“Isn’t that Brian Mulroney talking to some guy … Hey! Isn’t that one-a those Trudeaus?! Mulroney’s just another Trudeau lover! Like the Ottawa media elite!” Yadda-yadda… Below: The real Crazy Uncle Steve, Mr. Mulroney again, Heather Mallick. You can tell she’s a member of the urban Ottawa media elite because she’s wearing pearls!

VICTORIA, B.C.

You may think the Harper Tories are getting ready to do battle with the Liberals under Justin Trudeau (whom former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney just called “a potent package”) and the New Democrats under Thomas Mulcair (whom Mr. Mulroney called “the best Opposition leader since John Diefenbaker”), but if you do, you’d be mistaken.

Nope, at least according to the mail they constantly send their supporters, the Harper Cons getting ready to go to war with the media.

That’s the right, according to the stream of fund-raising emails the Tories send to The Base, the Libs and the Knee-Dips may be a bit of a problem, but the big one is that “the urban media elite are mobilizing against us.”

Reading this stuff makes it feel like your country is being run by your crazy Uncle Steve, the guy who brags he has an unregistered firearm hidden under the floorboards of every room in his house – “in case of burglars” – and says he’s ready to shoot back when the black drones from the United Nations manned by aliens start patrolling the airspace over his house. And he lives by himself, so there’s no one to give him his meds and lead him back to his room. Yeah, that Uncle Steve.

Except, you might argue, the Uncle Steve running the country, the one whose party functionaries and MPs send out these electronic epistles to the faithful, may be crazy like a fox.

Every third line or so in every one of those little e-pistles says something alone the lines of this: “chip in $5 and help us fight back and get our own positive record out.” (You know, like the 111,800 real jobs lost in Canada last month, which a compliant Statistics Canada managed to whittle down to one tenth that sum thanks to anemic job growth in the public sector and by counting the almost 87,000 people who chose, if you will, “self-employment.” Another 21,000 people didn’t even get counted any more because they’d given up and stopped looking for work.)

Who knows? By writing this I myself may get a dishonourable mention in a Conservative fund-raising email as an honourary member of the media elite – something for which the real media elite, which is Conservative to a man and woman, would never give a blogger credit. They’re certainly willing to strike back at individual journalists who fail to toe the Tory line. Case in point…

“Friend,” Fred DeLorey, the CPC’s “director of political operations” told me the other day in a note sent to thousands of others who clicked a link in a Tory Facebook ad, “this morning, I picked up a paper to read with my morning coffee. You won’t believe what I found inside. I discovered a 740-word column by the Toronto Star’s Heather Mallick, full of disgusting personal attacks on the Prime Minister. I won’t go into detail, but it included the word ‘sociopathic.’ Not even trying to hide her bias, Mallick ends her column hoping that when it comes to Conservative majority, ‘next year it will be over.’”

I think they threw in the bit about 740 words because that would sound like a lot to the Conservative Base. But, anyway … then came the first pitch for a $5 donation.

Holy Cow, Martha, better send five bucks to Mr. Harper right now!

Just for the record, in fairness or whatever to Ms. Mallick, here’s what she actually said: “Perhaps it was Harper’s dead sociopathic eyes or the way he campaigned with pre-selected audiences from behind a metal fence. No. It was when people started to think of his hair as a separate organ, like Dick Cheney’s heart which he basically kept in a pocket, a living pulsing thing that would halve, leap on you and clap both sides of your head if you poked it.”

This of course, prompted the usual withering response from the real media elite, the one that instructs its editorial boards to plump for Tories even when they’ve spent weeks deciding to do something else. Never mind that, though, back to Mr. DeLorey:

“How did the Liberal leader fare in her column, by contrast? It read like a heartsick teenager’s love letter: She swooned over his ‘intellect and wit’, his ‘good looks’, and the fact that he can really ‘wear a suit.’ Yes, it was thorough, hard-hitting journalism. If you ever had any doubt that the urban media elite are mobilizing against us, this ridiculous piece should end it.”

Actually, this sounds a bit like Mr. Mulroney, swooning over Mr. Trudeau: “He’s a young man, attractive, elected two or three times to the House, attractive wife, beautiful kids.” Maybe Mr. Mulroney’s now part of the urban Ottawa media elite now too, though! And you’ve got to admit – just sayin’ – Mr. Trudeau really can wear a suit!

Getting back to Mr. DeLorey’s come-on, this is where we find the second pitch for $5, which I particularly liked: “Let’s make sure that Mallick and her friends in the Liberal media elite have something to write about for four more years. Chip in $5 today …”

He concludes: “We’re up against the Liberals and the NDP in the next election, but we also have to fight an uphill battle against all their friends in the Ottawa media. Since we can’t count on fair coverage, we’re going to need to speak directly to voters. It’s not cheap, but it’s the only option.” This is followed by yet another pitch for five bucks.”

