Go Johnny Go!

ObfuscationForTheNation
BigConVille


So, the Federal (anti)Minister of the Environment, John Baird, has manufactured a big steaming pile of CCRAP that, rumour has it, smells like Con Spirit.

And/or says something to the effect that any serious attempts by Canadians to meet our Kyoto targets will result in the death of Hockey, the Cooper-All comeback, and the resurgence of the early morning Zamboni ride to the Timbit Bin.

But, when you see and hear Mr. Baird reel off his codswallop for the sound-bite Minstrels who refuse to do the legwork to either validate or refute Baird's ludicrous claims, you may wish to remember the following......

And that is that Mr. Baird has pulled this type of stunt before.

The first time, he was the Minister in charge of 'Destroying-Social-Safety-Nets' for Mike Harris.

Back then Baird was running with spin-doctor Dan Miles (who now handles 'noLeftCoast' Jimmy Flaherty). At the time, Baird was instructed to read a script about an (un)Common Sense Revolution program in which people on the dole were being forced to pee in a bottle to allegedly prevent them from shooting their welfare cheques into their arms.

And when he was done blathering, Baird set the media shark trap by throwing handfuls of syringes onto the table in front of the rolling cameras.

Of course, the entire thing was bogus. Neither Miles, nor Baird, nor anyone else in the Harris government had any hard evidence whatsoever that a significant number of welfare recipients were shooting up their cheques.

But that didn't matter, and in fact it never matters, because all these people really want to do is bamboozle the media just long enough so that they can push their agenda for a newscycle or four.

Because once those initial cycles have passed they know no one will ever call them on it, regardless the actual facts.

Here's spin-master flash Miles, who recently spoke to the CBC's Ira Basin about his stratergy in such matters:

Basin: What about preparing the Minister for the questions he is going to be asked and other preparations for the rollout?

Miles: .......If I can use our drug treatment event as an example; on any given day we are competing with 100's of news items coming in from around the world especially in the world that we live in today where everything can come from satellite and online so competition is quite fierce to gain attention in the media and with the drug treatment even that we did, clearly it was a controversial policy and it was something that wanted to portray to get across to people of the importance, and we wanted to grab their attention, and that Is exactly what we did. It is something that to this day people are talking about. And minister Baird wondered how the conversation went, it was a Sunday morning if I recall correctly and I was in the office and he was on the phone, and he said we needed to do something with needles because this was obviously the instrument creating the problem. So we had a chat about it, and basically I said we cannot use needles it's just not feesable! Because of disease so we couldn't do it, so we used brand new hypodermic needles and I said you've got to paint the picture, you've got to reach your hands into the box and grab a 2 big handful of these needles and deliver your lines, deliver the message and then just drop them and they would scatter and flow all over the table. That is something to this day that people remember.

{snip}

Basin: And so you help the Minister craft the sound bites?

Miles: Yea, there is no question! The minister and all the ministers I've worked with they were all very effective at it and they recognized what a sound bite was and quite frankly it comes back to from my perspective, (making) the job of the journalist that much easier. That is my job, to make your job easier. And if I can make your job easier then you can look at our policy look at our event, look at what we do a little more favorably

{snip}

Basin: Going back to the drug policy announcement, did it come off the way you wanted it to?

Miles: That was reported in the wall street journal. It was reported on the national news right across the country on every channel. It made it in the newspaper! So you know the policy itself was a first it was controversial so obviously the policy was very controversial to journalists so we positioned in a way that certainly grabbed everybody.

Ooooh, baby!

The Wall Street Journal!

A rag whose editorial page has such a hate on for anything that actually helps people that I'm pretty sure it would resurrect Ronald Reagan's bogus 'Welfare Queen' and run pictures of her mummified corpse for seven days straight if it could.

That's some catch.

Thusly, Mr. Baird and his handlers have already demonstrated that they will say anything and do anything, including taking advantage of lazy journalists, to push their agenda.

So, given that, why should we believe anything they are sayin'* this time around?

Even if he is didn't throw a bushel full of globes on the floor and start stompin'* on 'em*.

'Cause* that's what he really did yesterday.

OK?

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*Just so you all know, when I start droppin' my G's and loppin' off the front end of words, that's when, like all BigCons everywhere 'round these here parts, I'm really seriouser than usualler.


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