PONDERABLES
Given his record of obfuscation, backtracking, and evasiveness, why should anyone believe anything Justin Trudeau says about vaccine procurement?
And given that the Liberal government continually uses the confidentiality clause in their procurement agreements as the reason they can’t provide details of what they’ve really negotiated, could it be that it was Trudeau, not the pharmaceutical companies, who insisted on its inclusion?
A column headline in the National Post this week read “Why won’t the Liberals concede truth on China?” Could Prime Minister Trudeau’s admitted admiration for the Chinese dictatorship have anything to do with it? (See Wayne Easter item below.)
If it was a Zoom call, did Justin Trudeau don one of his ridiculous Indian costumes for his conversation with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi?
Why do Leaf GM Kyle Dubas and coach Sheldon Keefe think they can handle Alex Galchenyuk when six other GMs and six other coaches couldn’t?
THINGS I FIRMLY BELIEVE
It’ll be at least a generation before the extent of the damage Donald Trump has inflicted on the U.S. is fully known, and maybe not even then.
Only the athletes, who have spent their lives getting ready, would be hurt by boycotting the Olympics; the decision should be up to them, not the government.
P.E.I. MP WAYNE EASTER’S GUTSY STAND
Malpeque Liberal MP Wayne Easter, who is chair of the government’s standing committee on finance, effectively stomped all over Justin Trudeau’s admiration for the Chinese dictatorship by supporting a budget recommendation calling on his government to pull out of the Beijing-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and saying that his Liberal colleagues in cabinet need to “wake up and smell the roses” when it comes to the dangers posed by China. That required backbone rarely found among contemporary politicians.
TRUMP “TRIAL” A TRAVESTY
If screenwriters presented a movie treatment to producers based on the Trump impeachment hearing with the word “trial” in the title, they’d be laughed out of the room. It was a “trial” only in U.S. Senate parlance.
The “jury” consisted of the chamber’s 100 senators, all of whom except a couple of Republicans had clearly made up their minds before any evidence was formally presented. The Democratic impeachment managers, acting as prosecutors, did mostly a credible job presenting their case. But Trump’s lawyers managed to reveal some skullduggery on the part of the Democrats by showing how a few of Trump’s comments were edited to the point of being taken out of context. Also, a bit of the Democrats’ evidence was clearly hearsay, which isn’t allowed in a real trial.
In spite of punching a couple of holes in the managers’ case, at times Trump’s lawyers reminded observers of the legendarily incompetent Keystone Kops. The first lawyer to speak spent his entire time making rambling and largely incoherent comments, the relevance of which no one could perceive. The second was more coherent, but at one point seemed to think he was involved in a poetry contest rather than a senate hearing. The most eloquent of them, who was brought in to try to rescue the defense after the others’ disastrous first-day performances, was a personal-injury lawyer who, if he had any knowledge of constitutional law or U.S. Senate procedures, failed to demonstrate it. And at one point even mispronounced “Philadelphia,” which happens to be his home town.
The most egregious non-trial-like behaviour of all was the direct result of the dreadful first-day performance of the two original Trump lawyers. They were so bad, and Trump and his Republican senate enablers so upset with them, that three senators, the odious Lindsey Graham, the repugnant Ted Cruz, and the previously unheard of, but obviously unprincipled, Mike Lee, openly met with the Trump legal team to, by their own admission, “give strategic advice;” probably the reason the Philadelphia lawyer was brought in. In any jurisdictional world other than the U.S. Senate this would result in the immediate disqualification of all those involved.
Finally, there was the predictable verdict of “not guilty.” The cowardice and hypocrisy of the forty-three Republican senators who voted for acquittal was truly staggering. Especially that of Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee, all of whom spouted spurious reasons for their acquittal votes.
THE 2020 SENATE ELECTIONS WILL BE PARTICULARLY INTERESTING
There are twenty Republican senate seats up for grabs in 2020. Five of the races will be particularly interesting: the three who voted for acquittal (Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Mike Lee); and the two who voted “guilty” (Lisa Murkowski and Pat Toomey).