Hark, the war drums beckon!

Big Steve and a gaggle of like-minded neocon has-beens wasted no time offering Mafia Don props on a job well done.

Trump abrogates the Iran deal on Tuesday and Harper & Company have their rancid diatribe in the New York Times the very next day!

Only the greatest leader since Moses was quicker off the mark than this sorry lot; he managed to launch a major missile attack on Syria even before Harper et al launched their bought and paid for op-ed!

And who can blame him? After Trump's announcement of the US embassy move, after Trump delivers the imbecile MBS to the Israeli camp, after Trump unilaterally dumps the JCPOA agreement, Bibi obviously sees green lights all over the place.

No wonder they love Trump in Israel!

Harper is concerned that Iran "oppresses its people" and "commits violence against the people of Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon..."

Hmm... does Iran oppress its people more than, say, Saudi Arabia?

Is the war on Yemen not a Saudi project?

Has not the US committed far greater violence against the people of Iraq than has Iran?

And no one has inflicted more death and destruction on Lebanon than our good friends, the Israelis.

Even though fifteen of nineteen 9/11 terrorists were Saudis, and none were Iranian, Saudi Arabia is our ally, and Iran is the enemy?

But forget all these trifles! The free world must come together as one and teach those uppity Persians a lesson they won't soon forget.


I'll bet old Eric Arthur Blair is enjoying the greatest stiffy of his life, even though he's been in the grave nearly seventy years!

Big Steve hangs up political hat to surf the big waves of corporate cronyism

Yup, Big Steve done paid his dues, and intends to cash in with the "next stage" of his career; Harper and Associates Consulting.

Given that Mr. Harper and his government devoted so much time, energy, money, and misleading press releases during his ten year tenure to "helping women and girls" in the less fortunate parts of the planet, do we expect him to use this consultancy to advise non-profits on how to help those unfortunates even more?

Frankly, I don't think Harper's next stage is about altruism. It's about filling his pockets, a la Phoney Tony Blair. Mind you, it's unlikely that he'll ever be able to scale things to the level that Mr. Blair has. A lot of Blair's cachet among third world despots hinges on the illusion that the White House returns Tony's calls, something that nobody would remotely believe about Mr. Harper.

Nevertheless, there are reasons for optimism. Anybody who ever dug a little deeper into those many programs to help women and girls in the less fortunate nations inevitably came to the conclusion that these programs were more about helping Canadian and international agribusiness and big pharma. I mean, it's not that the Harper gang were lying; after all, women and girls everywhere need food and medicine.

So while Big Steve may never reach the heights of influence peddling that Big Tony commands, he's gonna do just fine!

POTUS and POTHEAD together at last

Apparently this is the first time a Canadian PM has graced the dining table at the White House since little Jean had a sit-down with Bubba nineteen years ago.

Hard to believe that Big Steve never got an invite, after his many years of pandering to Empire. That pipeline thing must have been a way bigger burr under the saddle of US foreign policy than anyone could have imagined. That would indicate a huge miscalculation on the part of the Harperites, at least in terms of staying onside with the folks they thought they were sucking up to.

But POTHEAD is making it all good today. Too bad POTUS is a lame duck President with mere months left in his White House tenure.

Pity!

Bleeding hearts play sympathy card in brazen attempt to sneak undocumented alien into Canada

I suppose the pinkos pushing the Joan Stirling case expected the public to get all mushy and misty-eyed when they went crying to their fellow-travellers at the CBC with their sob story. Stirling is the old bat who has been living illegally in Canada for over 80 years. Now, as a reward for eight decades of malfeasance, she's got the gumption to demand citizenship!

Not only that, but she wants a health card too!

Who can even imagine such a thing? A 99 year old with a health card!... My goodness; that'll be the straw that finally breaks the back of our beleaguered health care system once and for all!

Luckily for all of us, Team Harper is made of sterner stuff. Spokesperson for Immigration Minister Chris Alexander, Watta Dumphuc, explained the government position in an afternoon presser today.

"Rules are rules and illegal immigrants are illegal immigrants," Dumphuc explained. "Even though Ms. Stirling is old stock, this government takes the rule of law seriously. If we were to make an exception in this case, God only knows how many old Chinese guys would come crawling out of the woodwork, and we know there's thousands of them have been laying low at least since the Chinese Immigration Act of '23."

No doubt the pot-head and the pinko would see matters differently. Just one more example of how you can help keep this great nation safe and strong by voting Harper on October 19.

