Tony Clement wouldn’t let me write about anything else
AA san entertainment A writer, Iamb eg-g ging Canadian politicians gt os top doing t things that warrant ridicule in this section: we are already strapped for time, space and resources trying to keep up with The Trump Show. I’m looking at you, Tony Clement. And you, Tony Clement’s private parts.
You know those moments in life when you plan to do x and then along comes an unexpected y? On the night my twin daughters were born, nearly two months prematurely, I was supposed to attend a party with L.A. screenwriters.
I haven’t seen those people since. That is the nature of life.
Another one of these x-y moments happened on Tuesday night.
I was glued to the U.S. mid-term elections (x) when, out of the blue wave that turned out to be more of a teal splash pad, Mr. Clement’s private parts (y) got thrust into my psyche. You know who should be forced to contemplate Mr. Clement’s private parts?
Nobody, not even his wife. It’s disgusting. Just thinking Clement even has private parts is anathema to his family- values preaching. If you yanked down his boxers, I figured you’d see a smiley-face emoji taking cover under a pricey gazebo.
I just assumed this guy reproduced by mitosis.
Anyway, it was precisely 8:20 p.m. on Tuesday when a breaking news alert from the Star — “Conservative MP Tony Clement steps back from duties,
says he’s being extorted over sexually explicit images” — distracted me from CNN, just when it seemed like a rattled Wolf Blitzer was about to choke out John King to take control of the map: I’m zooming in on Miami-Dade, you bastard! Andrew Gillum can still win!
It seems Clement’s pickle has hereby got him into a pickle.
In a statement that ended up overshadowing the mid-terms, Clement confessed he had “shared sexually explicit images and a video of myself” — I’m sorry, what? — “to someone who I believed was a consenting female recipient.”
But as it turns out, “the recipient was, in fact, an individual or party who targeted me for the purpose of financial extortion.”
And just like that, Clement earned a spot in today’s Entertainment section.
Sexting scandal? Extortion? RCMP? The theoretical prospect of his pickle?
Check, check, check and checkedy-check.
Congratulations, Tony Clement, you have just pre-empted The Trump Show.
I’m afraid your inexplicable decision to go all Steven Spielberg on your junk and send the fleshy footage to someone you don’t know in real life has just killed potential columns on the Kardashians, People’s Sexist Man Alive, a new Breaking Bad movie, Ariana Grande and the CBC’s terrific new podcast, Front Burner. The emergency alarm blaring inside the Star’s entertainment department has put you on par with Kanye West and Sinead O’Connor — and neither of them is ensnared in a sex scandal that is more baffling than the Voynich Manuscript.
I’m not moralizing here. What two adults do is their business. But when Clement admits he sent sexually explicit images to someone he believed was a “consenting female recipient,” that’s a wrap. We are done. Au revoir.
Sir, pull up your trousers and go stand over there.
This Pervy Pickle Pics Scandal From Parry-Sound Muskoka has dethroned Trump.
I mean, how can a politician like Clement — one with oversight for national security issues, for crying out loud — be dense enough to treat his genitalia like it was a free hot dog at a Ford Fest? Clement doesn’t know to whom he sent his homemade porn? He thought it was a consenting female? But, what, it could’ve been a 13-year-old male hacker or a Russian bot or the social media team at Red Lobster?
I have friends who are more prudent with their elbows.
After what happened with the now ironically named Anthony Weiner, you’d think every politician in the free world — especially one also named Tony — would realize no good can come from sexting. To hold public office is to never point a camera below your bare waist — that’s why they’re called private parts.
First of all, any woman who claims she wants you to send her XXX snaps is a liar. No woman wants to see something that ghastly. I have female friends who’d rather get unsolicited photos of car crashes. Women visually tolerate a man’s anatomy the way a cartographer copes with sinkholes and shifting tectonics: an unfortunate reality.
So men who initiate sexting are the most delusional among us.
And politicians who sext with unknown entities are like cobblers who shine shoes with a bucket of battery acid: they are wildly destructive and incompetent.
But the bigger story here is even more troubling. Right now, given the never-ending Trump Show, I need Canadian politicians like Tony Clement to not intrude on the entertainment beat. I need them to stay reliably boring and predictably off-the-radar, so all non-Kardashian moments can be devoted exclusively to Trump.
Now that the Democrats have regained control of the House, the potential narrative friction leaves no room for any domestic Kabuki in which, say, Trudeau is preening for tabloid attention or Clement is exposing himself to random strangers.
Do your job, Canadian politicians, and stay out of these pages. I desperately need you to stay invisible.