Conservatives flailing at media criticism shows how exposed they are.
by Geoffrey Stevens
Confession, they say, is good for the soul. With that in mind, I will make a confession: I am a media lickspittle. A lickspittle, according to the dictionary, is not a nice thing to be; it means “a contemptible, fawning person; a servile flatterer or toady.”
Let me hasten to add, I am not the only toady in these parts. Thanks to Senator Marjory LeBreton, Stephen Harper’s leader in the upper house, we now know that the capital, and indeed the country, are infested by lickspittles.
Although the Parliamentary Press Gallery is clearly Lickspittle Central, these contemptible toadies are everywhere, asking questions, poking into public records, and making baseless insinuations about the expenses of “Good Old Duff” and Pam Wallin; about Nigel Wright (he of the $90,000 “gift”) — this being Wright, the chief of staff, whom the prime minister declared to be utterly innocent one day and guilty as sin the next; about why Conservative senators went to the PMO to get Wright’s help to whitewash their committee report on Mike Duffy’s expenses; about the ethics of the Harper government; and even about what the prime minister personally knew, when he knew it and what he did about it.
Attacking the messenger is a time-honoured strategy among politicians when they are under more scrutiny than they can bear.
As LeBreton revealed in a remarkable Spiro Agnew-like intervention in the Senate last week: “The reality therefore is that we are facing this crisis because we flung open the door and revealed what was going on and now rather than being credited for doing so, we are paying the price for taking this important and necessary step.”
“But, I am not surprised,” she continued. “I am a Conservative and I know more than most that around this town populated by Liberal elites and their media lickspittles, tut-tutting about our government and yearning for the good old days, that we are never given the benefit of the doubt and are rarely given credit for all the good work that we do.”
Has a government ever been so misunderstood, so misrepresented, so falsely blamed? Permit me to pause while I wipe the tears from my keyboard.
Marjory LeBreton has been around Parliament Hill for a half-century, employed by Conservatives in one capacity or another since the days when John Diefenbaker was leader. She knows her “Liberal elites” and “media lickspittles” as well, say, as Spiro Agnew knew his “effete corps of impudent snobs” and his “nattering nabobs of negativism” when he was Richard Nixon’s vice-president.
Attacking the messenger is a time-honoured strategy among politicians when they are under more scrutiny than they can bear. The strategy may serve in the short term to deflect public attention from real issues or questions, but it does not work in the long term. It didn’t work for Agnew and Nixon; both were forced from office.
The strategy is not working for the Ford brothers at Toronto City Hall; they are digging themselves in ever deeper, to the point of absurdity (Doug Ford: “If I was walking down the street and one of the lefties was driving, I’d make sure I’d jump on the sidewalk. Because you know why? We’ve stopped the social elites that have run this city for 50 years.”)
And it’s not going to work for the Harper government and its supporters in the Senate. The Senate scandal combined with that other ethical issue, the “robocall” affair, is already taking a toll.
A Forum Research poll in the National Post last week put the Liberals in majority-government territory with 44 percent of public support. The Conservatives, meanwhile, were down to 27 percent and bidding to slide past the NDP into third place.
Parliament’s prolonged summer recess — the House is to rise on June 21 for three months — will give the government time to regroup and to devise a better strategy, but the unanswered or unconvincingly answered questions will not go away. Those dreadful media lickspittles are everywhere, even on the summer barbecue circuit.
About Geoffrey Stevens
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens, an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail, teaches political science at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph. He welcomes comments at the address below. This article appeared in the Waterloo Region Record and the Guelph Mercury.
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