JWR Testifies
Sunnyways @ Mon Mar 04, 2019 4:55 pm
With the possible exception of Freeland, Philpott has been the most effective minister in this government. It’s a heavy blow. If any more big names go, JT’s position may become untenable.
N_Fiddledog @ Mon Mar 04, 2019 5:00 pm
PluggyRug PluggyRug:
She has a Bull Terrier.
OK she's won me over. I'm on her side.
PluggyRug @ Mon Mar 04, 2019 7:58 pm
....
Mowich @ Mon Mar 04, 2019 8:47 pm
Jane Philpott's resignation and more importantly her reasons for it - lack of confidence in her leader - sends a strong message to the rest of the cabinet. They can either show exactly how spineless they are and tow the party line or stand up and show that they put integrity over politics.
Freakinoldguy @ Mon Mar 04, 2019 9:08 pm
Mowich Mowich:
Jane Philpott's resignation and more importantly her reasons for it - lack of confidence in her leader - sends a strong message to the rest of the cabinet. They can either show exactly how spineless they are and tow the party line or stand up and show that they put integrity over politics.
I'm not so sure it's integrity over politics and not just the usual rats abandoning a sinking ship scenario.
My guess is that as the calls for Trudeau's resignation get louder you'll see more and more of these Liberal stalwarts getting out before they go down with Justin "The Titanic" Trudeau.
martin14 @ Mon Mar 04, 2019 10:43 pm
Mowich Mowich:
stand up and show that they put integrity over politics.
The Liberal Party ?
Yeah.
No.
FieryVulpine @ Mon Mar 04, 2019 11:09 pm
Looks like the #StandWithTrudeau is trending on Twitter. It is about as cringeworthy as I'd expect.
Douwe @ Tue Mar 05, 2019 8:09 pm
martin14 martin14:
Mowich Mowich:
stand up and show that they put integrity over politics.
The Liberal Party ?
Yeah.
No.
It is business as usual with the Liberals. They have always had a problem when it comes to dealing fairly with large Quebec corporations. It is nice to note the difference in reaction to a political misdemeanor between Canada and the US. Somehow I suspect that a similar case in the US would be considered too unimportant to attract media attention.
PluggyRug @ Tue Mar 05, 2019 8:45 pm
Rex Murphy's take...
Rex Murphy
March 5, 2019
6:08 PM EST
$1:
Fortuna, the wayward goddess, has abandoned her dalliance with Justin Trudeau. What he wins from here on, if he wins at all, will be on his own work, not her flippant favour.
The socks and the selfies are inert now, those props are dated, all their quaint magic gone. Even the rolled-up sleeves and the loosely knotted tie (his let’s-all-get-to-work look) come over now as a parody of the posing politician, the silk-vest patrician at the steel plant vainly affecting to identify with the sweating hard hats on the shop floor.
None of it is working anymore. The familiar gestures are all too self-conscious, the slogans dated and flaccid, the whole play-acting schtick is dead and worse — boring. And the speeches! Monday night’s in Toronto (to launch the election-year global-warming roadshow during a -19C cold alert ) verged on the manic; parts of the opening in particular were something you might have heard in the ancient Sunday morning revivalists’ broadcasts back in the Dark Ages of early television, Jimmy Swaggart or Garner Ted Armstrong raging against the darkness. It was eerie.
None of it is working anymore
The two-minute concessionary acknowledgment of Jane Philpott’s resignation was insultingly perfunctory, swaddled in all the usual pompousness of “diversity” and “listening to other views,” utterly out of touch with the gravity and import of her departure, and the moral indictment of his government in which she framed it.
Here’s where we are. After these two key resignations, on a principle as central as the rule of law, after accusations that he and his administration wished to bend or break that rule of law, Mr. Trudeau has either to drop out altogether, or, start acting like the full man, and directly, without intermediaries, face the challenge that confronts his government.
Drop the poses. Choke off the slogans and pieties. Leave the jacket on. Sit down and speak to Canadians in detail on the moral and legal questions these two most serious ministers have put to him. Cut the theatricals. Don’t talk fatuously of the “bigger picture.” There is no bigger picture than whether you are morally entitled to govern.
