My nominee for a Chutzpah Award is Conservative Member of Parliament Brian Pallister. Perhaps you have never heard of this honour. It isn’t as famous as Oscar, Emmy, Grammy or Nobel. And there is no official ceremony.
Chutzpah, for those who don’t know, is a Yiddish word that entered the English vocabulary a number of years ago. Webster’s defines it as supreme self confidence: nerve, gall.
The best way to understand the term is to think about a boy who is charged with murdering his mother and father. When he comes before the judge he begs for leniency because he is an orphan.
Our chutzpah nominee was elected on Jan. 23 to be the MP from Portage La Prairie. The election was on a Monday. By Friday, Pallister had announced that he was seriously considering leaving federal politics because the job of provincial Tory leader was calling out to him. No serious journalist with reliable sources believed that a Harper government would have a seat at the cabinet for Pallister. But that didn’t stop Democracy’s Orphan from issuing a grammatically challenged news release saying he had asked his leader to strike him from the list of cabinet appointments.
Memo to Manitoba: The orphan was never on the list.
Fact: The Harper government will have fewer people in cabinet than its predecessor.
Fact: Several members of the Harper caucus in Alberta, who are far more qualified than the orphan, won’t be in cabinet.
Fact: Harper wants to give some seats to less qualified members in Central and Eastern Canada. Call it geographic balance.
Fact: The orphan knew all this before the election.
Fact: Manitoba Tory boss Stuart Murray announced last fall that he was surrendering leadership. That’s when the orphan started mapping out this strategy.
Pallister now has the chutzpah to tell Manitobans that he has made a sacrifice in not accepting a cabinet invitation that he never had.
He has the chutzpah to tell Manitobans that he is only now seriously considering a departure from federal politics despite telling political intimates months ago that he was eyeing the job of provincial Tory leader, and despite taking a poll to find out whether voters could stomach the words “Premier Pallister.”
The orphan must think that Manitobans are a bunch of rubes, hayseeds, and political illiterates. Or perhaps that is simply how he sees the supplicants and sycophants among Manitoba media.
The Winnipeg Free Press, as late as this past Monday, was perpetuating the myth that the orphan was on the fast track to Harper’s cabinet table.
The Winnipeg broadsheet is either intoxicated by the fumes coming from the orphan’s muffler or is still regurgitating talking points from Paul Martin’s inner circle. The Martinettes were spreading the manure during the campaign that Pallister was going into cabinet, as a way of scaring Liberal voters into staying true to Big Red.
If the orphan is lucky, those who vote in the next provincial Tory leadership contest will forget how Pallister manipulated voters and sponged off the taxpayers. Fortunately for him, many who vote in the next leadership contest will be instant Tories signed up in rural Manitoba from the various lists of identified federal Tory voters that the orphan can get his mitts on without breaking a sweat. This April, Manitoba’s Tory leadership prize is Democracy’s Orphan.
If Pallister is really lucky, voters in the next provincial election will forget that he and his media dupes created the myth that he was going straight to cabinet when instead he was taking Manitoba voters straight to democratic hell.
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