11 June 2005

USS Connie-prise season ender (updated)

The Globe is reporting this morning that a recent poll for the Globe and CTV by The Strategic Counsel shows a further slide in Connie support and an especially noticeable increase in Stephen Harper's "negatives".

No surprise that; as noted here some time ago, it was inevitable that Harper would come under examination in the wake of his disastrous election "strategy". There has been some media comment on that in the past few days, unsurprisingly. Harper himself has been very quiet.

Meanwhile, CTV has got an interesting post about a blog called Buckets of Grewal. The name is a play on the similarity between the spelling of Grewal's name and that stuff people used to feed Oliver Twist.

A few things to notice:

1. Buckets has posted a slide show of the complete, revised transcripts of the conversations as posted to Grewal's site. BUT, and this is a big but, Buckets has highlighted all the additions and changes for most of the set. You can see now the extent of the deletions and omissions from the early versions.

This is one of the most damning aspects of this entire case - the shoddy presentation of evidence that leads to suspicion of tampering and withholding.

I had posted earlier about the wings flying off the Connie Express in an election. Well, it might just be that a few parts of the aircraft are starting to dislodge over this whole business as well.

2. Bucket's site is upsetting to the Connie bloggers. Well, actually, Grewal has been upsetting to them but like all good Connie paranoids they like to blame their own problems on other people. Hence, they have been attacking the media - Connies apparently only watch Fox News - and either the forensic experts who have questioned the validity of the taped versions or people like Buckets who have dissected Grewal with precision.

2.a Connie columnists like Coyne have been alarmingly silent. Face it, Andy, Gurmant is tainted. The whole thing was a fraud.

2.b Have a gander at this site: Blank out Times, written a la A.A. Milne. There's another site linked off the Bucket one put together by the same guys.

3. The CTV story makes it seem odd that bloggers fact-check. Lots of bloggers check their own facts and the facts of people they are debating and arguing with or about. They not all typically "Republicans" as the CTV story asserts, quoting Antonia Zerbisias from the Toronto broadsheet with a tabloid 'tude, The Star.

Anyone with some time on their hand can skim down through the few blogs linked from this site. Consider Wells, Spector, Coyne and Kinsella but then have a look at some of the others, especially the political stuff.

Then go have a look at Antonia's blog. Make your own judgement. Is media critic the new word for gossip columnist?

Anyway, Antonia should have been paying more attention over the past six months. This blog and others spent a lot of time discussing and debating facts related to the offshore deal, for example.

4. By contrast, take a wander through the Connie blog list. There are bits of everything here. Plus a lot of really angry, angry people. Some of them are as nasty a bunch as I have seen.

All of that anger and Grewal idiocy, my friends, is one of the reasons that Stephen Harper (likely in mint condition Jim Kirk uniform left over from his last Trekkie-Con) is hearing his chief engineer Peter "Scottie" MacKay on the USS Connie yelling "I canna hold 'er cap't'n."

And this time he ain't talking about the blonde.