Stephen Harper - Psychopath

Actually, right off the top, there's probably a lot of psychopaths in politics. Paul Martin's consistent ability to wax eloquently about values and principles that he had no intentions of honouring was certainly evidence of some sort of twisted, cynical moral calculus. But Stephen Harper projects the embodiment of the psychopath's inner emptiness, the absolute absence of human feeling that allows the psychopath to go from one selfish goal to the next.

In this post, where Harper's reaction to seeing a young person being carried off stage after fainting during one of his speeches is that there is no reaction. He sips his water during a pause in his speech and turns to see what the commotion is. Seeing what it is, he doesn't even raise his eyebrows, but quickly goes back to his water, it's got nothing to do with him evidently.

In that situation, Harper's coldness is laughable. But the point is that he functions this way at all times, and it's not funny. You can imagine the same blank stare as Harper is faced with an honourable public servant trying to do his job, as in the case of Peter Tinsley, Chairman of the Military Police Complaints Commission (MPCC) investigating the Canadian Forces' turning over of prisoners to torturers in Afghanistan. Tinsley is trying to determine if Canada is complicit in war crimes, in the hopes of doing something to correct this problem. Stephen Harper has no moral centre, and for him, the war in Afghanistan is popular with his drooling bloodthirsty base, so war crimes or no, this investigation is inconvenient and must be obstructed. "Canadian values" (whatever they really are, "values" in general being alien to Harper) can be crapped upon and flushed away.

A last example is Harper's vile response to CF personells' complaints about individuals among our Afghan allies (their soldiers, police and interpreters working for the CF) raping children. At first, CF brass tried to ignore these complaints, but they've persisted and some CF soldiers are in need of counselling due to the trauma of witnessing a child being raped and later seeing the child lying dead with his intestines hanging out. Harper's response? To cynically launch an inquiry into this affair (which reflects badly on the state that we're constructing, fighting and dying for) and giving it TWO YEARS to investigate and report, by which time, Harper's out-of-his-fat-ass 2011 deadline will have arrived and presumably Afghanistan's corrupt, unpopular warlord establishment can continue to rape children with impunity.

This is beyond sickening. These are the political fruits of late-capitalist political culture. There are far fewer capitalists than there are workers. To get worker/voters to support an elitist political movement that is antipathetic to their own self-interest, you first target the fucking stupidest people among the electorate and toss them red-meat like war, homophobia, racism and police brutality against minorities, get them all excited, and they'll not notice that their pockets are being picked.

We need a political culture that stands up to stupidity. We'll never be free of these imbeciles, but we should stop kow-towing to them, we should stop pretending that they're people whose opinions should be respected. Human garbage like Harper is what human garbage like the Blogging Tories vote for. Two-thirds of the electorate is at least redeemable and that demographic should be targetted with the waverers shamed into rejecting even considering throwing in their lot with the yammering jack-asses on the far-right.