Inauguration Night. I have two remote controls, a bag of Smartfood, a gallon of aspertame. Really psyched. I’m eagerly channel surfing the coverage, CNN, CBC, CPAC, CTV. I know what the game is. I am to fall. I should fall. I want to fall. Last summer I was so thrilled watching the Democratic Convention. I had tears watching Wrigley Stadium on November 4^th. But something slows me now. I’m a wallflower. I can’t join in with Will.I.am’s tears tonight. I’ve come down with something and I believe it’s a case of Post Republican Stress Disorder.

I call a girlfriend I know will be watching. “It came on all of a sudden,” I tell her. “I just don’t think I can make the jump. Eight years of Bush and I may be too cynical.” She tells me to give it up. Face it. The Obamas Might Be Cool. I know it but I just can’t do it.
(more…)

I find myself dangerously knee-jerk in my defence of Obama. Sunday night’s CTV coverage of his interview with George Stephanopoulos failed to use the exact soundbite that would have justified Sandi Renaldo’s intro to the piece, in which she announced Obama was now waffling on the promise to prosecute torturers no matter how high up they were in the Bush administration. “See the naysayers doubting him before he even begins? CTV’s chosen snippet confirms nothing about waffling,” I immediately concluded, believing CTV was being unnecessarily critical.

Upon further research, there was indeed a quote that justified their intro. It should have been the soundbite: “My orientation’s going to be to moved forward,” Obama said. He will put the issue in the hands of his attorney general. The attorney general has to stay above politics and “uphold the Constitution,” Obama added, but his administration will focus on “getting things right in the future as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past.” Will Obama turn a tolerant eye towards violations of human rights committed by Bush? Is Obama, in fact, a Canadian?

Will there be a Nuremburg for Bush? The question topped the list of citizen concerns on Change.gov last week, out of over 70,000 submissions. Outrage echoed throughout the world almost from the day Bush authorized waterboarding in Guantanamo Bay. A video of Bush’s admission to having personally chosen waterboarding from a proffered menu of torture techniques was shown Sunday night in television coverage around the world. The video was anathema to apologists of the practice who continue to defend Bush on the grounds that it was Dick Cheney who owned up to the authorization back in ’04, which put America on the list of 82 countries who practise torture.
(more…)

There is a word for it.

Canadians who despaired watching the dogfight that was our Leaders Debate now have a term to describe why the pitbull Jack Layton’s pugilism turned them off more than the obtuse self-involvement of Harper that night.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, that pneumatic Teuton we’ve come to know and love, Governor of  “Collyfornia,” declared on Sunday Night’s “60 Minutes” that “the left doesn’t like me . . . and the right doesn’t like me when I tax and spend,” concluding that he “can’t be psyched out” because he is in the service, not of the Republican Party, but of the public.

Arnie is postpartisan, a term we’d have used ourselves—if we’d known of it the night of our Canadian Leaders’ Debate—if merely to simply hurl it at the t.v. screen, along with the popcorn we were throwing at the unpleasant melee before us.  “Why can’t you all just behave like postpartisans,” we’d have shouted.
(more…)