Under the gun for massive, organized electoral fraud, the Harper Conservatives are fighting back. And if there were a Nobel Prize for chutzpah, I can think of a couple of MPs who ought to be on the shortlist.
Let’s begin with Laurie Hawn, the honourable member from Edmonton Centre. Hawn is a loyal, mindless footsoldier who can always be counted upon to deliver his PMO-issued talking points with glassy-eyed aplomb. But just after midnight last night, he was mad, by gum:
NDP member showed up for votes earlier dressed in a v-neck sweater and t-shirt under sport jacket. Way to respect Parliament, bud. #cdnpoli
Breathtaking, monumental, almost record-breaking hypocrisy—and the worst of it is, Hawn probably isn’t even aware of his feat. This sharp little reproof was uttered by a fellow whose government has so respected Parliament that it has been twice found in contempt of it; that has not only disrupted the vital Parliamentary committee process, but drafted a manual on how to do it; that has made closure—using its majority to cut off Parliamentary debate—an unprecedentedly routine occurrence; and just shuts the whole thing down when the going gets rough.
Way to respect Parliament, bud.
Moving quickly past this ignis fatuus*, we come to the invariably cheesy Dean Del Mastro, going on about the Vikileaks affair:
“This is just the latest in a long history of shady Liberal practices that harm our democracy,” Del Maestro said. “These nasty, dirty Internet tricks were deeply personal and fall short of the standard of behaviour that Canadians have come to expect,” he said.
“While that alone may offend the sensitivities of many Canadians, equally troubling is the fact that these dirty tricks were carried out using resources provided to the Liberal party and paid for by Canadian taxpayers.”
This, in the face of unprecedented lawbreaking electoral shenanigans that might well have delivered the Harper government its majority. And uttered on behalf of a disgraced Minister who described members of the opposition as child pornography supporters.
Way to “fall short of the standard of behaviour that Canadians have come to expect.”
And later this week, these little latter-day Joe McCarthys want to drag Adam Carroll, the kid involved, in front of the Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics Committee—my God, the sheer irony of that choice!—to give him the third degree.
Their problem is that he hasn’t done anything illegal, and what he has done, he’s already ‘fessed up to. Taxpayers’ dollars are going to be spent on this fatuous witch-hunt, no doubt intended to generate enough fog to help get them out of the robocon jam they’re in. Will the corporate media be sucked in? (That’s a rhetorical question.)
The hope is to force Carroll to name names, a completely hypothetical exercise. As what the National Post fatuously calls a “mastermind,” Carroll simply Tweeted publicly-available snippets about “Minister of Family Values” Vic Toews’ disgraceful private life. No doubt this was deeply distressing to the upright Mr. Toews, but, as noted, Carroll broke no laws, and no one with a sassy attitude, a Twitter account and access to a keyboard needs any assistance. And if others did know about his goings-on, there was no obligation for them to lift a finger—if they even exist.
On the bright side, perhaps this will be one Committee meeting not held in camera—the latter being yet another move by this oh-so-transparent, accountable government.
Remember when the savage theocratic state of Iran lectured Canada on our human rights record? Perhaps Karl Rove and Lee Atwater aren’t, after all, the only sources of the materiel to be found in the Conservatives’ fetid arsenal.
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* “A phosphorescent light that hovers or flits over swampy ground at night, possibly caused by spontaneous combustion of gases emitted by rotting organic matter.”
