March 23, 2009

 

#50 Irony


This is from a recent post from the blog "we move to canada" (a.k.a. expert-level white people) calling for George W. Bush to be indicted for "war crimes." Emphasis mine:
I've been reluctant to post this, but I need to get past my cynicism, and follow my own advice. Don't weigh the odds of positive outcome before taking action, because you don't know what the future holds. Just take action. Change starts with a movement, and all movements start with a dream.

Wasn't that also Bush's philosophy? :)

(I tried pointing this out in the comments section of the blog, but apparently it didn't pass moderation.)

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May 06, 2007

 

Sarkozy wins


...which I guess precludes me from ever becoming a senior political organizer in France, due to this post.

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August 12, 2006

 

I love to vote Refoooorm!


CalgaryGrit's "Greatest Prime Minister We Never Had" has entered its second round. There are lots of interesting matchups, but the one I'm most concerned with is Preston Manning vs. Roy Romanow.

Currently, Manning is trailing Romanow by a slim margin. Get over there and vote for Preston! (Remember, you can vote once a day, every day, until the round ends on Tuesday.)

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June 24, 2005

 

This Blog Has Too Few Laughs

Rick Mercer has started a blog, and the first target of his comedy skills is Jason Kenney. Mercer takes issue with Kenney's dismissive response to Don Boudria's complaint about an anti-SSM group registering donboudria.ca. Mercer's joke is -- wait for it -- to register jasonkenney.org and redirect it to the Marxist-Leninist Party's site.

Alas, poor Rick. How the mighty have fallen.

One of the primary sources of Mercer's fame was his "petition" in 2000 to force Stockwell Day to change his name to Doris, a protest against Day's proposal for citizen-initiated referendums. I laughed quite hard when I first heard about it, and then promptly signed the petition (in fact, I signed it four times). It was very funny political satire, even though it failed to make a valid political point.

Fast forward to 2005, where Mercer's complaint with Kenney is as follows...
Anyway while the speaker was admonishing Jason for such unparliamentarily language as “ignorant” I started thinking “What are the chances that Jason Kenney is so stunned that he would call another MP ignorant for not having registered his domain name when he hasn’t bothered to register his own?”
...except that's not what Kenney said. He didn't criticize Boudria for not registering the domain, he criticized him for complaining to Parliament about something that is in no way Parliament's jurisdiction, instead of using the proper channels. Of course, if Kenney had then staged a big protest over Mercer's registration of jasonkenney.org, it would have been very hypocritical. But he didn't; Kenney seems to have taken it with good humour.

It's also rather absurd for Mercer to criticize Kenney for not registering every possible iteration of his name. Every Canadian politician's website that I can think of uses either myname.com or myname.ca; there's no cause to call them negligent for not covering the .org's and .net's and .cc's and so on, not to mention variations like jasonkenney versus jason-kenney.

Rick Mercer is guilty of violating the first rule of satire: it has to be funny. It's okay to be one-sided or even partisan as long as you follow this, which Mercer failed to do.

Finally, I'd like to conclude this post with an image from Filibuster Cartoons, a site where humour comes before the party line:

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