Irony is not only dead, but its corpse had been desecrated

The young girl has a lovely voice, yes, but seeing Stephen Harper sing this song is like watching David Duke sing "We Shall Overcome." Someone who was disappointed we didn't get to play in the Iraq sandbox and is destroying our fiscal security to buy unnecessary stealth fighter jets should not be singing peace anthems. It is not merely distasteful,  it is hour-long-shower-scrub-with-a-wire-brush disgusting. Maybe this is his energy plan, to hook John Lennon's coffin up to a turbine and provide free electricity to the entire American continent from the resultant spinning.

He says he has his own lyrics for the song - I'll bet. Something along the lines of "Imagine there's no Liberals..." no doubt.

Personally, I'd have thought he'd be more into a different Lennon tune from a year or two earlier, though again he'd have his own lyrics... "You say you want a coalition..." or perhaps "Can't buy me Love."

Crossposted from the Woodshed

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you say impeachment, I say contempt of Parliament

Let's call the whole thing off!

Apparently there are those who interpret Parliamentary law as saying that Stephen Harper is now barred from holding office due to having been found in contempt of Parliament. I'm not sure this is the case since the confidence vote was held before acceptance of the committee report finding the government in contempt could be voted on by the House of Commons. Still, a such a finding even at the committee level is significant. Certainly, the report would have been confirmed by the House, although I suspect the Conservative-dominated Senate would have sent it back to the house.
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The PM, the conman, the blonde hooker and the Colonel

While I've been a bit distracted this week with personal matters , I have been paying some attention to the non-Japan related news. Really, there seems to be no depth to which Stephen Harper will not sink. With the revelation that one of his former close advisors did time for fraud and is currently involved in a dubious lobbying effort to enrich his 20-something escort fiance, and the looming likelihood that his government will be found in contempt of Parliament, Stephen Harper is feeling a bit cornered. It is  doubtful that he will win his precious majority if an election is called this spring and so he has tried telling voters that the disaster in Japan was sufficient reason to delay a vote.
When we didn't buy that, he stepped up his campaign of parliamentary obstructionism (dropping over 1,000 pages of documents 15 minutes before the committee session ended, for example) to try to avoid having his government and ministers found in contempt of Parliament. Tune in next week when he tells us that us that the government being found in contempt of Parliament is an example of how Michael Ignatieff hates democracy and is just some Johnny-come-lately who is playing games with the economy and is the son of Russian aristocrats not a "real immigrant"and besides LIBYA! FREEDOM! Democracy! Whisky! Sexy! We are at War! Don't switch horses in midstream! 
And if that doesn't work, expect him to try proroguing the house again, just to "save it from itself" and delay the budget so that he can "focus on the economy and the war."

Now, having said all that, let me clarify a few things: While Stephen Harper is a lying, power-grabbing, egomaniac and he may or may not be doing it for the wrong reasons, I think he is doing the right thing on Libya.
Yes, mark the day on the calendar -- I agree with Stephen Harper on something.
I think the moral choice with regards to Libya is at this stage is intervention by the international community. Libya is not Iraq, it is not Vietnam, it is not Bahrain. The closest comparison I can think of is Spain in the 1930s. There is a brutal, corrupt, autocratic ruler. There is a viable democratic opposition engaged in a popular revolution that has shown it has the hearts and minds of the population behind it. The regime in this case is being propped up by superior military firepower. The loyalists in the Libyan armed forces are mostly mercenaries and those who have profited from their affiliation with the regime. There have been numerous defections from the military by those troops and commanders who have refused to attack their own people.
As it would have been in Spain, the moral thing to do here is to side with the people against an autocrat that would crush them and murder those who dare to dissent.
The right thing to do is to freeze all of the Colonel's assets abroad, deny him jet fuel, artillery shells and other munitions.
The right thing to do is level the playing field by arming the people in Benghazi and Tobruk and elsewhere to allow them to defend themselves.
The right thing to do is to prevent the Colonel from bombing his own people or turning his tanks and artillery on the people who seek to be free from his corrupt and brutal regime.
It isn't a matter of sending troops into a quagmire, it isn't a matter of sticking our nose in where it isn't wanted.
It is a matter of dropping a few bombs and firing a few missiles to avoid a genocide and another generation of oppressive, autocratic rule in Libya, by a man who has supported terrorism in numerous forms (the Lockerbie bombing, arming the IRA, etc etc)
Just because Stephen Harper supports it doesn't make it a bad idea.

