I was on the road today, and I didn't finish the post I started this morning, so to keep my posting level up, I've decided to quickly blog about three songs that have re-intruded upon my consciousness in the past week. I first encountered these horrid tunes when I worked at a textile plant. The ladies on the second floor liked to listen to Hamilton's "K-Y FM" which played what is evidently known as "Easy Rock." This term includes sickeningly saccharine, corporate love pablum. These tunes were playing constantly for months at a time and I do not possess the ability to tune things out. While I was pushing a bin full of oven-mitts or table-cloths around, I'd be hearing every bloody word of all the stupid lyrics of all these crappy tunes. (This is probably why I'm so angry all the time. One reason anyway. And my inability to tune things out is also an inability to forget about the glaring hypocrisy and abominable ignorance and crude lies of the right-wing. Which is why I despise them so.)
And so, without any further ado, or introductions or anything, here they are. Comments are welcome!
Seriously! Ted Opitz's case is essentially that just because "clerical errors" mean that 79 voters are unaccounted for (with Elections Canada now claiming at the last minute that they can maybe account for 44 of them) in an election won by 26 votes, that this is no reason to invalidate his election.
What possible merit is there in such a brain-dead argument? From now on, in Canadian elections, harpercon sleaze-bags will simply walk from polling station to polling station giving fake names to harpercon supporting polling clerks and vote early and often? And any challenges will be derided as useless expenditures and attempts to take away the people's sacred right to choose?
Are they really arguing as if that's a valid point of view???
We're getting close to a political singularity here. When infinite cynicism meets infinite gullibility.
There's three things I'm just aching to write about today, so I'll dump 'em all out in a dog's breakfast of a post.
First of all, this CBC report from Brian Stewart: "Canada in Kandahar, some allies weren't impressed." It's based on a recent series of books and reports, some written by US or British military leaders, some based upon their testimony, saying that they had a lot of problems with Canada's contribution to the occupation of Afghanistan.
I'd like to get this out of the way at once: One of the commentators at the CBC web page points out a glaring error:
"Cowper-Coles records how he and then U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice were irritated by a Canadian briefing in 2010 ..."
Problem. Condoleezza Rice was NOT the US Secretary of State in 2010. She left office with George Bush in January of 2009.
Now, whether that original mistake is in one of the sources that Stewart is referring to, and he passed it along like a virus, or whether Stewart or somebody else made the error or typo, the overall argument is the same. Canada's military was far too small to pacify the insurgency in Kandahar and keep the province secure and Canadian politicians were too arrogant to accept this fact and ask for help.
In his fascinating memoir, Cables From Kabul: The Inside Story of the West's Afghanistan Campaign, Britain's former Afghan ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles marvels at Canada's cheery boosterism for the war.
He portrays Canada's top civilian on the scene, Chris Alexander, then
a former ambassador and top UN official, now a Conservative MP and
parliamentary secretary to the minister of defence, as being "among the
most persuasive of the optimists, and in many ways the golden boy of the
international effort in Afghanistan."
Interestingly, Cowper-Coles believes Alexander was too smart not to
see the flaws in the war, but "like many able and ambitious Westerners
involved in the project he saw no point in being anything other than
optimistic."
Oh yeah, ... "ambitious." Alexander is clearly ambitious and he's clearly hoping to have a brilliant political career as a right-wing imbecile staggering from one bloody foreign policy disaster to another. Unfortunately for him, he's hitched himself to a falling star and in a couple of years he will be forever shamed by his association with the biggest pack of criminals and incompetents in Canadian political history. So sad! Christopher Alexander was clearly willing to let overwhelmed Canadian Forces personnel to suffer and die for no reason in Afghanistan, just so that he could impress his masters back home. Have fun in disgrace you piece-of-shit!
And that goes for all the turds who threw our money down a rat-hole in this bloody clusterfuck. Especially stephen harper, peter mackay and, let's not forget the stupid, pompous blowhard General Rick Hillier who recommended the CF for this impossible task in the first place.
Second up, ... I just couldn't resist typing a response to this editorial by Thomas Friedman. Friedman, to me, is a complete waste of time. He's either completely wrong about things or his observations are convoluted expressions of the obvious. But a Liberal blogger who I very much respect praised this essay while providing a quote that I found less than impressive as a sampler. Let's look at it, shall we?
