Asinine

Erin O’Toole is not very bright. But sometimes he drops down to moronic. Attempting to kick Derek Sloan out of the CPC caucus – on the pretext that Sloan’s leadership campaign accepted a donation from one of Canada’s three Nazi adjacent minor character who donated under an unrecognized name – is idiocy on speed.

Where to start? Well, it appears that the donation in question slipped through without questions being raised by the Sloan campaign. This makes sense as the donation came from a Frederick P. Fromm which Sloan and his campaign were supposed to recognize as an alias, or maybe little used first name of….drum roll, Paul Fromm. How, exactly, they were supposed to recognize Fred as Paul is mysterious but O’Toole sees the acceptance of the donation as ““far worse than a gross error of judgment or failure of due diligence.” It is pretty much evil all the way down if there is a well-known white supremacist involved even if you do not have a clue at the time the donation is made.

Our Erin is having none of this sort of behavior in his “modern” Conservative Party. He promises to use his power as leader to prevent Sloan from running under the CPC banner in his riding. And just to make sure that no one thinks this is a mere clerical error, Erin turns the virtue signal dial to 11 with this ringing declaration, “Racism is a disease of the soul, repugnant to our core values. It has no place in our country. It has no place in the Conservative Party of Canada. I won’t tolerate it.” Suitable for MLK Day.

Sloan is too much of a socon for me to be a big fan but I am pretty sure he is not a racist. I might be wrong about that, but it does not matter one whit to our Erin: the opportunity to kiss up to the media establishment was too tempting. And, realistically, is there any place for Sloan in a “modern” Conservative party. Sloan is not actually a liberal in blue camouflage. He has been known to have strong views and, horrors, has been on Rebel Media. Double Plus Ungood!

Sloan has a substantial following among the deplorable socon wing of the modern Conservative party and our Erin is just dumb enough that he might think he can get rid of those dreadful people by firing Sloan. Fat chance.

Sloan himself has been rude enough to point out that if he, inadvertently took Nazi dollars, so did CPC HQ because 10% of leadership donations flowed through to CPC HQ. The cheek of the man!

But the very dumbest part of our Erin’s political calculus was forgetting that Sloan has an alternative party to go to: the PPC. Max would be delighted to welcome the PPC’s first sitting MP. And the PPC is a broad church in which socons are welcome. Max himself is more a libertarian but, no matter, if Derek Sloan wants to be the PPC’s Deborah Grey he’d be welcome.

As O’Toole’s stupidity becomes manifest his inability to come even close to Justin and the Libs’ polling numbers is causing many CPC members to do the following calculus: O’Toole can’t beat Trudeau, O’Toole is simply Liberal lite, voting for O’Toole will not get rid of Trudeau….Maybe I should look at somewhere else to vote. If Sloan came over to the PPC he might very well bring a lot of disgruntled CPC members and voters.