Aitchison Attacks Lewis

 

The race for the Tory leadership is coming down to the wire. Today, I received an urgent email from Scott Aitchison warning me not to vote for Leslyn Lewis.

It seems an odd thing to waste time on, since Pierre Poilievre has lapped the field, Lewis is probably running third, and Aitchison fifth. Why this fight?

Which makes it less forgivable. It violates Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment, to speak no ill of another Conservative (Republican). Criticism of a fellow Conservative feeds the Liberals sound bites for future election ads.

Donald Trump seems to violate this rule. Most recently he called for Mitch McConnell to be removed as Senate leader. But Trump only fires back: McConnell was running down Republican candidates.

Pierre Poilievre has also been harsh towards rivals in this race; but, again, it seems to me that Charest and Brown went after him first, and he was returning fire. Since he has been ahead from the beginning, why would he draw attention to another candidate by criticizing them?

Aitchison does this although to all outward appearances he has little personally to gain; he is not going to win the race. Does he have some overriding moral reason?

Aitchison’s specific concern is that Lewis has said in an email that vaccine mandates violate the Nuremberg Code.

Since I am a party member, I get Lewis’s campaign emails, just as I get Aitchison’s. I cannot find any such email in my inbox, and Aitchison, for good reason, does not link to it in his condemnation. She never said it.

The closest is an email from Lewis on August 19 outlining the Nuremberg Code and historical violations of it in the US, Canada and elsewhere, notably against blacks and natives. She warns that we must remain on the alert. 

She does not mention vaccine mandates.

So Aitchison is not running down a fellow Conservative out of principle. He is lying about them, out of pure partisanship.

He goes on “Leslyn Lewis is comparing the horrors of the Holocaust to the challenges we face today.” 

The Nuremberg Code is not about the Holocaust. It protects human rights from unscrupulous medical experimentation. To object to applying the Nuremberg Code to anything outside Nazi Germany is to object to the Nuremberg Code. 

Aitchison: “A small but growing number of people opposed to various COVID response measures have been making the bogus claim that mandates or policies enacted over the past two years are like what took place in Nazi Germany.”

Really? Rather, some, not Leslyn Lewis, are saying the vaccine mandates are in violation of the Nuremberg Code.

At least, I heard this claim from Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith. That’s the only place I have heard it, other than from Aitchison, although I keep close tabs on right-wing media. Erskine-Smith was citing it as a reason for imposing the Emergencies Act—to silence such unacceptable opinions.

Making Aitchison look like a fifth columnist waving a false flag.

Why is it so important to silence this view? If it is clearly false, one ought to be able to refute it easily. If, instead, you want to silence it, and so urgently want to silence it, there can be only one reason: because it is true. If you want to falsify it, it is because you cannot argue against it.

Aitchison sums up: “Let me be clear — being offered a vaccine that prevents serious illness and our governments’ responses to this pandemic are not the same as being tortured in a Nazi concentration camp.”

The issue is not being offered a vaccine, but being forced to take one. And Aitchison is the one equating a medical experiment with a Nazi concentration camp. He, with Erskine-Smith, is the one who ought to be condemned for incendiary rhetoric.

Aitcheson links to the argument that the vaccine is not experimental, because it has been approved by the Canadian government. 

This is circular. That is saying a government can never be held to have violated human rights, because they are following their own rules.

Whether the vaccines were or are experimental must be objectively determined. The argument is that they necessarily are. They use new technology, which without a time machine cannot have been evaluated as to its long term effects. 

It was always a mystery why Aitchison ran for the leadership, and where he found the financial support necessary. He was a political unknown with no visible ideological or regional constituency.

I think we can conclude now that he is bought and paid for by someone who does not have the best interests of the Conservative Party or the Canadian people at heart. Some special interest.