When you have technologies that promote quick short-term responses and
judgments, and when you have a generation that has grown used to
short-term gratification -- but you have problems whose solutions
require long, hard journeys, like today's global credit crisis or jobs
shortage or the need to rebuild Arab countries from the ground up -- you
have a real mismatch and leadership challenge. Virtually all leaders
today have to ask their people to share burdens, not just benefits, and
to both study harder and work smarter just to keep up. That requires
extraordinary leadership that has to start with telling people the
truth.
Now, please understand; you will go through that entire Friedman editorial and you won't find a single solitary clue about any details of the "long, hard journeys" that are supposedly necessary to solve the global credit crisis or to assist the democratic forces in the Arab countries. This is because Friedman knows that a) the global credit crisis is very much the fault of policies very similar to his own stupid economic recommendations over the years, and b) because Friedman is very much opposed to democracy in the Arab countries and has advocated for politics that would keep it suppressed, and, therefore, any actual recommendations from him here would expose him for the charlatan that he is.
Friedman's target audience
Anyhow, Friedman imagines him as some sort of visionary about the impact of technology on civilization and so he's decided to spew about how the instant gratification provided by a lot of modern technology has made the masses in the industrialized democracies hunger for the same sort of instantaneous wish fulfilment from world politics.
Which is, of course, laughable bullshit. For instance, the critics of the war in Afghanistan didn't turn against it because [imagine a whining teenager's voice] "It's taking too long!!!" We opposed it because it was a bad idea from the start. Western imperialists inflicting slaughter and starvation to impose a puppet-government of marauding narco-gangsters on a people who are mostly of a different ethnic group is self-evidently stupid. Meanwhile, the people who did support it have supported it for over ten fucking years, failure after failure, and the same goes (give or take a year) for Iraq. And the mushy middle waited years and years before deciding that maybe a decade of failure might point to some underlying problems. So much for Friedman's empty blathering about the people's desire for instant gratification.
It's bullshit from start to finish with Friedman:
Virtually all leaders
today have to ask their people to share burdens, not just benefits, and
to both study harder and work smarter just to keep up. That requires
extraordinary leadership that has to start with telling people the
truth.
Yeah. And that's why the Wall Street banksters gave themselves bonuses with their bail-out money and why corporate profits are at all time highs while unemployment and underemployment are raging worse than ever? That's why wages have stagnated for almost forty years? Because for forty years, workers haven't been making sacrifices? What? And just what sacrifices has Thomas Friedman been making? What?
Lastly, I'd like to give a tip o' my hat ...
... to Montreal Simon for bringing these twopolls to my attention. This rise in the fortunes of the NDP is a mixed thing for me. First of all, I think it makes all the hapless failures who steered the NDP into obscurity think that their boring, centrist, sell-out bullshit has been vindicated, when really it was just the result of the implosion of the Liberal Party as a viable alternative to the dog-shit of stephen harper.
"Hey! Michael Ignatieff! Did you provide effective opposition to stephen harper?"
"I did NOT!"
But, on a happier note, as I've long said, the mushy middle in Canadian politics is breaking down and not because of some sort of new mental fad among the population. This isn't something that die-hard Liberals can fix with slogans or persuasion of any kind. The understandable desire of people to have their cake and eat it too, to have a decent welfare state without a traumatic revolution is what made so many people vote Liberal for so long, and I'm starting to think that decades of neo-liberal failure, involving the very same "sacrifices" from working people that Thomas Friedman blithely imagines they have been hiding from, has started to impact on people's minds in a major way. They are opening up their eyes to the Left, sadly at the same time the failures of social democratic strategists are moving the party to the right.
In brief, the Optiz team is arguing that just because a bunch of incredibly sloppy mistakes were made in an election that was won by 26 votes out of 56,523 votes, is no reason to have a new election!
Funny that. So, if a teacher adds up the marks wrong on a test, that's no reason to change the results? So if a bunch of people vote and there's no paperwork, that's fine? It's amazing how these pieces-of-shit operate.
I'm going to tell you this right now: I honestly believe that harpercon hacks signed-on in droves to work for Elections Canada in Etobicoke-Centre just to fuck things up in favour of their boy Opitz. Being a polling clerk isn't rocket-science and voters who aren't on the list have always waited cheerfully and patiently as we did their paper-work. Something stinks and given the harpercons' multi-year hard-on for trying to make Canadian elections as discredited as those in the USA, I won't put anything past them.
