The Montreal comedy team pranksters who lured Sarah Palin into thinking she was on the receiving end of a phone call from French President Nicholas Sarkozy are operating in an honorable Canadian tradition, although when it happened in the 2000 election, it didn’t get any U.S. coverage that I ever saw. What could account for that?
In 2000, Rick Mercer (of the Canadian equivalent of Saturday Night Live) tracked down George W. Bush at a campaign event in Michigan and managed to get close enough (with a camera team) to tell him that ‘Prime Minister Poutine’ of Canada had endorsed him. Bush got an ‘oh, shucks!’ look on his face, and allowed as to how, as I recall, he was ‘very flattered.’ Of course, Prime Minister Poutine would most accurately be translated as the Prime Minister of french-fried potatoes with cheese curds and gravy, but we could scarcely expect Bush to have known that. Although we might have thought he would know that the Canadian Prime Minister was Jean Chretien and that he might even conceivably know that the probability of a Canadian Prime Minister endorsing anyone in a U.S. Presidential campaign, let alone him, had a probability of somewhat less than Absolute Zero. But there Bush was, looking dumb as a stick to the few Americans who saw the clip.
Ms. Palin did not look quite so wretched in today’s prank but one certainly is struck by her apparent view that the President of France might call her up to discuss hunting, his fondness for killing live animals, and his wife’s sexual temperature in bed. Palin responded with a comment about Sarkozy’s ‘lovely family,’ which--given that his wife divorced him about an hour after he was elected and he very quickly married a model—leaves one wondering exactly which family she had in mind. Well, she’s not part of that crowd, so it is possible that she was just sitting there thinking, ‘What kind of people call you up and talk like this?’ Her mother taught her to be polite, and she was, and the McCain campaign taught her to get her talking points out, which she did.
But, what have we wrought? A Republican V.P. candidate who declares with apparent sincerity how much she admires the President of France: none of those ‘Freedom Fries’ for Sarah, I guess. I don’t know how the right wing of the Grand Old Party will take that.
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4 comments:
And what exactly do you consider "honorable" about this tradition?
oh, it's a judgment call, i suppose, but the fact that rick mercer's bunch and the montreal guys weren't really vicious (which they could have been)is one reason i'd say it, and also because 'this hour has 22 minutes' was absolutely happy to do the same kind of thing to all brands of canadian politicians. watching marge delahanty in her warrior costume confronting chretien was, i'd say, an honorable act, although it was not, of course, deceptive. unless chretien really thought marge was a warrior?
get that grammar! 'watching marge' wasn't an honorable act; her doing it was the honorable act. watching it, i didn't feel that it wasn't honorable or fair.
That they do it to people of all stripes might make it even-handed, but hardly honorable. They call people up with the intent to deceive them in order to publicly humiliate them, thereby making money for themselves as entertainers. That's not honorable, not by any stretch of the imagination or any judgment call. You perhaps meant "time-honored," which sadly I would have to agree with.
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