Rose's Cantina

I was blessed with one of those iconic names. Rose. Actually, it's Rosalie. Named after my father's cousin in Scotland. Or a girl he knew in the Army. Depends who's telling the story. Rose is the girl that songwriters write songs about. As such, I've been a ballerina, the fun Puerto Rican girl of Bruce Springsteen's youth, a handjob given to a roadie in a Jackson Browne imagining. I've been a posey, a Texan, a Washingtonian. But this one takes the cake. Now I'm Richard Nixon. Or I used to be. I'm supposing this is referring to Nixon's Karma. Or it's something that Bruce Cockburn wrote when he was on mushrooms. Check it out. It's truly disturbing.

When I went to journalism school back in the 1970s, I met a lot of people who were there because of Watergate. My second year, the film All the President's Men came out, and the theatres were packed with J students who then piled into Oliver's Pub to talk about the heroic efforts of Woodward and Bernstein. I went to see John Dean spill. I attended a packed lecture by Carl Bernstein. It was almost romantic. Journos were the white knights and dastardly politicians wore the black hats. In the United States. None of us could conceive of a Watergate style scandal like that in Canada. Certainly, we've had the Sponsorship Scandal but it was about money, not about power. And it was in Quebec, not the rest of Canada where we often view our politicians as flawed but not dirty. It's now looking like we might have our first-ever dirty tricks caper in Canada. According to Elections Canada and Postmedia reports, at least 18 closely fought ridings were targeted by robotic...