Disgraced Politician Questions Trudeau Moral Fiber

[bush_cheney2004]

I'm sure that Trudeau was called worse things (than Nixon called him) by better people (than Nixon).

Nixon did damage to our country that even now isn't totally repaired.

No, history will be kinder to Nixon and the country is actually stronger, damage or not. In any event, he was spot on about Trudeau, and others apparently agreed. We know of Dick Nixon's foibles....they are not carefully hidden like PM Trudeau's.

Edited September 7, 2007 by bush_cheney2004

[jdobbin]

What is a a pleutre?

A wretched coward if my French is correct.

[jbg]

No, history will be kinder to Nixon and the country is actually stronger, damage or not. In any event, he was spot on about Trudeau, and others apparently agreed. We know of Dick Nixon's foibles....they are not carefully hidden like PM Trudeau's.

And Nixon's accomplishments were:

1. Wage and price controls;
   
2. Hyperinflation;
   
3. Bargain wheat sales to the USSR?;
   
4. A totally unnecessary rapproachmen with Communist China and the USSR;
   
5. Highly divisive campaign tactics in the 1970 mid-term elections and the 1972 campaigns;
   
6. Watergate;
   
7. Congressional actions taking advantage of weakness, such as:
   1. 
      War Powers Act;
      
   2. Chaotic Congressional methods of assigning Committee chairs;
      
   3. A dysfunctional budget process which President can no longer ameliorate; and
      
   4. Total loss of trust by people in goodness of government.
      

[*]Two recessions, both accompanied by inflation.

[bush_cheney2004]

And Nixon's accomplishments were:

1. Wage and price controls;
   
2. Hyperinflation;
   
3. Bargain wheat sales to the USSR?;
   
4. A totally unnecessary rapproachmen with Communist China and the USSR;
   
5. Highly divisive campaign tactics in the 1970 mid-term elections and the 1972 campaigns;
   
6. Watergate;
   
7. Congressional actions taking advantage of weakness, such as:
   1. 
      War Powers Act;
      
   2. Chaotic Congressional methods of assigning Committee chairs;
      
   3. A dysfunctional budget process which President can no longer ameliorate; and
      
   4. Total loss of trust by people in goodness of government.
      

[*]Two recessions, both accompanied by inflation.

Off topic, but surely you have a more balanced understanding of Nixon's presidency. For instance, do you know when the USA last had a real budget surplus (1969 - Nixon/Johnson)?

Nixon ran away with the '72 election....the "goodness" of government ranks equally with the Tooth Fairy.

Future presidents routinely asked Nixon for advice on foreign affairs. I wonder if PM Trudeau enjoyed the same?

Edited September 7, 2007 by bush_cheney2004

[August1991]

In the middle of a thread about two Canadian PMs:

Off topic, but surely you have a more balanced understanding of Nixon's presidency. For instance, do you know when the USA last had a real budget surplus (1969 - Nixon/Johnson)?

Damn Americans. They're the white keys on a piano.

If you tell them you like Spring, they answer that they like Fall and the next thing you know, you're talking about Fall - not Spring.

When an American tells me that she/he is from Baltimore, I answer: "Baltimore? Is that south of Los Angeles?"

Try that some time and watch the reaction.

Edited September 7, 2007 by August1991

[jbg]

Off topic, but surely you have a more balanced understanding of Nixon's presidency.....

I moved the response to a new thread (link) to meet August 1991's good-natured challenge:

In the middle of a thread about two Canadian PMs:

Damn Americans. They're the white keys on a piano.

If you tell them you like Spring, they answer that they like Fall and the next thing you know, you're talking about Fall - not Spring.

When an American tells me that she/he is from Baltimore, I answer: "Baltimore? Is that south of Los Angeles?"

Try that some time and watch the reaction.

Edited September 7, 2007 by jbg

[daniel]

Off topic, but surely you have a more balanced understanding of Nixon's presidency. For instance, do you know when the USA last had a real budget surplus ?

