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Raise Brian and temperatures rise

Posted by Mike Klassen on December 17, 2007 in Zeitgeist

You have to hand it to former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Few political figures in this country have sparked more emotion and debate. Local political commentator and long time Liberal Gordon Gibson has really stirred things up at the Globe and Mail's website. Literally hundreds of comments have come in during the few days since they published his article that argues, "Pierre Trudeau was the best man, Jean Chretian the best politician, and Brian Mulroney the best Prime Minister of this generation." Hoo, boy, them's fightin' words for lots of Liberals, and music to the ears of lots of Tories.

Back in 1995 I was sitting around a cafe on Commercial Drive talking politics (how appropo) when in the heat of the first accusations about Mulroney being 'on the take' were making news. I joked that we should start up a web page to collect donations to rescue poor Brian's reputation. And that we did. We schmoozed friends to let us host it and they wrote a script of a phoney 'e-commerce' site called the Brian Mulroney Reputation Restoration Fund. The URL included 'oink,' suggesting a political trough, which wasn't my idea but I couldn't argue with free hosting back then.

I was a bit of a Photoshop flunky already by that time, so I designed this little $2 bill (remember those?) with Brian's mug on it for the web page. Hilariously, archive.org still has all the comments that we received from visitors cached.

Frank Magazine a few months later did a similar stunt -- I still think they stole it from us -- where they duped former Mulroney cabinet ministers into thinking a legal defence fund was being built for the former PM.

Fast forward to today. Mulroney's in the headlines again, people are raving mad, and the political cartoonists can't resist picking on the showboating ex-PM once again. See below this cartoon from last week's Vancouver Province.