Oh, how the symmetry of the thing is admirable. The cloying sugar-water substancelessness of the Copenhagen summit fits Harper's "Conservatives" perfectly: it was a pseudo-event that produced a pseudo-pact that can now be marketed as something meaningful by a pseudo-government.
And the game's afoot.
Showing posts with label fuck-ups. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fuck-ups. Show all posts
Sunday, 20 December 2009
Friday, 5 June 2009
"Out of the Depths, Have I Sought Even Deeper Depths, O Lord!": Stephen Harper's De Profundis, Part One
One of the drollest of neo-conservative follies is the belief that government can and should be run "like a business". This formula--often taken seriously even by those alive to the futility of trying to run a train like a yacht--presupposes the notion that the ethos of selling as dearly as possible what one has made as cheaply as possible is both the key to sound national stewardship and the very essence of ministerial integrity.
This notion totally inverts the facts, of course, as does every article of neo-con faith: the optimal way for a government to pursue its rational self-interest (defined by maximising its return and minimising its costs) is to do precisely nothing on behalf of the electors it ostensibly serves: according to pure market values, it is illogical for a federal government to waste its four-year span of electoral impunity working on behalf of a people whose assent it no longer requires and who haven't the power to penalise the incumbents no matter how wasteful, arrogant, or inefficient they are; instead, the logic of pure self-interest requires government caucus members to use their four-year executive monopoly to enjoy and invest whatever personal equity they can extract from their position, particularly by cultivating the kinds of corporate contacts that will enrich them after their legislative mandate elapses or is withdrawn.
If this sounds uncomfortably close to the way Canadian governments actually operate, it is only because governments from across the ideological spectrum all do tend to behave like businesses, as will any human system that confers instant privilege, power and wealth upon ambitious social climbers with weak or expired commitments to any notion of civic responsibility.
"Running a government like a business" means producing as much wealth as possible for the party's shareholders (i.e. M.P.'s , party members and camp followers) whilst doing as little on behalf of tax-payers as possible--in other words, doing precisely what causes Canadians to throw out governments in disgust every eight years or so. This is not a formula for "efficiency" or "accountability"; it is a formula for the sad, dreadful status quo, and its dreary consequences are not the result of political "failure" in the strict sense but of an intentionally elaborated programme.
We need to keep all of this in mind when assessing the performance of Stephen Harper's regime: what appear to be its failures and scandals are actually the perfectly normal and predictable output of the CPC's business model of governance. In fact, it is on this most fundamental level that the CPC has arguably performed at its best, at its most creative, and at its most inspired.
Honest analyses of "Conservative" crises will reveal all the symptoms of an aggressive, disciplined approach to the "government-as-business" model: not content with safe, narrow, low-yield disasters, Harper's government has always sought functional depth in its flagrancies and has been content only when its wretched incompetence and venalities have achieved synergistic cross-platform interoperability.
The Lisa Raitt fiasco serves as a recent example. A Liberal version of this scandal would have seen the offending minister misplace a binder full of classified documents, resign in disgrace, and then quietly reappear in cabinet later when the smoke cleared; the typical Liberal inability to innovate, improvise and adapt to rapidly changing circumstances would have allowed this event to pass by without having its full potential exploited.
In sharp contrast, the CPC recognised the polyvalence of the Raitt affair and acted decisively to make sure that Canadians were exposed to the full wattage of its surreal brilliance. First, we heard that the binder was lost; then we heard that its information was classified not because it was dangerous to the state, but because it was dangerous to the party--revealing as it does that the cost of funding Atomic Energy of Canada will likely cost tens of millions more dollars than the government said it would in its January budget. Then we heard that the government fired Raitt's 26-year-old assistant for the misdeed without even bothering to establish that it was she, not her boss, who actually committed the misdeed.
Now, that is how incompetence is done when you really mean it: never be satisfied with the force of just the most obvious dimension of your stupidity; always strive to add value and layered functionality to it. In this case, we have a party caught withholding information the public deserves to have while misusing a classification protocol designed to protect the state while being caught in an act of colossal budgetary ineptitude while betraying ignominious cowardice in its invertebrate refusal to respect the tradition of ministerial responsibility, by which heads of departments have always held themselves accountable for the actions of their subordinates.
