What wouldn’t Erin O’Toole do to win?

Erin O’Toole put out a Facebook meme this week with a picture of himself gazing firmly into the distance, with this text superimposed: “I’m not the media’s candidate. I’m not going to go Liberal-light to earn the fake approval of the press gallery. Add your name if you’re with me.”

This message is so disconnected from reality—so transparently false—that it made me think of the old H.L. Mencken line: “A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.”

I wouldn’t dream of asking, as Conservative MP Arnold Viersen asked NDP MP Laurel Collins last week, if Mr. O’Toole has ever considered taking up sex work, but I do wonder what he wouldn’t do to gain an edge in his uphill battle for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada.

His meme is a false come-on, premised on nonsense, the idea that journalists are ganging up to anoint Peter MacKay, because we love red Tories. What codswallop. Erin O’Toole is a press gallery darling. He doesn’t have to get our fake approval. He has the real thing.