Race baiting becomes essential re-election strategy for Harper team

On the face of it, I too would be inclined to agree with the proposition that "a prospective future citizen of Canada should not be allowed to hide their identity at a citizenship ceremony."

Except, when you look into it at all, nobody is "hiding" their identity.

If and when Zunera Ishaq is permitted to wear her niqab at her citizenship ceremony, the entire country will know exactly who that veiled woman is.

By the time she makes it to the ceremony, Zunera will have revealed and unveiled herself countless times to various government functionaries in their semi-private offices. Zunera can do that because her faith dictates that she cover up in public.

As in a public ceremony.

At no point has Zunera Ishaq's niqab been about "hiding her identity."

Our local MP Larry Miller had to do a little back-pedalling when he got on national TV for proclaiming "those people should get the hell back to where they came from" back in March.

But Big Steve himself has been playing the same ugly game.

We're either a tolerant and diverse society, or we're not.

Death by TPP

That's the Trans Pacific Partnership in case you don't know.

As per usual, our union leaders are a month late and a hundred bucks short on calling this, the most odious "free trade" agreement ever.

But better late than never.

Big Steve is keen on getting Canada enmeshed in the TPP fine print ASAP. Preferably before the October election.

That will guarantee him many lucrative directorships in multinational corporations once he is consigned to the dustbin of history a month hence.

Wayner proves he's been a Weener all along

Back in the day, when a lot of beer guzzling mullet-heads in rec-rooms across this great nation watched Hockey Night in Canada religiously, we referred to The Great One as "Wayner," or the Trumpesque "The Wayner," and later in the evening, after a few beers and maybe a bottle toke or two had taken the edge off our religious experience, "Weener."

We were a million Bob and Doug Mackenzies in basements across the land, and the day Peter Pocklington sold The Great One to Bruce McNall, we wept as one.

Both McNall and Pocklington ended up in jail, but not for the crime of trading Wayne Gretzky to the Kings.

For his part, Wayne got over his betrayal by Peter Puck and struck up a bromance with McNall. Today's news that he's endorsing Big Steve shouldn't come as a shock. As great as he was as a hockey player, he's consistently been a failure as a judge of character.




Seems The Wayner's been a Weener all along...

Old boys club circles the wagons to keep new girl out of the election debate

I've been watching the Canadian election debate, brought to me by the national newspaper of record.

Absent from the debate is the leader of the Green Party. She won the last debate, which is why the old boys club made sure that she was excluded from this one.

Harper gang determined to milk niqab controversy to the very last racist vote

Yesterday I erroneously referred to the Federal Court of Appeal as the country's "top" court. It isn't. The top court would be the Supreme Court of Canada.

Therefore it shouldn't come as a shock that Big Steve plans to keep the phoney niqab issue alive by promising to appeal yesterday's rejection of the niqab ban by the Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court. Observant Muslim women who choose to cover up in public would, if the Harperites prevail, join the one other identifiable, or rather unidentifiable group for whom covering up in public has been criminalized; anti-government protesters.

Two years ago Harper's Holy Rollers used their majority to steam-roll Bill C-309 through Parliament. That's a pungent piece of police-state legislation that makes it a criminal offence, punishable by up to ten years in prison, for anyone to cover their face at any gathering that the notoriously thin-skinned Harper gang deems "unlawful."

Makes you wonder where this country is headed, doesn't it? Luckily, there's still one group that's allowed to hide their identity while out and about in public...

Harper's Rx for election victory: keep taxes low and towelheads out

Looks like Big Steve isn't about to alienate his base by showing weakness in the face of the unprecedented clamouring of Canadians at large that he "do something" to alleviate the suffering of Syrian refugees.

He is doing something. He's announcing, over and over, that Canada will admit up to 10,000 Syrians over a period of years, provided they pass strict security screenings. That's essential to keeping Canadians safe, of course, when these folks are coming from a country that features literally thousands of armed terrorist gangs.

And even more importantly, that's almost impossible to do. After all, how do you do an exhaustive background check on somebody who has lived in Aleppo all their life till three months ago? What were they doing six months ago? If they were Assad supporters... well, we wouldn't want that sort welcomed in Canada, would we?

And if they were against Assad, they were probably in cahoots with some terror outfit like al Nusra Front or, God forbid, ISIL itself! We obviously can't let that lot in either!

