So Lisa Raitt apologized today, bringing out the waterworks a day after she found out that acting like a robot and refusing to address the issue during question period wasn’t a working strategy.
The video is all over the place (the news media have finally figured out that when you talk about “tearful” and “emotional” apologies, it’s best to have the video). So now all Canadians (and opposition MPs) who might have branded her a heartless politician for calling cancer treatment a “sexy” political issue now feel sorry for a crying woman who lost her daddy and brother to cancer.
What gets me about this isn’t that the tears seem so scripted, as if a political analyst backstage told her to go out and cry. It’s that the people who are so naive about politicians to think that they don’t all put their political ambitions ahead of basic human decency, the ones who were so outraged about Raitt’s candid comments as if they told us something we didn’t already know, those are the same people who are going to fall for this display, who think she will have learned her lesson and that either she didn’t mean it or she’s changed.
For the rest of us, her candid comments showed a rare honesty, and her emotional apology is unnecessary.
Sadly, the rest of us are the minority.
Very crafted “apology”.
Not so sure we’re a minority. I think we’re just a silent majority.
Now that she got caught doing this, can she at least get fired? Otherwise, it sends the message that it’s OK. No, it’s not OK because everyone does it. It’s still totally wrong.
Although I completely agree that this whole debacle reveals the paradigm of self-preservation, power hungriness, and selfishness that exists in political life, i would stop short of generalizing all politicians as being these heartless asses. As someone who works in Parliament, and as someone who is quick to point out the discouraging – and quite honestly – obscene culture that in many ways encompasses Ottawa political life, there are still MANY members of Parliament whose hearts are in the right places, and make difficult decision not for their own personal gain, but for the greater good. There are many of us who are here because we care about our neighbors, our fellow Canadians, and our fellow men and woman around the world.
We hear more often about the cases of corruption and political partisanship bologna than we do about the fight to combat human trafficking, the fight to fix an economy, and the fight for human rights, among many others. Although Canadian politics can be a complete joke sometimes (as in the case of Lisa Raitt), generalizing this behavior to all the righteous mp’s is not only an insult to the often amazing work they do, but also makes us, the people, the hindrance to a future where government is more honest and more representative.