Harperium In Excelsis: Game of Drones, Part III

Several of the past month’s news stories force us to derive a number of painful yet unsurprising conclusions about Stephen Harper’s caucus, party, and supporters. I present below a list that is, sadly, not exhaustive. To wit, our Harperoids

...are not averse to watching the Museum of Civilization be bizarrely repurposed into a museum for folks who hate museums (by the people who’ve been perfecting a government for folks who hate government and a Canada for folks who hate Canada), which, if past performance has any predictive relevance, will undoubtedly feature as its centrepiece exhibit a gargantuan bronze statue of Christ in a “USA Kicks Ass” t-shirt riding triumphantly into Jerusalem on the back of a triceratops flanked by an honour guard of Navy SEALs;      

...are unmoved when their “populist” prime minister abridges the rights and privileges of his MPs merely because his party’s base is composed of people who expect their representatives to bring onto the floor of the House precisely the kind of obnoxious-to-the-vast-majority-of-Canadians motion Harper knows makes his caucus look like the cast of Porky’s II and is thus desperate to suppress;

...are content to see the protracted domestic detention of a Crown subject whose “confession”, gleaned by American torturers conducting an illegal, unanimously discredited sondergericht in a Cuban gulag, was extorted partly through the threat of being repeatedly rectally raped, by “big black guys,” naturally (the carriers of what the collective American imagination conceives as the most virulent genus of social contamination). Moreover, they agree with Stephen Harper that the Canadian people, though now paying the full cost of Khadr’s room and board, are too fragile to withstand the apocalyptic impact of whatever he would wish to say from behind bars;

...were proud to see their prime minister ornament the sombre dignity of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral by pimping the event for the sake of a cheap, guttersnipe attack on Justin Trudeau, insolently launched atop the still-warm corpses of the Boston Marathon victims. Nor do they overmuch mind that their tax dollars are currently funding a campaign of wretched defamation, the thrust of which is Trudeau’s alleged faggotry, that is so odious that even hardened Harper-fellating hacks like Stephen Woodworth and Brent Rathgeber—who’ve spent the last half-decade proving that they would queue up naked before the front door of 24 Sussex in a February hailstorm to receive the honour of drinking overflowing bowls of the foetid, maggot-speckled swill compounded of venality, illegality, sophistry, and moral cowardice that perpetually sluices forth from the dank cloaca of CPC HQ—find unacceptably repellent. It’s as if they’ve finally realised that, after seven years of forcing his ward-heeling invertebrates to prostitute every single principle they claim to hold, Harper has managed to become the only maquereau in the history of the West too stupid to know how to run a whorehouse at a profit.     

   

The primary, and perhaps only, utility Harper’s conservative lemmings can offer real conservatives is their service as a stark daily reminder that humankind is irremediably unregenerate: the immutable fact of human fallibility is a core conservative belief, and our justified awe before the myriad glories of human compassion, magnanimity, and virtue must sometimes be tempered by an acknowledgment that we have not crawled as far beyond the primeval slime as we think we have, a fact that Canada’s branch of the global confederacy of idiocy argues with irresistible eloquence.

     

A Fiasco Brought to You by Harper’s Cabinet of Callow Cretins: One Down, Thousands More to Go!

I find it odd that our media have neglected to mention, if only in passing, that Canada has just undergone the most mortifying foreign affairs debacle of its diplomatic history, courtesy of a cabinet that, having spent five years mistaking squalid pork-barrel hackery and petty partisan larceny for statecraft, is still not anywhere near being ready for primetime, as evidenced by a Foreign Affairs minister who gives scant evidence of being able to locate Israel on a map, let alone offer a meaningful observation upon it.

As far as we can tell, Stephen Harper made clear that his vision of the Middle East “peace process” [*cough*] required that it evolve according to norms not only totally unacceptable to the Arab world but completely contrary to Canada’s traditional Middle East policy, to the 1967 UN resolution that has ever since stood as the framework for negotiations, and to President Obama’s explicitly stated position.

Thus, Harper managed, without having any realistic hope of pursuing the alternative and futile trajectory he was proposing, to destroy Canada’s credibility as a proponent of the two-state solution while simultaneously undermining the public solidarity of the G8 and the authority of the United States, the only nation with the clout to condition the Middle East’s negotiating environment and the hyper-power to which Harper otherwise pledges undying loyalty. I will challenge anybody to find a precedent wherein a Canadian prime minister’s contribution to a multilateral forum has had this blend of incoherence and brattish uselessness as its main ingredients.

Shortly thereafter, the Honourable John Baird staggers out, blinking and stammering, and announces that Canada has reconsidered its position and now fully supports Obama’s view. While reporters wonder whether it was a consultation with a ouija board, a realization of Canada’s fundamental geo-political irrelevance, or a belated awareness of the idiocy of Harper’s initial position that changed the government’s mind, Baird proceeds to give every indication of being utterly unaware of what “1967” actually means to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He then shuffles nervously like an awkward sixth-grader and mumbles that he had no idea that UN resolutions on Israel were so important for a Minister of Foreign Affairs to be aware of, presumably whilst engaging the rueful, silent rumination that a career of banging fists on desks and screaming spittle-drenched taking points ill prepares one for a grown-up’s job.

Meanwhile, as this cheap vaudeville act unfolds, our media blandly report events as if they are not helping Canada become even more completely to the G8 what Poland is to the EU—a parochial, unambitious, and slightly dim gaggle of slap-happy bumpkins who’ve become so deeply convinced of their abject inability to offer the world anything of value that their only significant cultural export is their own poltroonish collective persona.

Allow me to become nostalgic for a moment—not for Lloyd Axworthy, the last Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs to have an overall ministerial value greater than that of his cufflinks collection—but for a time when Canadians could get angry about being made to look ludicrous on the international stage. By my reckoning, that would be 1979, when Joe Clark was eviscerated in the press, and rightly, for promising to move Canada’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. That misstep, seen as hugely embarrassing, was considered by many even in the Tory-friendly media to be enough to bring Clark’s fitness for office into question. Now, having grown inured to the self-abasing incompetence of their elites, Canadians appear immune to shame.

The Harper era has demonstrated a hard truth: a great nation cannot be long ruled by moral midgets without eventually being cut down to their size.

Constitutional Pedantry Justified*

* Now with "What He Said" and "Support Our Troops" updates!

Anyone who wondered how badly we need to restore dignity, authority and competence to the office of Governor General and beg of it to take ultimate executive authority away from the giggling psych-ward outpatients who now pretend to national leadership needs to understand that our current prime minister thinks democracy is dangerous. No, really.