Astonishing. That's a four-part invention of uselessness; a tetra-fuck-up. That's the kind of pioneering drive CPC shareholders expect from their party, and, in our increasingly competitive global market environment, it's the kind of drive they deserve.
This notion totally inverts the facts, of course, as does every article of neo-con faith: the optimal way for a government to pursue its rational self-interest (defined by maximising its return and minimising its costs) is to do precisely nothing on behalf of the electors it ostensibly serves: according to pure market values, it is illogical for a federal government to waste its four-year span of electoral impunity working on behalf of a people whose assent it no longer requires and who haven't the power to penalise the incumbents no matter how wasteful, arrogant, or inefficient they are; instead, the logic of pure self-interest requires government caucus members to use their four-year executive monopoly to enjoy and invest whatever personal equity they can extract from their position, particularly by cultivating the kinds of corporate contacts that will enrich them after their legislative mandate elapses or is withdrawn.
If this sounds uncomfortably close to the way Canadian governments actually operate, it is only because governments from across the ideological spectrum all do tend to behave like businesses, as will any human system that confers instant privilege, power and wealth upon ambitious social climbers with weak or expired commitments to any notion of civic responsibility.
"Running a government like a business" means producing as much wealth as possible for the party's shareholders (i.e. M.P.'s , party members and camp followers) whilst doing as little on behalf of tax-payers as possible--in other words, doing precisely what causes Canadians to throw out governments in disgust every eight years or so. This is not a formula for "efficiency" or "accountability"; it is a formula for the sad, dreadful status quo, and its dreary consequences are not the result of political "failure" in the strict sense but of an intentionally elaborated programme.
We need to keep all of this in mind when assessing the performance of Stephen Harper's regime: what appear to be its failures and scandals are actually the perfectly normal and predictable output of the CPC's business model of governance. In fact, it is on this most fundamental level that the CPC has arguably performed at its best, at its most creative, and at its most inspired.
Honest analyses of "Conservative" crises will reveal all the symptoms of an aggressive, disciplined approach to the "government-as-business" model: not content with safe, narrow, low-yield disasters, Harper's government has always sought functional depth in its flagrancies and has been content only when its wretched incompetence and venalities have achieved synergistic cross-platform interoperability.
The Lisa Raitt fiasco serves as a recent example. A Liberal version of this scandal would have seen the offending minister misplace a binder full of classified documents, resign in disgrace, and then quietly reappear in cabinet later when the smoke cleared; the typical Liberal inability to innovate, improvise and adapt to rapidly changing circumstances would have allowed this event to pass by without having its full potential exploited.
In sharp contrast, the CPC recognised the polyvalence of the Raitt affair and acted decisively to make sure that Canadians were exposed to the full wattage of its surreal brilliance. First, we heard that the binder was lost; then we heard that its information was classified not because it was dangerous to the state, but because it was dangerous to the party--revealing as it does that the cost of funding Atomic Energy of Canada will likely cost tens of millions more dollars than the government said it would in its January budget. Then we heard that the government fired Raitt's 26-year-old assistant for the misdeed without even bothering to establish that it was she, not her boss, who actually committed the misdeed.
Now, that is how incompetence is done when you really mean it: never be satisfied with the force of just the most obvious dimension of your stupidity; always strive to add value and layered functionality to it. In this case, we have a party caught withholding information the public deserves to have while misusing a classification protocol designed to protect the state while being caught in an act of colossal budgetary ineptitude while betraying ignominious cowardice in its invertebrate refusal to respect the tradition of ministerial responsibility, by which heads of departments have always held themselves accountable for the actions of their subordinates.
Astonishing. That's a four-part invention of uselessness; a tetra-fuck-up. That's the kind of pioneering drive CPC shareholders expect from their party, and, in our increasingly competitive global market environment, it's the kind of drive they deserve.
Saturday, 21 March 2009
Ignominious Defeat Makes For Strange Bedfellows
Ring the church bells, people. Canada has just lost her first war—an inevitability, really, once we hitched our geo-political cart to history’s most fecklessly narcissistic empire.
Once, we begged to negotiate only with "moderate" brutal, medieval Islamofascists--a human category Harper and his Harperoids always insisted did not exist.
