Prime Minister Stephen Harper told his Conservative caucus this morning that he’s “upset” by the conduct of some senators and members of his own staff, and asked them to uphold a “culture of accountability.”

Harper gave an address to Tory MPs and senators on Parliament Hill, his first public comments on the Senate spending scandal, but did not mention any names and did not take questions from the media, who were invited into the meeting. [emphasis added]

This is Watergate repeating itself, but not, this time, as farce, although it has its farcical elements. As in Watergate, Harpergate began with something of less than major importance: a burglary then, padded expense accounts now. But the same dismal cast of characters is emerging, drawing attention inexorably to the CEO. Once again, damage control is more damage than control.

Nigel Wright as Haldeman? Benjamin Perrin as Ehrlichman? Could Bruce Carson prove to be a less effective J. Gordon Liddy? Will pliant Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson, who has the Duffy/Wright deal in her possession at the moment, be the new Rose Mary Woods?

Feel free to add to the list.

We already have a number of Deep Throats, it appears. All we need now is the revelation that Harper is an obsessive self-bugger, and that’s not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility.

Watergate buffs: no spoilers, please. We’re glued to the screen here.

[H/t Rafferty Baker]

You are a father whose shrieking child was killed in front of your eyes by soldiers. Years later, sneering deniers mock you. You are part of a carefully orchestrated conspiracy to win world sympathy, they claim. Your kid is likely sunning himself on a beach somewhere. The media have been taken in by your lies, told as part of a strategy to secure a piece of land in the Middle East.

Despite actual photographic evidence, a committee of historical revisionists issues a report. There was no killing. The entire event was staged.

The father was never contacted by the committee. Neither was the eyewitness who secured the evidence, who is now considered to be part of the plot. He learned of the committee and its report through the press.

Clever “experts” weigh in. “No holes, no killing.” All a conspiracy by you-know-who.

Yeah, I think we’ve all seen this disgusting movie before.

But in this case, the irony is palpable. It’s the government of Israel and a committee with dubious credentials who have pieced together this remake. It’s the same kind of conspiracy-mongering: a similar smelly pastiche of selective evidence, empty speculation, pseudoscience, tendentious drivel.

The anguished father has offered to have his son’s body exhumed for examination. The outraged cameraman for France 2, who filmed the killing and who, incidentally, happens to be Jewish and to hold Israeli citizenship, has renewed his demand for an independent examination of the incident.

And reputable people are speaking out:

Yizhar Be’er, the executive director of Keshev, an Israeli media monitoring group that has extensively studied the case, dismissed the government report as “conspiracy theory” and said Mohammad al-Durra’s death was real.

“I believe that what we saw on the France 2 news item was exactly what happened and the camera caught exactly what happened,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “It is mission impossible to fake such a huge event. Nobody, least of all the Palestinians, can create such a fabrication.

“In principle, parts of the Israeli establishment are trying to create such a sitution where if we doubt France 2’s pictures, it means we can doubt everything the Palestinians say.”

Here’s Barak Ravid, writing in Haaretz:

It seems as though the report was written for use within Israel alone…. The evidence and arguments that were presented might convince the already convinced, but no more than that. The committee could not present any ‘smoking gun’ evidence showing the 25-year old al-Durra sunbathing on a Gaza beach. Not even close.

The Haaretz editorial board is outraged by this foray into revisionism:

“There is no evidence that Jamal [the boy’s father, who was wounded in the incident] or the boy were hurt,” says the abstract at the beginning of the report. The report’s authors arrive at that dubious conclusion using a collection of circumstantial evidence, some of it barely serious, like the impressions of an Israeli pathologist who watched the video.

Of more concern is the elephant in the room:

According to the human rights group B’Tselem, 951 children and teens were killed by Israel in the West Bank and Gaza between 2000 and 2008, yet no government committee was ever established to investigate the circumstances of their deaths. Only in the al-Dura case was such a committee convened.

…This report doesn’t lift the fog off this case, if there ever was any. Instead, it raises a more painful issue: the many young people killed by IDF soldiers during the second intifada.

