Bruce Dowbiggin
Buffett’s Sunny Escapism Masked The Decline In Biden’s America
Only time will tell if it was time well-spent—Jimmy Buffett
When singer Jimmy Buffett died last week, many of his chroniclers played “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” as his sign-off tune. The song and its video (filmed at the Square Grouper bar in Jupiter, Florida) became synonymous with his good-time beach creature. His adoring Parrothead fans ate it up.
But Buffett did not write 5 O’Clock Somewhere. It was written by Jim “Moose” Brown and Don Rollins. Alan Jackson had the hit with it, with Buffet joining him for the end of the recording and video. (Inexplicably, Kenny Chesney turned down the song before Jackson recorded it.)
But his fans didn’t care. It sounded like Jimmy. After all, Buffett DID write Margaritville and so many other romantic odes about the sun, the sand and the sea. (His grandfather was from Newfoundland and was the inspiration for the song Son of a Son of a Sailor.) He was what you wanted him to be— especially if you were an aging Boomer. As long as he lived ‘70s liberals held to his kinder, gentler vision of themselves and their legacy in the Post-Trump world.
“Thinking younger doesn’t quite do it. You still have to do the hard work of, as the Toby Keith song says, ‘Don’t let the old man in.’ And that is my job now, the way I see it.” Ironically, Buffett’s true purpose was to keep the aging ‘old-man’ Boomers from seeing that they were now out of the.loop.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has written a chummy eulogy to a friend whose loathing for Donald Trump was nearly as deep as hers. Buffet just kept it below the surface, lest he upset the non-#TDS followers in his audience. Buffett was just trying to emulate Michael Jordan’s famous ode, “Republicans buy running shoes too”. Dowd? Not so much.
Like Biden, Buffett was living a fading American dream. Working class guy sings like a pirate but makes out like a bandit with the hoi polloi. It comes as little surprise that he died a dedicated Joe Biden fan at age 75. As he told Dowd, “Looks like I am welcome back at this White House. I have known Joe a long time, and his favorite song is ‘Come Monday.’ I am honoured.” The Biden Crime Family details suggest that Joe’s favourite song is actually ‘Changes In Attitudes, Change In Latitudes’. No word if Jimmy ever wrote a song called Ukrainian Shakedown or Fire The Prosecutor. .
In Dowd’s piece she recounts Buffett’s eager acceptance of the 2019 Trump quickie impeachment by Nancy Pelosi over exposing the Bidens and their Ukrainian money machine. Buffett asks Dowd in an email, will this be “the rotten piece of bait that finally hooks this sleazy bottom feeder? I hope so.” We now know that rotten bait was Joe “Come Monday” Biden and his son Hinter’s extortion machine in Kyiv. But like so many of his fans Jimmy remained in blissful denial of that reality.
Politics aside, he was a nice, generous guy even if he found the pretentions of Dowd clever. “Usually, joie de vivre is a sign you’re not paying attention. But with Jimmy, it was ensorcelling. I went with him to Walter Reed medical center when he sang for wounded Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. He was able to transport them to a beach with no cares. During the Covid years, he did “cabin fever Zooms” with health care workers from across the country who were Parrotheads.” It’s not his fault that her arch smugness (WTF is ensorcelling?) found a home in his music.
Good on him. For so many Boomer liberals who now believe men can have babies and other absurdities, with Buffett you could pretend you were a JFK Democrat even as you loathed his nephew RFK Jr. He passed on squaring the sordid present for drifted liberals in their Tommy Bahama gear. His conch reality made them feel like urban pirates. So let’s go surfin’ with Justin Trudeau.
He was The Big Chill on a shrimper in the Gulf, an image the DC creatures like Dowd found clever and reassuring. Like the cast of that movie he could identify the spliff and the empty tequila bottle as totems of misspent youth without ever probing the cost of that lifestyle. In his song “Jamaica Mikstaka” he laughs off how his plane carrying Bono was strafed by Jamaican drug authorities who mistook it for an illegal shipment.
In the end the working-class kid from Pascagoula, Florida, would never betray Dowd or his acquired class in affluent Sag Harbor, the Hamptons, the Keys, Aspen and Palm Beach.
Because class is now what defines. As we wrote in 2018 in Traitor To My Class about the tumult after Donald Trump’s 2016 election as president in the United States, “it’s tantamount to a crime against your urban liberal class to think this is anything but a calamity for America and the free world. That class being white educated Boomers who cut their teeth on The West Wing and The End of the Innocence.
The kind of people who still laugh at the tired tropes of Weekend Update on SNL or believe that CNN’s Don Lemon is an honest broker of facts. Obama uber alles. The Canadian iteration of this class might be the most smug. The Trudeau mansplainers who celebrate our healthcare while ignoring that the U.S. takes care of our defence for us.
