Wente Watch

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

This is the liberal hour

Wente's assorted snark on the Liberal leadership race.

It hardly seems worthwhile to bother refuting this column, since it has no real point. It is just a motley series of snide remarks. Nonetheless, as is usual for Wente, it takes a few liberties with the facts.

[Bob Rae's] real problem is that the people with the clearest memories of his time in office would rather vote for a purple-bottomed baboon. That may be true for conservatives like Wente, but for a Liberal, comparing Bob Rae with Mike Harris is really no contest. Rae is the NDP's version of Pierre Trudeau; deeply unpopular when he left office, but steadily rising in esteem afterward, even as his party tumbled under a hapless successor. Rae is now a leading candidate for the Liberal leadership, while Harris had to stay out of the 2004 Conservative leadership race.

[Stéphane Dion's] biggest problem is that he's French. And west of Montreal, that spells out N-O S-A-L-E. How soon we forget Jean Chrétien and Brian Mulroney. This kind of Central Canadian elitism is the very thing that infuriates Western Canadians.

It's time to draft Belinda.. Odd attitude for someone who wrote a column snarking at Belinda just last week.

2 Comments:

  • Could you post the entire column? I'm boycotting the Paper for their anti Quebec bias. Since you are criticizing it, it would be covered under the free dealing exception of the Copyright Act.

    As for your rebuttal, Brian Mulroney was an Anglo-Quebecker who spent most of his formative years in Nova Scotia.

    By Blogger Altavistagoogle, at October 04, 2006 7:00 a.m.  

  • I think the law allows only excerpts from the column, not the whole thing.

    You can read the column by searching Margaret Wente on Google News.

    Mulroney was indeed an anglophone of Irish ancestry, but he grew up in largely francophone Baie Comeau and became so assimilated that for the rest of his life both language groups thought of him as francophone. He attended high school in New Brunswick, university in Nova Scotia, and law school in Quebec City, then settled in Montreal.

    By Blogger Tyrone, at October 05, 2006 10:23 a.m.  

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