Head Tale

Something in this CBC story caught my eye and I thought I'd share it here.  David Hale, the lawyer who's been charged with investigating WaterhenGate made this comment:

“'We just need to do this for Mr. Lingenfelter; we need to do it for Ms.
Higgins; we need to do it for Mr. Pedersen; and we need to do it for
Ryan Meili,' Hale said.”

Notice anything?  The use of the more formal Mr/Ms construct for all the other candidates and the full name for Ryan Meili probably means nothing from a lawyer who, by all accounts, will be impartial and is well-qualified to handle this investigation.  But you wonder if, on a subliminal level, that familiarity in how he used Ryan's name versus the other candidate's means anything deeper?  I mean, it's a small detail but possibly quite telling. 

Of course, don't break out the tinfoil hats yet.  I know a detail like that is roughly on the same level as counting Facebook friends to determine popularity (660 Link, 434 Meili at this moment!  Though probably, if I went through and once again counted only those identifiable as actual Saskatchewan residents, I expect it'd be something like 130 Link, 431 Meili ) 

[Edit: someone mentioned it and I alluded to it in this last paragraph but just to be absolutely clear, Lingenfelter is getting a very large amount of support on Facebook from people from Columbia, his wife's home country, who are ineligible to vote in the leadership race.  Nothing wrong or illegal with this other than the fact that it could create a misleading impression if someone only looked at the raw numbers without digging a bit deeper.]

Actually, this is a good chance to do some momentum math.

In my last post on Facebook support…
Link was at 543 and is now at 660 = 117 new supporters which is 18% growth since March 22.
Meili was at 290 and is now at 434 = 144 new supporters which is 33% growth since March 22.

Another interesting thing I noticed poking around on Facebook…
Ryan Meili (as an individual) is friends with Deb Higgins and Yens Pedersen but not Dwain Lingenfelter
Deb Higgins is friends with Ryan and Yens Pedersen but not Dwain Lingenfelter
Yens Pedersen is friends with Ryan and Deb but not Dwain Lingenfelter.

See a pattern here?  I mean, a lot of the Link defenses I've seen coming out since WaterhenGate say that if you're a good NDP'er, you shouldn't call Lingenfelter out for this screw-up because it's bad for party unity or it reflects poorly on the party.  Guess what?  It appears that's already the case and there's a big divide between three of the candidates and the other one.  (It's harder to wade through the hundreds of people on each candidate's fan pages so I didn't check there but I would imagine you might see something similar.) 


Oh, and still with Facebook.  Before they created the option to make Fan pages for politicians, celebrities, organizations, etc., some organizations would create profiles as if they were individuals.  That worked well for the most part but can lead to some embarrassing or confusing situations for organizations, especially those that you would expect to remain neutral or equally support all candidates who may be one day responsible for their funding. 

So it's pretty surprising to see that the profile for “Saskatchewan Arts Board” is “friends” with Dwain Lingenfelter and Deb Higgins but *not* with Ryan Meili and Yens Pedersen.  The SAB profile is a “supporter” of Ryan on his fan page (I didn't check if the same holds true for Yens) so I don't know whether this was intentional or more likely, just a mix-up/misunderstanding about the different meanings that may be implied by being someone's “Friend” on Facebook versus being a “Supporter”. 

Finally, another small detail similar to the subliminal Hale comment I listed above.  The Jurist has already pointed out that the provincial NDP has done a really good job of remaining neutral with their coverage of this race but may have slipped up by allowing Lingenfelter space to post his own explanation of Waterhen Gate without providing the same space to the other campaigns.   But I wonder if the NDP itself has sent a subliminal message with how they ordered the candidates on the official leadership page?  In pretty much any situation where you are treating people as equals, you would refer to them alphabetically by surname.  So the order of the headshots in the page's header I'd expect to see would go: Higgins, Lingenfelter, Meili, Pedersen.  Instead, we get Meili, Higgins, Pedersen, Lingenfelter. 

Again, I'm probably reading *way* too much into this but you wonder if this was another subliminal nod – perhaps to a preferred order of finish? Or perhaps someone at NDP HQ was already familiar with the type of attitude Mr. Lingenfelter can show to his own party?

“NDP Leadership Candidate, Dwain Lingenfelter, today expressed concern
that the Saskatchewan New Democratic Party has decided to ignore the
Far North in its series of Leadership Candidate Public Forums next
month, and says he has decided to organize his own public forum in the
region and invite the other leadership candidates to take part.”  So he can call out party staffers for their lack of organizational skills yet anybody criticizing Lingenfelter for Waterhen Gate is endangering party unity?  Right…  

Anyhow, I'm very conscious that this is really small, off-the-radar stuff that most people probably don't even pay attention to or notice.  And that individually, none of these examples probably means anything.  But I also can't help wonder if seeing more and more examples of these little things adds up to something bigger?