Questions are a burden to others, answers are a burden to oneself

For years, we've known that Stephen Harper is a control freak who insists that every utterance of everyone speaking for the government be vetted through the PMO, but methinks he has now gone a bit too far. 
 First, it was gagging backbenchers so that the ignorant, knuckledragging rednecks let's be kind and say the "less sophisticated, less media-savy" among his Reform Alliance colleagues didn't start ranting about racial minorities and commies under the bed "get off message" and embarass  the "New Government of Canada." Then, after he realized he a had a few of these loose cannons in the Cabinet, ministers were told to zip it, that anything that had to be said would be said by the PMO. After all the press were hostile and prone to asking "gotcha" questions and-- let's face it-- your average Parliament Hill journalist engaging a Reform-Tory Cabinet Minister in a battle of wits is pretty much attacking an unarmed target.
Having shut out the press to the degree possible, Harper then decided that even Parliamentary committees should be served a nice big mug of STFU, and the party put out a manual for Conservative members that explained how to block committee business, even completely shut things down by being obstructionist arseholes if things weren't going their way. When that didn't work well enough to keep 
a committee from demanding information about the way Afghan detainees were being dealt with and whether Canadian troops could face accusations of war crimes for the negligent way their superiors had decided to organize things, Harper shut down Parliament and hoped the whole thing would blow over.
It didn't.
Next he tried the classic American conservative argument -- that everything was a matter of national security and  tippy-top secret to protect our wonderful troops and if you wanted to violate that sacred trust and find out what the elected government had ordered the troops to do on the nation's behalf,  well clearly you were a troop-hating pinko bastard who hated freedom -- Wolverines!!!
Then the Speaker of the House stuck a pin in that particular trial balloon.
Now, Harper has decided that ministerial aides and other senior staff answer to no one but the PMO and the Minister and couldn't possibly be called upon to answer questions by Parliamentary committees. The spin he is trying to put on this is both hilarious and ironically true. The justification for this notion that just because they draw a government salary, civil servants shouldn't ever have to explain their actions to Parliament is that the Ministers are ultimately responsible for what is done in their ministry. This is true -- and just you wait and see how responsible some of these schmucks are going to be held if their underlings are ever made to testify under oath about the crap that goes on at the behest of their bosses.

So if Dmitiri Soudas is able enough to command a handsome taxpayer-funded salary as the director of communications for the Prime Minister of Canada, he can damn well answer a few questions about his job from the House of Commons Ethics Committee. Parliament is supreme and if it summons him, he better show up, otherwise he will be guilty of Contempt of Parliament. And if Michael Ignatieff , Gilles Duceppe and Jack Layton won't  go to the mat on this, then they won't go to the mat on anything and we might just as well let Harper appoint himself dictator-for-life and be done with it.

Also, what Dave said -- that goes double for me.

crossposted from the Woodshed

Why have a Parliament anyway?

Roy MacGregor, while largely acknowledging that Stephen Harper seem to have little but contempt for Parliament, insists that no one but Parliament Hill reporters and opposition MPs much cares about prorogation, which is hard to pronounce and just plain boooooring. Few people care about what Parliament does at the best of times, opines MacGregor, Canadians have "tuned out."

Gee, Roy, should we even bother with having a Parliament? Tell us, is it good for anything?

"What, one panel asked the other night, if there was "a national emergency"? Well, depending on what that may entail - a big snowfall in Toronto? Denmark invading Hans Island? - presumably they would get back to work and do whatever might be necessary.
An argument can be made, on the other hand, that this country runs quite smoothly when Parliament is not in session. Rare indeed is the Canadian political crisis that comes along in summer or over the long Christmas break - or, for that matter, during prorogations.
It can even be suggested that the country runs best under a prime minister who treats it as a part-time job."

