole went down in what is now being called the "Groundhog Day Massacre."

• Matt Gurney talks to a CPC "insider" on the slow-burning dumpster fire that eventually led O'Toole's "leadership" to blow up. Read yet another chapter on the civil war story at TV Ontario. 

• Living in a powder keg and giving off sparks: Another good read on the self-detonating pyrotechnics of the CPC, from Lawrence Martin at The Globe & Mail.
  

• Our good friend Ottlib has a rapid-fire series of recent blog posts on the Ottawa Occupation, the (local) political response to it from feckless mayor Jim Watson (and why the police should let them wear out their welcome rather than escalate, as irritating as it may be), the pathetic historical footnote that is (was) the tool man, and what needs to happen to the Tories in order to get some sense knocked into them (spoiler: a TKO from Trudeau). The latter may happen if the cons go to their Skippy place. Fingers crossed.
  

• Evan Scrimshaw's biting take on the crisis of conscience in the Conservative Party, and a bold prediction of what's to come of it (hopeful and reassuring, if you're a Liberal or, just, even a remotely decent person, therefore someone who doesn't want the cons to win). Read the best young gonzo journalist in Canada at Scrimshaw Unscripted.

• Clip of the week: As the Klanvoy continues its march of madness parading Nazi and Confederate flags and other hate symbols, the government continues its work — and a big part of their agenda is combatting those unacceptable expressions. The Liberals' Greg Fergus gave a powerful statement in the House on the impact of racist hatred masquerading as "freedom of speech." Shared by the PM on Twitter.
  

• Finally, this week's Cute Critter from Canadian Political Twitter. Bianca Butts, doggo baby of the Liberal Party of Canada's Svengali-in-exile. Bianca is tired of all the stupid people and just wants to catch some zeds.

Go Fund Me — er, Go Follow Me on the bird app!