Monday, January 29, 2018

John Ibbitson; Fluffer


I first came across the word "fluffer" while reading a Dan Savage sex advice column. Apparently some hot girl had a hot boyfriend and some twink asked her if he could join them in a threesome wherein said twink would consign himself to sucking her boyfriend's cock between her boyfriends shtupping her.

Savage said (I think) to go for it and to send him some pictures afterwards. But he also talked about the career choice of "fluffer" within the porn industry.
A fluffer is a person employed to keep a male adult film star erect on the set.[1] These duties, which do not necessarily involve touching the actors, are considered part of the makeup department. After setting up the desired angle, the director asks the actors to hold position and calls for the fluffer to "fluff" the actors for the shot.
I will submit to you that Canadian political pundit John Ibbitson is so debased that he has decided (all on his own and for no extra pay other than what his senile employers would have given him regardless) to act as stephen harper's fluffer.

How sad is that? To live and write in order to make some intellectual non-entity like stephen harper appear to be a vigorous, important political figure.


A few (many?) months ago, I saw the cover of Ibbitson's book about harper on the "new and recommended" shelf of the Hamilton, Ontario Central Library. I read the back cover (I can't remember what it said) and thought to myself how odd it was that Ibbitson had written a book about this political has-been/anti-democratic corporate whore. Of course, perhaps its the case that harper was still in power when Ibbitson wrote the stupid thing. I don't really know and I don't really care. I have zero interest in reading it. After all, Ibbitson is the racist dullard whose big pronouncement that there has been a permanent tectonic shift in Canada towards a more "conservative" (whatever that term is supposed to mean) Canadian polity turned out to be hugely, laughingly, thankfully wrong.

I will never read this, or any other book by John Ibbitson. For the same reason that I don't tune-in to Alex Jones on "InfoWars." Some opinions are garbage and a self-evident waste of time. To put it even more bluntly; John Ibbitson is a stupid asshole who was busy eating worms when Gawd was handing out brains.

I will, though, comment on this fine review of Ibbitson's drivel from Quill & Quire: "
A series of curious adjectives pepper the first half of John Ibbitson’s biography of Stephen Harper. “Calm.” “Measured.” “Reasonable.” These are not, safe to say, words that are commonly applied to Canada’s 22nd prime minister, a man more frequently identified with descriptors such as “remorseless,” “autocratic,” and “cruel” (all of which, to be fair, also crop up in Ibbitson’s book).
Now then; let's also just stop to point out that "calm, measured, reasonable" are also not applicable to the shambling, self-loathing, psychopathic coward that was stephen harper. He could pretend to be calm in public situations when he wasn't forced to honestly account for himself. It's not remarkable that a bully who holds (stole) all the cards can be calm while their victims become emotional. But the fact of the matter is that insiders said that harper was a raging asshole in private. He controlled through fear by being a petty and vindictive madman. He was not "measured." He was an extremist. He was not "reasonable," he was insane. I will grant that he had another quality that helped him to appear placid. He is dead to normal human feelings. Other people are meaningless to him. So it causes him no existential pain to injure his enemies and betray his supporters.
But it becomes clear quickly that, unlike many writers and commentators, Ibbitson is not out to demonize Harper, but rather to examine where he comes from, how his ideology was formed, and why he governs the way he does.
This would actually be a valid exercise. In the hands of a writer other than Ibbitson. For you see ...
And though he addresses the mistakes, missteps, and scandals – he could hardly avoid them – Ibbitson’s approach to Harper is generally approving: “I believe that he sought office hoping to leave things in better shape than he found them,” the author writes in his afterword, “and that he has, in the main, succeeded. I believe he has governed well.”
Wrong Johnny boy! Do you think Afghanistan was a success? Does being implicated in torture and other war crimes give you a tingle Johnny? Does the epidemic of Aboriginal suicides turn you on? Does a government that refuses to give Parliament cost-estimates but which does provide fraudulent verbal assurances of these costs strike you as "good governance"? Does sabotaging parliamentary committees constitute governing well? Is election fraud your idea of democratic behaviour? I could go on, but you all get the idea.

