How about “total loser”? Most impolite, yes, but I’m all about the verbiage.
Today the National Post and the Vancouver Sun and other Canwest papers play with words. This is consistent with yesterday and the day before.
Reporter Mike De Souza writes in his story (seen at National Post and other Canwest papers):
…She later left her position as chief executive officer of Magna International to run against Stephen Harper for the new Conservative party leadership, coming in a close second before being elected as a Conservative MP in the June 2004 general election…
And on the same page, columnist Don Martin sums it us thusly:
…But her political CV was considerably less glamorous — distant runner-up in the 2004 Conservative leadership race to Stephen Harper…
So hmmm. What are we to believe? Too bad they don’t have the actual facts at their disposal.
Taking a middle-of-the-road word-combining approach, the National Post’s editorial calls her finish neither a close second nor a distant runner-up, but rather a combo:
…And she seemed to take losing badly. After finishing a distant second to Mr. Harper, Ms. Stronach seemed incapable of showing party loyalty…
Don Martin and the National Post’s editorial board wins the battle of this fun-with-facts episode over their reporter. Stephen Harper won the leadership race on the first ballot—somewhat uncommon in major leadership races—with fully 56 percent of the vote, despite Stronach outspending Harper in the leadership campaign by a sizable margin of what I’m going to go ahead and call daddy-dollars.
Stephen Harper – 17,296 (56.2%)
Belinda Stronach – 10,613 (34.5%)
Over at the liberals’ Globe and Mail, they claimed in their editorial that…
She was thumped by Stephen Harper for the Tory leadership.
“Thumped”, huh? “Thumped” is what you’d call Liberal Party-endorsing Toronto Star, whose lead editorial today is about doggy doo, entitled “Better way to fight pet waste problem”, and begins:
Existing “poop and scoop” rules are evidently working so well in Toronto that pet waste has become the biggest single component…
…and this has nothing to do with alleged “dog” remarks from that meaniepants Peter MacKay, to which Stronach and her liberal-left brothers and sisters exercised their well-rehearsed feigned indignation ever so publicly and embarrassingly.
Of course none of that really matters. It was later finally discovered what I already knew and warned conservatives of at the time, ad nauseam: Stronach was actually a liberal. Or maybe everybody did know that—I’m still not sure.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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