But in spite of these obstacles, we are making progress. With two hundred thousand Syrians dead, two million in refugee camps, and four million displaced from their homes, Canada has already provided security clearance for nine Syrian refugees.

That's not nine thousand, that's nine.

Yet those braying socialist Harper-haters still claim the man lacks compassion...

An honourable politician in the Harper gang? Forsooth... what was I thinking?

It's been a couple of days. For a few hopeful seconds I thought perhaps Immigration Minister Chris Alexander had a "Damascus" moment. Faced with the enormity of the impact the Aylan Kurdi photo made on the conscience of the nation, I'd hoped Mr. Alexander suspended his re-election campaign to reflect on how far on the wrong side of history the Harper gang finds itself.

It appears my hopeful seconds were misguided. All indications are that the Big Steve crowd are consolidating around their utterly contradictory positions on Syria. The evil Assad gotta go, but the Canadian Air Force is over there bombing the crap out of Islamic State, the only force on the ground with any chance of facilitating that outcome.

That's beyond delusional and self-defeating; it's utterly schizophrenic

Be that as it may, the only "Damascus" moment the Harperites are likely to have is when God tells them they have to drop more bombs on Damascus.

As for the refugees, Harper has handled that file like he handles the ship-building file. You don't actually ever have to do anything.

Just keep making new announcements every few months.

That's the beauty of governing by photo-op and press release!

Harper's cynical manipulation of the Maher Arar file

That's a file open since at least 2002. In fact, CSIS obviously had a file on Mr. Arar well before that.


Mr. Arar was the Canadian dispatched to Syria for "questioning" by the US. Yup, that was back in the day when Assad was still a "good guy" and an ally of the Nations of Virtue. "Questioning" protocols have a little more elasticity in Syria than they do in the Nations of Virtue. "Question" a probable terrorist like Mr. Arar here in North America and all the bleeding heart soft-on-terror types will accuse you of torture.


So to keep our hands clean, we connived with the CIA to have Assad's thugs do the "questioning."


Mind you, that was while he was still a good guy.


There's nothing new in the Arar file, but at least thirteen years after the fact and ten years into the Harper regime, we suddenly get the news that the RCMP is charging a Syrian military officer in the torture of Maher Arar.


Could the timing of this announcement have anything to do with the fact that Harper is in the midst of a too-close-to-call election campaign?


What does the Harper gang get out of this?


A chance to silence Paul Martin, who's been a little too vocal in his support of Justin Trudeau. Martin was PM when the Arar fiasco originally unfolded.


A chance to change the focus from the faltering economy to the evil Assad.


A chance to pose yet again as the tough-on-terror, tough-on-crime strongman.


Are we expected to believe that the timing of these charges is a coincidence?

Obviously!


Otherwise, there would have to have been some pressure from the Harper gang to impact the fortuitous timing of this announcement from the RCMP, and that would be hugely inappropriate.

Maybe even illegal?!


You don't think anybody in the PMO would stoop that low, do you?

Bwana knows best

My Globe and Mail has this patronizing twaddle on view for my edification today.


The First Nations Financial Transparency Act was a typical bit of Harperite mischief-making. Slyly exploiting stereotypes dear to Harper's base, it promised to bring transparency to the no-doubt dubious financial dealings of native leaders.


According to the Globe, "anomalies started turning up... arrangements that in many cases had never before been made public and were surprising and puzzling to the members of those communities themselves. Those revelations proved the FNFTA's worth."


Yes, out of almost 600 bands that have reported, a small handful of anomalies did show up. But overall, I'd say that our native brothers and sisters have a track record far better than Harper's senate appointments.


And how's this for egregious self-righteousness; "The governed always need to know what the governors are up to."


Indeed!


Whoever wrote that must not be following the Mike Duffy shit show that's been unfolding in Ottawa. The crew that foisted "transparency" on Canada's native communities obviously doesn't believe in it for themselves... maybe that's because unlike Indians, those white chiefs in Ottawa can be trusted.


Or not.

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.

********

Dear Reader,

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

neumann

How tacky is it to drag your teenage kids into your election campaign?

Not too tacky for Stephen Harper.

Nope, it won't matter if he traumatizes his children; so long as it will score Mr. Family Values a few polling points, he's good to go...

Harper gang mines fear factor for maximum electoral advantage

Minus the Air India thing and a couple of French-Canadian wankers who converted to Islam and went nuts, Canada has NEVER had a terrorist attack of any sort.

Let alone an attack from Islamic State.

