Contempt for Parliament = Contempt for US

This is the problem with becoming inured to the revolting nature of Canada's political culture. 30% of the electorate is so ignorant, or so stupid, or so greedy, or so debased, that they think voting for stephen harper's party is a sane political option.

And then pretty much everybody who matters, politicians, pundits, the media in general, political back-room types, etc., all have to think: "Okay. That's what a lot of Canadians think, let's play this game. Let's treat the harpercons as a genuine political party and harper as a genuine human being and act accordingly."

And then the scum bag lets his idiot finance minister create massive deficits based on his delusions about the efficacy of 19th-Century economic theories in the present day. He lets his racist foreign minister consign several darker-skinned Canadians to torture and exile. He allows a Christian-fundamentalist moron to become Minister of Science. He lets the oil industry dictate our global warming policies. He encourages deliberately sloppy record-keeping to obfuscate our prisoner transfer practices in Afghanistan.

And then he provokes one constitutional crisis after another: proroguing Parliament to escape a non-confidence motion in response to his own childish bullying. He prorogues Parliament again to avoid having to account for his possible complicity in torture in Afghanistan. He forces the Speaker of the House to rule on an unprecedented denial of information to Parliament. He instructs government employees to disregard summonses from Parliamentary committees.

He displays serial contempt for our system of government. From handbooks for harpercon committee chairs to obstruct the work of their committees to allowing Bev Oda to lie to Parliament without consequence, ... it's all of a piece and all part of harper's ingrained contempt for all of us.

He does not have contempt for politicians who drag-down our political culture. He has contempt for our entire system of government and he has done more work than anyone to bring it down.

When Limousine Bev Oda lied to opposition MPs, she lied to US because they are OUR representatives!

It is justified to saddle the Liberals with "AdScam." "AdScam" was a terrible abuse of power and a terrible assault on our political system. But the naked contempt for our entire system of government that harper displays on a regular basis is something else altogether. The Liberals have never treated the entire opposition as worthy of complete contempt. Sure, they've been corrupt, have abused their power, have grown arrogant with power, etc.,etc., but harper is something else.

He hates Canada.

He likes to insult us overseas:

"Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it. Canadians make no connection between the fact that they are a Northern European welfare state and the fact that we have very low economic growth, a standard of living substantially lower than yours, a massive brain drain of young professionals to your country, and double the unemployment rate of the United States."

"In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half, don't feel particularly bad for many of these people. They don't feel bad about it themselves, as long as they're receiving generous social assistance and unemployment insurance."

He likes to imagine that we're ALL ignoramuses because we don't buy his snake-oil and puke:

Mansbridge: “How do you explain, to yourself, the apparent lack of knowledge on the part of a good number of Canadians as to what we are doing in Afghanistan…?”

Harper: “You know, Peter, I don’t know if I am shocked by that. I’m not sure if it’s different on Afghanistan than on any other area of public policy."

It will be so easy to destroy this monster if we get the opportunity. I mean, look at those quotes up there.

Guess what harper, you stupid dumb-fuck? There was no brain drain! It was all an invention of other stupid neoliberals such as yourself!

Here's what we know. There is at the moment a small net outflow of university-educated people moving from Canada to the United States. However, according to an October 1998 Statistics Canada study, international immigration of university-educated people into Canada -- a "brain gain" -- is at least four times larger than the "brain drain" to the U.S.
...

According to Scott Murray, a researcher with StatsCan, Canada continues to attract many times more engineers from abroad than it is losing to the U.S. The same holds true for computer scientists and natural scientists.

The StatsCan study concludes: "There is little statistical evidence in support of a large scale exodus of knowledge workers from Canada to the United States. On balance, Canada does lose a small number of skilled workers in key occupations to the United States, but the numbers involved are: small in a historical sense, [and] small relative to the stock of workers in these occupations."

...

Most are leaving either because they cannot find work in their chosen fields, or because they can earn more money in the U.S. In the latter case, higher remuneration in the U.S. is generally more significant than lower personal taxes. The reality is the private sector and universities in the U.S. are prepared to pay, for some professionals, much more than their counterparts in Canada. The debate about taxes is, for the most part, irrelevant.

And guess what harper, you stupid dumb-fuck? The insurgency continues to rage in Afghanistan despite Obama's "surge" because you imperialist assholes are only trying to force a brutal and corrupt government on the people there. You send Canadian soldiers to fight, kill, and die, for a regime of rapists and thieves. You send them to die for less than nothing.

Let's have this election! Let's bring it on!

People say it's dangerous to underestimate conservatives, but I think it's way more dangerous to OVERestimate them. To imagine that this pack of dullards, harper, Flaherty, Baird, Cannon, Kenney, Clement, ad nausea, are formidable intellectual opponents when their whole philosophy betrays their ignorance and insanity, is such a total waste of time.