Now we're negotiating with the Taliban's top leadership, in talks to be mediated by the world's wealthiest pro-Western Islamonazi regime--the country that produced most of the 9/11 hijackers.
Those of you familiar with the history of the Second World War will know that Churchill, FDR and Stalin never asked Hitler, Goering and Himmler over for tea and cucumber sandwiches; that's because they wanted to win and knew they would win. In war, petitioning for talks is an admission of defeat. Thus, all we have after six years of carnage is this blighted harvest, sown by the blood of far too many fine Canadian soldiers.
Now that our Afghan battle-group is operating on behalf of appeasers, enablers and collaborators, Harper has a stark choice: either repatriate and redeploy our troops or allow their last two operational years to be spent as the military arm of an Islamist Vichy.
Once, we begged to negotiate only with "moderate" brutal, medieval Islamofascists--a human category Harper and his Harperoids always insisted did not exist.
Now we're negotiating with the Taliban's top leadership, in talks to be mediated by the world's wealthiest pro-Western Islamonazi regime--the country that produced most of the 9/11 hijackers.
Those of you familiar with the history of the Second World War will know that Churchill, FDR and Stalin never asked Hitler, Goering and Himmler over for tea and cucumber sandwiches; that's because they wanted to win and knew they would win. In war, petitioning for talks is an admission of defeat. Thus, all we have after six years of carnage is this blighted harvest, sown by the blood of far too many fine Canadian soldiers.
Now that our Afghan battle-group is operating on behalf of appeasers, enablers and collaborators, Harper has a stark choice: either repatriate and redeploy our troops or allow their last two operational years to be spent as the military arm of an Islamist Vichy.
Tuesday, 15 April 2008
"Fucking Up for Canada"
Once upon a time, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was considered the most senior Cabinet portfolio. At its head would be placed the most august of the Prime Minister's caucus colleagues. This is an office that has been filled, with honour, by Nobel Prize winners and former prime ministers. Mike Pearson, Joe Clark, Paul Martin Sr. and Flora MacDonald number among the many who have done Canada proud on the world stage.
The ever-innovative Stephen Harper, always on the qui vive for ways of overturning Canadian traditions, opted to litter the Ministry with two of the most inconsequential dullards of his groggily mediocre caucus, thus facilitating his own retention of total control over foreign policy (for, you see, a minister with a decent IQ or a full scrotum might make that task damnably difficult).
First, the Canadian people had to suffer through the Peter MacKay era. MacKay is a football-faced harlequin whose rise from richly-earned anonymity during the 2003 P.C. leadership race was eclipsed by the ignominy of his pro-Alliance coat-turning and consequent assassination of his own party. He acceded to the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs purely for protocol's sake: being the leader of one the CPC's "legacy" parties, MacKay could not be seen to settle for Transportation.
Thus, bereft of anything even approaching an international profile, MacKay stumbled through his commedia dell' arte of a tenure while Canadians averted their eyes. In one of the most embarrassing spectacles in Canadian diplomatic history, MacKay publicly announced his crush on U.S. Secretary of State Condolezza Rice. For months, the North American press followed this sordid soap opera, which ended only when MacKay, finally put out of his misery in a Cabinet shuffle, was demoted to National Defence (the fact that Harper would use Defence as the destination of a demotion during a time of war says volumes about how seriously he takes that portfolio and the war).
Harper then outdid himself and appointed Maxime Bernier--yet another faceless drone nobody outside his riding had ever heard of--as Minister of Foreign Affairs. With Bernier, Harper got all the amateur-hour gaucherie and shallowness that MacKay had provided, and, what is more, got them wrapped in the big, red bow of Bernier's barely passable English. Imagine Harper's elation at having created his perfect minister: a man who not only cannot think for himself, but who can barely speak for himself into the bargain.
Bernier's latest triumph? He openly mused to reporters about wanting to have the governor of Kandahar replaced. Made aware of the colossal size of his gaffe, he retreated from this position a few hours later after suffering the unprecedented humiliation of being publicly rebuked by his own spokesman.
The governor in question, Asadullah Khalid, has been accused of detainee torture, and, now that the CPC seems to have come to the belated belief that such torture actually occurred, Bernier might see Khalid's removal as a necessary anti-corruption gesture.