Just when you were starting to bow under the apparently persuasive weight of the endlessly reiterated insistence that Stephen Harper has changed—that he is not the state-hating, anarcho-libertarian, free-market fundamentalist he used to be—the man himself proclaims that, since the "games" (he means "debates") that go on in Parliament are so frightening to international finance, the House is better off kept empty.

Disappointingly, Harper failed to pursue his train of thought to its logical conclusion and announce the indefinite suspension of Parliament and the immediate proscription of all political parties (except his own) in order to ensure that Canada remains attractive to the sharks that ply the world's capital markets. Perhaps he’s just waiting for his blue sweater to come back from the dry cleaner’s, as he would wish, of course, to sport his “harmless eunuch” look when promulgating that particular edict.



What He Said:

I just came across this week-old editorial by noted constitutional scholar Errol Mendes (of my dear old University of Ottawa) and thought I would share it with you. It’s so close to the spirit of my last post that it might have served as its contextual preface. I was quite surprised to read Mendes explicitly argue that Harper’s prorogation was undeniably unconstitutional (as in illegal).


"Support Our Troops":

On a lighter (though, also, darker) note, I thought I would pass along a clip of Noam Chomsky deploying his rarely used stand-up skills. Here, he talks about what asinine, bumper-sticker-ready slogans like “Support Our Troops” are designed to accomplish on behalf of élite objectives.

Given that the latest Parliamentary suspension might go down in history as the “Support-Our-Troops” Interlude (as it barred the evil Opposition from doing the Taliban’s work in their subversive House committees) and given that Chomsky’s guild syndicalism is the closest thing to Romantic-Jacobean Toryism of which modern Americans appear capable, I believe the clip to be more than glancingly apropos.

Noam Chomsky, ladies and gentlemen. Well into his eighties, and still really, really angry. Now that’s my kind of guy.

When Hacks Attack, Part Two: Sheer Hack Attack!

As a public service, I hereby append below an internal memorandum allegedly sent by "Conservative" Party brass to "Conservative" riding presidents.

I prefer not to divulge how it came into my possession, and I can’t reliably vouch for its authenticity. I’m rather dubious, frankly: Harperoids have come to be (wisely) leery of leaving paper trails. In any case, it certainly seems genuine. It is most likely the first draft of a memo that was ultimately edited into respectability by one of the party's half-dozen grown-ups, in case it got leaked. Enjoy!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Dear Riding Association Presidents:


In order to keep ourselves and our camp-following sycophants dunked in the vast plankton-rich trough of federal emoluments, our party has striven to fine-tune its electoral mechanism to the kind of exacting standard that you--the faceless, toadying party functionary--demand and deserve.

We have ruthlessly cut costs. We have performed efficiencies in key process elements. For instance, we’ve realised how unnecessary it is to run homo sapiens candidates in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Accordingly, after careful feedback and focus-group analyses, our party has hypothesised that the carcasses of dead squirrels stuffed with sawdust and impaled on wooden kebabs painted in party colours can hold CPC ridings with pluralities at par with or even greater than current levels. Running low-maintenance road-kill in safe SaskAlberta ridings will allow us to move resources to more challenging ridings.

The short questionnaire you see before you is part of our new, dynamic election-readiness tool-kit. It is designed to help you identify God-fearing CPC-friendly voters among the molten, unsentient mass of fundamentally lazy and bolshevist quasi-Talibs with which Canada is ridden.

We suggest you urge as many of your heathen riding mates as possible to complete the brief survey; then, carefully analyse their responses. Waste no further time and effort on those who score high: they’re ours. Naturally, most will score low. After adding their names to our official “Enemies of Stephen Harper and Therefore Possibly Al-Qaeda Sleeper Agents” master-list, spend some time with them in respectful, constructive dialogue (a cattle-prod is included in your package for this purpose). At the bottom of the survey, you’ll find a legend detailing what the results mean and offering tips on how to proceed with your evangelism.

Good luck, and good hunting!


------------------------------------------------------------------------


1. The word "liberal" makes me think of:

a) Someone who espouses what has arguably been the most potent political tradition in the post-Enlightenment West [1 point];

b) A naive, tax-grabbing statist [3 points];

c) A bilingual ballet enthusiast who thinks he's better than me [5 points].



2. The word "feminist" means:

a) Someone committed to the legal and social equality of women [1 point];

b) A radical who seeks to overthrow Western patriarchy [3 points];

c) A fat ugly dyke on the rag [5 points].



3. The word “France” refers to:

a) A great European nation that has been crucial to the development of Western civilisation and that established the foundations of Canada’s European heritage [1 point];

b) One of the senior members of the European Union [3 points];

d) A nation of over-scented queers in perpetual search of someone to surrender to [5 points].



4. "A Mare Usque Ad Mare" means:

a) "From Sea to Sea" [1 point];

b) Something I need to Google [3 points];

c) Some faggy Latin shit [5 points].



5. The Fathers of Confederation are:

a) The men who knitted together the main elements of Canada's geo-political fabric [1 point];

b) A group of colonial pragmatists desperate to escape the Act of Union's legislative straightjacket [3 points];

c) A bunch of hacks too stupid to sue for admission to the U.S.A [5 points].



6. My favourite political philosopher is:

a) George Grant [1 point];

b) Thomas Paine [3 points];

c) Larry the Cable Guy [5 points].



7. The "War on Terror" is:

a) A misguided and potentially catastrophic U.S.-led militarisation of what is really a development issue [1 point];

b) A noble but poorly executed effort at nation-building [3 points];

c) The inspiration for some of my favourite fridge magnets [5 points].



8. G.W. Bush's words, "You're either for us or against us" were:

a) An unstatesmanlike burst of arrogance unhelpful to the building of an effective post-9/11 Western alliance [1 point];

b) An unfortunate but understandable lapse in judgment [3 points];

c) Redundant. Of course I was going to be for him: he was my President [5 points].



9. Stephen Harper's assertion that Canada is a second-tier socialist backwater was:

a) Boorish and unpatriotic [1 point];

b) Wrong, but fair comment [3 points];

c) So cool that I made my girlfriend scrawl Harper's words onto her left thigh, right next to her tattoo of Merle Haggard [5 points].



10. Canada's consistent record of maintaining a higher standard of living than America's is:

a) Proof of the preferability of Canadian society [1 point];

b) Interesting but irrelevant [3 points];

c) Typical Canadian America-bashing [5 points].




