The liberty, free-speech loving supporters of the Wildrose Party certainly don’t take kindly to elitist media snobs who speak out against their darling Dani.
“When you grow up get a real job, one that contributes more than twenty thousand in income tax and provides a material service to others. Opinion based journalism is a disgrace,” one typically anonymous Wildrose supporter wrote in the comments section of this blog I penned the other day.
So far, the Wildrose media control room has issued three press releases “correcting” journalists expressing fair comment on their policies — myself, Graham Thomson and David Staples, both of The Edmonton Journal.
Oddly, they have issued no media releases on comments questioning their polices that were made by Duane Bratt of Mount Royal University, Steve Lafleur of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, Len Waverman, dean of the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary, or other economists and academics.
The old Reform Party warhorses running Danielle Smith’s campaign would never dare question people of such repute, but they know that attacking media “elites” plays very well with their red-meat Conservative base.
Wildrose Party policy 2.4.2.2 says that “all citizens have certain fundamental and immutable rights and freedoms, including the freedoms of speech and expression and the freedom to advocate, without fear of intimidation or suppression, public policies which reflect their deeply held values.”
That would be all citizens except the media rabble that refuse to willfully sing from their songsheet.
It will be interesting to see how the ‘Rosers react to National Post writers like Andrew Coyne, who tweeted that the Wildrose energy dividend (“Dani Dollars”) is “cynical idiocy,” or to Kelly McParland, who called the Dani Dollars “dismaying,” or Jen Gerson, who wrote that Alison Redford’s plan for 140 family care clinics was “sensible and necessary.”
The Globe and Mail, meanwhile, is still waiting patiently for its very own personalized media release from Dani’s Ministry of Truth.