Clinton/Gore 2000

Future presidents routinely asked Nixon for advice on foreign affairs. I wonder if PM Trudeau enjoyed the same?

Not by Presidents but by Prime Ministers.

[jdobbin]

August, I'd like to throw this in, more of in a devil's advocate manner than anything else. Isn't it convenient for Mulroney to make such a claim when he himself couldn't serve in WWII. How would we know if he'd go over? Do you think he would have?

You're quite right that Mulroney had no military service at all.

Trudeau, on the other hand, served in the Canadian Officer's Training Corps and later with the reserve unit Les Fusiliers de Mont-Royal.

I have no defence for Trudeau's foolish flirtation with antisemitism but Mulroney has no leg to stand on when it comes to serving in the military.

[Michael Bluth]

I have no defence for Trudeau's foolish flirtation with antisemitism but Mulroney has no leg to stand on when it comes to serving in the military.

Who did Mulroney think he was coming from a poor background?

Just because his father was rich he couldn't figure out how to gallavant around the world and put in token time in the COTC and LFMR?! What is up with that?

btw, Trudeau's unsubstantiated cracks about getting kicked out of the COTC show how respectful he was to the military.

[Shakeyhands]

I watched the interview with Lloyd Robertson last evening, I must admit that I learned a few things about Mulroney that I didn't know before, but I must also admit that whatever amount of respect I had for the man went right out the window after hearing him snivel for an hour.

btw, amazing how Trudeau knew that Jews were being exterminated by the Nazi's before the rest of the world did!

[Higgly]

Can somebody elaborate on Trudeau's anti-semitic remarks? What did he say and where is it quoted? I'm surprised I've heard nothing of this before.

As for Mulroney, he seems to have slipped over the edge. Now that Trudeau is no longer among us, his reputation is in the hands of the historians and beyond the reach of his old political foes.

Edited September 10, 2007 by Higgly

[jbg]

Can somebody elaborate on Trudeau's anti-semitic remarks? What did he say and where is it quoted? I'm surprised I've heard nothing of this before.

I believe they're quoted in that article. I was surprised as well, since Trudeau's Canada did vote against the "Zionism is racism" resolution in the UN in 1975. I don't remember Trudeau's record on Israel being particularly bad either.

[old_bold&cold]

I have said before that I hated Mulroney for the man he was. I think some of what he did was right and proper, until the end where he appointed so many friends etc that it was plain he was abusing his power. After watching him last night, I must say I hate him even more as a man, and would wish him to just shut up and go away. He is being very vindictive in much of what he says, and it is just so narrow minded. I would feel a lot better if Harper would stop using him as an advisor in many things, but maybe he just cherry picks things out of his advise. Or I would hope it is just that, and not following him blindly. Mulroney's fate lies in the hands of historians now and if he keeps opening up his mouth, it may well change that to one of a whining loser, who can not let go.

[scribblet]

I would take Mulroney over Trudeau any day. I think if I were Mulroney I would be doing the same thing, mainly because it appears that he (Mulroney) has been under constant attack since he left office. As he said in the interview, he has been cleared completely of everything, and it was fortunate that he had the means to fight back against the full weight of a government, most of would not have those means. The gov't even had to apologize, and agreed to pay his legal fees and other related costs.

[Keepitsimple]

Much of the so-called "disgrace" that supposedly clung to Mulroney was related to the Airbus "scandal". It conveniently sabotaged Mulroney's reputation. Even after Chretien's government apologized and settled out of court for two million dollars five years ago, the RCMP continued to investigate Mulroney until early this year. In Mulroney's CTV interview, he refers to the Liberals creating a parliamentary "rat-pack" - 4 or 5 MP's selected to feverishly attack MP's and the government on a personal level - the commencement of what has been a downward spiral of Parliamentary decorum. Their platform for launching the attacks was centered around the Airbus fiasco and most other criticisms became linked to this so-called corruption - since withdrawn with the Liberal apology. Mulroney was far from perfect but then again, real leadership that seeks to accomplish significant goals almost always clashes with those who prefer the status-quo - hence the protests and negativity surrounding Free Trade, the GST, US Relations, and Meech Lake. Here's an article that chronicles the Airbus story:

