Integrity, Debates and Polls

Wow - it's tough to blog about a subject that is just so depressing. Walking along the street today I saw a headline about John Baird being ahead in some poll. This is one of the reasons I dislike media carrying poll information, as it's just put out there in a few words in 200pt font on a masthead, and nobody gets any detail about the question asked or the margin of error.

I'm amazed and saddened that people can actually see that guy in normal operating mode and think "hey, there's a guy I want to support." I lose faith in humanity, in that people seem incapable of detecting (or perhaps caring about) sleaziness.

Meanwhile, I note at night on the CBC national news that a nightly flash of a chart showing the trend over several days is given. Luckily that goes by so fast that nobody can be very influenced by it.

With the freezeframe button on my remote, I can look at it long enough to figure out what it says. It's pretty much showing variations within the margin of error, but seems to indicate some growth for the NDP - perhaps at the expense of the liberals. There's some drop in the Conservatives, but again within the margin of polling error.

Integrity

Given the incessantly negative advertising of the conservatives, and their lack of a platform and their ongoing avoidance of allowing their people to talk for fear their propensity to insert their feet, I would think integrity would be a bigger issue in this election.

The recent plaigiarism scandel has been trivialized by some, but I think this speaks directly to integrity. However, I think the story is bigger than what the media is half-assedly reporting. Contrary to their reports, I think the issue is likely not that they copied an Aussie PM's speech, but rather that they were given text by someone in the US Republican party, and they parroted it 'cause that's what Uncle George told them to do. It seems unlikely that Harper's androids were sitting around watching John Howard speeches. Getting the daily communiqué from their republican handlers seems much more likely.

Does anyone care that our PM gets his speech text from a Republican handler? Seems not.

Meanwhile the debates are queued up, and set to clash directly with the US veep debates. You'd think they could have planned a bit better for this. I mean the pure theatre value of the swan dive being set-up for Gov Palin at the hands of crazy-man Biden should be pretty entertaining.

But debates have gone beyond their original purpose. God-forbid that we should have people tune in to the Cdn debate for the purpose of seeing who has the greater strength to lead the country. No, instead people watch it to see if someone can 'score points' against someone else. It's become purely theatre - more a sport than an intellectual discussion. We want to see losers hammered, not eloquent leaders. We don't want to see someone inspire us, we want to see someone trip-up the other guy.

I like to think that my interest in the US Veep Debate is to pull the cloak of lies off this Palin character, and expose her for the lightweight that she is.

I like to think that my interest in the Cdn debate is to hear who can put to gether the most cogent arguments for their platform. Given that certain parties have chosen to introduce no platform at all, and campaign purely on personal attacks doesn't leave me very inspired.