And Johnny, lil' Johnny. Lil' stupid, racist Johnny; NO. harper did NOT hope to leave things better than when he found them. harper was a whore for the Calgary oil industry and for Bay Street. Furthermore, harper serviced these criminal scum-bags as a means to his own personal power. To gratify his ludicrously gigantic personal vanity.
It helps that Harper embodies Ibbitson’s own theory about the direction Canada is taking in the 21st century. In his 2013 book, The Big Shift (co-written with pollster Darrell Bricker), Ibbitson argues that the Laurentian elites –
Blah, blah, blah. The next little bit is just a summary of Ibbitson's failed thesis that Canada had transformed from a basically liberal polity (public healthcare/pro-choice/peace-keeping/social programs) to that of the gutter rats who populate the comments section of whatever media scam Ezra Levant is operating. I shan't deal with it here because it's already been proven wrong. On with the book in question ....
It is foolish in the extreme, Ibbitson argues, to blame a conservative government for acting like conservatives. And the current government is, at least in Ibbitson’s view, the first truly conservative government in Canada’s history. (The author makes it clear that one of Harper’s biggest hesitations in contemplating the merger of the Canadian Alliance with the Progressive Conservatives was his antipathy to the red Tory tradition that persisted in the latter party.)
Right. Because having been slapped around by reality in the 1930s and 1940s, Canadian conservatives realized that they'd have to abandon their previous delusions and accept the reality of the need for social welfare supports if a consumerist-mass production-industrialized society was going to function. But not so the "new conservatives" who have built a mighty edifice of academic hackery and popular culture shit-headery within which they can hide from reality as the taxpayers bail them out of their increasingly gigantic failures, over and over and fucking over again.
Harper’s ideology was forged by his roots in Toronto’s suburban Leaside neighbourhood in the 1960s, combined with western disaffection stoked by his involvement with the Calgary School of academics and a sympathy for the economic theories of Friedrich von Hayek (whom Ibbitson calls “any good conservative’s answer to John Maynard Keynes”).  
That's kind of funny: Using a powerful word like "forged" to describe the way airhead harper simply agreed with the last person he spoke with during his formative years. He was a comfortable white suburbanite in Toronto and he supported the Liberals. Then he went out to the University of Calgary and became a "conservative" (read: "paid agent of foreign oil firms"). After his early twenties were over and his personality ossified, he refused to allow new information into his worldview and became the moronic coward we all came to loathe and despise. Friedrich von Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom which argued that allowing the state to provide public services inevitably leads to slavery. As opposed to unregulated capitalism which is The Road to Pauperism; to whit ... allowing the rich to get richer and screw over the poor will be fucking terrible in the long-run. I'm pretty sure that (as with most things) Ibbitson didn't have a clue what he was writing about in his comment about von Hayek.
Harper believes in a smaller, less intrusive state, a strict separation of powers between the federal and provincial levels of government, lower taxes, and more emphasis on the free market economy. He has provided all of these things.
No Johnny. Wrong again Johnny. (Ibbitson's got a pretty sweet fucking gig. He says any stupid thing he wants to. Gets his main thesis totally wrong. And just keeps collecting a paycheque. What a scum-bag. Ibbitson's career is yet another indictment of what passes for "political culture" in this country. Toss him on the pile with Ezra Levant, Margaret Wente and all the other hideous, racist, shit-heads.

