If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.
Nikita Khrushchev to Richard Nixon
quoted by Rick Perlstein in
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
“Get at it, boys,” said Mr. Smith, “vote and keep on voting till they make you quit.”
Stephen Leacock
The Candidacy of Mr. Smith
in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
Canadians go to the polls today, from coast to coast to coast.
This is a limited offer: one vote per customer.
The next time the man on the white horse comes in, he may not be so benign. He could be a real racial hater or a divider of people.
Jim Squires, one-time spokesperson for Ross Perot.
Squires made the comment after the 1992 U.S. election, which showed that millions of Americans were ready to go crazy for a thin-skinned, TV-adept billionaire who promised to shake things up in Washington, D.C.
Quoted in The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism,
by Steve Kornacki (p. 209)
With politics around the world increasingly characterized by lies, fear, and anger, Frontline, on the U.S. PBS network, is looking at how Facebook has been used to drive voters apart.
John Doyle reviewed the show in the Globe and Mail and offers this observation:
At the core of the matter is one key discovery about social media that’s not new any more: Fear and anger create ‘greater engagement’ online and therefore more advertising value.
Think about that for a minute. Irrational garbage isn’t an unintended consequence of social media — it’s part of the business model.
The Tyee has published a handy pdf version of our look at the record of the British Columbia Liberal government.
You can download it here.
The Tyee has posted the final version of our look at 15 years of Liberal rule in British Columbia.
You can read the full story here.
The second part of the Tyee’s look at the British Columbia Liberal party in power is up.
The Tyee has just published the story below, which lists some of the more dubious elements of the British Columbia Liberal government’s record. I played a small part in creating it, along with David Beers and a bunch of other Tyee folks.
My campaign to have “shitgibbon” declared the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2017 is gaining momentum with a ground-breaking revelation in the search for the term’s origin.
Ben Zimmer reports that this delightful word was coined by the British writer David Quantick.
“I’m surprised and delighted that a word I made up in the 1980s to insult British indie rock stars has resurfaced in the context of 21st century US politics and the shitgibbon in the White House,” Quantick told Zimmer. “It’s bizarre and a very odd journey for a very silly word.”
From the irksome Mark E. Smith to a strange-haired delusionist strongman is indeed an odd journey. Let’s hope the Oxford folks are listening.
(By the way, I’m following Zimmer’s practice and dropping the hyphen from “shitgibbon.” As the Canadian Press Stylebook notes, “in North America, the tendency is to drop the hyphen as soon as a new compound becomes familiar.” I say it’s time we all got familiar with this exemplary bit of invective.)
. . . then you can at least be inventive.
U.S. politician Daylin Leach didn’t resort to cliché when he called President Donald Trump a “fascist, loofa-faced shit-gibbon.”
It’s early yet, but I’m hoping “shit-gibbon” becomes the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2017. Turns out the word has been applied to Trump before, notably by @MetalOllie, the Hamfisted Bun Vendor.
I have to get this mug.
Rannygazoo 