If the government had chosen to investigate that, perhaps it would have been reasonable to include a chapter on the al-Dura incident. But focusing only on him is mere propaganda that won’t in any way improve Israel’s problematic image of being responsible for too many children’s deaths.

Blood libel. But whose blood, and whose libel?

The Attempted Assassination of the Queen

God prosper long our noble Queen,
And long may she reign!
Maclean he tried to shoot her,
But it was all in vain.

For God He turned the ball aside
Maclean aimed at her head;
And he felt very angry
Because he didn't shoot her dead.

There's a divinity that hedges a king,
And so it does seem,
And my opinion is, it has hedged
Our most gracious Queen.

Maclean must be a madman,
Which is obvious to be seen,
Or else he wouldn't have tried to shoot
Our most beloved Queen.

Victoria is a good Queen,
Which all her subjects know,
And for that God has protected her
From all her deadly foes.

She is noble and generous,
Her subjects must confess;
There hasn't been her equal
Since the days of good Queen Bess.

Long may she be spared to roam
Among the bonnie Highland floral,
And spend many a happy day
In the palace of Balmoral.

Because she is very kind
To the old women there,
And allows them bread, tea, and sugar,
And each one get a share.

And when they know of her coming,
Their hearts feel overjoy'd,
Because, in general, she finds work
For men that's unemploy'd.

And she also gives the gipsies money
While at Balmoral, I've been told,
And, mind ye, seldom silver,
But very often gold.

I hope God will protect her
By night and by day,
At home and abroad,
When she's far away.

May He be as a hedge around her,
As he's been all along,
And let her live and die in peace
Is the end of my song.

This caps what must have been the week from hell for our Conservative rulers. And it has been particularly satisfying, yet galling at the same time, to behold the usually complacent Parliamentary Press Gallery turn in lockstep against the government, penning reams of hostile commentary, from scathing criticism to angst to amazement to open ridicule (see the Gable cartoon, above).

To be fair, columnists have expressed occasional concern in the past over Harper’s undemocratic excesses, and more recently Andrew Coyne pronounced himself unsatisfied with the government’s style. Those of us who sounded the alarm from the beginning, however, found few allies in the punditocracy. Until recently.

But the cracks in Harper’s thin blue line of PPG collaborators have begun to show. Even the most jaded, cynical and partisan parliamentary commentators can’t just sleepwalk through this stuff. You will inevitably attract their reluctant attention when you try to wish away a missing $3.1 billion , spend a fortune of taxpayers’ money on blatant party advertising (the new Adscam?), or come out with a series of—even for the Conservatives—unusually childish attack ads that manage to be both demeaning and incomprehensible, while emitting homophobic dogwhistles at the same time. Or claim with a straight face that Peter Penashue’s defeat in Labrador was a Liberal loss. Or, as House leader Peter Van Loan has witlessly attempted, deflect attention from rampant Senate corruption by amateurishly smearing Thomas Mulcair.

This government is flailing.

And now it’s become open season. From continuing installments of the sordid adventures of a venal Senator (who, one can confidently predict, will soon be sharing his disgrace with colleagues) to a truly impressive takedown of archbrat Pierre “Skippy” Poilievre—in the Ottawa SUN of all places—the worst has happened. Outrage is turning to mockery. We’re laughing at them.

That formerly tight ship, the seemingly impregnable HMS Harper, has taken an unprecedented barrage. It’s listing, the masts are askew, the rigging is fouled. Surly sailors are giving jaw to the captain.

The damage can no longer be contained, even with Wright nobly falling on his sword. The connections are being made, and those connections are ramifying. A sad gaggle of impugned Senators trails away to become Independents, while it now appears that an internal Senate report on improper claims and expenditures was hushed up to give Mike Duffy a break. The RCMP, while it has acted like Harper’s Praetorian Guard in the past, is investigating, and the pressure will be on to get this one right. With its incredible shrinking credibility on the line, it just may.

And this one goes right up and into the PMO, all the way to Stephen Harper himself—the obsessive micromanager who, the chattering apparatchiks will now insist, had no idea what his right-hand man was up to. But Harper earlier defended him. Now that a fuller story has emerged, other than to mournfully accept Wright’s resignation, he has lapsed into a sullen silence.

