Familiar Face
I thought that face looked familiar this morning when I opened up the Citizen on page B6: Charles Gordon. Yes, that's him. His retirement was announced this past June in the Ottawa Citizen. Well, according to the tag line at the bottom of his editorial "Charles Gordon's column will appear weekly". This is good news for fans of Gordon's dry wit and humour. Today's column will not disappoint either. His column offers Brian Mulroney some hints on what to say to Peter C. Newman on a future phone call. He offers many examples of what to say on topics ranging from:
- Ottawa journalists: "They have a job to do, and part of the job is to savage the prime minister, perhaps because they have a book contract, but I'm not bitter about that, partly because my own book will be of much more interest to the public."
to
- Ottawa: "Pardon my language, but it's a darn nice city, one of my favourite cities in Canada, although there are many others, some of them perhaps nicer. I like it so much that I put all my commissions of inquiry here."
In a shroud of secrecy, Peter C. Newman's tell all book, The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister, was released to bookstores and has since gone into multiple printings.
The publisher's webpage writes that, "Mulroney names the names and spills the beans about what really goes on in Ottawa, which he describes as a "sick" city that runs on "goddamned incest": "They're all married to one another. They're shacked up with one another. Their wives are on the payroll of the CBC. It's just awful." Lucien Bouchard, his one-time soulmate, he calls "bitter and profane" and "extraordinarily vain." He writes off his constitutional foe, former Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells, as an "unprincipled son of a bitch." His disgust for the press is as monumental as his sense of being misunderstood, and in his eyes the Ottawa press corps are "a phony bunch of bastards" who don't give him credit even when the world applauds him for being "one of the three men who played the most important role in the collapse of the Berlin Wall."
Oh yeah... if you download the book's index (.pdf file) that Random House conveniently provides it's website you will note that a reference to Charles Gordon appears on page 149. Just thought you should know.
- Ottawa journalists: "They have a job to do, and part of the job is to savage the prime minister, perhaps because they have a book contract, but I'm not bitter about that, partly because my own book will be of much more interest to the public."
to
- Ottawa: "Pardon my language, but it's a darn nice city, one of my favourite cities in Canada, although there are many others, some of them perhaps nicer. I like it so much that I put all my commissions of inquiry here."
In a shroud of secrecy, Peter C. Newman's tell all book, The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister, was released to bookstores and has since gone into multiple printings.
The publisher's webpage writes that, "Mulroney names the names and spills the beans about what really goes on in Ottawa, which he describes as a "sick" city that runs on "goddamned incest": "They're all married to one another. They're shacked up with one another. Their wives are on the payroll of the CBC. It's just awful." Lucien Bouchard, his one-time soulmate, he calls "bitter and profane" and "extraordinarily vain." He writes off his constitutional foe, former Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells, as an "unprincipled son of a bitch." His disgust for the press is as monumental as his sense of being misunderstood, and in his eyes the Ottawa press corps are "a phony bunch of bastards" who don't give him credit even when the world applauds him for being "one of the three men who played the most important role in the collapse of the Berlin Wall."
Oh yeah... if you download the book's index (.pdf file) that Random House conveniently provides it's website you will note that a reference to Charles Gordon appears on page 149. Just thought you should know.
posted by John MacDonald at
Saturday, September 17, 2005
1 Comments:
Charles Gordon is back? :-) That is good news. I'll ahve to pikc up a paper.
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