Back in the pre-Youtube days – a phrase that sounds so quaint and old-fashioned you’d might as well be starting a sentence with “so I got my Van Halen 8-track stuck in my Geo Metro” – funny videos were hard to come by on the web. You’d have to use Yahoo, or Lycos, or Altavista or whatever to find some guy’s animated-gif-strewn, NSYNC-midi-blaring Geocities homepage where you could devote 20 minutes of intense strain on your 56k connection to download a 30-second RealPlayer video of whatever crap we found funny back then. (Oh yeah, and it’d buffer all the fucking time, don’t you kids remember buffering?) Back in those archaic days, after endless nights of commando-crawling through the trenches of the internet, I remember finding a video so amazing that to this day, it holds a special place in my heart. There was no Youtube, no Twitter, no Facebook, not a single luxury, so anything amazing that you found on the internet was a source of personal pride.

I suppose there’s no better way to discuss this video than to just tell you exactly what it is. It’s Arnold Schwarzenegger starring in a series of Japanese commercials for a questionable-looking vitamin drink. That’s right, we see the Governor of California dressed as a nerd playing Mahjong  before turning into a bedazzled, cackling superhero, shouting in Austrian-tinged Japanese like an escape lunatic, shilling for what I can only assume is crack cocaine in a can. I found this video all on my own in the 90s, probably saving it off an Angelfire site to watch in Windows Media Player, and it brought me so much joy.

Of course, to find the video these days all I had to do was type it into goddamn Youtube, and a hundred versions popped up with zero load time.

What I’m trying to say by all of this non-sequitur nonsense is that it’s not unprecedented for video to appear of a prominent politician running off to Asia to shill for a chemical company.

Tony Clement, your Minister of Industry, has shown up in a tacky promotional video throwing around his influence as a government official to whore himself out for a chemical company in his riding – it’s okay, they’re a green chemical company, so they can’t be evil! – in an infomercial aired in China. The opposition is not amused. We kind of are.

Here’s the video!

Ahaha this is the shittiest video. It’s narrated by Wilford Brimley with a mouthful of peanut butter and consists mostly of shots ripped from Canadian Heritage Minutes, and actually has the audacity to use the song from “Chariots of Fire” in its first non-ironic context since it was used in the actual movie “Chariots of Fire”. And “What a Wonderful World”, what the fuck are you serious, couldn’t this podunk grease-barrel company get some generic production music that doesn’t blatantly break music copyright laws without permission?

If Tony Clement can learn anything from Arnold Schwarzenegger in terms of selling toxins to Asians, it would be to turn into a sparkly space-magician and drown his rivals in noodles while cackling ominously. That might actually bring the level of decorum for the next Question Period up a notch, considering Tony’s already been compared to the ShamWow Guy in the hallowed halls of our nation’s parliament. NDPer Pat Martin compared Tony Clement, Minister of Industry, to – well, let me just quote:

“All that is missing is the headset and he could be the ShamWow guy. Vince, the Slap Chop guy, has some new competition.”

Well, the SlapChop guy and the ShamWow guy, that’s actually the same guy. He also beat the shit out of a transsexual hooker. Vince, I mean. Not Tony Clement. Or at least, not that we know of in Tony’s case.

Tony Clement, you’re now in the MapleRag Infomercial Hall of Fame. Now, just try to peddle your influence to get your colleagues in Parliament to star in some infomercials of their own. Baird would be great to be that angry, sweaty “before” guy that starts every exercise infomercial, the one in black-and-white who’s struggling terribly to perform basic human functions as the voiceover booms “are you tired of back-breaking sit-ups?”

[Story: CBC, if you trust those commies.]