Drop, too, the jobs cloak. There are too many unbuilt pipelines and an entire region that has been shedding jobs by the tens of thousands, while your government was writing Bill C-69, dancing at global-warming summits aimed at shutting down the oil industry, and writing new hymns to job-killing carbon taxes, for you now to pose as a job creator, and to shamelessly posit that saving SNC-Lavalin’s jobs was worth mauling the rule of law.
Ms. Philpott’s exercise of her choice is, in its way, even more explosive than Ms. Jody Wilson-Raybould’s. The latter was harassed over months; she was the focus and centre of the pressure campaign to desert her responsibilities as attorney general. The impact on her was direct. All that pressure, the special pleading and the veiled threats could understandably colour her judgment. Not to say, actually, that they did — but as a postulate, let us consider that.
But then we come to Ms. Philpott, arguably (pace Chrystia Freeland) the most adult, accomplished, unabrasive minister in Trudeau’s entire cabinet, welcomed in the early days as a lustrous ornament to his “new way of doing politics” and regarded since her arrival and service in many portfolios as singularly efficient and superbly competent.
This is the woman who resigned yesterday. Not some whining, marginal backbencher, with far less talent than ego, nursing a grudge over getting passed by.
Ms. Philpott, in one manner of speaking, was outside the contest, but being in cabinet, having been there when Ms. Wilson-Raybould presented to it, and to caucus — we may presume she’s heard the full tale. And having heard it, both sides, she concludes she has to resign; that the price (too high) for staying in this cabinet after what has been done to Jody Wilson-Raybould, is the sacrifice of her personal integrity and a scar on her conscience.
Philpott’s resignation, intrinsically linked to the case made by Wilson-Raybould, is a bolt of winter lightning to the central nervous system of the Trudeau government.
Philpott’s resignation … is a bolt of winter lightning to the central nervous system of the Trudeau government
Does anyone in the Prime Minister’s Office now actually believe that hauling out the knackered horse of climate change, placing Catherine McKenna in its tendentious, preachy saddle to tag-team with Justin, is going to — in that woeful cliché — change the channel?
If they do, they are delusional. They haven’t just drunk the Kool-Aid, they’ve poured it in the hot tub first, had a full splash-bathe-and-back-rub, and drunk the leavings.
I have a thought. Seeing what remains of their commitments to changing the voting system, abandoning omnibus bills, being open and transparent, remaining dedicated to the rule of law, unlocking Alberta’s oil — seeing where the Trudeau government is on all of these abandoned/mismanaged files — why should anyone think that even on its golden child of an issue, climate change, it is really any more serious or committed than on any of the others? Climate change might just be the last big pose.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau participates in a discussion at the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada convention in Toronto on March 5, 2019. Christopher Katsarov/CP
A word on Gerry Butts’ longed-for appearance Wednesday morning: Why is Gerry Butts appearing? He doesn’t even work there anymore. Why all this drama for an ex-employee when the CEO is still on the premises — and he’s the one, the only one, who has all the answers.
Gerry is of course welcome to come by later. Enough for now though with the surrogates and deputies. Two serious women of unsullied integrity, who committed their fortunes to joining your government, have told the public that morally they could stay no longer.
Mr. Trudeau owes them the courtesy of an answer, and the country of which he is the prime minister, a candid and complete accounting.
The socks and the selfies are inert now, those props are dated, all their quaint magic gone. Even the rolled-up sleeves and the loosely knotted tie (his let’s-all-get-to-work look) come over now as a parody of the posing politician, the silk-vest patrician at the steel plant vainly affecting to identify with the sweating hard hats on the shop floor.
None of it is working anymore. The familiar gestures are all too self-conscious, the slogans dated and flaccid, the whole play-acting schtick is dead and worse — boring. And the speeches! Monday night’s in Toronto (to launch the election-year global-warming roadshow during a -19C cold alert ) verged on the manic; parts of the opening in particular were something you might have heard in the ancient Sunday morning revivalists’ broadcasts back in the Dark Ages of early television, Jimmy Swaggart or Garner Ted Armstrong raging against the darkness. It was eerie.
None of it is working anymore
The two-minute concessionary acknowledgment of Jane Philpott’s resignation was insultingly perfunctory, swaddled in all the usual pompousness of “diversity” and “listening to other views,” utterly out of touch with the gravity and import of her departure, and the moral indictment of his government in which she framed it.
