We Are Not Crooks

Now here is a stunning bit of logic from our law and order government in Ottawa.

It reminds me of Richard Nixon's famous quote; "I Am Not A Crook."

As we all know innocent people have nothing to hide.

An official from the Prime Minister's Office recently followed a journalist off Parliament Hill, then approached the reporter to challenge a story about the PMO's refusal to disclose how Harper's travelling hairdresser is being paid.

The official told the reporter three times that accountability measures are for crooks, not honest people.

It appears to be a theme in the Harper government.

While stressing the need for clear rules and transparency for others, the cabinet continues to tightly control information, censor documents and only selectively disclose ministerial expenses.

See:

Harpers Fascism

Leo Strauss and the Calgary School

Post Modern Conservatives.

Why The Conservatives Are Not Libertarians

Liberals The New PC's

Trotsky on Harper

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ethics, accountability, autarch, autocrat, politics,

Harpers Fascism

Being an autocratic PM is not enough for Stephen Harper, he is now promoting narrow reactionary nationalism in Quebec, coming as he does from the reactionary rural based Reform Party of Alberta, which originated out of the Social Credit party,

This of course is the classic basis for fascism, the petit-bourgeoisie and farmers which coincidentally populate the racist populist 'third way' ADQ.

Instead, the prime minister chose to brandish his credentials as a Quebec nationalist, hoping to make further inroads in a province that is central to Tory efforts to turn their minority government into majority. "There is nothing more precious than the family farm, which represents so well all the values on which our country has been built,'' he said to rapturous applause.

Modern fascism promotes itself as 'the third way" as does Harper and the ADQ when they speak of their third way as Quebec Nationalists.

Apparently, the CPC believe that there is a "third way" between what they call "Liberal" federalism and Bloc Quebecois separatism. This is Conservative Quebec nationalism.

The Harper regime is a classic case of modern fascism, embraced by the neo-cons in their promotion of Machiavellian politics in reaction to Stalinism and the left.

More broadly, fascism may be defined as any totalitarian regime which does not aim at the nationalization of industry but preserves at least nominal private property. The term can even be extended to any dictatorship that has become unfashionable among intellectuals.

Fascists were radical modernizers. By temperament they were neither conservative nor reactionary. Fascists despised the status quo and were not attracted by a return to bygone conditions. Even in power, despite all its adaptations to the requirements of the immediate situation, and despite its incorporation of more conservative social elements, Fascism remained a conscious force for modernization.

In Fascism's early days it encompassed an element of what was called "liberism," the view that capitalism and the free market ought to be left intact, that it was sheer folly for the state to involve itself in "production."


The fascist moral ideal, upheld by writers from Sorel to Gentile, is something like an inversion of the caricature of a Benthamite liberal. The fascist ideal man is not cautious but brave, not calculating but resolute, not sentimental but ruthless, not preoccupied with personal advantage but fighting for ideals, not seeking comfort but experiencing life intensely. The early Fascists did not know how they would install the social order which would create this "new man," but they were convinced that they had to destroy the bourgeois liberal order which had created his opposite.

JSTOR: Italian Fascism and the Aesthetics of the 'Third Way'

See:

Leo Strauss and the Calgary School

Post Modern Conservatives.

Why The Conservatives Are Not Libertarians

Heil Hillier, Maintiens le droit

White Multiculturalism

The New Conservative Racism

Shameless

Stephen Harper

Autarky

Autarch


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Reading Entrails

The other reason Harper acted as he did yesterday, in pushing the Liberals buttons, is that he has read the entrails; the polls.

He is laying the groundwork to piss off the opposition enough that they get sucked into a confrontation that will lead to an election. Clever that.

He will wait till after March 26 to really begin pushing their red election buttons.




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Canada's Two Opposition Leaders

Canada does not have a PM it has an Opposition Leader running a Minority Government.

That is what was revealed by Stephen Harpers actions in the House during Question Period today.

He attempted a personal slander against a Liberal MP but was shouted down by the Official Opposition Liberals before he could finish quoting this from the Vancouver Sun;

A young Liberal MP who delivered Stephane Dion 250 leadership votes is the son-in-law of a man police have interviewed in connection with the Air India bombing case. Navdeep Singh Bains, MP for Mississauga-Brampton South, shot on to the national stage after the December 2006 convention in which he delivered huge support to Gerard Kennedy and later to Dion, who won the Liberal leadership by 437 votes.

The Vancouver Sun reporter is on a campaign to link the Federal Liberals directly to the Air India disaster. And it is a conspiracy theory worthy of a tinfoil hat. Her apparent political biases are gleefully pointed out by at least one sympathetic conservative blogger at the National Pest. She goes way back to show that the whole Air India disaster was Liberal bungling, or worse, conspiracy with nationalist militants in the Sikh community.

The number of questions surrounding why the Liberal party has suddenly done an about face on extending important provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act, provisions needed to continue the investigation of the Air India bombing, continues to grow.

Reporter Kim Bolan at the Vancouver Sun revealed that former prime minister Paul Martin sought the support of a terrorist group, the International Sikh Youth Federation, during his 1990 bid for the Liberal leadership.

Mr. Martin, flanked by other notable Liberals (Albina Guarnieri and Maurizio Bevilacqua) appeared at an ISYK convention asking delegates for their support as he sought the leadership of the party.

Here is the critical line in Ms. Bolan's report: "The Martin speech came two years after then Conservative external affairs minister Joe Clark warned Canadian politicians to steer clear of the federation, the Babbar Khalsa and the World Sikh Organization because of terrorist links."