I should know. I used to be one of them. As long as I sang from the hymn book I was golden. I have a prize to prove it. Two, in fact. Still know the secret handshakes. Know how to spot a racist or a homophobe when no one else can see one.
Because I have been one of them, I know that no one in their virtue circle is conservative. They probably know more pygmies than conservatives. So they base their prejudices on cartoons painted for them by Stephen Colbert. It comforts them to condescend.
It’s been remarkable to see the surgical removal of humour from this self-regarding class. As Robert Tracinski of The Federalist says, they’ve immunized themselves against hostile messages. “(F)or years, the left has trained itself in the habit of assuming that the only reason anyone disagrees with them is because of racism.
“As a consequence, those who live in this bubble tend to reflexively dismiss anyone who brings them a contrary message from the outside world.”
Buffett’s light-hearted lyrics about Cheeseburgers In Paradise aided the denialist wing of his audience in dodging the radical drift they’d allowed in society. It’s not his fault that they mistook Buffett’s good-times recordings and concerts for their reality. But, for all of Dowd’s tender ministrations, it will be his legacy.
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Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Bruce Dowbiggin
A Decade Later, The Picture That Launched A Thousand Ships To The West
Nine years after September 2, 2015 the image is still searing. A little Syrian boy in shorts and a t-shirt washed up on a Turkish beach after his father’s boat capsized during a panicked escape from the civil war in their country. If you had a shred of humanity you probably resolved to do something about it. You vowed to help these desperate people.
So you unwittingly elected radicals and social engineers to the highest offices in the nations, trusting that their honeyed words about Aylan Kurdi’s sacrifice would not go to waste. What you didn’t know is your tears for a tiny lad would be re-purposed by radicals into an immigrant culture washing over Western culture. Is it correlation or causation? At this point it doesn’t matter.
There are many factors at play, but you could do worse than look at that dead boy as Patient One in the fever gripping the elites of Canada, the U.S. and the EU. While you can argue about previous conditions in Syria and the Middle East, the photo is Day One in the obliteration of Western traditional society.
It certainly contributed to the downfall of PM Stephen Harper, who was holding his own in the 2015 federal election until the Syrian war spit out that desperate family, the family that was taken down by the waves. Looking to be taken seriously in his battle for PM, Justin Trudeau used the Syrian crisis to flail Harper’s cold-hearted approach to the refugees.
For a PM whose warmth was never a strong point, Trudeau’s exploitation of the drowned little boy hit with the Liberal’s burgeoning base of white suburban women (and men who want to sleep with them). As we wrote in September of 2015: “If the campaign has had a moment where blood pressure crested, even briefly, it was in the visceral reaction to the drowned Syrian boy. The heartbreaking photo provoked an authentically Canadian dismay and a completely disproportionate response to the gravity of his desperate personal quest.
Even flinty Post columnist Christie Blatchford was advocating open borders to assuage first-world guilt over the Syrian mess.” Before you could say Joe Biden/ Kamala Harris, the doors to Europe and North America were indiscriminately opened to penniless refugees, to the worst criminals the third world produces, to the most extreme Marxist revolutionaries, to climate-change fanatics. The pillars of western thought, built over two thousand years, are disintegrating as those immigrants (legal or otherwise) clog the streets with the politics and religions they supposedly left behind.
When a newly-elected Donald Trump sought in 2017 to limit immigration from nations with radical politics he was met with a banshee wail from MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post and New York Times. Still smarting from Trump’s election they branded him a racist, a stain that follows him till today.
Making it doubly exasperating was the fact that these interlopers were not what the public had voted for. A succession of progressive politicians such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh repurposed a geopolitical tragedy, diluting the traditional population with immigrants who neither care for nor respect their adopted homes. (Hands up anyone who’s heard these demonstrators with a good word about Canada or the U.S.)
The impact of this seemingly virtuous immigration touches every corner of Western societies. Having open borders is misconstrued as being open minded. It was argued again in the U.S. vice presidential debate on Oct. 1 with Democrat Tim Walz and his CBS News allies bizarrely insisting that the newcomers haven’t made housing more expensive. GOP nominee J.D. Vance countered that the surge of buyers was a supply/ demand driver for home-price inflation. The fact this was even debatable underscores how deep the rot has become.
From housing to education to healthcare, the ballooning of Canada’s population from 35 million to 40 million ignores the reality that makes citizens feel like strangers in their own land. While the moribund Liberal/ NDP axis and their paid media still embrace the flood of illegal aliens, polls show that most Canadians agree with the CPC’s stand that the saturation point was surpassed a long time ago.
The impact was similar in Europe where the attempts to staunch the flow of refugees looking for a toehold in the generous EU turned into a raging flood. Anyone asking to slow down the process was accused of wanting more Aylan Kurdis. Landing on all manner of craft in southern Europe the refugees made their way north to the embrace of health benefits and income guarantees. By the end of the decade all the major cities in the EU were penetrated by ghettos of aliens seeking to recreate their previous Damascus home in Stockholm or Paris or Brussels.
