Posts with category ‘Gaffe of the Week’

Toronto Star editors asleep at the switch

Star on the march—the annals of editing: in an otherwise tedious exercise in dull normal reportage (Shania Twain is getting separated blah-dee-blah), an editor at the Toronto Star (or was it a writer looking for a buyout?) inadvertently added a line for the ages. The piece appeared this afternoon on their Web site and will surely be taken down by the time you read this. In the interest of amusement and giggles, though, we’ve saved it so that future generations might know the truth.

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Categories: General, Internet, Newspapers, Gossip Hound, Over the Border, Gaffe of the Week
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Posted on May 15, 2008

Gaffe of the Week: Tory hacks caught on tape!

This morning’s on-line version of The Hill Times offers a thorough and thoughtful summary of what, for lack of a better handle, I’ll call the Sparrow’s Folly. I am referring, of course, to the ill-fated effort of the PMO’s media machine to spin the RCMP’s investigation into alleged election finance malfeasance. In events that sound remarkably like the embarrassing jokes told by your Uncle Lester after several too many at Christmas, three Torys—a flack (party spokesman Ryan Sparrow), a hack (Tory campaign director Doug Finley) and a lawyer (Paul Lepsoe)—held a secret briefing in an Ottawa hotel for selected journalists (this after changing the location to put other ink-stained hounds off the scent). They were found out, confronted by the excluded journos and forced to flee down a fire escape. I’m not making that up. Promise.

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Categories: General, Television, Internet, Newspapers, Gossip Hound, Egos, Magazines, Gaffe of the Week
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Posted on April 28, 2008

Gaffe of the week: Stupidity is stupidity, whether you’re Tom Lukiwski or Jeffrey Simpson

One of the stranger excretions during the Lukiwski news cycle arrived yesterday courtesy the Globe’s big-foot national affairs columnist, Jeffrey Simpson. In avoiding discussing the actual issue—and the content of the tape at the centre of it, in which MP Tom Lukiwski takes a rather dim view of gay men—Simpson combines a sort of boys-will-be-boys apologia with an extended swipe at the NDP. To wit:

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Categories: General, Newspapers, Egos, Gaffe of the Week
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Posted on April 9, 2008

Gaffe of the week: Harriet Harman fails to make friends, meat pies

On the spectrum of completely absurd utterances by clearly addled politicians, this one’s off the charts. Caught on camera wandering around her constituency surrounded by cops (right in front of the police station) and wearing a stab-proof vest (thereby indicating to her South London constituents that they are in fact living in Beirut circa 1985), the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman, offers the following to the BBC: