We all know how powerful the President of the United States is. But I don’t know if we ever recognized just how powerful. Almost … dictatorial?
Don’t agree? Well, what other kind of leader can decide, with the stroke of an expensive pen, to ban immigrants from 14 countries, on the basis that they belong to a religion that he doesn’t care for. A dictator? Not too far from the truth, I say.
This week, Donald Trump was so busy signing “executive orders” that he must have had writer’s cramp. Literally with the stroke of a pen, he re-started the Keystone XL pipeline, started work on his nutty Mexican wall, and put a temporary halt to immigration from 14 countries. No discussion, no debate. He just puts pen to paper, and presto! It’s the law.
Trump has spent the better part of is first week as president sitting behind a desk and making executive orders about just about anything that pops into his head. I know this whole executive order thing has been around for a long time – since the beginning of the republic, apparently – but I don’t recall any president being so brazen, so cavalier about it. It’s shocking.
Trump wasn’t just signing executive orders. He spent much of the week having his flunkies claim that 3-5 million illegal votes were cast in the election, and that none of them went to him. This is a sign of a mentally ill person, a narcissist so obsessed with how people feel about him that he is concocting fanciful “facts” to explain why he didn’t win the popular vote. There is not one shred of evidence, not one, that illegal voting is a problem in the U.S. But in the alternative fact universe that Donald Trump resides in, anything is possible if you just believe it to be true.
Real news about fake news
“Fake news” is back in the news this week, with the real news that the Facebook and Google are working on ways to crack down on fake news. Too bad they didn’t think about this, oh, about three months ago.
Incredibly, the campaign manager of Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch admitted to Maclean’s magazine that he deliberately posted fake news in an effort to draw the ire of “left leaning” voters. Nick Kouvalis tweeted a list of “billions” of dollars Justin Trudeau’s government had supposedly given to international aid organizations, including $350 million to the designated terrorist group Hamas. Kouvalis admitted the information was false, and he posted it to “make the left go nuts”.
So we have the campaign manger of a supposedly legitimate Conservative campaign manager who has admitted in aiding and abetting lies. He seems almost proud of trying to make the “left go nuts”. How is the respectable, honest behaviour by a Conservative leadership candidate’s campaign manager? It’s not, of course. Spreading lies is essentially the same as lying, and if Kellie Leitch thinks its OK to spread lies, then she has no legitimacy as a candidate. Not that she has a lot right now, anyway; this week, she vowed to “drain the canal”, a steal from Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” promise.
In other leadership news
Wildrose leader Brian Jean dropped a bombshell on the PC leadership race this week. In an effort to undermine the campaign of Jason Kenney, who wants to merge the two conservative parties, Jean announced that if the Wildrose wants to merge with the PCs, he’s OK with that, and that’s he’ll run for the leadership of the new party. Meanwhile the PC field got even smaller with the resignation of Stephen Khan, an inconsequential ex-MLA who somehow convinced himself he could lead the party. Khan cited “vitriol, anger and division” for this quitting the race, avoiding the obvious problem that he has no chance of defeating the Kenney juggernaut. That leaves just Kenney, Richard Starke and some guy named Byron Nelson in the race; there were six candidates to begin. As bad as the PC leadership race has been, it still beats the federal NDP race, which as of this writing has exactly zero candidates, with their convention in October.
RIP
Mary Tyler Moore, 80, star of two of classic TV comedies, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and her own legendary comedy, Mary Tyler Moore. On the Van Dyke show, she was approaching the modern female role model – she was no kitchen frump, and often wore form fitting capri pants. On her own show, she was a single (gasp!) career woman, the first in TV history, and she stayed that way for the duration of the series. Mary Tyler Moore was a brilliant show, one of TV’s best ever comedies. But there seems to be no room for it on TV today, and a whole generation (or two) of TV viewers know only that it was supposedly a good show. Take if from me, TV fans unfamiliar with Mary Tyler Moore … it was a great show, funny and humane at the same time. But with ceaseless reruns of the singularly disgusting Two Broke Girls and the exhausted The Big Bang Theory sucking up all the TV time, we may never see Mary again … Mike Conners, 91, star of the 1967-75 cop show Mannix … John Hurt, 77, the British actor Oscar-nominated for The Elephant Man. He also appeared in Alien as Kane (the first actor to have an alien explode from his stomach), and was the wand maker in three of the Harry Potter films, among many other roles … HMV stores, the once-mighty chain of music and video stores, a victim of downloading. They will all be shut down in the next few months.
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