AirBus: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.h...6d92ef0&k=0

[Canuck E Stan]

[url="http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070905/mulroney_intvu1_070905/20070905?hub=Canada&s_name="]http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/stor...ada&s_name=[/url]

But what is outrageous is a politician who has the stink of corruption all over him to suggest that some one else didn't have the morals to lead Canada. Mulroney didn't have the morals to lead, and that's why the Progressive Conservative will never ever be in power again.

Although Mulroney ended up being an unpopular politician,your choice of the word "disgrace" in the title of this thread has no basis and is strickly a personal view.

Like the Liberals after him you are attempting to tag the man with innuendos without a shread of proof.

The RCMP have cleared the man of the Liberal made "scandal",what evidence do you have that the RCMP doesn't have?

The Liberals were forced to apologise for their mistakes and pay big time.

The forum's moderators should have stricken this partisan label "disgraced" from the title,it has no basis.I'm disappointed that they feel it's not objectionable.

Richard Nixon was a politician who was "disgraced".Mulroney was unpopular,but never "disgraced".

You forget how the Liberals who were against all the unpopular programs that Mulroney brought forth are now the staunchest advocates of those programs.

Will the Progressive Conseratives ever be in power again? Of course not, they don't exist any longer.

On the other hand,the Conservative Party of Canada has a very rosey future, as long as the Liberals have Dion as leader.

[M.Dancer]

The RCMP have cleared the man of the Liberal made "scandal",what evidence do you have that the RCMP doesn't have?

The RCMP never "cleared" him.....they did however fail to nail him.

Will the Progressive Conseratives ever be in power again? Of course not, they don't exist any longer.

Another in the long legacy of failures that are attributable to the digraced politician. You can include The BQ in that list

He has the stink of corruption around him like a pile of Vancouver garbage sitting in 30 degree temperature......I am waiting for the dinner to raise fund to pay Karl........

[jdobbin]

The RCMP never "cleared" him.....they did however fail to nail him.

Another in the long legacy of failures that are attributable to the digraced politician. You can include The BQ in that list

He has the stink of corruption around him like a pile of Vancouver garbage sitting in 30 degree temperature......I am waiting for the dinner to raise fund to pay Karl........

It is funny how all the Mulroney supporters are crawling out of the wood work today.

I don't know that a disgraced RCMP commissioner really should have been the one to clear Mulroney.

The lingering questions about the $300,000 paid to Mulroney has never been answered.

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.ht...69-ea92736e2238

Former prime minister Brian Mulroney has refused to put an end to lingering questions about $300,000 in cash payments he got from German-born businessman Karlheinz Schreiber after he left office in 1993.

"This is the usual trash and trivia of politics," Mulroney said during a CTV documentary on his life that was aired Sunday.

He said he couldn't discuss the matter further because it is involved in on-going litigation. But he added; "I'm going to write about it my next book."

Mulroney was interviewed during a CTV documentary, titled Triumph and Treachery: The Brian Mulroney Story.

The documentary, segments of which had already been aired last week by the network, was timed to promote the release of the former prime minister's memoirs.

The memoirs did not deal with anything after he left office in 1993, including his dealings with Schreiber.

A cloud has hung over Mulroney since it was first revealed in 2003 that he had accepted $300,000 from Schreiber after he returned to private life. Mulroney has been tight lipped about his relationship with Schreiber, who is best known in Canada for his links to the Airbus affair.

[jdobbin]

AirBus: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.h...6d92ef0&k=0

This article was written in February and by March, Mulroney was back in court fighting off allegations of being paid for $300,000 by one of the people central to the Airbus Affair.

It isn't over yet and even yesterday, Muloney refuses to answers questions about it.

