Andy Furey's Fake News
Churchill deal in political trouble, NL Libs worried about next election
Saying Tony Wakeham is like Donald Trump is like Trump beating up on Canada as a source of eeeeevil.
It is incredible.
Unbelievable.
Untrue.
Yet Donald Trump does it repeatedly.
So does Andrew Furey, the soon-to-be ex-Premier of Dannystan and still a frequent flyer on the public dime in the few weeks he has left in the job. The other week, Furey told a few hundred fawners, bootlickers, and assorted enablers at a 500 buck a plate dinner of all the glorious gloriosity Furey’d achieved in his very short time in office. Don’t forget that after the next election, if it becomes the 500 a plate for Premier Tony Wakeham, most if not all of the same business butts will head for the same hotel to cheer for Tony’s Tory tale of triumph and transformation. It will be as unbelievable as Andy’s but the applause will be as loud and as sincere.
Donald Trump did the same thing a week earlier except his audience was way larger and had way more sycophants. It also had the cream of American political small-brainedness - Marjorie Taylor Greene, JD Vance, and the high intellects of modern American Republicanism - jumping to their feet on cue to cheer as the stock market tumbled, inflation in the United States worsened, consumer and investor confidence tanked, and the sprouts of Trump’s idiotic tariffs erupted across red-state America.
You have to see it to appreciate the political earthquake that comes from an elderly North Carolinian, a guy who did not know if Canada had a president or a preemeer, ask a question of his Republican congressman at a town hall meeting. The partisan stooge with the microphone starts to take it away from the guy. The audience gets ugly. He slinks back so the guy can finish. All he wants to know, anger evident in his voice, is if his Congressman, the guy he voted for thinks it’s right for the President to attack America’s oldest and closest friends like he’s doing. To be disrespectful. You don’t need to know more, except that the guy is not alone. Across America, Republicans are suffering buyers’ remorse akin to the way the Newfs felt about Dwight Ball around March 2016.
Don’t be that guy. Be a Bond Papers subscriber.
Andrew Furey didn’t just wank in public at the dinner, and certainly not as furiously as his idol Danny Williams used to. But he did another thing Danny and Donny love to do: attack his opponents personally. without doubt attacking the person instead of dealing with the argument is the coward’s way. It shows you have absolutely nothing better to say about yourself than that. It is the go-to for the weak. Attacking the person is despicable.
Premier Andy went after Tony Wakeham personally, accused him of using Trump tactics, and scolded him to do better. All the heights of self-righteousness and all the depths of bullscitte. All Andy did in the process is ensure his speech was the political epitaph for his own brief and entirely unremarkable political career, showing off all the real qualities he embodied: no original ideas, conflict of interest, and hypocrisy.
Attacking Wakeham personally is classic Trump. Classic Danny. Classic Trudeau for that matter. Even classic Clinton with her slur at Republicans as deplorables. But in Andrew Furey’s case it tells you something else.
He’s shitbaked. The sort of tone policing Andrew Furey has done twice in the past six months is what politically insecure people do when they are deeply worried about something and cannot deal with it any other way. Like really worried about it. Furey wasted time with the townie Bored of Trade last fall telling the Pea Seas they needed to “elevate the discourse” and “do better” but could not so so himself. Furey had the choice twice now between doing better in a speech, of elevating the discourse as he so pompously put it last fall. Instead, he whined. He scolded. He condescended. The rest of both speeches was the same tired recitation of old stories.
It’s like this reel on Facebook Furey’s office ran of Michael Sabia calling Furey a tough negotiator. Furey’s media manager added the line “I will always stand up for Newfoundland and Labrador” but the effect is the opposite. Furey’s reel quotes a guy many people believe suckered Furey and his entire team into a bad deal for Newfoundland and Labrador. Sabia’s already been on television trying not to contain his glee at how successful he was getting everything Quebec wanted an more besides. And given his self-interest in the deal, Michael Sabia is not a credible witness.