And, besides, the way Elections Canada works, they train a whole batch of applicants to help conduct the election process. I know. I did it. (Most of us are semi-political types who are between jobs.) As such, sure, errors can be made. Although the level of mistakes and the complete absence of paperwork is beyond anything that I've ever seen before. Which makes me think, ... how much of it could have been the deliberate handiwork of Conservative Party of Canada supporters working for Elections Canada in order to throw the election to their boy Ted Opitz?
Lastly, ... and pertaining to the broader scandal of the 2011 federal election, one harpercon hack appeared to admit that violations of elections laws did occur, but stupidly asks, "How do you know it was the Conservatives?"
Um, ... because the calls about the polling centres' new locations (when they hadn't been moved at all) came from call centres that had signed exclusive contracts with the Conservative Party of Canada? Because your own party admits that the Guelph riding crimes were committed by one of their own? Seriously?
Look, you wretched fucking cry-babies, ... if you're going to be all brazen cheaters and thugs and liars and anti-democratic scum, ... at least have the fucking decency not to play the goddamned victim card. (Not that I don't expect you to. I realize what revolting, contemptible specimens you are. I'm aware of the filthy cloth from which you're cut. I just wrote that to feel better really. Carry on. You're all going down.)
First off is a recommendation that you read Haroon Siddiqui's "West Speaks with a Forked Tongue on the Arab Spring." It's a pretty clear and coherent defence of what is happening in Egypt with a clear and coherent critique of Western hypocrisy:
We profess fidelity to democracy, especially in the Arab world. But our
commitment seems to come with the caveat that the will of the people is
acceptable only if it confirms our prejudices. If not — as in Egyptians’
choice of the Muslim Brotherhood for both parliament and the presidency
— some of our leaders, thinkers and media eminences get antsy and
irrational.
They begin to echo the logic of Algeria, Iran, Israel and the
dictatorships and monarchies of the Middle East that have resisted
democratic outcomes.
...
In varying degrees, Barack Obama, Harper and other western leaders
have paid lip service to the Arab Spring. They have failed to stand by
pro-democracy forces at key times.
They have been silent on the series of measures taken by the ruling
Egyptian military junta to consolidate its power and even attempt to
derail Mohammed Morsi’s election as president.
Yet Washington lectured him on the need to respect the rights of women and Coptic Christians.
This is not surprising coming from a capital that was complicit in
the crimes of Hosni Mubarak, who banned the Brotherhood and jailed and
tortured hundreds of its members for years.
And on and on it goes. Check it out.
Of course, imperialists in Washington and Ottawa and elsewhere aren't going to be moved by it in the slightest. The best of them are completely deluded about their own pristine adherence to human rights and the "Islamists" earth-shattering threat to civilization to be able to read his words if they were before their eyes. It would all just be transformed by filters into gibberish. Meanwhile, the worst of our elites would ignore Siddiqui because they know they don't give a shit about democracy and human rights and all their rhetoric is to provide a cover story for any future interventions to restore an acceptable status-quo there. The value of Siddiqui's writing is to expose borderline people to alternative interpretations of the bullshit coming out of Washington, and to give us the mental weaponry needed to counter the constant barrage of propaganda that we all face daily.
If one puts together (1) the Star’s excellent piece on the Afghan detainee inquiry report
(which properly excoriated the government for its unprecedented
dodging, weaving, political brinkmanship, refusals to produce documents,
denials of access, over-the-top redactions based on irrational and
unfounded “national security” concerns, preventing witnesses from
testifying, launching legal challenges, gagging of witnesses) and (2)
Chris Alexander’s protestation that the government provided “exceptional
co-operation” to the inquiry commissioners, with (3) reporter Alan
Woods’ report
that the ex-diplomat, rumoured as Bev Oda’s replacement at CIDA, is
considered a “star performer,” one wonders what he’s doing that makes
him a star. Perhaps he is understudy to Peter Kent’s Teflon approach to
problems. And we get Julian Fantino in the helping-others portfolio.
This should be interesting.
