Friday, April 18, 2014

The Media and Jim Flaherty's Death

It doesn't really surprise me that Jim Flaherty would be remembered as a competent financial manager by the mainstream media. You see, I belong to the team that is never surprised when the corporate-capitalist system falls flat on its face. We instinctively understand that when corrupt greed-heads compel their politician cat's-paws to impoverish and exploit the majority, then the overall economy is not going to prosper. Wealthy media elites and the journalists that they tend to hire are incapable of such insights. Therefore, the fact that Jim Flaherty was a dangerously deluded simpleton with a legacy of disastrous failure simply doesn't compute for them.

But, what does surprise me, and what is far more ominous, is the way these airheads treat Flaherty as more than just an ideological soul-mate. In death, he's been elevated into having been a "statesman." And this, my friends, is what is so disturbing. Presumably, as finance minister, Flaherty would have been one source for the majority in Parliament (you know, the people's elected representatives) to obtain the cost estimates for his governments building of new prisons and purchasing of white elephant fighter-jets.

If so, they were sorely disappointed, weren't they? You see, Flaherty was finance minister in a government that decided that Parliament shouldn't know how much government policies were going to cost before they voted whether to commit the people's tax dollars towards them. The oral statements that this government did provide turned out to be deliberately fraudulent and under-estimated costs by tens of billions of dollars. (Which is why, when the same people who support Flaherty and harper also support Rob Ford, in the name of "fiscal responsibility," I tend to sneer at them. They obviously don't give a shit.)

Flaherty's government was so insistent on not providing the people's representatives with the information they desired that they were prepared to be found guilty of contempt for it. "Contempt of Parliament." It's actually a serious charge. Just because the sun came up the next morning it doesn't mean that demonstrated contempt for our system of democratic accountability is unimportant.

Anyone with a modicum of understanding should have seen that.

It was Flaherty's government that then engaged in a sordid, anti-democratic, debasing, and evil campaign of election fraud in the 2011 federal election that followed their having been found in Contempt of Parliament. Again, you would think people whose job it is to report and comment on "politics" (which is to say, our democracy) would understand that this is a bad thing. Even those pathetic vermin who mewl that nobody says their vote was changed or prevented by the robo-calls, ought to grasp that attempted robbery is a crime in the same way that robbery is a crime. (And, anyway, were people to come forward and say that the harpercons' election fraud impacted on their vote, the harpercon partisan hacks would then insist that they were lying.)

And, after having stolen a majority government, Flaherty's government then crafted an ENTIRE SERIES of anti-democratic MEGA-OMNIBUS bills, to ram through major assaults on our entire system of government and body of laws, with minimal democratic oversight. And it was Jim Flaherty, as finance minister, who allowed his budgets to be the vehicle for this omnibus legislation.

You know, you would think that people whose job it is to watch and report on our democratic system at the federal level would instinctively grasp why such behaviour is wrong, bad, repulsive, appalling. Alas! This is Canada. A brain-dead democracy from the far-right to the far-left of the spectrum.

Typing this entry has changed my opinion of Jim Flaherty. I still believe that he was too fucking stupid to grasp the enormity of his crimes against democracy. But now, having added it all up, and including his alcohol-fueled "friendship" (if the camaraderie of lower life-forms such as Rob Ford and Flaherty can be called such) with likewise repulsive characters, I think it matters not that Flaherty was mentally incapable of knowing what he was doing. He was a villain who has done monumental damage to the health of Canadian democracy. On top of being, among the worst, if not THE WORST finance minister in Canada's history.

And the journalists and the pundits who can't grasp that (let alone the scum who actively supported him) show themselves for the miserable failures that they are by loading this idiot with undeserved accolades and laurels.