Just trying to summarize points I'm seeing all over the place about Link's Water(hen)Gate scandal (kudos to KS on Facebook for the name) – on blogs, on CBC news stories and other wire stories from across Canada among various other sources. 

This is getting to be a pretty big scandal and if the NDP make a decision about how to proceed tomorrow, I hope they keep these facts in mind…

1. Link's explanation that they were submitted by an “over-zealous” campaign worker seems fishy at best – especially since Accidental Deliberations reports that the Lingenfelter campaign has taken responsiblity for paying for all $11 000 worth of these memberships.  What did Link tell his campaign volunteers?  “Sign up anyone and everyone you can and if they can't pay, we'll cover it?”  Jesus.  I mean, luckily I was only “zealous” in selling memberships for Ryan instead of “over-zealous” – if so, I might have signed up everybody in my neighbourhood then gone knocking on their doors to tell them after June 6!

2. Okay, to be fair, NDP rules have a big loophole in them.  You are allowed to purchase memberships for people who can't otherwise afford them.  But you would expect that those memberships, if legitimately for people who couldn't otherwise afford them, would still need to be signed by the person whose name they were in.  Wouldn't the Lingenfelter campaign catch the small detail that they'd all been signed by a single person before submitting them to NDP HQ?  (See point 7 for more on this!)

3.  I'm not sure if this is truth or rumour but I read that all of these memberships came in, arranged alphabetically.  If that's true, that's yet another clue that something very fishy was going on that should've been caught by Link's campaign before the memberships were submitted.  If you ask me, organizational deficiencies like this (assuming it wasn't something worse – like being intentional submission of false information) don't reflect well on a man who has thirty years of experience and wants to be the leader of the party based, largely on that experience. 

4. Someone raised the concern that by the NDP going back to ask all of these people if they did intend to buy a membership in effect extends the membership deadline (someone who didn't intend to buy one might say “oh yeah, I did want one after all”) which does mean that party rules are technically being broken. 

5. Lingenfelter wasn't available for comment when this story first broke.  I know he was probably trying to find out what happened or get his story straight or plan the wording of his response but still, a brief comment about a scandal given the scope of what was revealed would've been appropriate I think.  To put it another way, not being available for comment is something that shouldn't happen in our current wired world where people are conditioned to reach anyone anytime anywhere via cell phones, Facebook, e-mail, etc.

6.  This part of his explanation from a CBC story really bugs me too: “'We have learned some hard lessons from this experience. However, the
only way to guarantee that a campaign will never make a mistake is to
have no campaign volunteers and to make no effort to bring new people
into the New Democratic Party.'”  Uhm, dude – a mistake is if I write the wrong date on one of the memberships I sell because I forget it's the 29th, not the 28th.  This is on a whole different plane where “mistake” is left behind and words like “fraud” and “criminal” start getting tossed around by observers instead.  Nice try to spin this as doing something positive though – man, old school politics everytime!  

7.  This whole CBC article has me shaking my head.  Another quote from the same article:  “Lingenfelter said his campaign signed up 6,000 members in total. In
addition to the 1,100 memberships in question, his campaign paid for
very few of the rest, he said.” 
You mean there are more paid-for memberships out there?  Numbers, please!

8.  Right-wingers are having a field day with this already and you can only imagine the election ads in 2011 from the Sask Party.  Ryan Meii's made the point at the Regina Forum that it's terrible when Brad Wall can even somewhat credibly stand up and say “hope beat fear” in the last election.  Now, will Brad Wall be able to say “Hope beats cheats” in the next one? 

9.  One of the memberships was sold to a brain-damaged former Canadian solider.  The Windsor Star picked up a Saskatoon Star Phoenix story which reports that one of the false memberships paid for and submitted by the Dwain Lingenfelter campaign was that of Clayton Matchee

“Among the names on the list is Clayton Matchee, the former Canadian
soldier who last fall saw charges of torture and murder of a Somali
youth in 1993 dropped by the military because he was unfit to stand
trial due to brain damage. It was unclear whether Matchee had agreed to
join the party.“

That last line seems to indicate that Matchee isn't completely brain damaged and may have still had capacity to purchase a membership.  But I wonder how likely that is considering that the Wikipedia article on Clayton Matchee indicates that he was found unfit for trial on more than one occasion and the Department of National Defense ruled that he would never be fit for trial.  I don't know – this one just sets off my “icky” alarm to a whole different level. 

10.  The fact that this story has been picked up by the Windsor Star (and probably other papers as well) means that our sleepy little leadership race, which could barely get coverage in the provincial mainstream media before this, is now going national – unfortunately, for the most embarrassing of reasons.

I really hope the NDP impose some serious sanctions on Link for this tomorrow – it's inexcusable as far as I'm concerned.