Here’s where we are. After these two key resignations, on a principle as central as the rule of law, after accusations that he and his administration wished to bend or break that rule of law, Mr. Trudeau has either to drop out altogether, or, start acting like the full man, and directly, without intermediaries, face the challenge that confronts his government.
Drop the poses. Choke off the slogans and pieties. Leave the jacket on. Sit down and speak to Canadians in detail on the moral and legal questions these two most serious ministers have put to him. Cut the theatricals. Don’t talk fatuously of the “bigger picture.” There is no bigger picture than whether you are morally entitled to govern.
Drop, too, the jobs cloak. There are too many unbuilt pipelines and an entire region that has been shedding jobs by the tens of thousands, while your government was writing Bill C-69, dancing at global-warming summits aimed at shutting down the oil industry, and writing new hymns to job-killing carbon taxes, for you now to pose as a job creator, and to shamelessly posit that saving SNC-Lavalin’s jobs was worth mauling the rule of law.
Ms. Philpott’s exercise of her choice is, in its way, even more explosive than Ms. Jody Wilson-Raybould’s. The latter was harassed over months; she was the focus and centre of the pressure campaign to desert her responsibilities as attorney general. The impact on her was direct. All that pressure, the special pleading and the veiled threats could understandably colour her judgment. Not to say, actually, that they did — but as a postulate, let us consider that.
But then we come to Ms. Philpott, arguably (pace Chrystia Freeland) the most adult, accomplished, unabrasive minister in Trudeau’s entire cabinet, welcomed in the early days as a lustrous ornament to his “new way of doing politics” and regarded since her arrival and service in many portfolios as singularly efficient and superbly competent.
This is the woman who resigned yesterday. Not some whining, marginal backbencher, with far less talent than ego, nursing a grudge over getting passed by.
Ms. Philpott, in one manner of speaking, was outside the contest, but being in cabinet, having been there when Ms. Wilson-Raybould presented to it, and to caucus — we may presume she’s heard the full tale. And having heard it, both sides, she concludes she has to resign; that the price (too high) for staying in this cabinet after what has been done to Jody Wilson-Raybould, is the sacrifice of her personal integrity and a scar on her conscience.
Philpott’s resignation, intrinsically linked to the case made by Wilson-Raybould, is a bolt of winter lightning to the central nervous system of the Trudeau government.
Philpott’s resignation … is a bolt of winter lightning to the central nervous system of the Trudeau government
Does anyone in the Prime Minister’s Office now actually believe that hauling out the knackered horse of climate change, placing Catherine McKenna in its tendentious, preachy saddle to tag-team with Justin, is going to — in that woeful cliché — change the channel?
If they do, they are delusional. They haven’t just drunk the Kool-Aid, they’ve poured it in the hot tub first, had a full splash-bathe-and-back-rub, and drunk the leavings.
I have a thought. Seeing what remains of their commitments to changing the voting system, abandoning omnibus bills, being open and transparent, remaining dedicated to the rule of law, unlocking Alberta’s oil — seeing where the Trudeau government is on all of these abandoned/mismanaged files — why should anyone think that even on its golden child of an issue, climate change, it is really any more serious or committed than on any of the others? Climate change might just be the last big pose.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau participates in a discussion at the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada convention in Toronto on March 5, 2019. Christopher Katsarov/CP
A word on Gerry Butts’ longed-for appearance Wednesday morning: Why is Gerry Butts appearing? He doesn’t even work there anymore. Why all this drama for an ex-employee when the CEO is still on the premises — and he’s the one, the only one, who has all the answers.
Gerry is of course welcome to come by later. Enough for now though with the surrogates and deputies. Two serious women of unsullied integrity, who committed their fortunes to joining your government, have told the public that morally they could stay no longer.
Mr. Trudeau owes them the courtesy of an answer, and the country of which he is the prime minister, a candid and complete accounting.
Mowich @ Wed Mar 06, 2019 9:54 am
Geppetto: "Nothing to see hear folks - just a difference of opinion and perspective .....on the part of JWR."
Mowich @ Wed Mar 06, 2019 9:57 am
PluggyRug PluggyRug:
Rex Murphy's take...
