A good day

Today was a good day. A politician I'm rather fond of is in the news for being on the up and up. And perhaps the politician I despise most throughly is in the news for being on the down and down.

I haven't mentioned a certain Mr. Gerard Kennedy much on the blog, despite my surfeit of manly affection for him. The two random people who stumbled across this blog and don't already know me will need to be brought up to speed on the fact I quite happily worked for him for six months during the Liberal leadership race. He's sharp as a tack and works like a dog. He likes mustard on his hot dogs. His children are adorable, except when they are punching you in the testicles. Go Gerard.

However, I maintained—and still maintain—a strong allergy to fanwank of the Cherniakian school. So, yes, Gerard is a great dude. But he sells himself. (And what he doesn't do, Dan does, far more effectively and intelligently than I might.) The last thing Gerard needed was a little shit like me writing daily dispatches echo-chambering His wise ideas, decrying those who did not pay heed to His pronouncements, and generally kissing His divine ass.

Besides, it was far more fun to kiss ass in person.

So Gerard made public today the fact that he wants to run for federal office in Parkdale—High Park, the riding he represented provincially up until last year. While it hardly comes as a huge surprise, I'm pleased Gerard is now in a place where he is (a) very likely to win the Liberal nomination and (b) very likely to subsequently layeth the holy red-machine smackdown on Peggy Nash. (Who, incidentally, as a friend of mind has pointed out, is the only fully sane NDP MP from Toronto. I'll freely concede there's some misfortune there that she gets caught in the crossfire. Oh, and sorry, Claire.)

Even more spendid news, this time from the Schadenfreude department, involves the general spearing of the head closest to the centre of my personal political dartboard, a certain Mr. Bill Bennett.

Mr. Bennett is one of those interesting creatures known as a "BC Liberal," which is an entirely different thing than a "Liberal from British Columbia." I'm sorta the latter. The latter is cuddly and wonderful. The former is most definately not, and while unfortunately (for them) it includes a few from the latter category, it also contains all manner of sketchy former Socreds, Reformers, Twenty-first Day Adventists, Spotted-owlivores, Milton Friedman fellatists, and toothy Andrew Carnegie sorts (the evil unstoppable clink of industry part, not the nice books-are-wonderful part).

Mr. Bennett is the two-term MLA for the provincial electoral district of East Kootenay, home of yours truly's mammy, daddy, and childhood stuffed animals. Mr. Bennett is also a man of, shall we say, contrasts? paradoxes?

Although he himself moved to the East Kootenay area from Ontario relatively late in life to pursue his true calling as a hunting lodge operator, the firstest and furiousest words out of Bill's mouth whenever anything right-wing was derided in the area was that this was clearly the work of the dastardly "lifestyle tourists"—smelly hippies from that smelliest of hippy holes, Calgary, that bought property in Fernie and wanted to preserve it as some kind of kitschy greeny-socialist playground with kitchsy greeny-socialist trappings like properly-funded hospitals and a whit of environmental stewardship. Real, born-and-raised Kootenay-dwellers like Bill apparently don't have time for any of this guff, and instead live ruggedly-individualist lives devoted to skidooing as close as possible to calving mountain goats, strip mining any tectonically stable surface, and changing the sheets at hotels frequented by weekend tourists.

Although a loyal footsoldier in a neoconservative government that routinely deployed its tongue into anything that so much as smelled faintly American, Bill's favourite whipping child in all things local is the uppity Montanans quite literally downstream of our provincial riding. When the Montanan government had the chutzpah to request, as provided for under the International Boundary Waters treaty, the Canadian federal government to look into the ecological impacts of Bill's pet proposal to open up the Flathead Valley to petroleum and mineral extraction, he upped his general torrent of anti-American abuse into something entirely more embarassing. On catching wind that United States Senator Max Baucus was planning on visiting Fernie and potentially meeting some of the Flathead Valley's defenders north of the border, he put out word to the local rednecks to ambush the guy, and noisely joined them in making a scene and telling him to get his Yankee ass out of our country. Now, Baucus is hardly a saint—I understand he's something of a cranky protectionist right-wing Democrat with alleged presidential ambitions—Bill basically pulled a stunt straight out of the playbook of some Eastern European ultranationalist party, and Fernie was delightfully portrayed in both the Vancouver and American media as some sort of mouth-breathing shithole. (Which it isn't.) (Most of the time.)

Although Bill (his own suspect localist cred aside) billed himself as defender of all things local, he increasingly found himself batting in favour of largely-Albertan guide outfitters and Calgary-based Elk Valley Coal in terms of land use in the area. This seems to be what ultimately proved his undoing. When the local Rod and Gun club—unsurprisingly traditional backers of Bennett given his priorities—lost patience with his record on this file. Bill, for his part, lost patience with their breaking ranks from his flannel coalition and playing into the hands of the GoreTex-wearing enemy.

Except Bill lost his patience is a delightfully explosive manner.

Bennett's been known as a spaz for a while. My family's been on the recieving end in light of my parent's chosen profession, as has pretty much any decent-minded municipal politician in Fernie at some time or another. (This article, for instance, has some decidedly diplomatic comments from Fernie mayor and all around good guy Randal Macnair who's been the target of Bennett's histrionics on more than a few occasions.) With the possible exception of the Baucus incident, Bennett's previous high-water mark had been when he told off a local kid using some fairly colourful turns of phrase at a public meeting: Bennett did not particularly agree with this guy's conclusions as to the ecological merit of national park expansion, and upbraided the guy for going away to university to learn about ecology from the idiots in ivory towers rather than asking what local guide-outfitters thought. That one prompted the rarity of angry letters in the local paper, and reportedly resulted in Bennett's Victoria-based overseers pulling him aside for a little chat about the importance of not openly insulting the concept of higher education.

As best I can tell, we have the great Sean Holman partially to thank for breaking this story on Public Eye in this post. There's also been amusing coverage in the American press (this from Seattle, and this from Kalispell); for his part Baucus even gets a few cheeky shots in.

With Bill humiliated, he might be due a turn a bit removed from the aforementioned bullseye on the aforementioned dartboard. Any suggestions for a new target of generalized disdain?