Tuesday, February 01, 2011
So Is He A Red Tory Or A Blue Liberal?
I see Rocco Rossi is running for Team Hudak. Yes, we are talking about the former national director of the Liberal Party of Canada and good buddy of the Iggster himself. This is no real surprise to me, as Rossi is to the right of Attila, but it raises further questions about the sincerity of the appeals to the left, from the very blue Liberal Party leadership.
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Come, now. They only brought Rossi in to head up the fundraising, which he'd demonstrated he was very good at, as the CEO of Heart & Stroke. Major bagmen like that are, by necessity, very connected & close to Bay St. Does that mean the rest of the party is like that? No. The fact is, they've been pretty loathe to do that kind of cozying up to big biz. for funds, which is why they've been lagging so far behind the Cons (who, don't let them kid you, are still getting a lot of money from corp's via their employees & employees' family members, to stay within the individual limits).
ReplyDeleteAs for the other guilt by association: were Rossi & Iggy really "friends"? Sure, Rossi floated his name: he knew him by reputation, because, yes, he HAD a very good reputation out of tall poppy syndrome Canada. But did they even know each other personally? Not that I know of; and it was Ian Davey who was bringing Rossi into the national Lib. fold, not Iggy.
Mr. Rossi is credited as the man who recommended to Davey that Iggy be brought back from Harvard. That sounds pretty friendly (if not friend like) to me. Also, I don't think it is "guilt by association". I don't consider either of them of being guilty of anything other than being conservatives in a party that presents itself as liberal.
ReplyDeleteAgain, recommending that the Liberal Party pursue someone that seemed on paper to be a Trudeau-type doesn't make them friendly, friends or good-buddies in the least. You don't even have any evidence that they had even MET or even CORRESPONDED, even once, prior to MI returning to Canada, much less that they got along well. This is just an Ezra Levant-class(less) smear.
ReplyDeleteWell, Rossi was the guy who got the Liberal Party's finances in order, in 2009.
ReplyDeleteThey've gone down again, now that Rossi's back in Toronto.
Whatever. Glad to have Rossi on board, myself. :p
Greg, I sent you an e-mail. Did you get it?
ReplyDeleteGot it just now. Sent a reply.
ReplyDeleteWhigwag, I think you are blowing this way out of proportion. Mr. Rossi is just changing from the white cats to the black cats. The way you are reacting, you would think I was accusing Iggy of hanging around with a serial killer. Iggy may not have invited Rossi to go on vacation with him, but he did invite him to join his inner circle and that speaks to a certain intellectual compatibility, if nothing else. I am sure it comes as no shock to you that the Liberal Party is dominated by its blue wing and has been for several years. If you can't accept that, that is your issue, not mine, I'm afraid.
ReplyDelete"you would think I was accusing Iggy of hanging around with a serial killer"...
ReplyDeleteCome on: you did lead with "Rossi is to the right of Attila [the Hun]," who, yes, does pretty much qualify as both a serial killer and mass murderer.
So, yeah, if you start out with a Godwin-type slander and associate that with the Liberal leader, expect a little blow-back.
You're operating like a Bill O'Reilly & getting wounded when someone like Jon Stewart calls you on it. Did you learn nothing from the Cons' attack ad debacle last week?
First of all. Rossi did little to improve Liberal finances. The party did it on its own. There was a new leader that was foisted on the party. They used the 5000 person Iggy database to say "hey, your guy's in now. Donate" and they did donate. Then, you had scores of nominations across the country driving both membership and party finances up. Then, simultaneously, the central party decided they were entitled to 33% of all the money raised by memberships signups. Money that used to stay in the riding itself (which are now all mostly broke now).
ReplyDeleteAnd voila, there's the Rossi "miracle". Please!
Oh. And I forgot the National Convention in 2009 that raised a shit load of money in the 1st and 2nd quarters from the Laurier memberships and registration fees to attend the coronation.
ReplyDeleteOh, Whigwag. I am flummoxed. Without speech. I don't want to break it down for you, because I think you are a smart person and are perfectly capable of doing it for yourself. Needless to say, when I used the phrase "to the right of Attila", I was not indicating that Mr. Rossi was a serial killer. The operative word is "right" and Attila is merely literary license to indicate through exaggeration, how far right, I think Mr. Rossi's politics are. Again, none of this is a surprise, I think Mr. Rossi has been pretty open all along about how conservative he is (conservative in the small c sense). I am sorry that I have upset you, truly I find Mr. Rossi's fecklessness funny, but I am a cynical bastard. Ask anyone.
ReplyDelete"flummoxed"? Try "bereft of insight," "Immature," "irresponsible"...
ReplyDeleteAgain, the evidence was that it was Ian Davey who brought Rossi into the "inner circle,"* and given the Davey family history with the Liberal party, it's only natural that MI would trust him on that.
So your prima facie argument that since the defector has shown himself to be far more congenial to the right than most progressives would like, then so is the leader -- is still pretty tenuous, and still just a matter of guilt by association.
And I only brought the 'Attila' thing up because thou didst protest too much in bristling at the criticism, digging yourself in deeper with "It's not like I accused him of hanging out with a serial killer," since, um, it WAS very much like that.
Tell you what: if you don't make drive-by smears, people won't track you down & throw it back on your lap. And own up to when you've been an ass.
* www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/former-ignatieff-lieutenants-defection-leaves-bad-taste-in-liberal-mouths/article1889840/
I will make you a deal. I will gladly admit to being an ass, if you promise to take a hard look at the people running the Liberal Party.
ReplyDeleteSelley agrees with you, Greg:
ReplyDeletehttp://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/02/02/chris-selley/
It’s easy to forget, but there was more to Rocco Rossi’s mayoral campaign than a horribly ill-judged expressway tunnel proposal. He wanted to aggressively pay down debt by selling off public assets, reduce the size of government, institute a public-sector wage freeze, eliminate sole-sourced contracts, contract out garbage collection, build a fixed link to the Island Airport, install more CCTV cameras in “problem areas” to fight crime, introduce term limits and recall provisions for unpopular councillors, and cut the size of city council in half.
And now he wants to run provincially for the Progressive Conservatives in Eglinton-Lawrence. I know — it’s crazy, right? Doesn’t that last paragraph just scream “Dalton McGuinty liberalism”?
Think I need to post on this over at my place, simply because people have taken leave of their senses...
@Ben: re: "When the careerists start fleeing for parties of ideology, it’s a sign that the party of power may not have all that much power left...."
ReplyDeletecome on: the reality was, Rossi's unemployed, probably in debt from the mayoral run, he burned his bridge w. the fed Libs by leaving them in the lurch after they hired him to head up their fundraising, he started fishing for a seat to run in provincially, and -- the Libs didn't have one to offer in Toronto. Hardly shows the party is in power.
As for "watching Liberal heads explode" -- again, come on. The only one who's really bent out of shape over this is Warren Kinsella, but not because he thinks it's such a loss to the Libs, but because he got 'Tom Sawyered' into helping Rossi paint his electoral fence, this summer... for free. And now Rossi will be running _against_ Kinsella's paying clients, the ON Libs. So he feels personally jerked around & betrayed. So a few bloggers sympathetic to Kinsella have added a few barbs on his behalf. But apart from that personal dimension, it really doesn't portend much about either branch of the Libs at all: you guys are just trying to make it into a tempest in a teacup.
er, "Hardly shows the party is running out of power."
ReplyDelete