John Baird is irrelevant. He's a rat, too fucked-up and stupid to realize that he's on a sinking ship. He's an incompetent blowhard and an international embarrassment for Canada. More to today's point, ... his own government's cavalier response to accusations of Canadian complicity in torture render his entire condemnation of the UN and the Syrian dictatorship utterly hypocritical and irrelevant.
Wait. Did I say that his government's response to Canadian complicity in torture has been cavalier? That's incorrect. They have taken this matter very seriously. They have moved heaven and earth to prevent investigation into their war crimes in Afghanistan and they've been very thorough about covering up our complicity in the torture of our own citizens, Abdullah Almalki, Muayyed Nureddin and Ahmad El Maati.
You see, that's the way it works in reality. Those three Canadian citizens were tortured in Syria, as was Maher Arar, because our government "security" services told them that they were terror suspects and they even fed the Syrian government questions to ask them while they were whipping the soles of their feet with cables. So, for a preposterous buffoon like Baird to condemn the Syrian government and the United Nations, ... well, he doesn't have the right to be taken seriously.
The Globe & Mail still prints on its masthead the quotation from Junius: “The subject who is truly loyal to the chief magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures.” and then, will write condemnations of Air Canada workers who showed disrepect to Labour Minister Lisa Raitt (by clapping in an exaggeratedly slow and obviously mocking fashion when she walked by), and says nothing about how workers were suspended for expressing their opinion and about how Raitt herself is the epitome of arbitrary measures (using legislation to side with a private sector employer against its workforce and imposing an inferior contract upon Canada Post workers than the one the employer locked them out for not accepting earlier).
John Ibbitson and Marcus Gee can't get it through their thick skulls that they're like some idiot at a dinner table who has shit himself and is making efforts of sophisticated conversation, oblivious to the fact that everyone else is overwhelmed with the stench and regarding them with disgust and contempt. Canada, meanwhile, is so sick a society that we're like a dinner party that's unable to remove the obviously befouled cretin who is yammering away at their place at the table as if all is right with the world!
Anyhow, back to the irrelevant Baird and his babbling about Syria. Syria is a shit-hole dictatorship that even tortures its own children. But Canada and the USA made use of its torture chambers (which the Syrians provided in a vain attempt to curry favour with Western imperialists). The United Nations is, very often, a hideous, hypocritical institution, where many of the world's despotic governments get to have paying gigs for their national elites on various committees and agencies, the bill for which is paid largely by the wealthiest members of the international community. It is indeed a joke that its human rights committee is staffed by representatives from Colombia (the country that kills more trade unionists every year than any other) and Kazakhstan. It's also a joke that the United States is represented on this committee, given its own adherence to the use of torture, arbitrary imprisonment and its multipleattacks on freedom of speech.
Baird is enraged at Russia and China for using their votes on the UN Security Council to block UN action against the Syrian government. At present, the Syrian government is under attack from mercenaries armed and trained and paid by the US government and its allies. The US government is not attacking Syria's dictatorship out of a feeling of repugnance against its torturing and its suppression of democracy. During the so-called "Arab Spring" the US has provided enormous support to the dictatorships in Yemen and Bahrain, as well as continued support to its abominations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The USA is going after Syria's Assad for the same reason it went after Libya's Qaddafi; because they retain some nominal independence. The US political elite is entirely insane and even though their intended puppet-allies in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned into bloody nightmares, requiring US troops to die protecting uncertain allies, these psychopaths imagine that Libya and Syria will turn out differently.
The entire world community is almost completely insane. Russia and China are governed by corrupt, autocratic governments. They're protecting Assad only to preserve a chess piece against the USA's increasingly desperate attempts to dominate the chess board.
Baird's stupid outbursts mean as much to the leaders of Russia and China as the yapping of a papillon through the front window of a house as you walk past on the sidewalk.Baird's an irrelevant hypocrite. The USA is a hypocrisy. The UN is a hypocrisy. Russia and China are hypocrisies. The Assad dictatorship is disgusting. His mercenary opponents are disgusting. The war in Afghanistan is disgusting. It's all disgusting.
I used to hang around on rabble.ca's "babble" until May, 2006, and, since then, I've been found at www.enmasse.ca and www.breadnroses.ca. Even more lately, I've been at EnMasse, but also numerous blogs from the progressive side.
I'm sometimes rude to people and I've been accused of "schoolyard taunts," so, here's my schoolyard.
