Stephen Harper:
A defiant Prime Minister Stephen Harper defended his embattled natural resources minister on Tuesday, dismissing the opposition's call for him to fire Lisa Raitt over controversial comments caught on tape as "cheap politics”.
Someone who is not Stephen Harper:
“This is a significant issue with tremendous impact on many families and women in this province. To try to play politics with it, I guess, speaks to the credibility of the members who are raising it in that fashion. It speaks to the depths they will reach to try to play cheap politics in this province," said
Wiseman.
Someone else who isn’t Stephen Harper:
I am not supporting this motion because it reeks of cheap politics. It is partisan politics of its worst.
Well, it isn’t really a similarity except that politicians who are in a tough spot, who may be trying to defend the indefensible, usually have nothing better to do than accuse someone of playing “cheap” politics with an issue.
If they don’t say that they accuse their political opponents of “political games” or “political opportunism” even though in the course of the scrum cum rant, the politician admitted they’d been sitting on information for the better part of the last year. [Hint: Check the scrum video for the bit about when government knew about the computer search for the word “breast”. Further hint: it wasn’t April 2009]
Condescension is the least effective form of political argument.
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