It’s an interesting time to sit back and watch the circus come to town. With election season in full tilt on both sides of the border, it’s always fun to see what lengths politicians – and their campaign supporters – will go to in an effort to shape public opinion. From SNL skits to the much hyped first interview, it’s clear that vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is the soup du jour down South that news and entertainment media alike can’t stop slurping up. 

Casting political biases aside, I’m still fascinated by Canada’s “puffingate” – not so much by Conservative site Not A Leader and the sophomoric approach taken diminishing Liberal leader Stephane Dion’s character by having a flash animation puffin deliver a well-timed turd on Mr. Dion’s shoulder – or even the fact that media outlets like the New York Times are covering this story.

Arguably, this move was not done in the greatest of taste and has caused the Harper camp to do some backpedaling. Still, I must confess that the defecating bird has left more of an unfavourable impression in my mind about Mr. Dion than it has about Mr. Harper. How can this be? The mental picture is hard to erase from my mind, and if subjected to a game of word association at the hands of Carl Jung the pooping puffin is the first thing that I would recall. So is it ‘mission accomplished’ for the Not A Leader web architects, or is my subconscious just languishing in the gutter?

A side note on a similar topic: over the weekend I had a read of Joshua Errett’s entertaining, yet not so unbiased, Web Jam column in NOW Toronto that explores the use of social networking sites by the Harper camp. Have a look at the PM’s Facebook and MySpace pages – and I ask, should individuals – even the PM – be on the hook for entering/updating their own content, or is this just the equivalent  of a PR practitioner’s byline in cyberspace?