[jdobbin]

I would take Mulroney over Trudeau any day. I think if I were Mulroney I would be doing the same thing, mainly because it appears that he (Mulroney) has been under constant attack since he left office. As he said in the interview, he has been cleared completely of everything, and it was fortunate that he had the means to fight back against the full weight of a government, most of would not have those means. The gov't even had to apologize, and agreed to pay his legal fees and other related costs.

Mulroney has never disclosed the work he did for $300,000 from the person who is linked to Airbus bribes. The RCMP was never told about the payment when the settlement with the government was reached.

[August1991]

I have said before that I hated Mulroney for the man he was.

It's nice to see that you approach this subject with detached impartiality. Then again, since you claimed that you met Mulroney (almost) drunk at Harrington Lake, I take your command of the facts at less than face value.

Can somebody elaborate on Trudeau's anti-semitic remarks? What did he say and where is it quoted? I'm surprised I've heard nothing of this before.

If you are interested, go to your local library and borrow this book:

This book shines a light of devastating clarity on French-Canadian society in the 1930s and 1940s, when young elites were raised to be pro-fascist, and democratic and liberal were terms of criticism. The model leaders to be admired were good Catholic dictators like Mussolini, Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain, and especially Pétain, collaborator with the Nazis in Vichy France. There were even demonstrations against Jews who were demonstrating against what the Nazis were doing in Germany.

Trudeau, far from being the rebel that other biographers have claimed, embraced this ideology. At his elite school, Brébeuf, he was a model student, the editor of the school magazine, and admired by the staff and his fellow students. But the fascist ideas and the people he admired – even when the war was going on, as late as 1944 – included extremists so terrible that at the war’s end they were shot. And then there’s his manifesto and his plan to stage a revolution against les Anglais.

This is astonishing material – and it’s all demonstrably true – based on personal papers of Trudeau that the authors were allowed to access after his death.What they have found has astounded and distressed them, but they both agree that the truth must be published.

It bears noting that the authors of this book were left-leaning friends of Trudeau. I'm sure they tried to put as good a spin on this material as they could.

Mulroney, to his credit, is simply reminding some diehard Liberals that Trudeau was not a demi-God, but just another politician.

[jbg]

I would feel a lot better if Harper would stop using him as an advisor in many things, but maybe he just cherry picks things out of his advise. Or I would hope it is just that, and not following him blindly. Mulroney's fate lies in the hands of historians now and if he keeps opening up his mouth, it may well change that to one of a whining loser, who can not let go.

Mulroney has always said the right things. The trouble was that he didn't follow through on many of his apparently better instincts. Not unlike Bill Clinton in that regard.

[Visionseeker]

Alright, this topic has stayed around too long for me not to weigh-in and tell you why Mulroney is a prig to use Trudeau’s past in criticism of the man.

Trudeau’s “privileged” education in private Catholic establishments necessarily meant that he was fed a healthy dose of the Lionel Groulx school of thought. This “philosophy” pined that Confederation was a complete failure, that Quebec should strive for independence and that only a leader who followed the example of people like Mussolini could truly secure a future for French-Canadians. Groulx’s teachings contained many underlying racist tracts (he was no friend of the Jews) that were seamlessly interwoven with revisionist stories of peace and heroism of early French settlers. While Groulx gave credit to episodes in Canadian history that worked in favour of the French-Canadians (such as the pact between Baldwin and Lafontaine), he proclaimed that Louis Riel’s execution and the conscription crisis of WWI were evidence that such reconciliation was impossible.

This was the history and political science that the monied class of French-Canada were taught well into the 1950’s. This system produced the likes of Camille Laurin (father of Quebec’s language law Bill 101), Michel Chartrand (labour activist who expressed sympathy of the FLQ), Jean Drapeau (Mayor of Montreal 1954-57, 1960-86) and Pierre Elliot Trudeau.