Rex Murphy
March 5, 2019
6:08 PM EST
Rex Murphy
March 5, 2019
6:08 PM EST
$1:
Fortuna, the wayward goddess, has abandoned her dalliance with Justin Trudeau. What he wins from here on, if he wins at all, will be on his own work, not her flippant favour.
The socks and the selfies are inert now, those props are dated, all their quaint magic gone. Even the rolled-up sleeves and the loosely knotted tie (his let’s-all-get-to-work look) come over now as a parody of the posing politician, the silk-vest patrician at the steel plant vainly affecting to identify with the sweating hard hats on the shop floor.
None of it is working anymore. The familiar gestures are all too self-conscious, the slogans dated and flaccid, the whole play-acting schtick is dead and worse — boring. And the speeches! Monday night’s in Toronto (to launch the election-year global-warming roadshow during a -19C cold alert ) verged on the manic; parts of the opening in particular were something you might have heard in the ancient Sunday morning revivalists’ broadcasts back in the Dark Ages of early television, Jimmy Swaggart or Garner Ted Armstrong raging against the darkness. It was eerie.
None of it is working anymore
The two-minute concessionary acknowledgment of Jane Philpott’s resignation was insultingly perfunctory, swaddled in all the usual pompousness of “diversity” and “listening to other views,” utterly out of touch with the gravity and import of her departure, and the moral indictment of his government in which she framed it.
Here’s where we are. After these two key resignations, on a principle as central as the rule of law, after accusations that he and his administration wished to bend or break that rule of law, Mr. Trudeau has either to drop out altogether, or, start acting like the full man, and directly, without intermediaries, face the challenge that confronts his government.
Drop the poses. Choke off the slogans and pieties. Leave the jacket on. Sit down and speak to Canadians in detail on the moral and legal questions these two most serious ministers have put to him. Cut the theatricals. Don’t talk fatuously of the “bigger picture.” There is no bigger picture than whether you are morally entitled to govern.
Drop, too, the jobs cloak. There are too many unbuilt pipelines and an entire region that has been shedding jobs by the tens of thousands, while your government was writing Bill C-69, dancing at global-warming summits aimed at shutting down the oil industry, and writing new hymns to job-killing carbon taxes, for you now to pose as a job creator, and to shamelessly posit that saving SNC-Lavalin’s jobs was worth mauling the rule of law.
Ms. Philpott’s exercise of her choice is, in its way, even more explosive than Ms. Jody Wilson-Raybould’s. The latter was harassed over months; she was the focus and centre of the pressure campaign to desert her responsibilities as attorney general. The impact on her was direct. All that pressure, the special pleading and the veiled threats could understandably colour her judgment. Not to say, actually, that they did — but as a postulate, let us consider that.
But then we come to Ms. Philpott, arguably (pace Chrystia Freeland) the most adult, accomplished, unabrasive minister in Trudeau’s entire cabinet, welcomed in the early days as a lustrous ornament to his “new way of doing politics” and regarded since her arrival and service in many portfolios as singularly efficient and superbly competent.
This is the woman who resigned yesterday. Not some whining, marginal backbencher, with far less talent than ego, nursing a grudge over getting passed by.
Ms. Philpott, in one manner of speaking, was outside the contest, but being in cabinet, having been there when Ms. Wilson-Raybould presented to it, and to caucus — we may presume she’s heard the full tale. And having heard it, both sides, she concludes she has to resign; that the price (too high) for staying in this cabinet after what has been done to Jody Wilson-Raybould, is the sacrifice of her personal integrity and a scar on her conscience.
Philpott’s resignation, intrinsically linked to the case made by Wilson-Raybould, is a bolt of winter lightning to the central nervous system of the Trudeau government.
Philpott’s resignation … is a bolt of winter lightning to the central nervous system of the Trudeau government
Does anyone in the Prime Minister’s Office now actually believe that hauling out the knackered horse of climate change, placing Catherine McKenna in its tendentious, preachy saddle to tag-team with Justin, is going to — in that woeful cliché — change the channel?
If they do, they are delusional. They haven’t just drunk the Kool-Aid, they’ve poured it in the hot tub first, had a full splash-bathe-and-back-rub, and drunk the leavings.
