Mulroney" getting it off his Chin
Saw this little screed on the Windsor star today. I have never been a Mulroney fan, or Don Martin for that matter....both of them where too compromising of conservative principle and comfortable with status quo federal politics for my liking....However, Mulroney probably did the best he could with the motley "progressive" coalition he had but it was just not good enough to save Canada from the ravages of creeping statism and entrenched federal corruption. But they both get my thumbs up for this assessment of Ottawa and Ottawa ruling class society.
At any rate one of the repeated themes in "the Chin's" candid commentary in the unauthorized Newman book, was his distain for the sleaze and patronizing nepotism in Ottawa......according to Mulroney, Ottawa in the 80s was a cross between Mordor and Soddom steeped in biblical proportions of corruption..... some out takes:
Ottawa "is really a sick town," Mulroney says in Peter C. Newman's tape-all, tell-all book, The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister.
Here, nobody MPs lust at becoming cabinet somebodies to the exclusion of all other considerations. It's where great people are blocked from deserved promotion by geographic, gender, linguistic duality factors or, more likely, their failure to perform as elite-level sycophants.
It's a place where MP marriages go to die as long separations from family are compromised by the aphrodisiac of political power in a city dubbed the lonely ladies' capital of Canada.
"The longer you stay in Ottawa, the harder it is to write anything," he lamented. "The list of topics you can tackle which doesn't burn your contacts or hurt your friends gets shorter and shorter."
That's the bottled essence of Mulroney's rage. If the capital is a village, reporters were the village idiots during his reign. Everybody was friends with everybody else. Except him. He was the outsider. And so they set out to get him. Surely Conservative Leader Stephen Harper can empathize.
He may not see a great prime minister in the shaving mirror every morning, but Brian Mulroney had Ottawa figured out. It's a sick place.
Can't add to that. This has been my observation for years....now confirmed by the insiders. I think it is a feather in Mulroney's cap and probably the best legacy he could have, in the fact he did not fit into the clannish decadence and corruption of the Ottawa "A-list".
At any rate one of the repeated themes in "the Chin's" candid commentary in the unauthorized Newman book, was his distain for the sleaze and patronizing nepotism in Ottawa......according to Mulroney, Ottawa in the 80s was a cross between Mordor and Soddom steeped in biblical proportions of corruption..... some out takes:
Ottawa "is really a sick town," Mulroney says in Peter C. Newman's tape-all, tell-all book, The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister.
Here, nobody MPs lust at becoming cabinet somebodies to the exclusion of all other considerations. It's where great people are blocked from deserved promotion by geographic, gender, linguistic duality factors or, more likely, their failure to perform as elite-level sycophants.
It's a place where MP marriages go to die as long separations from family are compromised by the aphrodisiac of political power in a city dubbed the lonely ladies' capital of Canada.
"The longer you stay in Ottawa, the harder it is to write anything," he lamented. "The list of topics you can tackle which doesn't burn your contacts or hurt your friends gets shorter and shorter."
That's the bottled essence of Mulroney's rage. If the capital is a village, reporters were the village idiots during his reign. Everybody was friends with everybody else. Except him. He was the outsider. And so they set out to get him. Surely Conservative Leader Stephen Harper can empathize.
He may not see a great prime minister in the shaving mirror every morning, but Brian Mulroney had Ottawa figured out. It's a sick place.
Can't add to that. This has been my observation for years....now confirmed by the insiders. I think it is a feather in Mulroney's cap and probably the best legacy he could have, in the fact he did not fit into the clannish decadence and corruption of the Ottawa "A-list".
posted by W.L. Mackenzie Redux | 10:35 AM
5 Comments:
I guess the end game is that NOTHING HAS CHANGED... not even the voters now put the Libs at 40% in some polls. Let's file for divorce!
Well that poll smelled bad Debris...the pollster admitted he too a 20% undecided answer ans arbitrarily split it between the socialists and the Statists and the CPC got 7% of it....quite the contrived poll...the lying bastards even tried to make these eastern guina pigs belive the Libers polled 30% in Alberta !! ;-).....but I say full speed ahead anyway in preparation for an independet western Canadian nation if harper wins he only forstalls the inevitable half a decade...if the Liberals win, the western separation movement will be given a shove in the right direction.
Aizlynne: For those old enough to remember AGT (Alberta Government Telephones) The state run communications monopoly in conservative Alberta, you may be open to the idea that there have been all sorts of utopians and statists and sundry other rag-tag "progressive" left running under a conservative banner. Like him or Hate him Mulroney was the leader of a conservative coalition: fiscal and social conservatives from the west, compromised "progressives (liberal in all but finance) from the east and left wing sovereigntists from Quebec....to keep everyone in this motley coalition together and ultimately keep power from the liberals, much conservative-libertarianism policy was compromised. He got a trade deal passed but he surrendered to the left in his caucus when he allowed consumptive taxing (GST) and the baseline structure for the current gun control laws.
His administration was conflicted....but I do feel closer to Mulroney (as a westerner) than I ever did in read these revelations about how he didn't fit into the nepotistic decadent corrupt culture of Ottawa...he was an outsider and the liberals and their media fear what they can't control so they attacked him.
In many ways what Mulroney experienced is what Harper is going through....and we see that winning a federal election and forming a government is not the answer to the monolithic culture of elitist statism and corruption in Ottawa....it pervades the culture and the media....and this is why Harper and the CPC keep banging their head against a brick wall......the Ottawa elite ( political class, academia, media) are all a big tribe that feed from the public trough either directly or indirectly and any hint that some un connected outsider intends to clean up the patronage and corruption that keeps that trough full, will be attacked.
As I have stated many times on this form, the Ottawa/eastern media is part of the problem...a large part...they are co-opted into the Ottawa ruling class elite culture and are the main reason why corruption this large exists. Their meal ticket is attached to "Canada's natural patronage party" and they have run interference for their unsavory doings for better than 25 years.
The fact they hated Mulroney is a point for him
Maybe Ottawa needs to be hit with a "storm surge"...
Nothing wrong with the Conservatives.
Everything wrong with our media outlets!
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