Dion's Pit Bulls At Their Best

Artisitc license? Or cherry-picking Liberal lies?

Posted by Steve Janke of the Blogging Tories at 01:32 PM
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The Conservative ads attacking Stephane Dion, new leader of the Liberal Party, are particularly effective because they use statements made by other Liberals criticizing Stephane Dion's record.

One Liberal blogger is trying to counter with his own ad. But it flops. He manages to find a clip of John Baird, Minister of the Environment, stating "our party has got into a mess on the environment".

The problem is that Baird was quoting Liberal Michael Ignatieff. And Ignatieff was talking about the Liberal Party.

Nice try, Jason, but what you call artistic license is in fact a lie.

Here is the Laird quote from Hansard:

Hon. John Baird (Minister of the Environment, CPC):

Mr. Speaker, in recent years, Canadians became very used to Mr. Dithers, the leader of the Liberal Party. Now we see Liberal members showing up at committee and what we have is Mr. Delay. They want to study it for months. Canadians have had enough of that.

I wanted to look for some wisdom on Kyoto to find out what Kyoto was all about and here is what I found:

I think our party has got into a mess on the environment. As a practical matter of politics, nobody knows what (Kyoto) is or what it commits us to.

Does the House know who said that? The deputy leader of the Liberal Party said that.

The deputy leader would be Michael Ignatieff. Not only does he criticize his own party, Ignatieff criticizes the Kyoto Accord, and the ill-defined commitment to the accord made by the Liberal Party.

But editing the clip, Cherniak scrubs all meaning from Baird's words. He then layers on new meaning by placing the quote in his video. In other words, he delivers a message that is not true. He tells us Baird is criticizing the Conservatives. We call that lying.

Cherniak calls it "artistic license" in the comments.

If I were John Baird, I'd be considering some sort of action.

Cherniak is a lawyer. I really thought he would have more respect for the truth, and for the consequences of lying.