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.

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:

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?

The Internet As Lie Detector

Funny thing about the Internet, isn't it? Almost everything that is uttered or printed by public officials cannot, happily, be rewritten à la Orwell's Nineteen -Eighty-Four. But then again, the government depicted within the novel must have felt the need to guard against uprisings by the people and so relied on scapegoating, invective, close monitoring of citizens, etc. While these techniques are certainly used with regularity by the Harper regime, I suspect that our 'government' feels that its greatest defense against repercussions over its corruption and its debasement of democracy is the apparent monumental indifference of large swaths of the Canadian public.

It must be thus, otherwise how can we explain Harper's shameless and very obvious contempt for the truth? For example, last Wednesday on Power and Politics the regime was expressing its full confidence in Nigel Wright's payment of the $90,000 to the disgraced Senator Mike Duffy. Indeed that staunch defence continued until Wright's resignation on Sunday. :

And yet now, in what can only be viewed as a massive middle finger sent from Peru to the people of Canada, the odious Stephen Harper would have us believe that he acted immediately upon learning of the payoff, an "inappropriate deal' that, he says, elicited sorrow, anger and frustration when he learned about the payoff. Left unexplained was why Wright continued to enjoy his full confidence until Sunday, long after the payoff had been revealed:

And if you have the stomach for it, you could watch the video below in which Eve Adams, who has apparently replaced former Harper pet parrot Pierre Poilivre as public defender of all things Harper, launches into a sycophantic justification of 'dear leader.' Her nauseating performance begins at about the 7 minute mark:

So the evidence is there for all to see that our Prime Minister is also our prime prevaricator. As Oscar Goldman used to say on The Six Million Dollar Man, We have the technology. The real question is, do enough Canadians have the will to use it in the interests of beginning the process of restoring our country in 2015?