I’ve written several blogs these past few days.  Then deleted them.  You likely already know the gist of them…rants, senate, Harper, Christy Clark….amateur politics, Dave style…….the stuff of common knowledge really.  You get enough of that from the ordinary media.  Ya don’t really need me for that.

If anything.

The problem is that I am trying to write what I feel and think about and some of that junk is where my head is at.  But, if I shunt that crap out of my head, what am I left with?

Well, Orcas and ravens and construction projects, of course.  But anything original?

Here’s one: the CBC has orchestrated this senate scandal.  I mean Wallin and Duffy and Brazeau are real, of course, but senate waste is an old story, one we have lived with for years.

From the beginning, this scandal is really a story of the CBC in survivor mode.  And, tho the focus story is a financial tempest-in-a-teapot (tragically, misspending hundreds of thousands by lying and cheating is not really uncommon enough to make much of a deal over these days) it is serving to illustrate the backroom dealings and Machiavellian nature of our government.  Revealing a bit of the underbelly of this and any of the past governments is really just the CBC coming to grips with the fact that the Harper government is trying to kill off the skeletal remains of our national broadcaster – one that has been dying from lack of funding for decades.

Of course, news is just infotainment and the CBC is just fighting for their jobs, not necessarily the public’s interest, but their’s is a fight against a bully and that makes for good watching at the very least.

So, to that extent, the senate scandals are compelling reading for me.  The money itself, the corrupt senate, the lying…pshaw!  Picayune – the type of stuff that rarely lasts on the front page for long.  They have wasted multiple times that on the G8 Summit /fake lake and over-the-top security, the helicopter purchase debacle and even the Cohen Commission’s fish study ($26M to interview scientists who have been saying the same thing for years and then shelving the report is a HUGE waste of money). Look at the submarine scandal.  The slashing of environmental laws for the petroleum industry.  The list goes on and on.   And don’t get me started on the dozens of other crooked deals hatched by our governments these past few years.  Like I said, it is old news and all bad all the time.  And we all just move on….as a rule.

But not this time!  Not the CBC this time!  The CBC is fighting back.  Listen carefully, watch closely.  They are chewing and chewing every little morsel they can find and then hacking it back up for another chew if the there is room.  They will not let the senate issue die till Harper pulls the plug on the CBC.  They are against the Harper government and the gloves are off!

And should the senate scandal somehow get boring?  They will have dredged up something else.  Trust me on this: the CBC are at war!

The good part is that it is encouraging others.  Of course, the ‘free’ press and the ‘freelancers’ have been shrieking for years (Lala Yulie, The Tyee, The Commonsense Canadian just to name a few) but they have the same taint as I do……..we sound biased and partisan.  Our stripes show.  We don’t sound ‘balanced’.  And that is because we are not. I am just a nut and they are more credible.  But marginal nevertheless.

But the CBC still has the ring of professional journalism about them (undeserved but still there) and this is even putting some of the sell-outs to the corporate news outlets looking more critically at the way they do their job.  The Globe and Mail and even the Big Easy (the Vancouver Sun) are, infrequently still, sounding a smidge critical at times.

One can only hope.

Anyway, my point: things are changing.  Independent media, social media and even baby bloggers like Lala Yulie and Rafe Mair are starting to make changes from the sidelines.  It is good to see.  Let us keep our fingers crossed that these new voices can help sway a nation.  And let us hope that the CBC girds their loins to the sticking post and inspires an internal revolution of institutional thinking so as to support that.  Maybe the new revolution is possible by way of information..?  Who knows?