Other Tory emails ask for 25 bucks. “Unlike the Liberals, we don’t have the Ottawa media elite backing us,” said one such recent plea. “But we have something even better – our strong and supportive grassroots base – people like you and me, who understand that we’re better off with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and are willing to work together to make our country a better place.”

You get the picture.

Now, look, I hate to say this, but if you do have five bucks, there’s a better way to put them to use. Why not click on the donation button on the left-hand side of this page? Bloggers? We’re doing more than the Conservative Party ever will to bring the media elite to its knees!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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7 Comments

  1. Crazy Uncle Steve? I don’t think so. Hiding unregistered guns under the floorboards in one’s house might be considered eccentric by some, but in reality is simply a demonstration of an abiding belief in law and order. And Uncle Steve’s lab in the basement? Why, that’s all just innocent fun.

    But thanks, Dr. Dave, for working to keep law-abidin’ ordinary Canadians safe from the radical soshalist hordes, media or otherwise, that threaten the very fabrick of Canadian sosighity.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgJQvyngAeM

  2. “…like Dick Cheney’s heart which he basically kept in a pocket…”

    I think Mr. Cheney has to keep someone else’s heart in his pocket now since he had the transplant, or, as some would say, the heart installation, since you have to have a heart in the first place to have it replaced with another one. I wonder how he got to the top of the list for that one. Hmmmm…

    As for Mr. Mulroney’s dissing The Steve, it seems like he’s had a change of heart. (There’s all that talk about hearts again.)

    Ian Shelton from iPolitics quotes Mulroney from CBC’s Daybreak Montreal show:

    “I’ve said dozens of times that I think on the economic record alone, established by Prime Minister Harper and Jim Flaherty and now Mr. Oliver, the government should be re-elected with a majority just on the basis of the quite impressive way that they’ve handled the economy now for eight years.”

    I read that and the first thing that popped into my tired, cynical mind was, “Uh, oh. What nasty revelations to the public have the Cons threatened Mulroney with now?”.

    And then he praises Flaherty, although the Cons seem determined to go ahead with the income splitting thing that would give scads of tax money back to the people who already have lots while pretending to give tax money to ” Canadian families”, most of whom in this country would see precisely nothing or very little from this move. Flaherty himself, it one of his last hurrahs, rejected this measure:

    “It benefits some parts of the Canadian population a lot. And other parts of the Canadian population virtually not at all,” Mr. Flaherty said. Earlier, he had mused that the tax measure needed “a long, hard, analytical look” by experts “to see who it affects in this society and to what degree. Because [he wasn’t] sure that overall it benefits our society.”

    So much for sound economic stewardship by the Cons, unless you’re already rich of course, in which case you’ll just keep getting richer.

    Why do they need all those $5 cough-ups from the base? Don’t they already have enough? (I’m kidding. They never have enough.)

  3. I’m guessing the miniscule donations are to collect the last unmined contact. And besides, no self respecting Harperite would donate a small amount.

    Your$5 suggestion reminded me I’m trying to renumerate content creators. Especially ones with no middleman. So I just dropped you $10. That’s what the human mind does. I’m now better than the minimum amount donors. (A little better. Ha.)

  4. .. well, its not just your crazy Uncle ..
    Its that mysterious buddy of his, Ray Novak
    Some sort of tag team.. like minds, soul mates
    and the lately departed to Ol England, Nigel Wright
    another sort of soul mate, so disgraced that he now
    uh.. is in charge of investing the Canada Pension Fund
    I can’t wait… at this rate, Pam Wallin will run the CBC soon

  5. ow Uncle Steve has taken a keen interest in the Franklin expedition, personally announcing the discovery of one of the two long lost ships at a news conference in Ottawa, proclaiming it a “historic moment for Canada.”

    Apparently Steve is using it to bulk up his image as a defender of Ottawa’s claim to the Arctic. He described the Franklin expedition as laying the foundation for Canadian sovereignty in the region.

    According to the legend, when the Franklin expedition became trapped in the ice, the doomed crew salvaged everything they could off the ships, including a piano which they dragged across the frozen tundra until one by one they all died. For what reason nobody knows. You could say that piano helped lay the foundation of Canadian soverignity.

    It’s comforting to know the roots of our insanity run deep.

  6. Only in the neo-fascist fantasyland that is the HarperCon base could the Ottawa media be called “leftist”. Postmedia? Sun News? The Mop & Pail? Andrew Coyne, Bruce Anderson and Rex Murphy on the CBC? All corporatist in their orientation. Not all adhere to the Tea Party-lite ideology the HarperCons use for their fund-raising, but they are hardly leftist.

    What a load of equine excrement (which is slightly different in its linguistic connotations from its bovine equivalent).

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