But that's not slowing down the Harper crew's attack on Islam.

The latest headline grabber is Harper's proposed new law on banning travel to "terror" states.

Trudeau is right in labeling this as "posturing."

But it's so more insidious than that.

First of all, bear in mind that Canada has been utterly terror free.

In that environment, Canada, ie the Harper gang, decide to join some jury-rigged "coalition" that is bombing ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

This is justifiable because ISIS has declared war on Canada. Yes, some Islamic State spokesperson mentioned Canada while reading a list of states allied against them.

That was the "declaration of war."

Big Steve has been milking that like gangbusters ever since.

Let's have a closer look at this ban on travel to so-called terror states.

Big Steve is obviously not going to designate our NATO ally Turkey as a "terror state."

Yet virtually 100% of Western Islamic State recruits enter Syria via Turkey.

You don't have to ponder this conundrum very long or very hard to come to the realization that the most recent Harper pronouncement about terror travel is absolute electioneering bullshit.

It means nothing, but it gets Big Steve a chance to fan the flames of fear while simultaneously presenting himself as the solution to a non-existent problem.

So fight terror. Vote for a strong Canada. Vote for peace and freedom.

Vote Harper on October 19.

Stephen Harper's Alliance Church mafia

I've made reference from time to time to the influence of the fundamentalist Christian and Missionary Alliance on Harper government policies. There's an interesting profile of Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton in today's Globe and Mail. Here's a quote that made my coffee spray out my nose;




Politically, Mr. Harper has found the sweet spot between economic success and responsible environmental policy, Mr. Hamilton said, and he's made Canada relevant on the international stage.




In reality there's never been any question that economic considerations trump environmental concerns in Harper's Canada, nor does any reasonable observer imagine that Canada is more relevant on the world stage today. What's frightening is that Harper and the clique of Alliance Church types around him totally believe their own bullshit.


Here's a quote from the Alliance Church's "vision statement" that might help explain our foreign policy;


Vision Prayer


O God, with all our hearts we long to be:
a movement of churches
transformed by Christ,
transforming Canada and the world.
By your grace and for your glory:

• Renew and empower us through a fresh encounter with yourself
• Release us to be strategic in service, kingdom-connected in practice, passionate in pursuit of your mission and mercy

Use us to fulfill your purpose for Canada and the world.

… Canada and the World ...

• Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the ends of the earth...
• Pray for our nation - the government - that godly agendas be required through minority rule.
• Pray for a missionary you know by name in a cross - cultural situation. Ask God to provide inspiration. Ask God if you are to be a provider.
• Pray for an utterly unreached people group - those under the domination of Islam, closed Hindu and Buddhist nations, etc.

If you've ever thought that our Israel First foreign policy smacks of religious fervor, that's because it's religious fervor.


And here's what they call an "Environmental Vision" at the Alliance Church. Good luck trying to find anything in it about what most normal people think about when they hear the word "environmental."


Faith can be a beautiful thing, but I don't recall where Canada ever signed up for faith-based government.

Prime Minister Harper confined to suite, forced to order room service due to outlaw bikers staying in same swank hotel

Seems Big Steve and the Hells Angels have similar tastes and budgets when they're on the road. Check out the hilarious comments on this story at CBC.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-harper-hotel-hells-angels-1.3182917

Harperites impose terror quota on staffers

Seems that Baird-replacement Rob Nicholson has instructed his staff at the Dept. of Foreign Affairs to bring him at least three scary terrorism stories per week as the nation heads down the home stretch towards that fall election.

Yup, gotta keep the 'tards riled up with imaginary terror tales, so as to scare 'em into voting for Big Steve again!

Gotta give Nicholson credit for that bit of brazen assholery. Maybe he's man enough to fill Baird's shoes after all!?

Big Steve uncorks multi-billion candy scramble just in time for fall election

Yup, the Harper gang done found 3 billions to spread Tory cheer just a few months before a federal election. They've found the funds to spruce up the Universal Child Care Benefit to the tune of $3B, and in the nick of time!


After all, with a federal election mere months away, what better way to get voters all warm and fuzzy about the Harperites than to buy them off with their own money!


Proving once again how important it is to have a completely dysfunctional education system...


If that system did even a half-assed job of teaching the critical thinking they love talking about, cynical stunts like this would be called on the spot.


In fact, if we had a politically literate polity with even marginal critical thinking acumen, the people in power would never dare float out this kind of egregious nonsense in the first place.


Thank God for that education system!