So much for "no blog until morning"

(Although it's 1:07 AM, so technically it *is* the next day.)

The election's in the bag, and while a couple seats might yet change hands (it was maybe an hour ago I saw Andrew Telegdi, with the little "elected" checkmark, in second place), we have a pretty good idea of our new government.

Spoiler alert:

Conservatives. Lots of Conservatives. Like, a scary number of Conservatives, winning by disheartening numbers.

I don't know what caused it, I'm not going to pretend to examime the numbers and come up with nothing of substance - can we agree yet that polling is a crock?

Instead, I want to make note of two moments from tonight which satisfied my surrealist sense of humour.

9:20 EST, ten minutes before polls closed in Ontario, Craig Oliver is on CTV explaining that the reason he doesn't look directly at the camera (like every other trained seal in the TV reporting business) is because he's legally blind due to glaucoma.

Fine. I have glaucoma, and know that although my case is mild, it's definitely a serious disease.

Problem: Craig Oliver was diagnosed with glaucoma 35 years ago. It's not like it was a recent health problem which might have prompted a suddenly different behaviour. He's been the same way for as long as most people can remember. What was the point of this, other than to fill time before results started coming in?

Moment number two, which I suspect Mike Duffy will have a field day with, would bring a smile to my face and a bounce to my step as I raced to type out the exact quote before I forgot it:

As soon as the theme of the night (Liberal losses begetting mostly Conservative gains) became apparent, CTV - particularly the aforementioned Oliver - began opining incessantly that this was the end for Dion, there was no way he could lead the Liberals after tonight. Whenever they interviewed another Liberal, leadership was the first question they asked. CTV even went so far as to put Rae and Ignatieff on at the same time, hoping for some potential conflict between the two presumed front-runners in the Dion replacement sweepstakes. CBC did none of this, at least from what I saw.

So you can imagine my delight when Dion was walking into an auditorium to give his concession speech, CTV's Roger Smith asked him if he'd be stepping down, and Dion replied with a dismissive "the last one I want to speak to now is CTV, you understand that?".

In the few minutes of Dion's speech, CTV quickly readied their plan of attack - the most passive-agressive journalism I've ever seen. After the speech, Oliver, Smith, Tom Clark, and even Lloyd Robertson openly declared that there was no way Dion could continue on as Liberal leader, with Smith pretending to frame Dion as simply being disheartened from the results, while ever-so-subtly calling him a bad politician, naive, "focusing too much on policy" (seriously???), and other things I can't remember at the moment. It was truly a sight to see.

CTV News - fair and balanced. :)

--Ryan