The Sheila Copps of the Conservatives

Last year I rolled my eyes at Jason Kenney's faux outrage over the hurt he suffered as a Roman Catholic over some stupid statement by Joe Volpe. Yesterday he was trying to play this game again and had the whole thing blow up in his face:

Conservative MP Kenney stepped up to the podium and informed reporters about a disturbing thing the Conservatives discovered in a blog kept by Scott Feschuk, a Martin speechwriter who is blogging while following the PM around the campaign trail.

Feschuk is a humorist who once edited the National Post's very funny Post-Mortem page.

According to Kenney, Feschuk "exposed his true feelings for Canada's cultural diversity by referring to Omni Television subscribers as 'socially awkward people who believe in UFOs'" in his blog.

Omni Television is a multicultural television channel based in Toronto.

"Omni subscribers represent the tremendous diversity of Canada's ethnic communities and they would be rightfully concerned and insulted by these kinds of pejorative remarks coming from the prime minister's own speech writer," Kenney said.

"What's he saying? That ethnic minorities who are the television viewers of Omni are paranoid, abnormal, are ungrounded in reality? What's he saying?"

Reporters rushed back to their offices to check out whether the Liberals had lifted Feschuk's controversial and rather bizarre comments about multicultural communities.

When they arrived at their desks they were shocked to see Feschuk was already addressing Kenney's criticisms.

"It wasn't a joke, Jason," Feschuk blogged. "I was being serious. Of course, I was referring to subscribers to Omni, the magazine for science buffs and those who believe they've visited Alpha Centuri, not viewers of Omni television.

"In the spirit of interstellar goodwill, I make this offer: if Jason apologizes, I'll send him a free subscription to Omni and a tin foil hat."

What a dolt. If Kenney or his equally doltish hangers-on had maybe stopped and thought for a second whether the scrap of text that got them so excited made any sense when interpreted the way they had, they might not have made fools of themselves in front of a crowd of reporters.

Seriously, Kenney belongs in the NDP.

Posted by Bruce Gottfred at December 1, 2005 09:48 AM | TrackBack