Your Morning Smile (for most of us)

And under the "methinks he doth protest too much" file, enjoy this.

...Gone?

The tale of Eve Adams gets increasingly melodramatic, and increasingly reminiscent of Helena Guergis. That she will suffer Helena's political fate is looking more likely with each passing day.

Readers may recall that prior to her fall from grace, Helena Guergis, at the Charlottetown airport in February of 2010, allegedly threw a tantrum and screamed obscenities at staff who asked her to take her boots off for security screening. An airport worker said it was among the worst meltdowns he had ever seen.

Fast forward a few years and a similar outrageous sense of political entitlement was acted out this past December by Ms Adams who, it seems, showed her displeasure over a bit of ice remaining on her bumper after a car wash by blocking some gas pumps for 15 minutes at an Ottawa gas station.

John Newcombe, a Conservative supporter and the owner of the Island Park Esso station in Ottawa’s west end, said he contacted the Prime Minister’s Office in January to complain about an incident with Adams in December 2013:

An analysis of the incident can be seen here, from yesterday's Power and Politics:

Finally, also like Guergis, who suffered her lethal blow over allegations of misuse of her office, Ms Adams is being accused of misusing her political clout in seeking the nomination for the riding of Oakville North-Burlington. It has already cost her affianced, Dimitri Soudas, his job as executive director of the Conservative Party of Canada.

On yesterday's Power and Politics, Jeff Knoll, a board member of the riding association in question, explained why he signed a letter asking the prime minister to look into allegations about MP Eve Adams:

One wonders what particular brand of bottled water our elected public 'servants' drink from. If the kind of outrageous and contemptuous behaviour evinced by Ms Adams and countless others proves to come from something they drink, the product should come under immediate investigation by Health Canada and recalled.

Then again, perhaps it is just the Kool-Aid that is served to the entire Harper caucus.

Guest Post: The Salamander

Responding to a post I wrote this morning commenting on a Lawrence Martin article, The Salamander offered the following trenchant assessment of what he predicts will be the Harper 'legacy.' Enjoy:

.. I find the fading tiger analogy problematic.. maybe its just me ..

Having a background in social work, with criminals, mood disorders,
addiction, maximum security prisons etc, I tend to adapt to new terminology,
diagnostic criteria, and trust evidence based medicine..
More and more I trust natural consequence .. history and observation..

Tom Flanagan, a man with his own issues, demons and fallacies
glorifies his apt pupil Harper.. as a 'predator' ? Some sort of animal ?
He could better have compared Harper to a pudgy 'jail house lawyer'
ie an incarcerated felon other felons recognize as adept at gaming the law.
So there's an analogy to consider

When considering the blight that The Harper Party & its conjoined and comorbid Harper Government represents.. I keep seeing and feeling a prison connection.
No.. I doubt Harper or any of his flawed partisans will end up in jail..
Its more that the so-called Harper 'Legacy' is actually the prison and 'record' that Harper himself is building each and every day.. cementing himself in

Harper seems to have no idea on how to back down or shut the whole flawed corrupted runaway train down.. Instead he employs ludicrous inept shallow characters to double down, defend the undefendable policies or ideologies. There is not a single' Minister' in the Harper Government that can actually rationalize or coherently defend what they are doing, enacting or obstructing or making up as they go.. or are told to go. Leona on Environment ? Laughable.. pitiful. Poilievre ? Canadians love this Act?

History won't be kind at all, won't be sparing...
Harper will be vilified by every associate, MP, robo geek he 'used' or abused
And those who called out Harper for betrayal, obstruction, deceit & arrogance
will pile on.. and take some revenge.. It won't be pretty
But that's the yard, cellblock and prison range Stephen Harper operated in.

Read Garth Turner 'Sheeple' .. to catch a polite and mild but wicked reflection ..
imagine the venom and ferocity from a Soudas, or Del Mastro
the polite damning testimony of a Nigel Wright.. defended by Guy Giorno who stunningly also represents The Harper Party now (What ?!?)
How about a jilted RCMP lover.. No.. not of Stephen ...
or what if Ray Novak goes renegade.. or Stephen Lecce.. ??

Whew.. !!

Welcome to your 'Legacy' Mr Harper
It was never Fight or Flight ..
It was never fair or honest in any damn way
certainly not Canadian.. as if .. !
Nope .. it was always Blight

Going, Going ....

And soon gone, would be my guess. Read this CBC report and watch the following video, both of which suggest to this observer that Eve Adams is not long for this political world:

Slip Slidin' Away

Slip sliding away, slip sliding away
You know the nearer your destination, the more you're slip sliding away
- Paul Simon

I know, by his public efforts to appear reasonably normal, that Stephen Harper is a Beatles' fan. Whether he has ever listened to or crooned any of Paul Simon's songs is less certain. Yet I couldn't help but think of Simon this morning as I read Lawrence Martin's latest piece in The Globe and Mail.