"A national emergency in Canada? That's unpossible!"

Yeah, forget that Canada has almost 9% unemployment, that the economy is in dire shape, that we are mired in a pointless war halfway around the world with no end in sight or that the government ordered our military to hand over prisoners to be beaten and tortured - especially that last part. No one cares but a bunch reporters and nerds on the internet!

Besides, burning stick soon come!

MacGregor should stick to what he's good at-- writing about hockey--and leave the political commentary to people that understand that democracy is not a just a minor inconvenience that takes up valuable space in the newspaper that could be used for sports stories.

Our own little Nixon

Lots of fuss in the blogosphere about Steverino's big singing debut. Pale makes some nice points with a pop-up version of the video here.
Last year, big gala's were "elitist" and Steverino was hot and heavy to chop all the arts funding he could get away with. Now, he's appearing on stage with Yo Yo Ma at the National Arts Centre Gala? Well, his wife is the honorary chair of the event, so I suppose it makes some sense, but just to be clear about his feelings for the arts, Steve left the building before the event was over and went tieless to the blacktie event. When was the last time you saw him without a yoke of the corporate oppressor necktie?

Oh yeah, now I remember...



And how did that work out for ya Steverino?

This whole thing is just another sweater vest moment and it won’t work any better than it worked for Nixon. The people who like Harper are the same people who liked or would have liked Nixon and they like him for the same reasons – because he’s mediocre, just like them. They hate anyone smarter, better educated, better looking or more talented than they are and so they loved Nixon because, just like them, he wasn’t comfortable in his own skin and lacked any social graces at all. (See Rick Perlstein's Nixonland for myriad examples of Nixon being Nixon - Steverino is Nixon writ small)
They don’t like anyone different from themselves and they don’t like new ideas or change.
Read any posting on any Blogging Tories blog - its all about the resenting anyone different, anyone that they think is getting something that they aren't getting. And that, and fear of The Other, is what conservatives have been running on for the last 50 years.

That’s why they like guys like Steve. But you have to ask why they feel they need to sell this idea that he’s human. Why are they trying so hard to convince us that he’s a regular guy?
If he was a great piano player or singer, his advisers never would have let him do this--he'd look like an elitist, a star. Since he's merely adequate, he looks like a "regular guy" instead of the awkward, narcassistic, power-hungry, control freak that he is.


When I saw Harper at the piano keyboard, I immediately thought of Nixon, but Red Tory beat me to posting the video



Plus ca change, plus ca meme frickin' chose

Dept of "I'm not saying he is, I'm just saying" --Could it be that Harper is actually an android fuelled by the succulent flesh of tiny babies? Why doesn’t Stephen Harper, if that is his real name, level with Canadians and deny his baby-eating and the accusations that he’s really an android?

crossposted from The Woodshed

Selling Canada one piece at a time

I always thought that when people said "count the silverware" when the government changed hands, that it was just an expression of general mistrust, not something to be taken literally.
Silly me, I forgot we were talking about Stephen Harper and Co.

crossposted from The Woodshed

Post I never thought I'd write: Michael Ignatieff is my homeboy

The CBC has an excellent letter from an expat grad student in England about the Conservative Party of Canada's attacks on Michael Ignatieff for being a) a successful intellectual and b) living outside the country for many years before returning to enter politics. By all means read the letter, then have a quick scan of the comments and ask yourself why anyone with a top notch education and contacts abroad would want to return to a country that is so full of ignorant, provincial knuckledraggers. The woman is obviously a patriot, just don't tell her about the Blogging Tories and Small Dead Animals and she might still come back one day.

What I really want to talk about are the idiotic attack ads by the CPC, which attack Ignatieff on everything except substance. He must really scare them. And he should.

