The Eighteen Percent Solution...

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So.

It would appear that the object of the BC Liberal Party's recent smear campaign is rising faster than Ed Asner's helium balloon-assisted animatronic abode constructed from nothing but ones and zeros by the House of Pixar.

At least that's the story according to the pollsters over at Angus-Reid:

"Across British Columbia, 40 per cent of decided voters and leaners (+2 since March) say they will support the NDP candidate in their constituency in the next provincial election. The New Democrats had not been completely alone in first place since a survey conducted exactly one year ago, before the announcement of Gordon Campbell’s resignation as premier.

The governing BC Liberals are now second wit

h 31 per cent (-12). The BC Conservatives have clearly benefitted from the drop in support for the incumbent party, and have reached the highest level ever recorded in an Angus Reid Public Opinion poll (18%, +13). The BC Greens are fourth with eight per cent (-2)....

{snippety doo-dah}

....The BC Conservatives have increased their standing dramatically, particularly in the Southern Interior and the North. The Tories have attracted a large proportion of former BC Liberal supporters, effectively splitting the centre-right vote, despite the fact that many British Columbians either do not know John Cummins, or have not made up their minds about him..."

All of which says a whole lot about how flat-out wrong the pundits were when they kept telling us, over and over and over again, that the act of 'The Smear' itself was nothing more than a silly 'mistake' that just kept on keeping on after the (not)Premier decided to run away from the electorate earlier in the fall (all the way to Nixon's China?).

Thus, the landed gentry that makes up the majority* of our puffed-up pro-punditry just laughed it all off as dumb and dumber. As a result, they did not feel the need to make the BC Liberal Party braintrust pay for what was clearly an orchestrated, atrocious, duplicitous and misleading character assassination committed with malice aforethought.

Which, in my opinion at least, is no laughing matter because it is corrosive crap like that, especially when it is not called out for what it truly is, that is turning our public square into a place where cynicism, negativity and the politics of destruction reign supreme.

And then, of course, that same ostrich-plumed pro-punditry will, as they do after just about every election these days, chastise we the people for not engaging and voting in 2013.

****

Look.

Despite my diatribe above, I am not trying to say that 'The Smear' did not backfire and actually fill at least one of those tanks of helium that are now inflating all the pockets of John Cummins' hairshirt sweater-vest.

But I am saying that the lead-fingered Wizards behind the LINO's tattered curtain clearly had the trends and numbers to know that they were in big, big trouble on their far rightside weeks, if not months, ago.

Which means that most of the puffed-up pro-pundits that walk amongst us (and/or sit in the semi-private, hoi polloi-free SeaWest Lounge when they are forced to take the ferry instead of the Helijet across the waters) have long known about those numbers too, given what we know about how things really work 'round here.

And while I warily respect, and can see the reasoning/strategic POV, behind Ian Reid's analysis that Mr. Cummins' most excellent high-altitude adventure is grabbing votes from both the right and the left sides of the discontented voter spectrum, I do have to say that, maybe for the very first time ever, I actually kinda/sorta agree with one of the glibbest of the glib of the local 'lectronic media's Horshackian acolytes trying his best to make the Dean's list (far-west, junior-jumping-jack flash 'Pick-Me!' division) on this one....

OK?

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*There was one way outside media club outlier who did call out the Wizards at the time, and that was Mr. Willcocks....Also, Eleanor Gregory, speaking on Sean Holman's Public Eye radio show, undercut the blather of the Rabble-Rousing panel on the matter when she said, almost under her breath, that "sometimes dumb works"....

.