Are You Calling Me A Liar? No, Just A Bozo (and a Plagiarist)
Posted in Miscellaneous on May 12th 2004 by Randy Reichardt:: There are times when I am embarrassed to be living in a province with leadership characterized by its collective arrogance and close-mindedness. Actually, it’s 99% of the time. Recently, our premier behaved like a spoiled brat, when he appeared before a provincial public accounts committee. When asked to produce a receipt for a golf trip, he lowered himself to the level of Beavis and Butt-Head:
Klein: “Is the honourable member suggesting I am lying?”
Blakeman: “No, sir, I am just asking for the document.”
Klein: “Oh, why would you ask for the document if you are not suggesting I am lying?”
Blakeman: “Because this is the public accounts committee, sir, and we can ask for that kind of information.”
Klein: “Oh, I see. In other words, you’re saying you won’t take my word for it. I want to know if she’s calling me a liar. She doesn’t believe me.”Blakeman tried to respond, but Klein cut her off three times, repeating: “You don’t believe me.”
The press Klein received following his whining was all negative, even from his usual conservative supporters. He was ridiculed in political cartoons and on radio shows, but the best response had to be from CBC Radio in Edmonton, which produced a 48-second segment, weaving Klein’s schoolboy outburst with Robert De Niro’s “Are you talkin’ to me”, from Taxi Driver, and Joe Pesci’s “I’m funny how, I mean funny, like I’m a clown” sequence from Goodfellas. Listen and enjoy, and consider that this man runs the richest province in Canada, where the next budget surplus could top $8 billion CDN, erasing the last amount of debt the province owes, but a province in which the roads and infrastructure are deteriorating rapidly, and education and health care continue to deal with cutbacks and layoffs. And my apologies to Beavis and Butt-Head, no offence intended.
Oh, and it just gets worse. This morning, in the 13 May 2004 edition of the Edmonton Journal, comes word of the following: A paper Klein wrote for a communications study course at Athabasca University had been tabled in the provincial legislature recently to counter charges that he is insensitive to Chileans who suffered under Pinochet (another long story), making the paper available to the public. Upon close examination, it was confirmed that at least half of the 13-page paper was skimmed directly from an assortment of websites without proper citation or quotations.
On the last page of the report, the premier lists his sources, including 10 websites. Word for word passages from the essay are found on those sites – and a count found 58.7 per cent of the lines in the essay are the same as those on the websites listed.
It’s time for Ralph Klein to go.