This circus has had a wonderful sideshow, too. Mike Duffy’s body double in Toronto, the darling of the yawping Right, stumbling and bumbling from one boorish misadventure to another, has likely taken one too many hits.

But let’s not be distracted. The Big Top is where the good stuff’s happening, and we’re all in the front row. Praise the Lord and pass the popcorn.

[H/ts—too many to name. You know who you are.]

OK, DSM-5, if you insist that grieving, child temper tantrums and transexuality are treatable pathologies, let’s add a few more:

Obsessive entitlement disorder: Criteria: displays an obsessive appetite for material wealth and socio-political position. Pathological liar. Expresses unusual confusion, including his sources of income and the location of his own house.

Aggressive gestural disorder: Criteria: Habitually points, gesticulates and yells, even in normal conversational settings. Fixated on one or more other countries which he identifies with his mother-imago, who did no wrong.

Regressive “brat” syndrome: Criteria: Shallow affect. Unreasoning partisanship. A tendency to angry outbursts at least once a week for more than three months. Dislike of unions indicates a profound fear of intimacy. A puer aeternus, likely to resist maturation treatment.

Sado-political pathology: Criteria: Unable to restrain public enthusiasm for torture and surveillance. Enjoys petty acts of cruelty, such as depriving prison inmates of pizza they paid for themselves. Urge to control and dominate extends to teenage babysitters.

Environmental inversion disorder: Criteria: actively hates the natural environment. Fixated at the anal level, the patient favours messy oil sands pollution and pipelines, fears environment defenders as “dangerous radicals.” (See: Paranoia).

Racial reaction formation: Criteria: cultivates racially diverse contacts, but to a superficial degree. Expresses strong antagonism to numerous racial groups, including Roma and non-white Muslims.

Castration/mutilation syndrome: Criteria: An abnormal fascination with cuts, even of vital parts of the body, to “get the economy back on track.”

Absolute monarch complex: Criteria: An obsessive sense that the natural order was self-created, and requires constant monitoring. Micro-manager and “control freak.” Delusion that “l’état, c’est moi.”

The prognosis for these pathologies, while not promising, improves somewhat when these individuals are removed from positions of power and influence. The latter, in fact, is considered an imperative first step in the patient’s recovery.

Michael Den Tandt has never been one of my favourite scribes, but his column on the whole mess is frankly masterful. Go read it.

Are we all nuts? Or is it the psychiatric industry?

A kid has a temper tantrum? Someone over-dramatizes? Overeats only once a week? Forgets where he parked the car? Worries about the inevitable pain of his terminal cancer? Refuses to accept a choice between two rigid genders?

Welcome to “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder,” “histrionic personality disorder,” “binge eating disorder,” “mild neurocognitive disorder,” “somatic symptom disorder,” and “gender identity disorder dysphoria,” respectively.

There’s a pill for that. Or confinement.

Pychiatrists tend to be well-paid. Big Pharma does all right, too. Of course, correlation is not causation, but…

This is a keeper, no pun intended:

Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, the psychiatry association’s incoming president, said challenging the handbook’s credibility “is completely unwarranted.” The book establishes diagnoses “so patients can receive the best care,” he said, adding that it takes into account the most up-to-date scientific knowledge.

Wait a sec. How do people suddenly become “patients?”

Well, here’s one way. In the US, the state (police), school authorities and psychiatrists have proven to be a lethal institutional folie à trois. Kids as young as 5 have been arrested and hauled off, either to jail or a mental institution. The US is a carceral society: by fetishizing liberty, it inevitably fetishizes its opposite as well. But this appalling tome is regarded as authoritative around the world. It is an alibi for confining almost anyone.

Anyone remember the bad old days of the USSR, when dissent was diagnosed as “slow schizophrenia?” Well, they’re still doing it in Mother Russia:

On March 23, [2006,] police and emergency medical personnel stormed Marina Trutko’s home, breaking down her apartment door and quickly subduing her with an injection of haloperidol, a powerful tranquilizer. One policeman put her 78-year-old mother, Valentina, in a storage closet while Trutko, 42, was carried out to a waiting ambulance. It took her to the nearby Psychiatric Hospital No. 14.

