Naming names

It’s been quite the week for exposés, in a sense. A newer player on the Manitoba blog block is a site called Comments Closed. They’ve picked up where the Winnipeg Sun left off in the game called “who’s the Blackberry Addict?”

They have an interesting theory, bolstered by alleged “tips” from various camps in the evolving Fort Rouge NDP situation. They say we may well be former Manitoba NDP übercommunicator and Jack Layton honcho (now returned to Manitoba and said to be interested in succeeding Tim Sale as MLA) Donne Flanagan.

This info apparently came directly from one of the “anti-Donne” camps.

Their theory includes thoughts about M. Flanagan having an epiphany about the power of blogging during his stint in the big time in Ottawa and that he seems to have time on his hands as no one seems to know what he really does these days. (Hmmmm… it’s so true.)

It reminded us of all the ink spilt by the Winnipeg Sun a while back about the offended Mr. David Carrick, a Winnipeg corporate lawyer who was upset about having the same name as an earlier nom de plume of the BB Addicts.

We understand the intrepid Rochelle Squires spent some time trying to ferret out the identity of the BB version of Mr. Carrick. According to word at the leg, one tipster, a Tory staffer posing as a “Jim Tomchuk”, forwarded a theory or two to the talentless Ms. Squires, who then gleefully decided to posit the theories to the government to see if this pathetic “shaking the tree” technique would produce results. Alas, no dice.

Back to the aforementioned Comments Closed issue: Now we have a juicy piece of info forwarded today by one of our anti-Hugh Tory correspondents (who had been pretty quiet until recently).

We are told that the Comments Closed blog is a response right from Tory central to the BB Addicts, authored by non other than … (wait for it) MLA Kelvin Goertzen.

It seems somewhat implausible to us, though, that an actual MLA would stick his neck out with a blog site with such a puerile raison d’être.

However, we are somewhat persuaded by the fact that Mr. Goertzen is already an accomplished blogger. We also know that Team Huey is apoplectic about the BB Addicts and is behind much of the skullduggery to ferret out who is actually behind this modest experiment in freedom of expression.

Mr. Goertzen is, of course, a keen Hugh disciple and fancies himself one of the new young bucks ready to take the reins away from the old farts of the Filmon era, and doing so not too subtly. (We see some of the fallout of this campaign this week with the resignation of the charter member of the Tory old farts club, Jack Penner.)

Now this accusation may well just be spec generated from a somewhat rejuvenated anti-Hugh movement, cobbled together between the Schulanders and the old Tory farts, as fits the much-storied Tory history of vicious back-stabbing. On the other hand, it does make some sense.

Our email lines are a-waitin’.

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Next day update: We note neither Mr. Goertzen nor anyone claiming to be behind Comments Closed have contradicted the above information. Hmmm. Very suspicious, indeed.