The clash of cultures produced horrific results that those who’d invited the strangers into their homes were reluctant to admit. Stories of grooming white girls in Bradford, England, or attacking outsiders who wandered into Malmo, Sweden, were dismissed and, now, punished by new anti-hate legislation. Those who cared in 2015 are now finally realizing the impact of using Aylun Kurdi to satisfy their liberal guilt has been a disaster for their culture.
It is said that a week is a long time in politics. In this case a decade has been more than enough to bring Western Civilization to its knees.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Bruce Dowbiggin
Rogers Buys Out Bell In MLSE Shakeup: What Does It Mean For Fans?
There is an old joke that Canada has two seasons. Summer. And the months when the Toronto Maple Leafs lead the nightly Canadian sports networks. Perhaps it’s not that bad, but for those who don’t live in southern Ontario it often feels that way.
The reason, some said, for this Buds obsession was that both TSN and Rogers Sportsnet were part owners of the team through Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, a business giant created in 2011 when the warring telcos took equal percentage shares in MLSE (Larry Tanenebaum took the final 25 percent, now 20 percent after selling a share to The Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System.)
At the time the merger of Bell (TSN) and Sportsnet (Rogers) was compared to Twitter and Facebook deciding to partner. Such was the rivalry that many predicted it wouldn’t last. But it did—if you don’t include Stanley Cups. Until this past week when it was announced that, if approved, Rogers will buy out Bell’s stake in MLSE, leaving it with 75 percent ownership. The process should close next year.
Rogers also has an option to buy out Tanenbaum next year, giving it complete control of the Leafs, Raptors, Argos (CFL), Toronto FC (MLS) and Toronto’s ScotiaBank Centre, among other baubles. (The new Toronto WNBA team is owned by Tannenbaum and several partners.)
Why the deal? Why now? Despite the huge national audience for the NHL, NBA and MLB, the component parts are said to be underperforming in a time when equity in sports franchises is soaring. Rogers’ national NHL TV contract is a significant drain on revenues. The Blue Jays’ flopping in the standings has left them a “stranded money-losing team” whose value isn’t fully reflected within Rogers. The Raptors are now also-rans.
Bell’s debt rating was downgraded to one notch above junk in August by Moody’s Investors Service. While not to the point of selling pencils there’s a thought that packaged as a group under one owner, the teams will now be more lucrative and, possibly, lead to an IPO in the future.
What does it mean for sports fans? For now, not much change. TSN is getting a 20-year agreement to get 50 percent of the regular-season Leafs and Raptors games. So it will have an NHL/ NBA presence until April. (It also has regional Montreal Canadiens rights.) TSN also has a strong NFL, tennis and golf presence. Rogers will have the existing property rights for the NHL playoffs as well as regional interests in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa. Plus its existing monopoly on the Blue Jays broadcasts.
Bell is reportedly interested in cutting its property inventory and concentrating on “5G, cloud and enterprise solutions”. TSN says it remains the prime media backer of the CFL, even though it no longer has an ownership position. Mediocre Toronto FC remain an add-on with a niche audience. As NHL national rights holder, Sportsnet (using CBC as a cutout) will still be the major outlet for postseason hockey. It’s also the exclusive home of the Blue Jays and the MLB postseason.
What does it mean in business terms? Despite the apparent cordiality of the deal, there is a fly in the ointment should digital companies such as Amazon, Prime, Apple, YouTube or Disney decide to bid on the primo national NHL broadcast rights packages. Already big leagues such as NFL, MLB and NBA have hived off packages to these outfits. Could they drive the price past Rogers’ comfort zone?
All this begs the question of what happens to the Raptors, Argos and Toronto FC which have fallen from their hip status of years prior. It’s well known that Rogers execs aren’t fond of Raptors president/ GM Masai Ujiri. Will they get the love in the C suite to bid on the top basketball contracts? Ditto Toronto FC, a pet project of Tanenbaum’s. It competes nationally with other Canadian teams. Will it have an ally in the front office?
If there is an ally it will have to be the peripatetic new CEO Keith Pelley who returns to Canada from running the European PGA Tour after stints running TSN, Rogers Sportsnet, the 2010 Winter Olympics and the Toronto Argos. Pelley knows all the broadcast and sports players firsthand from his prior gigs. He’s seen as an innovator but he also has good friends in the traditional sports leagues.
The one certainty is that cable and satellite packages will not decrease in price. Nor will ticket prices as pro sports continues to stretch the boundaries on how much people will pay for tickets (still a key revenue for NHL owners). And, for those wondering, the chances of leading newscasts with a Maple Leafs practice will be remain very strong for the future.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
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