The former nuclear scientist, a vocal activist and public defender for several years in this city 70 miles north of Moscow, spent the next six weeks undergoing a daily regimen of injections and drugs to treat what was diagnosed as a “paranoid personality disorder.”

“She is also very rude,” psychiatrists noted in her case file.

The uses of psychiatry may not be as overtly political in North America, but as the US experience shows, they are just as crass. The aim in both cases is to cultivate a sterile conformity, and to enforce a passive obeisance to authority. A docile population is so much more convenient for the rulers.

By the way, questioning authority with any degree of angry passion has a name, too: “Oppositional Defiant Disorder.” I’m amazed the likes of our Minister of Torture and Surveillance, Vic Toews, hasn’t latched onto this dodge. Please don’t alert him, or a lot of us could be in big trouble.

If your going to protest, have the guts to show your face.Pretty brave behind the mask. @deniscoderre good on you for ignoring it.

— David Wilks (@DavidJohnWilks) May 16, 2013

I have no idea what this is even about, except that it is an independently and objectively stupid statement. Yeah, I know, it’s one of those water is wet things. I just felt like sharing.

Obviously no public servant should have his hand in the cookie jar, and forced resignation is the lightest of penalties for that sort of thing. Helping himself to taxpayers’ money for private Spanish lessons, lavish meals at the Rideau Club and expensive travel would seem to qualify as cookie-monstering, all right, and on a somewhat grander scale than Bev Oda’s $15 orange juice or even the excesses of Senator Duffy. Caron’s not even a politician, for crying out loud, and $170,000 is a lot of scratch.

A Harper appointee, Caron was in the news recently for foisting a totalitarian Code of Conduct on his employees, curtailing their off-duty professional activities. Caron insisted that a “duty of loyalty” to the government made their interactions with colleagues “high risk.”

Apparently a duty of loyalty, at least for himself, doesn’t require an undue concern for the public monies entrusted to him.

It was his actual job performance, however, that had the professionals in the field aghast. As I noted not long ago, he simply ripped and tore. He eliminated interlibrary loans, effectively denying access to LAC resources to Canadians across the country. He permitted no new acquisitions since 2009, and has hived off historically priceless items to private institutions. Caron, in fact, has just been all-around bad news, and we can now breathe a cautious sigh of relief. Adiós.

But “cautious” is, of course, the operative word. Harper is not interested in probity or competence or abilities or relevant expertise. Blind loyalty from his apparatchiks is all that he requires, until they goof up enough to cause serious embarrassment—at which point the Conservative bus comes a-rolling, and the inevitable push comes to shove.

Will we get an actual professional heading up LAC soon, one who can repair the wide swath of destruction that Caron caused during his lamentable reign? Or just another loyal, incompetent hack? I’m afraid to answer what most people by now will consider merely rhetorical questions.

OK, to ask the obvious, what happened?

This sort of thing doesn’t just happen here. The Brits asked that eye-rubbing question in 1970, and again in 1992 when the polling results were historically out of whack.

Speculation abounded in 1970, when Labour Party leader Harold Wilson lost his sure thing. I recall commentary at the time as well that the surprise turnabout was an uprising against the polls themselves, a demonstration of electoral free will.

In any case I raised a few points after the Wildrose upset last year. They still seem pertinent.

At the very last moment in the Alberta race, a couple of antediluvian Wildrose candidates generated some unwelcome noise. Wildrose leader Danielle Smith blamed that, and strategic voting by Liberals, for her party’s defeat. But:

I would suggest that there is a third factor to consider—the polls themselves. The recursive nature of polling never seems to be taken very seriously, but it should be. Polls affect the very people being polled. As voters saw the “inevitable” victory of the WRP looming, various effects could be, well, predicted. One would be that some WRP voters, confident of the coming landslide, might stay home. Those opposed, of course, would be more moved to turn out, and, swallowing hard, to change their vote to a strategic one towards the end, prompted as much or more by the polls than by a couple of Albertosauri.

