{"id":132,"date":"2008-09-11T14:59:40","date_gmt":"2008-09-11T19:59:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/election08.cusjc.ca\/?p=132"},"modified":"2009-04-24T08:12:57","modified_gmt":"2009-04-24T13:12:57","slug":"mea-culpa-mea-culpa-mea-maxima-culpa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/?p=132","title":{"rendered":"Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Paul Adams<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Harper, like Jean Chr\u00e9tien before him, used to be firmly in the apology-means-weakness school of politics.<\/p>\n<p>Remember the\u00a0 Conservative press release in 2004 that was headlined &#8220;Paul Martin Supports Child Pornography&#8221;? He pulled the release but wouldn&#8217;t apologize. &#8220;I&#8217;m not going to, in any way, give the Liberal Party any break in its record on child pornography,&#8221; he told reporters when he was asked whether he would apologize. &#8220;It is disgraceful, they have had multiple opportunities to do something about it <em>[child pornography]<\/em>, and they have refused.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Since his election in 2006, though, his government has issued a series of apologies to historically aggrieved groups, and this apologetic spirit has survived into the campaign.<\/p>\n<p>After the puffin poop outrage, Harper said: &#8220;My apologies for it having been up.&#8221; (Odd choice of words, but the thought is there).<\/p>\n<p>And today, a campaign aide who took a swipe at the father of a soldier killed in Afghanistan, was both suspended and ordered to apologize by Harper. (I guess it must have been in the reverse order, come to think of it).<\/p>\n<p>It must be that sweater vest.<\/p>\n<p><em>Paul Adams was a political reporter with CBC and the Globe and Mail. He is now a member of Carleton&#8217;s journalism faculty and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Paul Adams Harper, like Jean Chr\u00e9tien before him, used to be firmly in the apology-means-weakness school of politics. Remember the\u00a0 Conservative press release in 2004 that was headlined &#8220;Paul Martin Supports Child Pornography&#8221;? He pulled the release but wouldn&#8217;t apologize. &#8220;I&#8217;m not going to, in any way, give the Liberal Party any break in its [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-election2008","category-election-2008-campaign-strategy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":746,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions\/746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}