Results:


35-50: Yeehah! This subject is a member of our natural constituency. In fact, he's probably Kathy Shaidle. Only a lobotomy could make him more devoutly committed to our cause. He needs no further proselytising. Move on.

20-35: This subject is in the ballpark, but he’s still far too much of a typical defeatist, can’t-do Canadian. Administer a copy of Atlas Shrugged immediately. Have him re-take the survey within two weeks. Who knows? By that time, he may have suffered an IQ-suppressing head injury and become more open to persuasion.

10-20: Any further effort on this far-left terrorist would be wasted. Make sure to send his name to party headquarters so that we may issue a security certificate and arrange for his indefinite detention.

"Out of the Depths, Have I Sought Even Deeper Depths, O Lord!": Stephen Harper's De Profundis, Part Two

No "Conservative" activist has provided higher multi-fuck-up value for dollar than Ottawa mayor and former temp-agency CEO Larry O'Brien. This man's plunge from the twin Everests of his massive ego and colossal managerial incapability has been painful to witness, especially as so much goodwill is owed someone who has advanced so far in life despite the handicap of looking like he's been indifferently cross-assembled from the physiognomic fragments of Lex Luthor, Daddy Warbucks, and Stalin's most brutish-looking Byelorussian NKVD Commissar.

Now, most of the major national media outlets that have been watching his bribery trial have assumed that O'Brien fully intended to prove himself not guilty of the Crown's charges. That is, after all, conventional. Sadly, things have not gone well for the mayor.

For weeks, the court has been treated to testimony placing O'Brien at the heart of the "Conservative" machine in Ottawa. In fact, he was recruited and groomed personally by John Reynolds, ex-CPC M.P., influential party bag-man and rain-maker, and trusted Stephen Harper confidante. Reynolds wanted O'Brien to run federally, but O'Brien decided to carry the CPC flag in the 2006 mayoralty race instead--selflessly--just to bring a little of the Harper magic to us socialist, Northern European Ottawan barbarians. According to testimony, the O'Brien network is a Who's Who of the CPC's Ottawa nomenklatura: Baird operatives, Poilievre aides--they're all there, brokering (allegedly) some sort of deal between O'Brien and Terry Kilrea, the potentially vote-splitting right-wing candidate whom O'Brien is accused of buying off with an appointment to the Parole Board.

On Monday, after watching witness after witness effectively corroborate Kilrea's damning version of events, O'Brien's defence team performed a stunning volte face; it asked the presiding judge to render a directed verdict, something normally brought down in order to dismiss a Crown case for lack of evidence but which would, in this case, dismiss the charges for not fitting into the relevant provisions of the Criminal Code. In effect, the defence is arguing that O'Brien's alleged offence is not covered by the law and is thus perfectly legal.

Specifically, the defence contends that the law is meant to criminalise only the act of promising a monetary reward for doing someone a political favour; the promise of a political reward, they argue, is lawful. Thus, it would have been corrupt of O'Brien to have tempted Kilrea with an envelope full of cash, but, since he sought to have Kilrea whore himself for a seat on the Parole Board, O'Brien's in the clear. Lost in this mincing quibbling, apparently, is the obvious fact that a lucrative Parole Board position is, collaterally, a monetary reward.

Ottawa scribe Randall Denley puts the situation in perspective quite lucidly, I think:

According to the defence, offering someone a federal job as an inducement to drop out of a mayoral race is legally acceptable behaviour. The Crown contends that it's not, despite politicians' history of using Senate and cabinet appointments to politically benefit the party in power...If [the judge] determines that there is nothing illegal about what O'Brien is alleged to have done, he is putting a judicial stamp of approval on conduct that stinks...The political culture of senior levels of government has played a dominant role in what is actually a municipal issue...The defence is relying on Canadians' deep cynicism about the honesty of politicians...In the world described in court, unethical behaviour and even stuff that is technically illegal is the everyday fare of what is rather grandly referred to as "political discourse"...Our standards of political behaviour are certainly low. If his defence is successful, O'Brien will have done his bit to help move the bar even lower.

Stephen Harper's "Conservative" party has finally effected a profound reform of Canada's culture of governance, one entirely consistent with its tradition of grotesque political perversity. This party, that strode and swaggered across this country in strident presumed possession of a total monopoly of political integrity, that vowed to extinguish corruption and maintain the highest ethical standards of conduct, that made the "Accountability Act" the key element of its legislative agenda and the heart of the party's moral bona fides, has now outdone the mere passive betrayal of its ideals.

This party has requested, through its loyal Ottawa agent, that political bribery--the most egregious of all the forms of corruption that appal Canadians--be enshrined in Canadian case law as an acceptable, lawful practice. This precedent having been set, the "Conservative" Party will have succeeded in legally institutionalising the worst, most ignoble manifestation of the very corruption the eradication of which is ostensibly their raison d'etre.

The CPC has become the most avidly concupiscent carrier of the venereal disease that has been chancering our body politic for decades. The "Conservative" pretence to be anything else but the defalcating exploiters and enablers of what is worst about our society is the most offensive and least convincing piece of political quackery to be inflicted upon this country in living memory. This earnest appeal on behalf of the élite's right to scoff at the natural law, by the way, comes right on the heels of the CPC's attempt to force judges to impose harsh prison time on people caught growing a quantity of marijuana carrying an intoxicating effect roughly equal to that of a bottle of wine. Bribe an ideological co-militant to slime into City Hall, and walk away with the prize; grow some grass, and go to jail. That's "justice" in Stephen Harper's Canada.

In order to rinse out the bitter taste this case leaves in my mouth, I read this piece about Alex Munter, the young, bright and capable man whose mayoral aspirations were crushed by the demagogic smears of the smiling CPC simian who now begs us to shrug away his flippant debasement of normative civic standards. I read that Munter is not bitter; he seeks no vengeance; he is happy doing productive, necessary work with at-risk youth.

I reflect that, in Stephen Harper's Canada, it seems to be the doom of the good, the honest, and the virtuous to lose, and the fate of the scum to rise to the top. If legally codifying that civic dysfunction is not a crime against humanity, I don't know what is.

"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.

Mélange Adultère: Part Four

Sloth Makes Waste:

The extravagantly titled Transport, Infrastructure and Communities Minister John Baird recently yapped excitedly about his expectation that federal infrastructure funds will flow "ten times faster than anything in the modern era". That's a relief, because the Building Canada Fund his government created in 2007 to dole out infrastructure money to municipalities has, so far, transferred precisely nothing: breaking its funds-disbursement speed record might just be something this government can do.

