Did the Prime Minister's wife really leave him for a woman?

It's that time of the year when the pot-addled hillbilly likes to drop in on friends, relatives, distant relatives, friends of friends, and random acquaintances old and more recent who have the good fortune of owning waterfront vacation property. I've got this summer strategy down to such a fine art that it wouldn't make any sense for me to get my own place on the water.


So it was that I found myself the other day drinking in a 4.9 million dollar view over in Muskoka. Also found myself chewing the fat with a couple of guys who have some proximity to certain Harper gang insiders.


We were musing about what might or might not yet come out in the course of that theatre of the absurd commonly known as "the Duffy trial." That's turning into quite the sordid spectacle, is it not? All those God-fearing Alliance Church types twisting the Word Of God inside out to justify the fact that their least favorable option when caught fibbing is to fess up and just tell the truth. I mean, look at poor Nigel - he reached into his own pocket and pulled out 90 big ones just to avoid the truth coming out.


Here's a scripture for you, Nigel; "be sure your sin will find you out."


We got to speculating about what else Harper's Holy Rollers might have swept under the carpet in this dark decade, and talk eventually came round to the Laureen Harper scandal. That might sound like an oxymoron to the Big Steve fan club, but google "Laureen Harper affair" or "Laureen Harper lesbian affair" and you'll be shocked at the slimy innuendo that bubbles up.


When that story was first getting traction a few years ago, it didn't last long. The general public may have assumed that was because it lacked substance. But when you look at the lengths that these God-fearing men will go to bury the truth, you have to wonder.


Then the conversation turned to my favorite Harperite, bullshittin' Baird. Regular readers will know that the think tank here at Falling Downs has theorized that the reason for Baird's sudden disappearance from the Harper cabinet was nothing more significant than his decision to cash in on twenty-five years of public service.


But apparently there's another angle. For many years Big John was something of an anomaly among the Bible-thumping Harperites; an unclosetted if not quite openly gay man amongst a gang of homophobes, it was obviously Big John who was putting the fun into fundamentalism.


Too much fun, it seems. The Alliance Church Mafia was alright with his egregious incompetence and his boorish hooliganism on the world stage, but they were never comfortable with his lifestyle choices, and the word is he sealed his fate when he and his posse of party boys rocked Macdonald House in London for free during the Christmas holiday of 2012. That was a bridge too far, and from that point on even the most loyal of Harper loyalists began to secretly lobby for Baird's demise.


As with Laureen, we were always prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt; after all, if the various scandals had any substance to them, they wouldn't disappear so quickly, would they? What the Duffy trial is showing the public is how hard the Harper gang works to make unpleasant facts go away. It's been quite the eye-opener for a lot of once-loyal Harper fans.


To paraphrase Heiner Muller; the deepest plunge into Hell is from the heights of self-righteousness.

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Dear Reader,

Much has changed since I wrote this post six years ago.  Check out my latest work at Substack.

neumann