I have a thought. Seeing what remains of their commitments to changing the voting system, abandoning omnibus bills, being open and transparent, remaining dedicated to the rule of law, unlocking Alberta’s oil — seeing where the Trudeau government is on all of these abandoned/mismanaged files — why should anyone think that even on its golden child of an issue, climate change, it is really any more serious or committed than on any of the others? Climate change might just be the last big pose.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau participates in a discussion at the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada convention in Toronto on March 5, 2019. Christopher Katsarov/CP
A word on Gerry Butts’ longed-for appearance Wednesday morning: Why is Gerry Butts appearing? He doesn’t even work there anymore. Why all this drama for an ex-employee when the CEO is still on the premises — and he’s the one, the only one, who has all the answers.
Gerry is of course welcome to come by later. Enough for now though with the surrogates and deputies. Two serious women of unsullied integrity, who committed their fortunes to joining your government, have told the public that morally they could stay no longer.
Mr. Trudeau owes them the courtesy of an answer, and the country of which he is the prime minister, a candid and complete accounting.
The socks and the selfies are inert now, those props are dated, all their quaint magic gone. Even the rolled-up sleeves and the loosely knotted tie (his let’s-all-get-to-work look) come over now as a parody of the posing politician, the silk-vest patrician at the steel plant vainly affecting to identify with the sweating hard hats on the shop floor.
None of it is working anymore. The familiar gestures are all too self-conscious, the slogans dated and flaccid, the whole play-acting schtick is dead and worse — boring. And the speeches! Monday night’s in Toronto (to launch the election-year global-warming roadshow during a -19C cold alert ) verged on the manic; parts of the opening in particular were something you might have heard in the ancient Sunday morning revivalists’ broadcasts back in the Dark Ages of early television, Jimmy Swaggart or Garner Ted Armstrong raging against the darkness. It was eerie.
None of it is working anymore
The two-minute concessionary acknowledgment of Jane Philpott’s resignation was insultingly perfunctory, swaddled in all the usual pompousness of “diversity” and “listening to other views,” utterly out of touch with the gravity and import of her departure, and the moral indictment of his government in which she framed it.
Here’s where we are. After these two key resignations, on a principle as central as the rule of law, after accusations that he and his administration wished to bend or break that rule of law, Mr. Trudeau has either to drop out altogether, or, start acting like the full man, and directly, without intermediaries, face the challenge that confronts his government.
Drop the poses. Choke off the slogans and pieties. Leave the jacket on. Sit down and speak to Canadians in detail on the moral and legal questions these two most serious ministers have put to him. Cut the theatricals. Don’t talk fatuously of the “bigger picture.” There is no bigger picture than whether you are morally entitled to govern.
Drop, too, the jobs cloak. There are too many unbuilt pipelines and an entire region that has been shedding jobs by the tens of thousands, while your government was writing Bill C-69, dancing at global-warming summits aimed at shutting down the oil industry, and writing new hymns to job-killing carbon taxes, for you now to pose as a job creator, and to shamelessly posit that saving SNC-Lavalin’s jobs was worth mauling the rule of law.
Ms. Philpott’s exercise of her choice is, in its way, even more explosive than Ms. Jody Wilson-Raybould’s. The latter was harassed over months; she was the focus and centre of the pressure campaign to desert her responsibilities as attorney general. The impact on her was direct. All that pressure, the special pleading and the veiled threats could understandably colour her judgment. Not to say, actually, that they did — but as a postulate, let us consider that.
But then we come to Ms. Philpott, arguably (pace Chrystia Freeland) the most adult, accomplished, unabrasive minister in Trudeau’s entire cabinet, welcomed in the early days as a lustrous ornament to his “new way of doing politics” and regarded since her arrival and service in many portfolios as singularly efficient and superbly competent.
This is the woman who resigned yesterday. Not some whining, marginal backbencher, with far less talent than ego, nursing a grudge over getting passed by.
Ms. Philpott, in one manner of speaking, was outside the contest, but being in cabinet, having been there when Ms. Wilson-Raybould presented to it, and to caucus — we may presume she’s heard the full tale. And having heard it, both sides, she concludes she has to resign; that the price (too high) for staying in this cabinet after what has been done to Jody Wilson-Raybould, is the sacrifice of her personal integrity and a scar on her conscience.
Philpott’s resignation, intrinsically linked to the case made by Wilson-Raybould, is a bolt of winter lightning to the central nervous system of the Trudeau government.