I was amused to hear Baird explain why he sees no need to conduct strict oversight of the way infrastructure funds are spent: he's not worried, he says, because provinces and municipalities must provide matching funds for their federal money--an obligation which apparently provides "the biggest form of accountability" conceivable. Thus, a senior member of Canada's ostensibly "fiscally conservative" party maintains that the optimal agent of governmental accountability is another level of government and that governments become reliably self-policing whenever they are forced to spend money in order to get more money.

I wonder--is the term "fiscally conservative" really something that this party believes it can claim unironically, or are they aware that it's become merely the punch-line of a sick joke?



The West Wants In (To The Trough):

Just because you allow a barely-staffed "commission" to sit idle whilst funnelling a million tax-payer dollars into its inertia does not mean you can't violate the principles on which it was established in order to toss out partisan pork to under-qualified courtiers.

Only a few years after elevating himself to Canada's pontificate of political moral supremacy and waging an electoral campaign full of ad urbis et orbi fulminations against government waste and arrogance, Stephen Harper invited a lorry-load of his ideological confederates to dip their biscuit faces into rich, thick tax-funded gravy. None declined the honour, though I am sure they all retain their commitment to their libertarian, anti-government ideals.

I love the statement from the PMO on the matter:

"...a spokesman for the Prime Minister's Office says the posts went to qualified candidates, and that their partisan activities and friendships with Harper should not exclude them from the jobs".

One is struck by how radically different this exculpatory whine is from the rote statements issued by Liberal PMO's down through the decades; for instance, it contains the word "Harper" rather than "Trudeau", "Turner", "Chrétien" or "Martin". If you don't think that's a huge difference, you're clearly with the terrorists. And you're probably gay. You no doubt also speak passable French.



“Just Because I'm The Minister Doesn't Mean I Have To Do Stuff”:

Minister of Defence Peter Mackay assures us that "the federal government is constantly looking at[sic] ways to improve search and rescue response", except where the need for improvement is obvious and pressing.

Should a transit point for hundreds of heliborne offshore oil-rig workers--a place that witnessed the deaths of seventeen men in a tragic crash a few months ago--be given a dedicated search-and-rescue helicopter? Maybe. Minister Mackay doesn't know. Moreover, he says, it's not his problem: it's the Armed Forces' decision to make. "I guess that's a judgment call that the military make based on the information that they have," he bleated.

Astonishing. Harper's tin soldiers are proudly political about sending young men and women to Afghanistan to die defending a corrupt Islamist narco-state; it's personal to them--a crusade, a vendetta. When it comes to their sedulous patronage of warlords and Talib fellow travelers, offered with a smile from the ivied ignorance of the Centre Block, they show fearless leadership indeed.

When it comes to providing security to their own citizens, to hard-working tax-payers doing some of the world's most dangerous jobs on Hibernia's oil rigs, Harperoids will let faceless, irresponsible, non-executive bureaucrats make the key decisions. After all, the Canadian military cannot be expected to do everything: it can't prop up Hamid Karzai's rule over Kabul's suburbs and prevent needless catastrophes by providing a minimum standard of search-and-rescue capability to its own people. Let's keep our priorities straight: warlords first; Canadians second.

Mélange Adultère: Part Two

The older I get, the more tolerant I become with those who believe they can smell the aftershave on each of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The darkly glittering treasure hoard of human depravity seems, each day, to be newly enriched by gems more resplendently base than anything seen before, carried in the jaws of dragons to which we feed what is best in us, about us, and among us. To wit:



War, Disorder and Bad Government: The Canadian Way--Harper Style!

What does a boorish, lead-hearted partisan hack of a prime minister do? Abide by the carefully deliberated findings of a Canadian federal court on a matter that strikes at the core of our fundamental values, or prolong a disgraceful miscarriage of justice and deepen a young man's agony in order to pander to the worst, xenophobic instincts of the most verminous elements of his quadruped base?

You guessed it.



America Elects A President Who Knows How To Pronounce "Nuclear"; World Still In Deep Shit!

Don't get me wrong; there are many reasons to be worried at the sight of the Taliban patrolling Pakistani territory only sixty miles from the nation's capital as if they own the place (because they do own the place), eight long years after the invasion of Afghanistan.

I'm just saying that the main reason might be that Pakistan has an arsenal of deliverable nuclear weapons, gifted to them by the folks who hate to see violent Islamist regimes make nukes with their own money but who gladly invite violent Islamist regimes to make nukes with crisp U.S. greenbacks.



Mission As Accomplished As It Ever Will Be

So, let's see: Iraq's current "stability" consists of a religiously segregated, deeply corrupt society devoid of meaningful institutions and functioning infrastructure, scarred by daily suicide bombings and routine sectarian assassinations. After six years of occupation, Baghdad can hardly keep the lights on.

Thus, thousands of American dead and tens of thousands of Iraqi dead have fertilised the flowering of another Lebanon. I'm not sure this is what Wilson had in mind.



Canadian Values: They Suck, But They're Good Enough For Immigrants

Jason Kenney apparently wants immigrants to be more deeply imbued with "Canadian values" upon their entry to their new country. He failed to say whether this policy would apply to American emigrants, whose values Kenney clearly considers so much better than ours.

Really, being lectured on "Canadian" values by a senior member of one of our two officially Canada-hating parties is a bit like being yelled at by the madam of a dilapidated whorehouse for entering the vestibule with our shoes on: it's embarrassing, degrading, and symptomatic of something profoundly wrong about our lives.

Kenney seems comfortable expecting immigrants to know more about their new nation than their hosts care to know. One cannot expect a political and moral castrato to challenge Canadians on their own cultural ignorance and champion the kinds of radical institutional changes that would (finally) fully immerse us in our civic heritage. No. All Kenney can manage on his empty nutsack is a pathetic innuendo about the mongrelising influence of dark-skinned exotics on a people ruled by a clique of continentalist deracinés who take their cultural orientation from daily viewings of South Park.

As mascot for this imbecility, please take Susan Boyd. She was one of the prime agitators against principal Erik Millett after he decided to suspend the singing of "O, Canada" at Belleisle Elementary School in New Brunswick.

This CBC documentary on the controversy is fascinating. It includes an interview with Boyd, who lost a nephew in Afghanistan. Go to 4:10 in the documentary, and be amazed. Boyd says, "the Lord’s Prayer is gone, the Pledge of Allegiance is gone... because we don’t want to offend the minority, but what about the majority? Now our anthem is disappearing".

