Monday, April 07, 2008

Maybe he should strangle someone

Taking a break from making fun of the cro-magnons who trawl this space with semi-literate comments, made from the safe anonymity of their double-wides fresh from drinking a bottle of Jack and beating their wives, this column by Aaron Wherry is instructive, particularly for those who, like us, are Dion fans.

He takes Valpy to task for his column which basically suggests that Dion has to become more of a politician--i.e. to jettison his policy-based approach, jettison exactly the reason why he was selected in favour of a more-American style focus on sound bites and dashing images.

It speaks in most part for itself, but one exchange deserves to be singled out.

Valpy wrote this drivel:

But it's Mr. Dion's comportment that is considered the black hole of his problems. Environics' Michael Adams puts it bluntly: “This man has to be more masculine. He has to think about how to be more masculine" ... And it is Stephen Harper, not Stéphane Dion, who is seen as having carved out the territory of the archetypal male.

[WTF? More "masculine"? We're talking about Prime Ministers of Canada, not army generals or football commentators or something. Do we really care? And is chubby Stephen Harper, who probably can't even grow a beard and hasn't seen his own dick over his belly in years, really all that masculine? Is this how we should pick our PM--based on what kind of a jock he is? The Americans tried that one and look how they ended up.]

Wherry responds:

Michael Adams is probably a very smart man. But this is likely the most dispiriting assessment of politics in Canada this century. If leadership has been reduced to a question of manhood, then we are even more silly a society than previously imagined. For a good chuckle, turn the question around. How big of a man do we really think Mr. Harper to be? Does anyone believe him to have ever thrown a punch in his life? Perhaps to settle this we should demand our prospective political leaders proactively disclose their penis size.

Awesome.

[For our American readers, the "maybe he should strangle someone" is in reference to this.]

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