The sheer unanimity of the pollsters could not but have played a significant role in determining the paradoxical outcome of their public crystal-gazing. The more general question before us, then, is whether these sondages enhance or detract from the democratic process.

That very issue was well-canvassed in this 1997 article in the University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review. At this point I would agree with its conclusions: there should be a blackout on published polls for some reasonable period before E-day.

These polls deform the will of the electorate, placing voters in a real-life variant of the prisoner’s dilemma, in which the possible behaviour of one’s fellow-voters becomes a crucial component of many voters’ own decisions. Some simply opt out, thinking their vote isn’t necessary: in yesterday’s election, nearly half of the voters stayed home. Others turn out when they might not have before, trying to save what they perceive as their party’s lagging fortunes. Some (although this wouldn’t have been a factor in the two-way BC race) vote strategically.

The observers, in other words, are directly affecting what they are observing. This negatively affects the democratic process. The unanimous wrongness of pollsters’ findings in Alberta and BC paradoxically reinforces that conclusion.

Shut them down. Your views?

The riding of Labrador, by the way, was not stolen. That was last time, silly SUN. (Is Conservatism a form of collective insanity? No need to answer that.)

This headline gave me momentary hope. Well, one can dream.

[H/t PB b/c]

Like a moth in congealing wax, the independent spirit of young girls is still too often drowned in the sludge of sexist imagery and symbology that defines our “advanced” society in 2013. The picture above is worth much more than the proverbial thousand words.

That’s the Disney corporation, doing a little cultural reinforcement. A brave princess, modeled upon the daughter of the project’s creator, Brenda Chapman, is transmogrified into arm-candy.

Perhaps it is by no coincidence that Chapman was fired by Disney halfway through the production, and replaced by a male director. In any case, she’s none too happy at the moment, and I suspect most of us can see why.

But these things are never simple. Disney has consciously—one might say self-consciously—struggled with racial and gender stereotypes over the past few years. All sorts of strong lead characters have emerged, young African-American, Aboriginal and Asian women among others, as the corporation continues to wrestle (not always successfully) with prevailing prejudice and its own past.

Proud, independent young princesses (yes, princesses: these classy moves will not survive intersectional analysis) didn’t just spring from nothing over the past two or three decades. They were brought to us by the market, seeking new opportunities in the wave of feminism and anti-racism that exploded in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies. Corporations don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.

But those winds are never prevailing winds. Like society itself, they take many conflicting directions, which savvy corporations do their best to track. Even that mythical “good corporate citizen” is enmeshed in the economy of signs. It’s simply unavoidable: check out this page, on the Yahoo parenting site Shine, paying special attention to the links at the bottom.

In the end, it’s all about selling. A niche market has arisen that seemingly embodies progressive values, but there is also the tried and true one that doesn’t. The answer: segmentation!

For Disney, it’s not just the blockbuster animated films, but the spin-offs. Peggy Orenstein has some trenchant comments, with illustrations, and she makes that key point:

I’ve always said that it’s not about the movies. It’s about the bait-and-switch that happens in the merchandise, and the way the characters have evolved and proliferated off-screen. Maybe the problem is partly that these characters are designed in Hollywood, where real women are altering their appearance so regularly that animators, and certainly studio execs, think it’s normal.

I like the unconsciously ironic use of the term “real women” here. “Real” as in Kardashian hyperreal? Anyway, you’re the market too, like it or not, so let those execs know differently. Go sign the petition, and help keep Merida brave.

[H/ts Angus Johnson and Paul Liberatore]

UPDATE: (May 14) Sometime yesterday, the “feminized” image was quietly removed from the Disney site and replaced with the original. [H/t PK, BC]

An interesting exercise: mapping the sources of hateful Tweets in the US. The results might—or might not—surprise you.

Here’s the interactive map itself.

I wish someone would do this yeoman service for Canada—and overlap the map with Conservative ridings. Not that all of Harper’s “red meat” base is on Twitter, of course.

[H/t BS from PS]