The Pledge of Allegiance is gone! This woman--not obviously an idiot by any means--believes that the Canadian majority mourns the loss of the Pledge of Allegiance. I've rarely seen a sadder, more lurid spectacle of cultural senility.

While it is inconceivable that a French woman would pine for the old days when class would begin with a stirring rendition of "Das Deutschlandlied", while one would not dream that a Swede would ever wonder why children are no longer required to start their school day with "La Marseillaise", we Canadians have learned to tolerate and even expect the absurd surreality this woman represents.

Boyd is in the heart of "Conservative" country (her M.P. is Greg Thompson, Harper's Minister of Veterans' Affairs), yet she's not sure what country she's in. She's precisely the kind of vain, vapid, pseudo-Canadian who thinks she needs protection from the alien, valueless "minorities" that Kenny seeks to "civilise". Kenny strokes her vanity: he keeps his power; she keeps her ignorance.

These "conservatives"--the Kenneys and Boyds--strain so hard for patriotism; they're like superannuated sopranos with laryngitis, attempting arias and emitting only rusty croaks. They've got the "Support the Troops" bumper stickers and the Maple Leaf lapel pins, but they're incapable of understanding how thoroughly compromised and worm-eaten their Canadianness has become. Their citizenship is a corpse in full rigor mortis that the "Conservatives" have embalmed and propped up against a wall in order to make it "stand up for Canada".



I Guess You’ll Not Be Needing Those Firewalls

Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach seems to have decided that Ottawa can meddle in Alberta's affairs if it wants--as long as the "meddling" consists of a huge gift of 700 million dollars. The millions Alberta already receives through the Western Diversification Fund just aren't enough to buy baby his new shoes, apparently. It was inevitable that Alberta--that pious inculcator of fiscal thrift and high priest of anti-Ottawa individualism--would eventually find itself panhandling on Parliament Hill without a shred of shame.

Fatuously, Stelmach complained that Alberta "can't carry the country" through the recession, in a risible bid to sustain Albertans' painfully swollen self-concept during what must be a humiliating period for them. For the record, when Alberta's GDP grows beyond being a mere third of Ontario's, we shall talk about it "carrying the country". Right now, the only thing they're carrying is an ego full of helium and a bladder full of gall.

Election Eclectica, Part III

"Hey! Let Me Tell You the One About the National Health Catastrophe and the Idiot Cabinet Minister":

Has anybody else noticed that, whenever hard-Right, state-hating libertarian ideologues get their paws on power, people die?

But it sure is nice to know that, in the midst of a "stressful" conference call, Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz can still find enough sang froid to turn tragic deaths into cheap jokes and glibly wish death upon his Opposition critic. What poise! What sprezzatura!

I find the way this story has been reported to be remarkable. The facts that have not been subject to comment are, to me, the most outré. Everyone is howling over Ritz's oafish quips about "cold cuts" and Wayne Easter while missing the more egregious features of this débacle.

This meeting was not comprised of off-duty stevedores hoisting pints at some pool room or dive bar. The conference call was hosted by the Privy Council Office, chaired by the PCO's deputy secretary to cabinet, and included a wide range of senior CPC political staff, none of whom, it would seem, took exception to Ritz's callow frat-boyisms or his total lack of interest in anything but the "political fallout" from the disaster (I guess, for CPC ministers, the sight of Canadians dropping like flies isn't nearly as ghastly as the fear of dropping poll numbers). My guess is that it was an official from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency who went to the press, as that agency has long been at odds with Harper's ministry (with good cause). The rest of the participants, we must infer, were unmoved--at least, not sufficiently moved to speak up on behalf of decorum.

Thus, a group of state executives--people in whom we have entrusted managerial stewardship of the nation--sat acquiescently, perhaps silently smiling, throughout Ritz's degrading performance, apparently void of whatever modicum of decency is required to detect the utter unacceptability of the man's blitherings and offer admonishment.

Forget Ritz: he's an expendable hack apparatchik who'll soon fade away with nary a footnote to memorialise his trivial political existence. Think of the civil servants and PCO staffers who were on that call: they will still be there when Ritz is long gone; they'll still be making crucial, sometimes life-and-death decisions on our behalf; and they'll presumably still have the moral complexion of slugs. I am not entirely comfortable with that prospect.

Happily, "Conservatives", being resourceful buggers, don't stop at corpses in their quest for vulgar flippancy; they also like to spout off about drunken Indians too, not terribly long after Stephen Harper "apologised" to the Aboriginal community with great self-serving fanfare.



"How Harper Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb":

Stephen Harper seems to think allowing foreigners to mine our uranium is just nifty. He may be on to something there.

Far too many narrow nationalists would smugly assert that Canada has earned to right to monopolise its own uranium mining industry for the most spurious reasons (they might blather on about Canada's proud and inflexible non-nuclear status and support for non-proliferation, and so on), but it's that kind of parochialism that keeps us perpetually short of fulfilling our sacred obligation to remain in resource serfdom to the planet's lords. Our Boy-Scout morality doesn't help uranium get to the people who really need it (like China, India, and Pakistan), and opening up our uranium mines to wholly foreign-owned firms is an excellent way of making our world a more dangerous place, apparently a key item in the CPC agenda (and that of their American Republican doppelgänger, John McCain).



"Well, They All Sound Alike to Me":

Stephen Harper has developed a quirky new way of bribing electoral special interests: rather than tossing the money to them in a straight line, he bounces the cash off a wall so that it lands near their feet.

In a recent case, Harper decided that the best way to "invest" in Canadian Francophone TV programming is to sink fifteen million dollars into TV5MONDE. That the network is based in France and features but a tiny smidgeon of Canadian content seems immaterial to the CPC brains trust, many of whom are, perhaps, so eager to fellate a massive corporation that they're willing to restrain their anti-Gallic instincts long enough for them to stuff wads of cash into a French one.

Shall we speculate as to how many millions will be going to the BBC Worldwide? Surely, as the most accessible vehicle of the Queen's English on a continent whose tongue is held hostage by varieties of the American patois, the BBC deserves equal consideration, and, as it is non-Canadian, it meets the stringent new criteria which the CPC is now applying to its cultural funding decisions.

