First to the man who said “I am Peterborough,” without realizing the he is not really in the league of Louis the Sun King. Dean Del Mastro is an albatross around the neck of an already ethics-challenged Conservative party. The appropriately nicknamed Cons are simply debasing the base. The PM appointed Del Mastro his government’s spokesman on ethical and electoral matters. That’s akin putting Dr. Arthur Porter in charge of something really important like CSIS oversight…. Wait, Harper did that too!
Despite having fled Canadian corruption charges, Porter is still a Canadian Privy Councillor, courtesy of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s stellar judgment of people. At least Panama is paying the good doctor’s room and board behind bars while he fights extradition to Canada on a clutch of criminal charges.
Harper also appointed Del Mastro as his parliamentary secretary, and kept him in that position even while he knew Del Mastro was under investigation by Elections Canada. Given his personal selection of Porter, Bruce Carson, Patrick Brazeau and Del Mastro, it’s a fair question: does this PM have an infatuation for jailbirds?
Some people felt sympathy when they saw that indelible image of ‘Deano in Chains’ leaving the courtroom. You know, it’s probably not the snap for this year’s Christmas card. But as the great American poet Wallace Stevens observed, sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
The real scandal in this matter is a jail sentence more suited to a parking-ticket deadbeat than someone who has lied and cheated his way into a seat in parliament.
This is the guy who felt so little remorse after his conviction for cheating in the 2008 election that he referred to the judge’s verdict as her “opinion.”
If Superior Court Justice Lisa Cameron took Del Mastro’s utter lack of remorse into consideration before sentencing, she picked a strange way of expressing it; limiting his jail time to a mere 30 days.
Don’t talk about couch-time, or feeding the cows time, or time off to go to church. Del Mastro’s offence was dead serious and should have carried serious time. What’s to deter the next cheating politician – 30 days in stir and four months of tv time in the Lazy Boy? Del Mastro, now on bail, served one night in jail. He now awaits his appeal. Not exactly picking oakum, right?
Three things come to mind. Why should Canadians pay the pension of a cheater and a liar? Why should he ever be allowed to seek public office again? And how did Michael Sona rate nine times the sentence of a guy who profited from his illegalities at the expense of other candidates and voters — and placed himself at the right hand of the prime minister lecturing the opposition about probity in public life?
The Del Mastro debacle would have constituted a bad week for any prime minister seeking re-election. But wait, there’s more. Kory Teneycke decided to try his hand as a stand-up comedian on Global News’ West Block.
The Conservative Party campaign spokesman told Tom Clark that the party’s use of ISIS videos to attack the Liberals was just a way to show the differences between the parties. Never mind that the Harperites might be breaking their own anti-terror laws by showing the ISIS video with the group’s anthem.
Here’s how the Cons really see it. The PM called it “irresponsible electoral politics” to criticize the fight against ISIS. But it is apparently responsible electoral politics to use ISIS videos to criticize Steve’s political opponents. Bottom line? In Harperland, Harper & co get to criticize the other guys, but it is irresponsible for the other guys to answer back.
Another giant step towards Canadian demockery.
The funniest line from the CPC sock-puppet came when he told Clark that the party was doing exactly the same thing that Global and others do on the news. Poor Kory. He never has made the mental leap from public relations to news, as his pathetic tenure at Sun TV shows so thoroughly. He helped to make the place unmarketable — a laughing stock, really — that was so hyper-partisan that it would make Roger Ailes blush.
But things went from comedy to theatre of the absurd when Teneycke boasted of the Conservatives “We’re better than the news, we’re truthful.”
Even the base must be choking on that pork-chop bone. Some people tell lies to conceal the truth; the Conservatives tell lies because they have forgotten what the truth is.
On the whopper index, this PM continues to Reach for the Top. No boots on the ground in Iraq. Sixty-five F-35 stealth fighters for $15 billion. The cheater Peter Penashue is the best MP Labrador ever had. ISIS has already attacked Canada. It would be madness to regulate the energy sector. There will be no appointed senators. Opponents of pipelines are a bunch of foreign-financed extremists, Linda Keen was a Liberal hack, Stephen Maher is a controversial journalist….you get the picture.
Humiliated by Del Mastro, embarrassed by Teneycke, Harper’s agonies were exquisitely refined by his political amigos. Some boys and girls on the far right led by blogger Stephen Taylor started up a U.S. style political action committee (PAC), to raise dark money to wage war against the union hordes opposed to Harper. The PM reportedly hit the roof. If anyone was going to get the cash, it was the CPC.
In less than a week, three of Harper’s old buddies, one of whom shared a past with him at the National Citizens’ Coalition, pulled the plug on HarperPAC. Not only that, but they promised to return all the money they had collected. (I would like to see the list of donors.)
Why did they do that?
In a word, they were poaching the Harper brand and Himself was not pleased. It was like stealing the formula for Coca-Cola. In fact, Harper was reportedly so displeased that the party and the prime minister were plotting a legal battle to force the shutdown before the group voluntarily disbanded.
Enter Teneycke anew, who this time explained that he felt that the use of Harper’s name was “deliberately” confusing. That choice of words more than suggests a whiff of trouble in Tory-land.
Why would a band of Kool-Aid drinkers with a history in the party and in far right organizations want to “deliberately” confuse donors to the Conservative cause, especially when Stephen Harper himself had gone all the way to the Supreme Court arguing for unlimited third-party spending in Canadian politics when he ran the National Citizens Coalition?
It is all about controlling the message. As his political woes deepen, Harper has a habit of moving away from substantive discourse and doubling down on the emotional and irrational. He is a master channel changer and his success begins where debate ends.
The last thing Harper and his apparatchiks want is a reasoned discussion about the Iraq Mission against ISIS. Literally everything being done in Iraq and Syria has been done before — there and elsewhere — and failed; sending in the trainers, boots on the ground, partnering with Iran, arming the Kurds, and hoping for a political alliance between Shia and Sunni factions forged by the government in Baghdad.
Here is a number to keep in mind. At the peak of the second Iraq War, the U.S. had 505 bases manned by 166,000 troops in country. A total of $25 billion U.S. was spent training and equipping of the Iraqis with virtually nothing to show for it.
Now the U.S. is beginning training again as if that will make a difference on the ground. As Peter Van Buren, who blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during the Iraqi reconstruction, put it, “How could more American trainers accomplish in a shorter period of time what so many have failed to do over so many years?”
There is no good answer to that question, which is why the Harper Conservatives don’t want any debate.
So here’s a sneak preview of what’s coming to TV screens near you this summer: many many more attack ads using ISIS images and frightening drumbeats, capped with Michael Bibeau’s suicidal raid on parliament. There will be no discussion of the government’s record, save meaningless talking points on balanced budgets that will likely segue into highlighting the payola Harper is offering to everyone with children under 18.
All-ISIS-all-the-time is Harper’s Hail Mary pass thrown from the swamp of the Del Mastros, Teneyckes and Taylors. Oh, and let’s not forget the Senate scandal that sticks solidly to the Conservatives’ army boots.
As Harper knows, fear does strange things to peoples’ minds. South of the border, the fear factor is so great that CNN correspondent Lucy Pawle reported that a man dressed in black was displaying a banner at the London gay pride celebrations this weekend that was “very distinctively the ISIS flag.”
CNN removed the segment from its website, when it realized that the offensive banner was actually an assortment of sex toys. Over to you Steve.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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