{"id":811,"date":"2004-04-19T15:06:00","date_gmt":"2004-04-19T15:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/2004\/04\/19\/making-politics-fun-to-watc\/"},"modified":"2016-10-29T05:51:31","modified_gmt":"2016-10-29T05:51:31","slug":"making-politics-fun-to-watc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/2004\/04\/19\/making-politics-fun-to-watc\/","title":{"rendered":"Making politics fun to watch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As a Canadian political junkie, I can&#8217;t help but feel a little envious at what&#8217;s happening with our neighbours. There&#8217;s something kind of refreshing about the way that the Bushies and the Kerryites are hammering away at each other, even thought the election is a long ways off. It&#8217;s just not the same up here, where we see our Prime Minister (not) campaigning every day at some event or another (Today, it&#8217;s a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.canada.com\/national\/nationalpost\/news\/story.html?id=d957e573-5921-4e2a-af3f-d837f97cbc9f\">speech<\/a> to aboriginals) across the country. Tomorrow, it will be another. Meanwhile, our MPs are back in Ottawa without any idea of what they&#8217;re going to be doing to earn their money. Will there be a spring election? Or will it be in the fall? Or will it be next year? Does anyone really care?<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, the gloves are off in the US presidential election. It&#8217;s happening and no one is arguing about when or where. George and John (and Ralph, don&#8217;t forget) are waging war with each other. The latest shots (beyond the usual rhetoric) is happening on the Internet. Bush&#8217;s supporters have launched a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rnc.org\/News\/Read.aspx?ID=4094\">new, online video game<\/a> called &#8220;John Kerry: The Tax Invader Web Game.&#8221; People who log on get to shoot down tax proposals using a little animated George Bush head that fires the bullets. Cute&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Not to be outdone, the Democrats put together an Internet Ad of their own, called <a href=\"http:\/\/democrats.org\/mistakesweremade\/index.html\">Mistakes Were Made.<\/a> It features video footage from last week&#8217;s televised press conference of the President struggling to come up with an answer to a question on what his biggest mistake was since Sept. 11. While he hems and haws, several suggestions come up on the screen, such as &#8220;We found the weapons of mass destruction,&#8221; and &#8220;Mission accomplished.&#8221; The ad ends with the message &#8220;Credibility is on the ballot this November.&#8221; More good stuff.<\/p>\n<p>I like this stuff. But in Canada, we see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.liberal.ca\/ads_e.aspx\">self-serving ads<\/a> from our political leaders that don&#8217;t really address much. They&#8217;re really soft, and they don&#8217;t give much credit to us as voters&#8230;then again, since more and more of us don&#8217;t vote, perhaps we&#8217;re getting just what we deserve&#8230;What I&#8217;d prefer is to know that we&#8217;re in a campaign and just be done with all this &#8220;timing&#8221; nonsense.<\/p>\n<p>As George might say&#8230;&#8221;Bring &#8217;em on.&#8221;<br \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As a Canadian political junkie, I can&#8217;t help but feel a little envious at what&#8217;s happening with our neighbours. There&#8217;s something kind of refreshing about the way that the Bushies and the Kerryites are hammering away at each other, even thought the election is a long ways off. It&#8217;s just not the same up here, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p88Hib-d5","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=811"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1798,"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions\/1798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}