In Canada, it appears any bozo can run for MP
Joseph Goebbels, eh? Luckily, quite a few get weeded out before they can do any harm
The B.C. New Democrats waded into controversy a few years back when they required candidates for the provincial leadership to come clean about their postings on social media.
Invasion of privacy. Online strip search. And so on.
But the edict doesn’t look so excessive in light of the current federal campaign, where the parties have been losing candidates left, right and centre over ill-advised online comments.
The running tally (near as I could make it Friday) was 15 candidates dumped or dropping out over what are known as bozo eruptions.
While the results can be broken down on party lines — a half-dozen apiece for the Liberals and Conservatives, two New Democrats and one Bloc Quebecois — it would be more to the point to note the source of the distress.
I make it nine victims of regrettable postings on Facebook, one done in by reckless entries on Twitter, one goof who committed political suicide on YouTube, and a fellow who made un-take-backable comments on a newspaper website.
Three others were exposed via more traditional methods: A survey of court records turned up a marijuana conviction. The appliance repairman from hell was caught on video peeing in a client’s coffee cup. One candidate expressed his misbegotten views about homosexuals in a newspaper column — which is so last century.
Note, too, that others survived exposure for comments that were at least as obnoxious as those that led some to drop out or be fired.
The Conservatives dumped the coffee-cup offender and the fellow whose idea of a joke was to fake disabilities and orgasms on YouTube. They forgave the candidate who compared Tom Mulcair to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels and the one whose online musings included this about Muslims: “People come to this country with certain values and now want to kill everyone else.”
The Liberals bid an un-fond farewell to the candidate who offended both Jews and Muslims with her online postings, to the 9/ 11 truther who denied jet airplanes brought down the World Trade towers, and to the hopeful who portrayed marijuana as a cure for skin cancer and a means to reduce domestic violence. (Perhaps she meant if ingested in sufficient quantities, B.C. bud would also reduce the incidence of getting out of bed in the morning or doing pretty much of anything.)
The Liberals did cut some slack for a candidate who characterized women as “whores” and “F-ing bitches,” on grounds he was getting treatment for alcohol abuse. Time was, a drinking problem could have cost one a bid for high office. Now it’s a cover story.
The New Democrats chose compassion for the candidate who made a penis joke about Auschwitz, then covered herself by claiming she never heard of the notorious extermination camp. News coverage notes she scored two university degrees (one in peace studies) and got elected as a school trustee without ever running across that bit of historical trivia.
The New Democrats also forgave the candidate who called Stephen Harper “a pathological psychopath,” which is, admittedly, tame compared to other online traffic in what has been characterized as Harper derangement syndrome.
The NDP did part ways with the candidate who compared ultraorthodox Jews to the Taliban and the one who accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing.”
Not to be outdone in the leniency sweepstakes, the Bloc Quebecois stuck with the candidate who cited as supplies she’d want to have on hand after a nuclear attack: “My phone, a penis and lots of chips.”
Clearly the parties haven’t settled on consistent rules for dealing with bozo eruptions. Likewise their candidate-vetting procedures need work.
A possible starting point is the one referenced above, namely the questions the B.C. NDP put to candidates in the 2011 leadership:
“Do you currently author or have you previously authored a blog? Do you have a personal website or belong to any social networking sites such as Facebook? Do you have a Twitter account? Are there any photos or videos of you on YouTube or similar sites? Do any of your social-media sites have material ‘behind’ privacy settings?”
Then this: “Please provide details including your username and password for all social networking sites to which you belong.”
The party justified the latter intrusion by noting how it lost a candidate in the 2009 provincial election after release of a behind-the-privacy wall Facebook photo of him palming the breast of a female companion.
Would-be leadership candidate Nicholas Simons balked at handing over passwords. But he was able to persuade the party he had no passwordprotected postings on any social media sites.
Still, recent experience suggests the candidates are probably not the most reliable source of information about online misdeeds. They may have forgotten what they vented in the heat of the moment or believe that “the postings have been removed.” (No they haven’t been, you poor sap — didn’t you know the Internet is forever?)
Happily, others have become quite good at ferreting out bozo-ness. Several recent casualties were outed by True North Times, a website devoted to the ridiculous and staffed by techsavvy university students.
Far from grumbling about their success, the political parties would be well-advised to put someone like them on retainer for the next campaign. Let the social media pros handle candidate screening and the bozos fend for themselves.