Awkwardly, though, most Afghans no doubt consider such a gesture to be their responsibility and their prerogative, to be undertaken how and when they choose--like in an election. The cause of Afghan stability is in no way advanced when the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs addresses the population as if he were an Ottoman Caliph addressing a gaggle of turbulent bedouins.
Ultimately, Bernier has only made Khalid's position more secure, as Karzai--painfully aware of the Afghani perception that he's a NATO puppet--will be loath to allow domestic affairs to proceed according to Western dictation. Moreover, Bernier has provided more ammunition (literally) to the insurgent propaganda that the West sees itself as Afghanistan's overlord rather than an ally. Finally, Bernier has unwittingly removed the fig leaf from the ugly fact that, at least in one region (and there are many others like it), Afghan "democracy" has amounted to a Gaza-Strip-like shambles of corruption and violence.
If Stephen Harper is as smart as he thinks he is, he'll muzzle Bernier, put him on a leash, and send him chasing after Condi's skirt. At least then, like his predecessor, he'll be harmless.
The ever-innovative Stephen Harper, always on the qui vive for ways of overturning Canadian traditions, opted to litter the Ministry with two of the most inconsequential dullards of his groggily mediocre caucus, thus facilitating his own retention of total control over foreign policy (for, you see, a minister with a decent IQ or a full scrotum might make that task damnably difficult).
First, the Canadian people had to suffer through the Peter MacKay era. MacKay is a football-faced harlequin whose rise from richly-earned anonymity during the 2003 P.C. leadership race was eclipsed by the ignominy of his pro-Alliance coat-turning and consequent assassination of his own party. He acceded to the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs purely for protocol's sake: being the leader of one the CPC's "legacy" parties, MacKay could not be seen to settle for Transportation.
Thus, bereft of anything even approaching an international profile, MacKay stumbled through his commedia dell' arte of a tenure while Canadians averted their eyes. In one of the most embarrassing spectacles in Canadian diplomatic history, MacKay publicly announced his crush on U.S. Secretary of State Condolezza Rice. For months, the North American press followed this sordid soap opera, which ended only when MacKay, finally put out of his misery in a Cabinet shuffle, was demoted to National Defence (the fact that Harper would use Defence as the destination of a demotion during a time of war says volumes about how seriously he takes that portfolio and the war).
Harper then outdid himself and appointed Maxime Bernier--yet another faceless drone nobody outside his riding had ever heard of--as Minister of Foreign Affairs. With Bernier, Harper got all the amateur-hour gaucherie and shallowness that MacKay had provided, and, what is more, got them wrapped in the big, red bow of Bernier's barely passable English. Imagine Harper's elation at having created his perfect minister: a man who not only cannot think for himself, but who can barely speak for himself into the bargain.
Bernier's latest triumph? He openly mused to reporters about wanting to have the governor of Kandahar replaced. Made aware of the colossal size of his gaffe, he retreated from this position a few hours later after suffering the unprecedented humiliation of being publicly rebuked by his own spokesman.
The governor in question, Asadullah Khalid, has been accused of detainee torture, and, now that the CPC seems to have come to the belated belief that such torture actually occurred, Bernier might see Khalid's removal as a necessary anti-corruption gesture.
Awkwardly, though, most Afghans no doubt consider such a gesture to be their responsibility and their prerogative, to be undertaken how and when they choose--like in an election. The cause of Afghan stability is in no way advanced when the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs addresses the population as if he were an Ottoman Caliph addressing a gaggle of turbulent bedouins.
Ultimately, Bernier has only made Khalid's position more secure, as Karzai--painfully aware of the Afghani perception that he's a NATO puppet--will be loath to allow domestic affairs to proceed according to Western dictation. Moreover, Bernier has provided more ammunition (literally) to the insurgent propaganda that the West sees itself as Afghanistan's overlord rather than an ally. Finally, Bernier has unwittingly removed the fig leaf from the ugly fact that, at least in one region (and there are many others like it), Afghan "democracy" has amounted to a Gaza-Strip-like shambles of corruption and violence.
If Stephen Harper is as smart as he thinks he is, he'll muzzle Bernier, put him on a leash, and send him chasing after Condi's skirt. At least then, like his predecessor, he'll be harmless.
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