Harper used the pretext of the Air India Inquiry and his attempt to renew the Liberals Anti-Terrorism Act to personally vilify and call into question the integrity of a sitting MP and his family. He was so eager he almost jumped out of his ill fitting suit.

Like the blogger at the National Pest, Harper is attempting to opportunistically use the Air India disaster and its 'about to fail public inquiry' to throw heat on the Liberals.

The Conservatives in opposition have long held that there was something nefarious and untoward in the Liberals working with their traditional base; immigrants and new Canadians. The Vancouver Sun reporter continues her articles in the same vein. The swipe by both the Vancouver Sun and the Conservatives is that the Liberals are guilty of associating with terrorists because of their support and fund raising in the Sikh and Tamil communities. A broad brush is used condemning whole communities, and the terrorist smear is one of convenience for the Conservatives. After all they have skeletons in their own closet.

What Harper attempted to do today was something that was NOT Prime Ministerial. Being the autocrat and autarch he is, he could not resist.

But PM's being statesmen and parliamentarians do not do such things. They leave the bullying and bully boy tactics to underlings, to cabinet ministers, to right hand men and women, whom they trust. To be able to sit back serenely in knowing you ordered the hit but not taking the pleasure or abuse that comes from delivering it.

But pompous megalomaniac he is Harper could not resist, nor could he trust anyone else to deliver his hit on Dion and the Liberals.And so he showed himself to be what he really is, an Opposition Leader. Not a Prime Minister.

And what he was today was an Opposition Leader, a strong one, one who is gaining in the polls. And thus one doomed by his limitations of office, and personality, to act like an Opposition Leader rather than as a PM. Holding on to power with a minority, but acting like you are majority has won Harper the polling support of some Canadians.

But in reality what the recent polls have shown is that he is far better as Leader of the Opposition than Dion is.

And that is what he confirmed today. He does not have the stuff to be PM. He is no statesman, and no parliamentarian.

He spoke of being the Executive branch of the government, and he is one who wants Executive power and prestige that the office of President has to the south.

And as such he will always be a pretender not a PM in the Canadian system of parliamentary politics.

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Heil Hillier, Maintiens le droit

Military chief called period of Liberal governments a 'decade of darkness'; Liberal says Gen. Rick Hillier a `prop' for Tories

Gee I said that: Joined At The Hip

The first two people Harper met with after the election were RCMP Commissioner Zaccardelli and General Hillier.

Scary that.

Consider the political role the RCMP had in the defeat of the Liberals. Releasing a press release during the campaign that said they were investigating the Liberals over alleged Income Trust leaks. Which was revealed this week, over a year later, with a inconsequential bust of a bureaucrat who profited from the Income Trust announcement but not a leak or any evidence of any kind of leak.RCMP income trust probe goes bust

Pure politics by Zaccardelli, which won him government support during the Arar affair, until he shot himself in the foot which he had already placed in his mouth.

Of course the RCMP has always been political.

They are Paramilitary Force created by the State to defend the State. That they would support a self declared Law and Order government is the essence of their slogan; Maintiens le droit.

Which my history Prof Jim Penton reminded his class meant Maintain the Right. As in the Kings Right, droit, or law, which the RCMP themselves translate as the harmless; Defending the Law. But as our Governor General Michelle Jean translated more accurately, and in the context of the Harpocrites a starkly insidious; “Upholding the Right,”

Another voice of men with guns and right wing political views was former General Lewis Mackenzie who is now an outspoken Conservative. But at least he waited till he retired to declare his allegiances to the right. Until Prime Minister Harper’s election and the brave new direction he set for Canada’s foreign and military policies, Gen. MacKenzie’s was almost a voice in the wilderness in this land.

General Hillier on the other hand is an outspoken supporter of War and of the Harper Government, because they do his bidding. Going to war in the South of Afghanistan was the first act of the New Harper Government, prior to that we had been doing peacekeeping in Kabul.

Hillier's Pro War ideology and Harpers correspond in wanting to recreate Canada's Armed Forces. By transforming them from their traditional Liberal role as Peace Keepers back into a traditional conservative Fighting Force. He began the change under the Liberals who appointed him but has mobilized his mouth in favour of Harper and War at any cost. Harpers War was originally posed to Canadians as an extension of Liberals Peace Keeping operations in Kabul. But all that changed when we joined the Americans in Kandahar.

Now we have a new Fighting Armed Forces. Complete with new recruitment ads. Gone was the tradesman/woman of the No Life Like It era, appealing to the Maritimers, the vast majority of our nations Armed Forces. Now it is a stark black and white world in the ads that show the viewer that we are fighting back.

Not only has Hillier been outspoken in public about the need to make war; the blunt-speaking Gen. Hillier has denigrated those fighting against Canadian troops in Afghanistan as "detestable murderers and scumbags." An over the top appeal to conservative law and order types. But our Armed Forces now find themselves in a situation where they face charges of attacking innocent villagers and abusing prisoners.

And Hillier has mobilized his troops to take to Canada's streets to support the war in Afghanistan.

The Red Friday Rallies began in Ottawa with Harper addressing the partisan crowd of spouses of our soldiers, Hillier was there, and the Conservatives allowed public servants time off to join the noon hour rally.

Since then Red Fridays across Canada have been small affairs notably made up of the RCMP and the Army and its conservative supporters. While ostensibly billed as supporting our troops it really is a rally to support Hillier and Harpers War.


And we remember the last time we had mass rallies of armed forces.

Men with guns being political. Scary.

SEE

Hillier

Afghanistan

RCMP

Autocrat


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