If he were bitching and complaining, then Sabia’s words might have some measure of truth about them. Had Furey walked away from the deal, then Sabia’s criticism of Furey as a tough negotiator might have been helpful. If the talks had come with some public spats, then we might be more ready to believe Furey fought and won a great deal. But we got none of that. Furey kept everything about the deal secret until it was done and even then has been thoroughly unable to explain in simple terms how the deal is not just good but amazingly, excessively fantastic.
If all that weren’t true and if the deal were really as wonderful as Furey has claimed, then the little video clip would be unnecessary. You wouldn’t see it. People would know the deal was great. By the same logic, if the video appears, then you have to figure the opposite is the case: the deal isn’t that good and people aren’t buying it. In this case, this bit of logic and the delayed election plus Furey’s surprise departure line up with other rumblings from The Hill that the polling on the deal isn’t making the Liberals happy at all. And as pointed out here last fall, Furey’s sudden bolt for the exit door is likely tied to how badly this deal is going over.
We can safely make those connections and conclusions because Furey’s political communications always suck and that fits with the provincial Liberals, whose political comms has sucked since they won the 2015 election. Furey’s hypocrisy - accusing others of doing what he loves to do - just adds another element. These episodes are reliable guides to what is really going on, which is that the Liberals are pushing an election out to the back end of their mandate because they cannot be assured of a win.
Wow.
The Andrew’s other political role-models, besides Brian Tobin and Frank McKenna and Danny Williams, is obviously The Donald. And like Donald Trump, it’s all about The Ego. Furey’s not as crude as Trump or Danny but the ego-centric campaigning, the relentless focus on his own media image, the bombast, the fluffy language are all part of the same style, allowing for some personal variation. Furey’s all there for the ego-stroke, for example, which is why he has a little team to flood social media with pre-packaged stuff but it doesn’t really do anything more than that. Trump’s ego stroke is keeping the conventional media in a tizzy even as he bypasses them with his own social media and other comms channels to talk to his personal Fan Klub.
None of this is new, even if Charles Lipson, an American political scientist with zero background in political communication, can get an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday to tell us all that what Trump has been doing since before 2016 “revolutionizes” political communication. Nonsense. We are already beyond wherever Lipson is, if only because rather than waiting to see if it’s effective on any level, there is the judgment of the stock market, the town halls, already rendered, which Lipson ignores.
Meanwhile in Canada, the Conservatives nationally know very well how to bypass conventional media. They’ve built their current party strength on it and in fundraising you can see how brutally effective it is. In 2024, the Conservative Party raised $41.8 million compared to the Liberals with $15.2 million and the NDP with $6.3 million. CPC raised almost as much as the Liberals annual haul - $12.8 million - in the last three months of the year and pulled in half the Liberal total for the year - $7.6 million - in December alone.
Cash in the bank translates into relentless advertising, which helps drive votes, which is why the federal Conservatives blanketed online spaces heavily over this past weekend to attack the Liberals and the new Prime Minister. No let up. Liberals whine about it. Liberals criticize it and in the process share it to more people *and* tell the CPC how effective it is at throwing Liberals off their focus. Instant feedback on your message effectiveness and a multiplier built into one.
Same thing with a local Pea Sea message that criticised local media that managed to earn the Wakeham crowd three days or so of social and conventional media chatter despite being taken down. The Liberals who whined about it and the conventional media who reported the spot and asked questions about the spot didn’t do the damage they hoped. Instead, they reinforced the message to core Pea Sea voters - thanks Andy, says Tony for adding the speech to the mix - and told the people planning Pea Sea ads what to hit on if they want to supplement their meagre war chest with some free media thanks to the conventional newsrooms and Team Furey-Hogan’s repeated political stupidity.
The only Trumpian thing we haven’t heard from Furey’s Liberals yet is a claim that something reported is “fake news.” Mark Carney came sloe with his admonition of Rosie Barnett about Carney’s blind trust. But as far as Furey goes, we haven’t heard the fake news cry publicly. But if you listen carefully, you can hear those two words all through Furey’s speech. It’s only a matter of time before some politician says it out loud, where microphones can pick it up.