Entitled The Harper machine is in disarray, Martin reflects on the many obstacles that have emerged to obstruct what I presume is Dear Leader's destination, not only to win the next election but to become Canada's long-serving prime minister. (Put aside for the moment that he seems to have blighted our political landscape for far too long already.)

Like an aging tiger, Harper seems to be losing some of his truculence. As Martin notes,

Few expected this. The bet would have been that the Prime Minister would have gone to the wall to protect Dimitri Soudas, as he has many other loyalists after acts of folly.

But just four months after having been appointed, the Conservative Party’s executive director is out the door. He joins a lengthening list. In recent months, Stephen Harper has also lost his chief of staff, his finance minister and a Supreme Court nominee, plus several senators as a result of the expenses scandal.

Dimitri Soudas' dismissal, suggests Martin, may mark an act of Harper deference to the rank and file who are becoming increasingly restive chafing under their leader's storied iron grip on all facets of the operation. Why? Matin cites several reasons:

-His party has been trailing the Liberals in the polls.

-He presided over a scandal he claimed to know little about, but should have known a lot about.

-Rebellious caucus types have confronted him, demanding some freedom of speech.

-Former finance minister Jim Flaherty contradicted him on income-splitting, a major policy plank.

One could certainly add to this list considerably, but perhaps the most egregious example of trouble has to be the almost universal repugnance with which his current favourite puppet, Democratic Reform Minister Pierre Poilievre, is being met over the misnamed Fair Elections Act. I won't be surprised if loyalist Pierre is soon invited to sit in the party ejection seat as well.

Martin points out that similar problems of resistance and bickering have beset past prime ministers as they approach the 10-year mark, including Mulroney, Chretien and Trudeau, at which point it becomes a situation of fight or flight.

However unlikely, let us hope that Stephen Harper chooses the latter option.

Is The Master Losing His Grip?

Listen to The Globe's Campbell Clark and decide for yourself:

What A Friend We Have In Stephen*

* With apologies to Joseph Scriven's original hymn, What a Friend We Have in Jesus.

One can only assume that these days there are far fewer congregants lustily singing the praises of their dark lord and master, Stephen Harper, in that hallowed place of worship known as the Conservative caucus. Their faith has, in recent times, been sorely shaken.

From the Moses-like figure who led them out of the political wilderness, Harper became a Jesus-figure, welcoming all into a family of shared values, righteousness, and integrity, intent on driving the money-changers from the temples of Parliament. That dream quickly faded, however, to be replaced by corruption, callousness, and exclusion that seem inevitable accompaniments of power; but at least the party faithful knew that some of the immense rewards of this world were well within their grasp, as long as they remained faithful and provided unquestioning service to their lord.

They are now learning that they were wrong.

While evidence has been circulating for years of Harper's willingness to abandon anyone who no longer served his agenda, recent events have demonstrated the absolute ruthlessness of his nature. There was, of course, his jettisoning of the terrible trio of Senators Duffy, Wallin, and Brazeau after having initially defending them in the house. As the optics changed, so did Harper's public pronouncements of them, to the point where they became personae no grata. More recently, as I noted in an earlier psst, there was his refusal to allow personal friendship with and deep political indebtedness to Nigel Wright stand in the way of publicly vilifying him as the chief-of-staff who betrayed him.

The most recent example of what some might describe as a lack of character at best, or as deeply pathological at worst, is the firing of Dimitri Souda, another Harper loyalist who answered his master's call to leave his current job, as he has done before, to become executive director of the Conservative Party of Canada. Because it became public that he was trying to gerrymander the nomination process so that the love of his life could steal win the nomination over a local favourite in the new riding of Oakville-North Burlington, he has been fired, as reported in The Toronto Star. Soudas' firing followed that of Wally Butts, a party organizer who had complained about Soudas' strongarm tactics.

Eve Adams’ campaign chairman, Stephen Sparling, denies that Soudas was fired, saying he voluntarily resigned so he could be more deeply engaged in Adams’ campaign. “He’s taken a new private-sector role and he’s freed up to work on his partner’s behalf”.

Perhaps on the strength of her own deep and abiding loyalty (start the link video at the five-minute mark) to Mr. Harper, Ms Adams still believes the nomination is within her reach.

Hmmm. I wonder if she remembers the name Helena Guergis?

Breaking 'News'

There is a story posted on the Globe website entitled, E-mails cite ‘directive’ to re-brand government in Harper’s name, which reveals that Dimitri Soudas lied when he denied a story circulating that orders went out to some civil servants last fall mandating that they use the term “Harper Government” in official government of Canada communications.

This is news?