Election Eclectica, Part II: "Conservatives" Denounce U.S. Recklessness and Hope Nobody Notices

Soon after the election began, I received an e-mail solicitation from Irving R. Gerstein, Chair of the Conservative Fund Canada (i.e. chief panhandler for the CPC), as I'm still on the CPC's e-mail list. The tedium of reading this pathetic appeal for more money with which to wage their intellectually vacant campaign in this farcical election was redeemed somewhat by the precious glance I was given into the way "conservatives" talk to each other when they think nobody is watching. Incredibly, they sound even more stupid than they do in their conversations with sane Canadians.

The ignoble contents of this piffle provide a case in point. Mr. Gerstein whines:

Stéphane Dion is a risk to our reputation around the world with his reckless suggestions of bringing the Taliban to Canada and NATO invading Pakistan. We can't go back.

The "back" that Gerstein wants us to dread so deeply is, we assume, the pre-Harper foreign policy era--before Canada endorsed child torture, before we turned POW's over to a corrupt Afghan regime for more torture, before we ran away from our every significant environmental obligation, and before the world began to have to get our attention by tapping us on the shoulder while we kneel before the open zipper of the White House. Yes indeed, Mr. Gerstein: thank God that sad chapter is closed.

Gerstein's glib jab about "bringing the Taliban to Canada" would appear to be a swipe at Stephane Dion's suggestion that Taliban detainees could be brought to Canada for internment, an utterly outrageous idea that was, oddly, considered good enough by Canadians during the Second World War, during which approximately 40 000 Axis POW's were imprisoned on Canadian soil, including members of the notorious Hitlerjugend SS Panzer Division, arguably the most fanatical and savage warriors Hitler's war machine produced.

Gerstein's stupidity reaches heroic levels, though, in his denunciation of Dion's "reckless" suggestion that NATO should invade Pakistan. Gerstein is referring to Dion's stated view that NATO might have to intervene in Pakistan, given that the country seems unable or unwilling to police its Afghan border. Dion insisted he meant a "diplomatic" intervention (whatever that is), so Gerstein's allegation is hysterical, at best, though it was repeated and exploited by a number of Blogging Tory lemmings. CPC MP Jason Kenney called Dion's views a "descent into amateur hour".

Someone needs to remind CPC apparatchiks that they really ought to read the news, if only to keep in touch with the reality that they seek to distort. The day after Harper dropped the writ, a U.S. attack on Pakistani soil claimed at least twenty-three lives, most of them women and children. This attack was later confirmed to have been authorised by the President himself. As the story tells us, the most recent attack was part of a new American strategy of operating within Pakistan's borders without the nation's consent:

U.S.-led forces have stepped up cross-border attacks against al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Pakistani tribal areas. Helicopter-borne commandos carried out a ground assault in South Waziristan last week, the first known incursion into Pakistan by U.S. troops since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, killing 20 people, including women and children...The U.S. commando raid and repeated territorial violations aroused anger in Pakistan, prompting the government to partially block supply lines to Western forces in landlocked Afghanistan.

This is astonishing. A CPC operative announces that allowing NATO to operate within Pakistan would amount to an "invasion", an act of fatal recklessness, and that Canadians must do everything in their power to defeat a leader who advocates such a thing. Concurrently, we learn that the White House, the effective executive authority of the Afghan mission in which Canadian soldiers are engaged and the very embodiment of all that is right and noble for the CPC and their acolytes, has been doing precisely what the CPC tells us is unthinkably stupid.

Have I missed something? Have you read that Stephen Harper has announced his dismay at this worrying development and demanded that NATO pull back from Pakistan and respect its territorial integrity? I have not, and I'm at a loss as to how to explain this glaring incoherence.

Is it that the CPC really believed that invading Pakistan would eventually become necessary, but (with typical cynicism) merely wanted to nail Dion for uttering an unpopular notion that it also happened to believe to be true? Is it that an idea, no matter how preposterous and dangerous, becomes perfectly acceptable as soon as it is espoused by Americans? Perhaps the CPC feels that, while it is fine for Americans to protect their own troops by rooting out the Taliban bases in Pakistan, Canadian troops should not be allowed that privilege but are, instead, best employed as the good little dumb-Canuck sitting ducks that Americans think we are.

I hope one of my CPC-friendly readers is able to give me some insight into how the party could manage to extricate its feet from this self-shat pile. I should also like to hear opinions about which path their party should take from here: should it apologise to Dion for ripping him apart over a tactic that the CPC's own heroes and the de facto commanders of the Canadian Afghan contingent are already using, or should it pressure its leader to advise George W. Bush of the "recklessness" of his Pakistani incursions and to demand an immediate halt to them?

Frankly, I think both gestures are in order.

A New Low, and Not the Last: Part II

Time, now, to examine the flip side of Stephen Harper's latest partisan junk-mail campaign, sent, on the tax-payers' dime, in the guise of a local constituency update. Yes, there are two sides to this pamphlet. Of course there are: you can always trust "Prime minister" Harper to get the most out of other people's money.

As the sides aren't marked, who knows which side is "Side One"? It hardly matters: I'm discussing them in order of hilarity--in descending order. That's why I began with the side that showed our proud national hero, Atlas-like, supporting the full weight of our brash new war-cry, "Canada's Back", on his smirkingly confident head while surrounded by a batch of kitsch Canadian signifiers ("Canada" on the name plate, the desk-sized Maple Leaf on the table, and Harper's barely visible Maple Leaf lapel pin).

The photo's sheer desperation is as glaring as its sick irony: Harper's environment needs to represent Canada, because the man cannot. Inanimate objects are asked to provide the patriotism and nationalist conviction that Harper cannot honestly communicate (cannot communicate at all, actually, as he's a terrible liar). Canadians have seen their share of preposterous political slogans (Pierre Trudeau's Maoist "The Land is Strong" counting among the most risible), but Harper's is the first to be delivered by pieces of plastic, rather than by a man (if there is, in this case, a meaningful distinction to be made between the two).

Here is the other side:



It's a slice of good old-fashioned reactionary "law-and-order" tripe, aimed at the sweaty, bug-eyed paranoiacs who sleep with loaded .45's under their pillows and who've watched the country go to hell in a handbasket ever since we started letting the "coloureds" in (that would be since about 1780). Such people represent a hefty proportion of Stephen Harper's core support, and this mail-out is meant to cement their allegiance, to show them that, even though Harper's "Conservatives" haven't yet torched the House of Commons(like they ought to), they are still worth voting for.

The pamphlet succeeds beautifully. My favourite part of it is the main graphic, of a trio of kids in hooded sweaters running away (presumably after having committed some horrible crime).