A quick look at Michael Ignatieff's bio shows him to be an academic and public intellectual of the highest caliber who has held posts at the most prestigious institutions in the English-speaking world. That those institutions happen to be located outside Alberta and mostly outside of Canada is hardly his fault, as in show business and sports, you go where the work is. Yes, one can be a highly respected public intellectual on the world stage while living in Canada, but there are only so many jobs for such people.

Crapping on Ignatieff for spending his career at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard instead of the University of British Columbia is like criticizing Phil Esposito for spending his hockey career with the Bruins and Rangers instead of staying with the Sault Greyhounds, or slamming Dan Ackroyd and John Candy for not sticking with Second City in Toronto.

One of the commenters on the CBC site criticized the author of the letter, described as a Rhodes scholar and Ph.D candidate at Oxford, calling her "a snob" and claiming the author "thinks she's better than us." As a Rhodes scholar, she is certainly demonstrably smarter then the cementheaded commenter. She is certainly more open minded, almost certainly more well-travelled, better-read and more cosmopolitan, and probably has "qualities of truthfulness, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for and protection of the weak, kindliness, unselfishness and fellowship; exhibition of moral force of character and of instincts to lead and to take an interest in one’s contemporaries," but then to the audience of resentful, embittered, small minded, petty bourgeois, know-nothings that the Conservative attack ads are pandering to, none of those things are desirable.

I'm not a big fan of Ignatieff and his running for office in 2006 with his eyes firmly on the Liberal Party leadership was unquestionably a bit opportunistic. So was Stephen Harper's channelling of western Canadian resentment in helping form the Reform Party. So was his departure for the National Citizens Coalition when it became evident that Preston Manning wasn't going to turn the party over to him. While Ignatieff at least got himself elected to parliament before seeking the Liberal leadership in 2006, Harper decided to try for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance Party when Stockwell "Doris" Day looked weak in 2002 and after an ugly campaign won the leadership. Then he pushed Ezra Levant out of the way to run for Preston Manning old seat in Calgary.

Ignatieff is criticized for considering a return to Harvard is his bid for election in 2006 didn't work out. He got elected and stayed in the House, despite losing in his first campaign for party leader, and was re-elected again in 2008. If he had not won a seat in parliament in 2006, Ignatieff would have continued on at the University of Toronto for a least another year as visiting professor and senior fellow at the Munk Centre for International Studies. After that, he might have run for parliament again, or he might have returned to his career as a scholar, living wherever the work took him as he pleased.

Harper, on the other hand, has a history of quitting when things don't go his way. He quit the Liberal party because he didn't like the National Energy Program (He was working in Alberta for Imperial Oil at the time). He quit the Progressive Conservatives a few years later after going to work for a Mulroney government backbencher because they didn't end the NEP fast enough to suit him. He quit the Reform Party when he couldn't get Preston Manning to step aside as leader and let him run things along more Straussian ideological lines. He quit the National Citizen Coalition a little less than four years later when he saw a chance to grab the leadership of the Canadian Alliance party after using the NCC to undermine Stockwell Day for a year. Once leader of the Alliance party, he devoted all his energy to co-opting and absorbing the Progressive Conservative Party to try to present a united right wing front.

If he fails to win a majority government next time around, will he quit Canadian politics? If some conservative think tank down south like the Heritage Foundation offers him some primo wingnut welfare job to push economic integration or some other neo-con pie in the sky, do you think he'll hang around Calgary scanning the want ads? I'm sure with his hard won Masters degree, Liberty University could find a job for him teaching remedial English or something, but he's not really qualified to do much else. Aside from the mail room at Imperial Oil nearly 30 years ago, he's never really done anything outside of politics and think tank work.

