"Party of One" - A Belated Review

Found a signed hardcover version of this at Value Village a month or two ago. Just finished it. I hadn't forgotten how vile and loathsome stephen harper was, but this book does an excellent job of clarifying the details that demonstrated his banal evil, shallowness and stupidity. Some random impressions:

I never clearly understood just how illegitimate and sleazy harper's attack on nuclear regulator Linda Keen was. She was just doing her job and harper stupidly attacked her thereby doing a lot of damage. His reasons, obviously, were stupid, because he is stupid. Through and through.

Which compels me to jump towards near the end of the book. The Duffy scandal. It was really too bad that Senate corruption resonated more with Canadians than did contempt of Parliament and war crimes. But it was fun to read Harris's concise summary of the scandal. Coming away from it you realize these people are all insane. Duffy, to his credit, wanted to be a Senator from Ontario, but harper told him it would be PEI and this would be fine, because he, harper the great, had decreed it would be so. Turned out harper was wrong. Whatever. Because Duffy decided all by himself, that if he could lie about living in PEI, he could lie about travel and accommodation expenses. Duffy, all on his own, decided to expense to the taxpayers for food he ate at home in Ottawa. And to this day, Duffy, Wallin, ... the whole lot of these fraudsters who were shilling for the harpercon party while pretending to represent their regions in the Senate, believe they did nothing wrong. The rules were "confusing." (No. They aren't.) They made honest mistakes. (No. The didn't.) They really are entitled to expense personal travel costs to the public dime. (No.)

But the real treat is reading how harper, the coward/bully/cad & thief, put his incompetence and stupidity on constant display when he finally found himself in a crisis he couldn't run away from. One easily disproven stupid lie after another. Each contradicting the previous stupid lie. Only harper's extreme shamelessness allowed him to stand in the House of Commons and  utter these idiocies one after the other without throwing up.

I think Harris goes too easy on Helena Guergis and Rahim Jaffer. Although it was nice (a little) to read that she vocally expressed her disapproval of harper's evil-asshole decision to de-fund "Sisters in Spirit." It seems to me though, that Jaffer was probably engaged in some shady business and the fact of the matter is that a guy from a "law and order/lock 'em up" political party to be driving drunk with cocaine in his car is total hypocrisy. Not enough is said about this sickening double-standard. Also, regarding her alleged meltdown at a Maritime airport, Harris relies on the word of Peter Mansbridge, who says he saw the video footage and that it was nothing remarkable. Mansbridge isn't someone whose opinion I respect.

I wish Harris wrote with more vitriol about the vile and sickening election fraud perpetrated by the harpercons in the 2011 election. And I wish he were more sceptical of everyone he wrote about. I think Sona, Prescot, harper, ... all of them, the whole damned bunch, were guilty of violations. Being scum-bags, the bigger players made Sona the fall-guy, and Sona had to balance his fury at their betrayal with his understanding that they'd really make him suffer if he lashed out. Furthermore, the bullshit inquiry into the scandal is not described for the travesty that it was. This was one of the lowest points.

The part about harper's sickening betrayal of wounded veterans is done very well. You really do get a sense of what total slime-balls, thugs, liars and hypocrites they harper government was.

There's more I could type. But I'm bored. I also planned on quoting from some stupid "conservative" fuckwads who gave the book a one-star rating on amazon and go to town on them. Instead I'll just say that these idiots are irredeemable. They fart out stuff like "Harris just doesn't like Harper so instead of facts he provides page after page of innuendo and smear."

The goddamned facts are right on the pages in front of them but they're too stupid, partisan and deluded to see them.

Edited to Add: The chapter on how harper made an international conman/felon the chair of the Security Intelligence Review Committee (the watchdog for CSIS) and had disbarred lawyer/embezzler Bruce Carson as a senior advisor, privy to all sorts of valuable information, reminds us again how incompetent and stupid harper was. It's kind of a litmus test for intelligence and morality: If you're showing off pictures of yourself with the dregs of society such as Dick Cheney, Benny Netanyahu (or stephen harper), ... you're probably a scum-bag.