To be sure, the pamphlet could have shown them running towards the viewer (which would have made the photo so much the more menacing, in fact), but the CPC would certainly have faced a storm of criticism if the kids' faces had been black. Why not hide the faces, and let the viewers use their imaginations? For all we know, the kids may all be white (yeah...sure they are). This is surreptitious, guilt-free race-baiting, not done this expertly since the American Right of the 1960s--realising they could no longer respectably rail against "niggers" and "nigger-lovers", gentrified their hate by championing "states' rights" and "small government".

The photo in question was obviously used for a reason, and it wasn't because it matches the nature of the legislation it is meant to advertise. Most of Harper's "Tough on Crime Omnibus Bill" (Bill C-2) dealt with non-violent issues like impaired driving, bail laws and the age of consent. What are the kids supposed to be running away from? Jail bait?

Given the manipulative mastery we see in that graphic, we find it hard to discern whether what seems idiotic elsewhere in the ad is actually an act of devious genius, or at least of a calculated strategy. For example, when the ad screams "Age is no excuse", are we to take it literally that, for the "Conservatives", age is never an excuse, and that a nine-year-old deserves to have applied to him the legal sanctions we apply to adults? Are the "Conservatives" here implying the mirror-image of their own abnormal psychology? Since they insist upon habitually acting like children, are they convinced that children must be treated like adults? We cannot really know.

Nor can we discern what is terribly new about a fact Harper seems to find quite frightfully urgent: "Young thugs are committing crimes without fear of the consequences", we're informed, leading most of us to recall the evident fact that all crime is committed without any appreciable fear of the consequences (since most criminals do not intend to be caught) and that crimes do not lose their sting even when criminals do fear the consequences. For just those reasons, crime rates are spectacularly higher than are Canada's in places where fear of many kinds--fear of execution, fear of government, of the law, of one's neighbours--reigns supreme. Yet, where there is little fear--Norway, Iceland, Denmark--crime rates are lower even than ours. What's their secret? Note to "Conservatives": it's called "civility"; look it up, and actually earn your ministerial wages for the first time in two long years.

Now, think of the language: "young thugs". That choice of words is key.

Some people want their federal leaders to inspire them--to help them engage with causes higher than themselves, but they are not Stephen Harper's people.

Some people expect their leaders to touch and arouse what is best in them, to make manifest their latent greatness, to magnify their souls, but they are not Stephen Harper's people.

Some people pace their dark, dank basement apartments in tatty t-shirts and punch holes in the walls while swearing oaths against "young thugs", immigrants, women, Muslims, Jews and everybody else who has caused the pain, the mediocrity and the insignificance of their sad little lives. They are Stephen Harper's people, but, sadly, deep down inside, they know perfectly well that the châtelains who have the gall to tell them that "Nobody is above the law" are just laughing at them.

Those poignant facts spoil the many elements of real, unaffected, almost child-like bits of comedy that abound in the ad--like the ungrammatical nonsense of the phrase, "Keeping dangerous youth criminals off the streets while awaiting trial" (in which it is the government that is awaiting trial, in a nice Freudian slip), and the absurd question, "Who do you think is on the right track on crime?", which equates nicely and tautologically with the question, "Who is the only leader who, as prime minister, has had the opportunity to propose and enact a track on crime?".

Then, the comedy ends, and we get to the meat of the appeal. Those of us who weren't sold by anything in the ad so far are hit with this devastating hortatory salvo: "Real Action; Real Results", the ad brags, its writers having wisely relied on the proven method of using the adjective "real" to conjure an actual reality (call it the "Abracadabra Effect"), a reality whose "results" so far include some of the most horrific murders in Canada's history and our first serious urban riot in over fifteen years.

I feel rather sorry for the CPC Members of Parliament who have had to suffer seeing their names and faces pasted onto this rubbish in order to have it passed off as legitimate riding news. Sure, it allowed them to rob the public purse and keep the CPC party's coffers that much richer for the widely expected fall election, but I cannot believe that it was worth what it cost their souls. And, yes, I persist in the belief that "Conservatives" have souls. Call me an optimist.

A New Low, and Not the Last: Part I

In the old days, Canadians had to either read the great works of Western literature's most trenchant critics of totalitarianism (Kafka, Solzhenitsyn, Orwell) or pay close attention to American elections if they wished to see partisan propaganda deployed in a form so pure that it approached sublime self-parody. Fortunately, ever since a paltry but sufficient slice of our countrymen saw fit to hand care of the Dominion over to an ideologically autistic clutch of vandalic berserkers with the collective moral acumen of a loan-shark and the visionary power of an apprentice Avis Rent-A-Car clerk, propaganda laughably absurd enough to stand proudly beside Kraft durch Freude posters, COMINTERN announcements proclaiming the imminent victory of the international proletariat and Ku Klux Klan anti-miscegenation pamphlets has been freely available to us for the last twenty-seven months. Truly, there seems to be not a single principle of decency, taste or integrity that "Prime Minister" Stephen Harper will not garrotte, disembowel or dismember.

The species below, in which you see one side of a recent CPC pamphlet, will serve as a case in point. I gather from what I've been reading on a newsgroup I belong to that this mail-out consists of a generic template upon which the photos and names of CPC MP's have been grafted. It seems that thousands of these have been mailed out to people in CPC-held ridings across the country.

All Members of Parliament have the right to send a limited number of tax-funded mail-outs to households in their constituencies. Originally, the pamphlets were used only when people had to be informed of changes to their riding boundaries. Now, the enabling parameters have widened, but, still, these pamphlets are supposed to be strictly informational and local--that is, they are meant to allow the MP to inform people in his or her riding of what he or she has accomplished or advocated on the Hill.

Lately, the "Conservatives" have begun to use this tax-funded service as a cost-free method of deploying U.S.-style direct-mailing campaigns. Notice that the pamphlet below conveys no information whatever about the Member of Parliament on whose behalf it was sent but serves only to promote the CPC and Stephen Harper. Notice also that the return address is a House of Commons address. Thus, this pamphlet is a party device, used for partisan purposes at Parliament's (i.e. tax-payers') expense. That's right: you are paying Stephen Harper to whore himself to you. Even Hugo Chavez wouldn't have the balls.

The best (and by that I mean the "worst") propaganda always provides satisfying comedy, and we're not disappointed by the CPC's latest offering. Consider this:




























"Canada's Back", it yells, as if the nation were a cheap sitcom going into summer re-runs. Clearly, somebody thought that the dynamism and vigour of this alleged national renaissance would be conveyed most convincingly by the sight of our prime minister sitting on his ass, smiling like the half-drunk facilitator of an Amway seminar.

