Martyn brown bc biography of barack
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Political attack ads say more about aggressor than party under fire
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Decades ago, a now long-deceased Socred cabinet minister once jovially introduced me to his hardball philosophy of attack-politics: “Call ’em a pig-$%#r and let ’em deny it,” he said of the NDP, and like an idiot, I laughed. Stupidly, it stuck.
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That crass credo somehow took on more legitimacy when I later learned it was reputedly coined by former U.S. president Lyndon Johnson.
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For years, it too often informed my bare-knuckles approach to politics. Recently, a B.C. Liberal activist tweeted out a picture of Adrian Dix next to a picture of a weasel, ostensibly, in a dumb attempt at humour to equate the NDP leader with a “greased weasel.” Suffice it to say, it backfired. Badly. And so did B.C. Liberal MLA Kev
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Martyn Brown: Separating myth from reality in B.C. politics
By Martyn Brown
Myths are powerful things, especially when they feature forces of good (“free enterprise”) and evil (“socialists”), and evoke heroes (B.C. Liberals), villains (B.C. Conservatives), and monsters (NDP) to spin a good yarn that is rooted in fear and in distortions of blindly accepted “facts”. Great myths derive their greatest power from their retelling, to the point where lore is accepted as “truth”, half-truths are accepted as fact, and reality approximates fiction. Such is the main myth of British Columbia politics, which warrants new questioning and inspection.
As explained by the Globe and Mail’s Justine Hunter and Ian Bailey, “The right-wing forces stick together, usually, because British Columbia is by and large a province divided into only two political faiths, with the NDP or its predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, on one side and some type of center-right coalition on the othe
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