The difference between Trudeau and the others was that he left the country to study (first in the US and then in France). His international period of scholarship could easily be seen as a cleansing period (i.e. wiping-out the Groulx drivel). He then fortified this cleansing by traveling to different parts of the globe (backpacking as it were) in a discovery of truth. What he found was that the world may be a terribly complex place, but people and their aspirations are largely the same.

Trudeau escaped from some pretty severe brainwashing to develop an outlook and direction that an entire nation followed.

Meanwhile, whilst Trudeau learns about the world, Brian Mulroney is only mid-way through his studies at a private college in Chatham NB.

In his first year of university, Brian joins the Diefenbaker camp (led by none other than Ted Rogers of Rogers cable and Macleans (among others) magazine fame). Then, he becomes a fan of Dalton Camp. Then, under the guidance of Dalton Camp he becomes a fan of Robert Stanfield. Then, Mulroney becomes a fan of himself and loses the Conservative nomination. Then he tries again in 1983 (by filling the house with homeless people to stack the ballot) and wins the nomination. Talk about loyalty!

Mulroney would then move on to forge alliances with later graduates of the Lionel Groulx school (Roch Lasalle, Benoit and Lucien Bouchard) and then seek to seduce another (Robert Bourassa, Premier of Quebec). Bourassa complied by issuing Quebec’s DEMANDS to rectify a constitutional wound that the majority of Quebeckers said they didn’t feel.

OK says Brian, with no mandate to do so, we’ll reopen our 6 year old constitution to acquiesce to your demands and change the amending formula to boot. Well, his project (thankfully) failed and his alliances went with it.

For Mulroney to deride Trudeau’s early influences with Groulx and yet ignore the allegiances he’d formed with the unreformed members of that sect is either rank hypocrisy or shear stupidity. Or maybe both.

As said elsewhere, Trudeau in his present state is more than a match for Brian (Oh everyone else is to blame for my failures) Mulroney.

[August1991]

Well, Visionseeker, that's an interesting perspective. You manage to paint Quebecers (both past and present) in an unseemly light. Lionel Groulx is a separatist fascist! Was he a drug pusher too? And you simultaneously credit Trudeau for his strength of character to crawl out of this morass of craven backwardness.

Yet, Trudeau travelled in Europe in the 1930s, well before he espoused his anti-semitic ravings. Unlike any of the people you mention, Trudeau saw (albeit as a young teenager) Mussolini's Italy firsthand. Moreover, Trudeau grew up speaking English at home, in a Montreal neighbourhood of mixed vintage.

If I were looking for a prime example of a pure, untainted, easily malleable Quebecer, I wouldn't look to Trudeau.

-----

To be honest, I think your little theory is a crock but I also think it doesn't really matter. I hardly think we should hold Trudeau now guilty for what he thought in his 20s. Young people think all kinds of crazy things.

What's significant, in my mind, is that Trudeau once thought them and then obviously he changed his opinion. First, he never admitted this while he was alive and the discovery of his writings were something of a surprise. Second, he nevertheless thought them. And as Mulroney accurately pointed out, while other young men were volunteering to go abroad and risk their lives to defeat fascism, Trudeau stayed at home and defended the fascists.

IOW, Pierre Trudeau was a human being, and a politician.

Edited September 11, 2007 by August1991

[M.Dancer]

Well, Visionseeker, that's an interesting perspective. You manage to paint Quebecers (both past and present) in an unseemly light. Lionel Groulx is a separatist fascist! Was he a drug pusher too? And you simultaneously credit Trudeau for his strength of character to crawl out of this morass of craven backwardness.

Quebec's history is a matter of record. The mayor of Montreal, Cammilion Houde was a fascist sympathizer and was interned during the war, Henri Bourassa sang the praises of the Axis well into the 40s..and then of course, there was the petty totalitarian, Duplesis.

Trudeau and Quebec managed to pull themselves out of this cloistered, arch conservative mentality during the quite revolution, but the spectre of ethnic nationalism always threatens to pull them back.