While Ignatieff was working outside of Canada, he made no secret of his Canadian-ness and we as a nation were happy to call him one of our own. He may have referred to Britain as his "adopted nation" a few times in the 20+ years he lived there or used the rhetorical flourish of "We Americans" when writing for an American audience, but unlike Conrad Black, Wayne Gretzky, Michael J. Fox and Pamela Anderson he never became an American or British citizen. He has been a Canadian all along. More importantly, he has not publically badmouthed his country to foreign audiences, (which as we know from conservatives' descriptions of Bill Clinton organizing anti-war protests in England while he was a student there during the Vietnam War is high treason or something) unlike Stephen Harper, who had this to say to a U.S. think tank less than a year after leaving parliament the first time:

"Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it"

"If you're like all Americans, you know almost nothing except for your own country. Which makes you probably knowledgeable about one more country than most Canadians"

As I said, I'm not a big fan of Ignatieff, mostly for his original positions on the Iraq War and torture and for yanking the rug out from under the idea of an NDP-Liberal coalition government. He is a bit conservative for my tastes, but I think he'd make a much better prime minister than any of the other options on offer.

His job history and personal story are nothing if not enviable and his time abroad is a feature, not a bug. Ignatieff has done more than simply teach at the world's finest universities. He has been a broadcaster, a filmmaker, a journalist, a writer of non-fiction and fiction alike and travelled the world. Unlike Stephen Harper, who's last real job was in the Imperial Oil mailroom and who didn't even have a passport until he entered the House of Commons. Harper graduated high school in 1978 and went work for Conservative MP Jim Hawkes in 1985 and has been out of the job market ever since.

Before entering electoral politics, Ignatieff wrote prize-winning books on human rights and foreign policy, delivered the Massey Lectures and had a novel short-listed for the Booker Prize. Stephen Harper has supposedly been working on a book on hockey for longer than anyone can remember and wears sweater vests to try to make us think he's human.

Only the complete "morans" who make up the current electoral base of modern conservatism would consider being well-educated, widely-travelled and highly accomplished bad things. They get the leaders they deserve.

And as for the notion that spending time, even a long time, outside the country make one any less Canadian --I've been living in Japan for dozen years and, like Ignatieff, the place I miss most is Algonquin Park. If you think I'm somehow less Canadian because of where I live (and I'd move back tomorrow if the right job opportunity presented itself, but you go where the work is) or who I married or because I eat sushi more often than poutine these days, you are just plain wrong and can kiss my fat, maple-syrup loving, multicultural ass. I may be less engaged than I once was in the daily cut and thrust of Canadian politics, but I'd venture to guess that I still pay more attention than most in the Great White North. That must be true, because you sure as hell wouldn't catch me voting for Stephen Harper.

Crossposted at the Woodshed

More evil

Apparently it isn't just Thomas Wolfe who can never come home again.

Apparently it doesn't matter if the RCMP and CSIS say you aren't a terrorist, what matters is whether a regime - known to have imprisoned and tortured people for no good reason - that is no longer in power once said you were a terrorist.

The George W. Bush administration = evil.

The Stephen Harper administration = evil's lil' helper.

Canadian Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon = unprintable, even on a blog.

Harper to teach FOX News a lesson

A week after Greg Gutfeld and his panel of brainless wonders yukked it up over the idea that Canada actually has an army, pissing off so many people in the Great White North that even Canadian Defence Minister and neocon lickspittle Peter McKay condemned FOX News. But not to worry, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has now entered the fray. He's going to be in Washington on Sunday and New York on Monday - not to meet with U.S. officials - but to do media interviews. Including one with FOX News host Chris "His father must be so embarrassed" Wallace.

Harper did provide Radio-Canada with a rare interview on Thursday evening and is scheduled to give another Sunday to CTV.

Canadian correspondents were told not to bother trying to track Harper in Washington or New York. "You will likely be disappointed," said Teneycke.

The prime minister's latest round of media shopping comes just a month after he was last in New York.

It's part of a strategy to limit Harper's Canadian interrogations - where the questions tilt toward the specifics of Canada's troubled domestic economy - in favour of foreign media who can be expected to compare this country favourably to its international partners.

The only detail provided by the Prime Minister's Office was that Harper will be doing a live interview on Fox News on Sunday morning and a CNN interview on Monday.

Somehow I doubt the interview will begin the way it should, with Wallace presenting Gutfeld's head on a silver platter. Way to stand up for Canadians, Steverino.

It will be Harper's second interview with both Fox and CNN in a month. He has not granted an interview to The Canadian Press, Canada's national news service, since December 2007.