EDITED TO ADD

I've been doing my best to shut-out the media coverage of Flaherty's funeral. The whole coverage of this non-event. I therefore forget the even more distressing fact that opposition politicians, who Flaherty had abused for years, were likewise unable to see Flaherty for what he was. Thomas Mulcair's idiotic tears at Flaherty's death were much more disgusting than media fawning over the man. Sadly, ... this whole sordid episode reveals the incapacity of those opposition politicians who, in his death, saw Flaherty as one of their own rather than their enemy.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

I guess the fact that a human being died and will be missed by his friends and family was lost on you...

thwap said...

What a brainless comment. I guess every single point was lost on you.

I wasn't talking about friends, you idiot. I was talking about journalists. Fool. Then, I spoke about opposition MPs. Dunce.

Those people should have Flaherty's contempt for Parliament and other anti-democratic actions front-and-centre in their analysis of Flaherty's career, and not whether he was "likeable."

Did you miss that? Idiot?

Finally, ... given the fact that Flaherty was anti-democratic (as well as a deluded simpleton) that anyone who would become his friend would have to be blind to obvious reality or cut from the same sort of cloth as he was.

Or does contempt for democracy not measure large in your blinkered, pathetic worldview?

Next time you read a set of words in front of you, do yourself a favour and try to remember the meaning of those words as you go through them.

Anonymous said...

Bravo.. you said what i am incapable of articulating well.

Anonymous said...

Is that the liquor or you talking Thwap?

Hard to tell anymore.

thwap said...

Anonymous who said: "Bravo.. you said what i am incapable of articulating well."

... Thanks. I wrote it to provide myself some sort of catharsis.

Anonymous who said: "Is that the liquor or you talking Thwap?

Hard to tell anymore."

I suppose the inference is that once upon a time my writing did not read as drunken ravings.

Inconsequential, meaningless criticism.

I also suspect you're the first anonymous who blathered on that I missed that Flaherty was a human being who'd left loved ones behind.

If that's the case, then you remain a complete idiot. Only an idiot would miss in the first reading my very detailed descriptions of Flaherty's crimes against democracy and how they should take away from any journalist or fellow politician's knee-jerk instinct to want to praise a former colleague.

But when you typed your brain-fart of a comment and I spelled it all out for you in even greater detail, you show yourself to be the most hopeless of dullards.

Anonymous said...

I like how I didn't insult you at all and didn't even say I disagreed with you, and yet you did nothing but insult me.

And for the record, I'm the first anonymous, not the second.

thwap said...

Passive-aggressive bullshit.

If you ever come up with anything that is both 1) relevant and 2) substantive, ... let me know.

Anonymous said...

How was what I said bullshit?

thwap said...

Fine. Let's play:

What did you mean by this:

"I guess the fact that a human being died and will be missed by his friends and family was lost on you... "

... as a response to my post about the media forgetting Flaherty's serial crimes against Canadian democracy and choosing to revere him as a great finance minister (he was actually one of the worst) and a "statesman"?

Why did you type that statement?

Anonymous said...

You know what, I don't know why we're arguing because really, we don't disagree. I think Jim Flaherty was a bad Finance Minister as well. And I've also tried to avoid media coverage of his death. Unlike you though I just decided to keep my mouth shut. You didn't, and fair enough, we have a difference of opinion on that. My point was though that I think whenever anyone dies no matter how bad they might have been that a certain degree of respect should be shown for their loved ones. I see now that it wasn't the right place for such a comment. I'm sorry that this discussion had to get so testy.

thwap said...

As I said in another post about the Jim Flaherty phenomenon, his family is never going see my writings on him. And I've always despised the man.

I'm quite capable of grasping such human subtleties as the grieving of families and friends for a departed loved one though. I'm actually far more capable of empathy than all the selfish, callous, deluded harpercon government members put together; what with all the blood that's on their hands.

I wasn't asking the media to condemn Flaherty for his crimes. It would be nice though if they could have acknowledged the enormous damage he's done to our democratic institutions and simply refrained from praising the idiot to the skies.

Because that damage is now compounded by the impression that that cretin and his anti-democratic government were "just folks" and no different from any previous government.