We're so screwed. No one in Ottawa seems to have noticed.

Stephen Harper wants a weaker, less-intrusive federal government or, as one blogger quoting right-wing intellectual Grover Nordquist [sic] put it, he wants to "shrink government down to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub." That's the secret agenda and it's baffling how some media thought it was secret considering it's been the unabashed dream of conservatives for roughly half of the 20th century if anyone cared to listen.

What's astonishing about it is Harper, for the past two years, has been mounting a closet revolution that involved systematically dismembering Ottawa, but it was so much more interesting to concentrate on important matters of the state like Rona Ambrose's hotness and its effect vis-a-vis global warming.

And now it's done.

He left it up to his former advisor Tom Flanagan to cackle about his accomplishments - it wouldn't be prime ministerial to riffle the fingers and mutter the Monty Burn's "Excellent."

In a wide-ranging interview with CP this week, Flanagan said last week's budget was the final flourish to a stage-whisper campaign that's left Ottawa unable to mount any sort of meaningful initiative over the next few years.

That's the way it's has worked around the world for a quarter of a century: get in power, spend everything in sight as quickly as possible, underfund social programs so that you can claim they don't work anyway, destroy the revenue base, and declare a crisis which can only be solved by the very policies that caused it. You'd think we'd have learned by now.

H/t Drew.