The cuckoo bird places one of its eggs in the nest of another bird species. The egg hatches and the chick takes over, tricking the mother into feeding it even when the chick outsizes her and runs her ragged. The cuckoo chick will also push out all of the mother's own eggs so that it doesn't have to compete with anyone else and gets everything - food, shelter, protection for itself alone.
Judged by human standards, the cuckoo is not a nice bird. It wants it all and doesn't give a damn who gets hurt.
Steve reminds me of the cuckoo bird. Dons a blue sweater vest to try and trick us into thinking he's warm and fuzzy, cuddles stunned looking kittens in photos that only make him look creepy, steals policy ideas from other parties, plagiarizes speeches, engages in photo-op after photo-op in an attempt to suck off some of the goodwill reserved for the main subject of the photo, commandeers the ideas and efforts of others, such as red shirt day, usurps parliamentary and traditional roles as when he gos ahead of the GG to take the military salute due that office...
He hopes the things that Canadians warm to will rub off on the superficial image he presents, tricking us into warming to him.
Most of us are smarter than the mother birds of other species that the cuckoo seeks to trick, and this latest nauseating attempt to steal what isn't his in a bid to pretend he is oh so wonderful won't work either.
In fact, it may bring him trouble.
Eight days ago, in Welland, Ont., Stephen Harper made an apparently innocuous announcement that’s a harbinger of much more to come: He unveiled the creation of the Prime Minister’s Volunteer Awards to recognize 17 people each year from non-profit organizations across Canada.
The GG already has volunteer awards, and they are non-partisan awards. With Baird co-ordinating this new PR stunt, you can bet the list of volunteers given awards will face an entirely different set of criteria. It's marketing, folks.
But this is the Harper government, controlling all as none before it, eager to find political advantage in everything the government does. Thus it’s a logical extension of this controlling urge to want the Prime Minister to be associated with the awards and the honours in the minds of the recipients. And so it’s logical, with this objective in mind, to have Mr. Baird, the über-partisan cabinet minister, provide guidance for the internal review.
It’s creepy, if you think about it, that any prime minister would even think about meddling with the non-partisan honours and awards system just so he and his office (and party) might be more closely associated with it.
Creepy indeed. And sleezy.
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