Friday, September 26, 2008

Cherniak keeps digging and digging....

An update from this morning... Lesley Hughes has been fired.

Cherniak denounces Liberal candidate and supports her dismissal, for which, incidentally, he is largely responsible. Hooray, a moment of integrity, the ship is righted, and my faith in politics restored, right? Wrong!!!!

As someone who saw Cherniak throw Ontario Liberal cabinet minister Michael Colle under the bus in order to spare McGuinty the embarrassment of running a "slush fund",  I'm not surprised to see him discard a Liberal candidate to suit his ulterior motive: Cherniak wants his shit to somehow end up sticking to Jack Layton. Let's read his "denouncement" carefully. 

My how quickly he refers to Lesley Hughes as "the former candidate". Just this morning Dion was defending her, then an about face, a she's dropped just like that.  But what we shouldn't miss here is that Cherniak ultimately wants to connect the condemnation of Leslie Hughes to a need to similarly condemn the leader of the NDP.  Thus, rather than denouncing her for  writing on the 9/11 Truth Conspiracy, he rebukes instead her support of Truth theorists.  This way, when, in the next sentence, he decries that "it is far more serious when the leader of the NDP encourages 9/11 truth conspiracy theorists than when one Liberal candidate has to be dropped because of it", the reader is meant NOT to see the enormous differences. Hughes didn't simply encourage or support this position, she adhered to, wrote about, and perpetuated the Conspiracy. Jack Layton refused to be rude and impolite to a Truther. At worst, Layton could be accused of pandering, which all politicians do. To attempt to think otherwise and to link his actions with those of Lesley Hughes is well... Cherniakian ("thoroughly scurrilous, desperate and disingenuous").  Hope Cherniak is proud of himself.

Of course, another issue would have been what an honest discussion might look like. Was Hughes wrong in everything she wrote? Was there prior intelligence that suggested an imminent attack? Is the "official" version all there is to say about 9/11? Certainly we know that governments never manipulate their electorate.  I mean who doesn't believe that Iraq was directly involved in 9/11 and that it was harboring loads of WMD's which required military intervention?

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