Our master Caesar is in the tent/ Where the maps are spread ~W.B.Yeats

Telling the President of the United States that he won’t take no for an answer? Spying on Brazil? Threatening the Commonwealth? Having his Minister of Foreign Affairs lecture the Maldives on running clean elections? (That’s rich.) Running around in military apparel as though he’s a Commander-in-Chief?

This is getting downright embarrassing. Let’s be realistic, even if our Dear Leader is not. We are a middle power in the world, not a superpower. We do not call the shots internationally, although we have certainly played supporting roles in the past. And we don’t have one-man rule here at home—yet—although, more and more, it seems that way.

I suspect that on the world stage we have been a laughingstock for quite a while, but when the circus clown starts to break things and attack people at random, the crowd reaction is likely to turn from guffaws to alarm.

Our ultra-secret spy agency, Communications Security Establishment Canada, has been assigned, we learn, to carry out industrial espionage for private corporations: make no mistake, this will have serious consequences. At home, election-rigging and a continuing contempt for Parliament as an institution threatens what little democracy we have. And over all, El Supremo reigns as though by divine right, leaving a trail of wreckage in his wake but never looking back.

This will not end well.

The question posed in the hed was, of course, rhetorical. Harper knows very well who he is—a caudillo, a military genius, a player, dammit. The rest of us might think “delusions of grandeur,” but so what? We’re not driving the tank. The problem is, he thinks he is.