The Mound of Sound

Dona Cadman looks a bit spinny at the moment, vouchsafing for the prospective boss on the strength of having looked into his eyes, but no matter.

There’s endless debate over what happened and whether it was illegal and whether some Libs defamed Harpo by claiming he was in on it, but no matter.

What does matter is this. Jodi Cadman said it herself, it was an “indecent proposal.” It was a truly indecent, utterly sleazy act to try to take advantage of a man just weeks away from death, a man about to leave a wife and child to an uncertain future.

It was indecent and, by his own admission, Harper knew of this indecency and did nothing to stop it when he could have. Harper was content to sit back and let his henchmen try to take advantage of a man’s vulnerabilities and weaknesses in a moment of enormous peril.

Stephen Harper might not be a criminal but he’s shown, beyond the slightest doubt, that he is a vile, loathesome creature utterly devoid of any shred of integrity or even decency. He’s a moral reprobate, a huckster. He’s a power-grabber, sneak thief and a theoconservative mandrake. Canada can do well without him and his kind.

(p.s. the “mandrake” reference – Mandrake is a powerful herb of the Nightshade family used for its anaesthetic and supposedly magical qualities. Closely related to the deadly Belladonna, Mandrake (like Harper) can cause hallucinations and delerium if ingested. According to folklore, the humanoid Mandrake root screams when it is pulled from the earth, and the human who hears it will go deaf, become insane, or in more extreme versions of the legend, drop dead)

In Charlie Madrid’s half century on this planet he sure hasn’t learned much. Here are a couple of them:

If you want to kill the president of your country, best not to tell your ex-girlfriend. And, if the Los Angeles police later show up at your door and ask, “Do you want to kill the president?,” it’s not going to help you a lot to say “yes.”

Madrid has been charged with charged with knowingly and willfully threatening to take the life of the president. It’s kind of a weird offence, one that can land an American in a lot of trouble for simply thinking out loud.

According to Charlie’s mum, he’s just had a streak of bad luck lately. As if the breakup with Wanda O’Hickey-Way wasn’t bad enough, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis two years ago. Then his job as a technician at a local radio station was cut back to part time and then some bastard stole his only means of transportation, his bicycle, off mom’s front porch.

Said Rachel Madrid-Hall, “Sometimes life just kicks you in the teeth.” Amen.

It sort of reminds me of Olde England where they had the offence of imagining the death of the king. A conviction for that in the Star Chamber could fetch you the full Braveheart – drawn to the place of execution on a hurdle, hanged but cut down while still alive, disembowled and then hitched up to the horses and quartered. Nasty folks these monarchs.

Faith, they say, can enable man to endure horrible ordeals.

Conrad Black, now inmate Black, is a man of faith – faith in God and even more faith in Himself.

Old 18330-424, as he’s now known, has faith that his fraud convictions will be overturned and even has faith that he’ll be out of jail in just a few months.

I don’t think 424’s faith is going to spring him nearly as fast as he might hope. The most serious conviction, the obstruction charge, is based on videotape of him removing boxes of documents from Hollinger’s Toronto offices. It’s going to take a heaping helping of Divine intervention to get that one set aside.

“A moron who actually seriously looks at this case sees that it is a crock and I expect it will ultimately be determined to be so,” he said. That counld be so, Conrad, but I wouldn’t count on the appellate judges being morons.

Sitting out here on Vancouver Island, I view Ottawa/Ontario politics with a degree of puzzlement. It’s more than a degree, I just don’t get it.

Now, as I understand it, Harpo’s FinMin, Flaherty, is a recycled dud from the former Ontario government of Mike Harris, the outfit that surprised the good people of that province with a parting gift in the form of a $5-billion deficit.

There are certain things we all know. Globalization hasn’t been good for North American manufacturing sector, this we know. Stephen Harper really gets off on playing Rovian wedge politics, this we know. Harpo can’t stand Liberals, federally or provincially or even those who just show up at voting stations, this we know. SHarper’s minions, that is to say his cabinet ministers, don’t wipe their backsides without Steve’s say so, this we know. Furious Leader has two eyes; one he uses to scan the country in search of carrion, the other he keeps focused on his home province and future energy superpower, Alberta, this we know.

So why is Harper using his trained chimp, Flaherty, to pick a fight with Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty? Is it because Harpo has been too busy defunding the federal government just as McGuinty has come, Oliver Twist style, asking for another bowl of gruel? Is that what this is all about? Does Harpo want to make Ontario voters believe their province’s economic woes are their Liberal government’s fault? What is it?

Now you know that a guy with a name like McGuinty who resembles nothing so much as a reincarnation of Ichabod Crane, doesn’t come to power unless the outgoing bunch really screwed the pooch somewhere. The voters have to be some peed off to do that. Flaherty was, of course, a player in that reviled government so why, of all people, is Harpo using him to wage war on Ontario?

Sorry, I don’t have any answers. Please enlighten me.

That Stephen Harper took time to study Karl Rove’s playbook is clear but the one chapter that really got his attention was the one devoted to “defunding” the central government.

The idea behind defunding government is to leave it so impoverished that it can no longer afford social programmes. When the Rove/Bush/Cheney regime seized power they faced the prospect of defunding a government with surpluses. That all changed on 9/11 – the surpluses were gone. However Bush acted as though they were still around, changing the fundamental nature of American taxation, cutting taxes for the most advantaged and waging multi-trillion dollar wars without end on borrowed money. In the process he’s almost guaranteed a cataclysmic future for America’s Social Security system and other entitlement programmes as his debt and deficit spending comes home to roost in the next administrations.

The only war Bush has succeeded at is the class war he has waged on his country’s working and middle classes.

Stephen Harper has done a good job of defunding the Canadian government despite the restrictions of minority government. He did it by stealth, spending increases and tax cuts.

Harper’s own Karl Rove, political strategist Tom Flanagan told Canadian Press the Harper “Conservatives are gradually “tightening the screws on the federal government,” leaving more money in taxpayers’ pockets and making it harder for Ottawa to spend.
To launch any big-ticket initiatives over the next few years a prime minister – whether Harper or a successor – would either need to risk political suicide or hope for an economic miracle.

That’s because raising taxes, returning to a deficit or slashing existing programs could be the only ways to pay for new spending, barring an unexpected economic boom.

“They’ve gradually re-engineered the system. I’m quite impressed with it,” said Flanagan, a political strategist who ran the 2004 Conservative campaign.”

I’m not entirely convinced that Flanagan’s crowing is valid. Repeated polls have shown Canadians to be a centrist, social-moderate bunch and, while the Harper measures will present a problem for future governments, I don’t think they’re insurmountable.

Without launching into my theories again, I will point out that Harper has an early 20th century approach to leadership that’s going to become increasingly irrelevant in the face of the environmental, security and economic changes we’ll be facing in the coming decades. Those realities, much more than Wilsonian ideology, will shape the relationship between the Canadian government and its people. Simply put, I think we’re stronger than he is.