It continues:

After more than a decade of Liberal government rule, Canada's reputation abroad floundered and even our capacity to patrol our own borders was significantly diminished.

Amen to that. During the Liberal Dark Ages, we had no more than a hundred main battle tanks. Now, thank God, we've got about a hundred and forty, most of which are in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, with our Nigerian-sized air force and navy, Lord, but we would provide a right bloody nose to anyone foolish enough to invade Fortress Canada. It continues:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative government are protecting our sovereignty here at home and speaking with a confident voice on the world stage.

Damn right. Stephen Harper has made it crystal clear that he will not allow anyone, not even Canadians, to bully him into doing anything the White House doesn't want him to do. Far from being an ideologue, Harper is, in fact, the ultimate neutralist: he refuses to interfere even in his own internal affairs. The Pentagon is running things quite swimmingly, thank you very much. Any input on Harper's part would be...well...redundant--an unacceptable inefficiency in our increasingly competitive global market.

Then we read this illiterately punctuated sentence:

We have an important role to play; representing to the world the Canadian values of security and human rights...

Naturally, I was astonished to discover that Canada apparently has a new "value". I only wish I knew what precise banality the word "security" is meant to communicate. Is it supposed to mean the kind of "security" we feel when we're snuggled up tight under our duvets on a cold January night? Who knows?

I've always thought of security as a collateral benefit of having the right values rather than as a value as such. The NKVD, the Securitate and the Gestapo thought differently, as does Iran's Council of Guardians, and as does Stephen Harper, it would seem.

At least Harper got one thing right: respect for human rights is a Canadian value, or at least it was until our government decided to stand idly by and watch an "ally" abduct a Canadian child, torture him, and hold him indefinitely without trial and without regard for even the merest niceties of international law. In the context of that ongoing disgrace, Harper's claim to be a champion of human rights is not just ludicrous; it is sacrilegious.

Omnibus Post: "O Tempora, O Morons!"

The varieties of "Conservative" Party idiocy are becoming difficult to catalogue. They multiply so prolifically and bloom in such an immeasurably wide spectrum of gaudy hues, that one requires the patience and skill of a Linnaeus if one hopes to keep a full account of them all. Please find below, in digest form, details of the latest CPC cretinisms:


"I'm Ready for My Close-Up, Mr. Dion":

After two years of loitering sullenly near the precincts of paranoid absurdity, CPC Communications strategists finally pole-vaulted over the shark yesterday with accusations that Elections Canada alerted the Liberals before their raid on CPC Headquarters in order to give them time to send videographers over to film the fiasco. CPC apparatchik Peter Van Loan provides a detailed description of the black helicopters:

"I am also given pause to wonder why it was that the Liberal Party of Canada just happened to be on the scene, camera crew at the ready..."

[Nota Bene: the CPC objects to the term "raid", insisting that the proper word to describe the execution of a search warrant is "visit". I expect major media outlets to act on this cue presently. I can just see the headlines now: "Police Visit Grow-Op".]

Predictably, then, the CPC has diverted attention away from their own alleged misdeeds with yet another attack upon the civil service, and they chose their target wisely: they do not allege that the RCMP leaked news of the raid, but that Elections Canada did, although there is as much evidence to suggest RCMP involvement as there is to suggest EC involvement (that is, none whatever), but some branches of the civil service are safer objects of scorn and slander than others. In this case, the CPC has preposterously chosen to impute partisan motives to a Ministry headed by a CPC appointee.

Essentially, the CPC is spitting mad that people with camcorders were allowed to record the sad sight of their party's reputation wilting, yet again, under the searing heat of public scrutiny. It is like hearing the doorman of a brothel complain of a client's badly knotted tie.



"The Wit and Wisdom of Rob Anders":

Chronic national embarrassment Rob Anders has delivered himself of the opinion that China is the "worst human rights abuser in the world". Sources close to the rabidly pro-Tibetan CPC clown confidently assert that Anders also stands foursquare behind the position that little kittens are cute and that it is nice to help old ladies with walkers negotiate busy intersections.

Strangely, however, Anders has never gone on record in support of a comprehensive anti-Chinese trade embargo, presumably because he would hate to see the regime's ruthless repression, vast network of slave labour camps and mass political executions get in the way of really neat deals on tube socks at his local Wal-Mart.

Also of note is Anders' vocal support of Tibetan rioters, whom he considers "freedom fighters", unlike scum such as Nelson Mandela, whom Anders once denounced as a "terrorist". Repeat after Rob: "Commies are bad; neo-Nazi Apartheid thugs are good".

Rob Anders is actually a legislator, people. We really should be losing some sleep over that.



"Junk Mail Just Got Junkier":

The CPC has been caught abusing a taxpayer-funded parliamentary mailing service in order to spread hysterical propaganda of the crassest kind.

The public mailing service was originally intended to allow M.P's to inform former constituents of riding boundary changes. All parties have used the service for other, more partisan purposes, but the CPC refuses to be governed by any decent restraint. While the Liberal Party has spent 1.9 million taxpayer dollars and the NDP 1.4 million dollars on the service, the CPC has pissed away a whopping 3.2 million dollars on obnoxious, Opposition-baiting junk mail.

Naturally, this CPC communications campaign has taken the high road. It's class all the way:

"But the sheer volume of Conservative flyers, combined with their highly provocative and patently partisan content, is raising eyebrows.

"The cost of Stephane Dion: Higher Taxes, More Debt," reads one such flyer that appeared in mailboxes near Elmira, Ont., recently.

Recipients were invited to check one of three boxes beside a picture of Dion:

-"I want higher taxes."

-"I want more debt."

-"I want a bit of both."

They could also check a box beside a smiling picture of Prime Minister Stephen Harper that states: "I want lower taxes and less debt."

Another flyer that's appeared in ridings across Ontario features a smirking, moking, beer-drinking, n'er-do-well in a "wife-beater" T-shirt staring into the camera--apparently under house arrest. The flyer accuses Liberals of being lax on sentencing."

One isn't sure whom to name as the inspiration for this tripe. Lee Atwater? Karl Rove? Julius Streicher?

There you have it, Canadians. The CPC has essentially wiped its ass on three million of your dollars in order to send you infantile anti-Dion vitriol--thus expending a fortune on something dozens of slackwitted Blogging Tories offer us daily, for free.

Canada's New Government: getting old, real fast.