Philpott’s resignation … is a bolt of winter lightning to the central nervous system of the Trudeau government
Does anyone in the Prime Minister’s Office now actually believe that hauling out the knackered horse of climate change, placing Catherine McKenna in its tendentious, preachy saddle to tag-team with Justin, is going to — in that woeful cliché — change the channel?
If they do, they are delusional. They haven’t just drunk the Kool-Aid, they’ve poured it in the hot tub first, had a full splash-bathe-and-back-rub, and drunk the leavings.
I have a thought. Seeing what remains of their commitments to changing the voting system, abandoning omnibus bills, being open and transparent, remaining dedicated to the rule of law, unlocking Alberta’s oil — seeing where the Trudeau government is on all of these abandoned/mismanaged files — why should anyone think that even on its golden child of an issue, climate change, it is really any more serious or committed than on any of the others? Climate change might just be the last big pose.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau participates in a discussion at the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada convention in Toronto on March 5, 2019. Christopher Katsarov/CP
A word on Gerry Butts’ longed-for appearance Wednesday morning: Why is Gerry Butts appearing? He doesn’t even work there anymore. Why all this drama for an ex-employee when the CEO is still on the premises — and he’s the one, the only one, who has all the answers.
Gerry is of course welcome to come by later. Enough for now though with the surrogates and deputies. Two serious women of unsullied integrity, who committed their fortunes to joining your government, have told the public that morally they could stay no longer.
Mr. Trudeau owes them the courtesy of an answer, and the country of which he is the prime minister, a candid and complete accounting.
Rex rules.
Mowich @ Wed Mar 06, 2019 4:39 pm
I for one am no further ahead in understanding the real truth behind Lavascam. I think there is way too much left unsaid and that we may never know what exactly happened. One thing I do know is that the twit of the Privy Council is suffering from some form of dementia - last time it was blood in the streets, this time it's all about social media attacks. Get real buddy everyone is a target these days and when you make outrageous statements about assassinations in Canada you are bound to get more than a few people who think you are out of your gourd.
peck420 @ Wed Mar 06, 2019 5:26 pm
Mowich Mowich:
I for one am no further ahead in understanding the real truth behind Lavascam. I think there is way too much left unsaid and that we may never know what exactly happened.
Honestly, I would put money down that this rabbit hole is so deep that no one actually knows the entire extent.
I would also put money down that far more than one major Canadian company would be found unsavory if the anything more than the most recent allegations are investigated.
FYI for everyone else, we generally don't 'bribe' in Canada, in construction. We have other methods for doing the same thing that are 'technically' legal, when viewed individually, and extremely difficult to prove as illegal when combined to show patterns of corruption.
martin14 @ Fri Mar 08, 2019 10:52 pm
peck420 peck420:
Mowich Mowich:
I for one am no further ahead in understanding the real truth behind Lavascam. I think there is way too much left unsaid and that we may never know what exactly happened.
Honestly, I would put money down that this rabbit hole is so deep that no one actually knows the entire extent.
I would also put money down that far more than one major Canadian company would be found unsavory if the anything more than the most recent allegations are investigated.
https://o.canada.com/news/snc-lavalin-c ... -blacklist
Canada leads World Bank blacklist of fraudulent companies thanks to SNC-Lavalin
Scandal-plagued engineering firm and other Canadian companies make up a fifth of the list
$1:
Canada leads the world in companies and individuals that have been banned by the World Bank from contributing to international aid and infrastructure projects.
Of the 608 companies and individuals listed on the World Bank’s just-released blacklist for fraudulent or corrupt conduct, 119 are Canadian companies. But engineering firm SNC-Lavalin and its subsidiaries, many of which are registered outside Canada, comprise 16 per cent of the total.
Of the 608 companies and individuals listed on the World Bank’s just-released blacklist for fraudulent or corrupt conduct, 119 are Canadian companies. But engineering firm SNC-Lavalin and its subsidiaries, many of which are registered outside Canada, comprise 16 per cent of the total.
Thanos @ Fri Mar 08, 2019 11:03 pm
Mowich Mowich:
PluggyRug PluggyRug:
Rex Murphy's take...
Rex rules.
Rex rules.
Rex Murphy is a national treasure. And one of the very few media figures of the last thirty years who can legitimately be described as a spokesperson for the moral conscience of the nation.