It's all about being accountable to Canadians, isn't it Steverino, you dead-eyed, baby-munching, presidential wannabe.

Crossposted from the Woodshed. 

That was then, this is now

Stephen "Mucho Macho" Harper in 2006:

"Your work is about more than just defending Canada's national interests. Your work is also about demonstrating an international leadership role for our country."
Harper told the troops they have the support of the Canadian people and government on what he called the country's most challenging deployment since Korea.
"There will be some who want to cut and run, but cutting and running is not my way and it's not the Canadian way," he said, to a round of applause.

and from the same month, back in Ottawa:

A debate on whether Canadian troops should be in Afghanistan would put the troops in danger, and any attempt to pull them back would be a betrayal, says Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Harper, speaking after a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, stressed that the previous Liberal government committed the troops to their Afghan mission, which has proved deadly in recent weeks, and that the Conservatives will honour the commitment.
"I'm saying that Canadians don't cut and run at the first sign of trouble," he told reporters. "That's the nature of this country, and when we send troops into the field, I expect Canadians to support those troops." He repeatedly rejected the idea of a debate and said his government will not make decisions based on opinion polls.
"I understand the frustrations," he said. "Perhaps the previous government should have had a vote on the deployment, but that was not their decision. The decision was taken and we can't change our opinion when the troops are in danger."
He did not say why a debate in Canada would put soldiers at risk in Afghanistan, but he stressed it is "a very dangerous mission. "It's not the intention of this government to question the particular commitment when our troops are in danger," he said. "Such a debate or such a lack of strength by any of the political parties in Canada will merely weaken the resolve of our troops and will even put our troops in even more danger."

Nietzschean ubermench that he fancies himself, he even thought that the occasional dead soldier was a good thing for the military, since anything that didn't kill them all, only made them stronger - though to be fair, Harper's attitude in this regard is hardly limited to the Canadian military.

"I can tell you [the Afghan mission] has certainly engaged our military. It's, I think, made them a better military notwithstanding -- and maybe in some way because of -- the casualties."

But what is this? What light through yonder seive-like cranium breaks?
Stephen "Bring'em Home" Harper March 1, 2009:

Canada PM says West won't beat Afghan insurgency
Associated Press
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper says Western forces alone won't defeat the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, and that the U.S. must have a viable exit plan before asking other countries to do more there.
OTTAWA—Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper says Western forces alone won't defeat the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, and that the U.S. must have a viable exit plan before asking other countries to do more there.
"Frankly, we are not going to ever defeat the insurgency," Harper said in an interview that aired Sunday on CNN. "My reading of Afghanistan history is that's it's probably had an insurgency forever of some kind."
Canadian and other NATO troops have made some gains against the insurgents over the years but those gains are not irreversible and the overall success has been modest, Harper said.
"What has to happen in Afghanistan is we have to have an Afghan government that is capable of managing that insurgency," he said. If a foreign power is perceived as the source of authority, "it will always have a significant degree of opposition," he said.

You might have thought of that 100 or so lives ago, Steverino. You are finally conceding that our prescence there was pointless all along, just as the Americans are preparing to double their numbers there and possibly try for something other than a stalemate. Well timed sir!

I guess that now that you've abandoned the sunken costs argument ("we can't ever leave or our soldiers will have died in vain") we can expect the knuckle-draggers at SDA and the kill'em-all-and-let-God-sort'em-out caucus of the Blogging Tories to follow in lockstep and tell us about how they've been against the war all along and what Wanda Watkins can do with her grief. Someone should have stapled this to the PM's forehead a year ago. I guess you don't support the troops after all. Or could it be that those who have been saying the best way to support them is to bring them home were right after all?

As usual, Dr. Dawg says it better.

Crossposted from The Woodshed

In a perfect world...

... it would not have been necessary for Stephen Harper to eat a baby...

GO !

.

And yes I have stolen Ottawonk's entire site logo here but he's off on Perogies and besides I'll put it back before he gets home.

Cross-posted at Creekside