No Johnny. harper most certainly did NOT believe in a less intrusive state. He used the Canada Revenue Agency as a weapon against groups he did not like. He passed Orwellian surveillance legislation. He "intruded" on Canadians' Charter rights big-time at the G20 in Toronto. No Johnny, ... what harper was opposed to was a state that provided public services to the people. He sabotaged the Census out of privacy concerns but then he passed C-51. Knowing about this stuff is supposed to be your fucking job Ibbitson. Except for the fact that your real job is that of partisan Conservative hack/fluffer.
Unfortunately, in so doing, he has also embarked upon a scorched-earth policy of cuts to services and agencies such as  Library and Archives Canada and the CBC. His government is responsible for the so-called Fair Elections Act, which benefits the Conservatives by making it harder for likely opponents to vote in federal elections; Bill C-51, the astoundingly overbroad government surveillance legislation that even many Conservative supporters have expressed concerns about; and tough-on-crime legislation that increases penalties and restricts rehabilitative measures while ignoring the fact that crime has steadily decreased since the 1990s. If Ibbitson mentions these things at all, he generally glosses over them, or spins them in such a way that they sound much more palatable than they actually are.
Right. Because Ibbitson is a shameless hack.
He expends little time or effort examining some of the other less-than-savoury things Harper has done in office: muzzling his government’s own scientists when they dare to disagree with their pro-oil bosses on climate change; pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol; claiming that the epidemic of missing and murdered aboriginal women “isn’t really high on our radar”; and presiding over the first government in Canadian history to be found in contempt of Parliament (over its refusal to disclose the true cost of purchasing a fleet of F-35 fighter planes). And this is by no means a comprehensive list.
I told you this was a good review!
“Legislatively, the Conservatives have hardly been cruel,” Ibbitson writes, before engaging in one of the most egregious acts of fence-sitting in recent memory: “If you decided that, despite its accomplishments, the Harper government has left the public service so cowed, the flow of knowledge so impaired, and Parliament so weakened that it doesn’t deserve your vote, that would be a reasonable call. If you decided that democratic institutions remain robust and the government should be judged on other aspects of its record, that too would be a reasonable call.”
How true. Ibbitson is such an idiot that he writes the equivalent of "If you think the patient is still alive that's a fair call. If you think the patient has died that's equally valid." I shudder to imagine how much my thinking ability would have to deteriorate to write something as stupid as that!
Ibbitson’s sleight of hand is in employing his own steady, measured tone to convince the reader, despite all evidence to the contrary, of the reasonableness of this latter position.
Right. Because Ibbitson is comfortably employed and he knew he had a publisher for this piece of shit book. And he knows that being a failed pundit ["The Big Shift"] and a liar will have zero impact on his career. 
This deference results in some discordant moments. The Conservatives’ signature Federal Accountability Act, Ibbitson writes, “ensured that Ottawa would never have its own K Street, the thoroughfare in Washington where powerful lobbying firms practically dictate the legislative agenda of Congress.” Perhaps, but if the author doesn’t at least suspect that Big Oil is instrumental in setting policy (see, for example, the Keystone XL pipeline farrago), he is either hopelessly naive (which he clearly is not) or wilfully blind.
First of all, harper's "Federal Accountability Act" was a complete failure at its purported goal. Second of all; Yes, harper was the oil industry's servant and Ibbitson is wilfully blind.
Then there is the author’s lack of inquisitiveness regarding how much Harper knew about the $90,000 cheque his former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, gave to Mike Duffy to repay certain dubious expenses the senator had claimed. “[T]here was much to be said for what critics derided as Harper’s control-freakish handling of his office,” Ibbitson writes at one point. “He knew, for one thing, exactly what was going on in it.” And later, “Nothing of importance is decided until the PM signs off on it.” How, then, can Harper claim not to have known about Wright’s interference with Duffy? For Ibbitson, the question remains unanswered.
Right. Because, at the end of the day, John Ibbitson was like a fluffer on a porno-set. Keeping the "stud" stimulated so as to appear virile and potent for when the camera starts rolling. Except Ibbitson is fluffing up the limp, stupid dick of a flaccid, moronic, cowardly tool of corporate Canada. What a disgrace!

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