Canada stunned to learn PM has "stylist"

That news came out in the the course of the CBC expose on the Harper government paying the tab for 30 CEOs who accompanied him on a China junket.

I mean take a look at the picture in the link. This requires a stylist? The suit, the tie, the shirt... I swear any dweeb can walk into Moore's with five hundred bucks and come out looking like that. And surely he can comb his own hair into the 'do we see here.

Maybe the stylist picked the glasses?

My first suit was a Samuelsohn I got at David Enchin's place in Guelph, The House of David I believe it was called. Still have the jacket, and by God it still looks damn fine with a pair of jeans forty years later.

Think Steve will be saying that about the rig he's sporting, forty years from now?

I guess the bigger story is why the government would pay a planeload of CEOs, multi-millionaires every one, to accompany the PM on a sales trip to China. That's not how influence peddling works in the rest of the world.

Normally, the CEOs would be expected to pay the tab for the Prime Minister.

But maybe Mr. Harper  suffers from some deep-seated insecurities. He wants those CEOs to like him, because after all, sooner or later he'll be back in the private sector.

That would explain the stylist too.

You know we're screwed when we're begging China to pay for our imperialist misadventures

The NATO worthies are all cutting and running from the Afghan quagmire. The face-saving strategy is to pretend we're keeping "trainers" back to train the so-called Afghan army.

That in itself should be the tip-off as to how disastrously the Afghan campaign has gone off the rails.

When and where has the losing side in any war been retained to train the army of the winning side? Did Israel hire on thousands of Egyptian trainers after the Six Day War?

Did Viet Nam hire on American trainers after those last helicopters left the roof of the embassy in Saigon?

Did any of the allied nations hire Italian trainers after the Italian campaign in WWII?

But for some reason we're supposed to believe that the folks who put the run to the best that NATO has to offer need the NATO nations to train their military.

A moment of reflection will lead to the conclusion that the supposed Afghan "training mission" has nothing whatsoever to do with training the  Afghan military, and everything to do with maintaining Afghanistan's status as a vassal state.

As long as we keep their military dependent on us, we'll keep them as a customer for our weapons systems, and we'll be able to keep our bum-boy Karzai in place at least for the time being.

Problem for these NATO conquerors is they can't afford to keep their "trainers" in the country.

The cost of keeping a NATO-friendly army running is estimated to be at least 4 billion dollars a year. The Afghan resistance has driven NATO out with less money than it takes to keep my pick-up truck on the road.

But we're determined to keep a high-tech army trained and supplied? Why? Because it's our last lever of control over the country.

Canadian Defense Minister Peter "Pinocchio" MacKay today revealed that NATO will ask China for help in footing the bill. Now we know that there's something on the agenda for Harper's China visit next week other than begging the Chinese to buy our dirty oil.

We'll be begging them to save our butts in Afghanistan.

Top court refuses to hear torture case as Harper prepares to lecture Chinese on human rights

The Supreme Court of Canada on Thursday refused to hear an appeal brought by three muslim Canadians who claim they were tortured in Syria and Egypt because of information provided by Canada.

As you know, Canada is a light unto the nations when it comes to human rights. No humans have more rights than the lucky humans who count themselves Canadians. We have even exported our superior moral code in the form of the R2P doctrine that was used as the official excuse for NATO's rape of Libya.

There are some Canadians who would quibble with this assessment of Canada's moral superiority, but every party needs a pooper, is what I say. Those Indians in Attawapiskat, for example, who'd be freezing to death in their home and native land right now were it  not for the intervention of the International Red Cross.

The Harper government  had them figured out right away as a bunch of malcontent whiners. Send food! Send fuel oil? We're freezing and starving!...

Well, if you are, the Harperites replied, you have no one to blame but your own lazy and corrupt selves. Just look at the money we have lavished on you!

Same deal with these muslims now making their extravagant claims about torture. And they are but the tip of the proverbial ice-berg, let me assure you. Please note that none of  these whiners claim to have been actually tortured in Canada! See what I mean? Our moral superiority remains intact.

No, we have adopted the out-sourcing model for torturing our nere-do-wells. We send our Arab malcontents to friendly Arab states for "enhanced interogation," along with a list of questions we would like the enhanced interogators to ask. Our  friends in Syria or Egypt or Libya do all the interogation, apply all the enhancements, and clean Canadian hands stay clean!

None of which is likely to impress the Chinese when PM Harper delivers his obligatory rant about human rights when he visits next month. Not human rights abuses in Canada, of course, but in China. He'll say just enough to get a few headlines back in Canada; Harper chastises Chinese on human rights record.

Then it'll  be on to the nitty gritty of the visit; Harper  pleads with Chinese to buy our dirty oil.