Harper & co., feeding off a tragedy

Not ones to let a tragedy pass without profiting from it and finding some angle to either elevate themselves or attack their opponents, the harpercons and their sycophants have jumped on Trudeau’s comments concerning the bombings, deliberately misrepresenting them and showing, to any with a brain, not only their callous opportunistic natures, but their lack of understanding on how to prevent such future attacks.

“Two days ago, there was a horrific tragedy and I expressed clearly both today and yesterday the shock that I can only imagine that father feels that his son was killed for wanting to give him a hug,” Trudeau said on Parliament Hill.  “I really hope that Mr. Harper rethinks the extents and the lengths he’s willing to go to personally attack people and to politicize tragedies like that.”

Trudeau was right in saying what he did –

“We have to look at the root causes,” Trudeau said in the interview done just hours after Monday’s bombing. “Now, we don’t know now if it was terrorism or a single crazy or a domestic issue or a foreign issue.

“But there is no question that this happened because there is someone who feels completely excluded. Completely at war with innocents. At war with a society. And our approach has to be, okay, where do those tensions come from?”

He’s not suggesting we hug-a-thug, or get all “touchy-feely” like Jonathan Kay tries to say Trudeau is angling at. 
And we don’t even have to guess what Trudeau meant.  He explains - 


“Yes, there’s a need for security and response.  But we also need to make sure that as we go forward, that we don’t emphasize a culture of fear and mistrust.  Because that ends up marginalizing even further those who already are feeling like they are enemies of society.”

Any intelligent, well-balanced person understands that looking at the root causes of violent actions and those who perpetrate them is not “an interesting exercise to try to understand how sick minds become radicalized.”  It is critical in stopping such violence before it occurs by solving the problems that lead to it in the first place.
Not all of the tough on crime measures, the terrorist acts, the enhanced security that harperites scream to put in will make us safe from attacks like those in Boston.  That this latest act of mass violence occurred on a crowded street where people were engaging in what they expected – and had every reason to expect – was a safe event should tell us that it is impossible to prevent such attacks.  We can’t make everyone safe, everywhere, at all times, and attackers will look for openings.


Ignoring what drives the attackers only makes them more frustrated, more desperate, and I’m very sure Trudeau and those who agree with him aren’t saying we compromise and give the murderers what they want.  They are saying something is dysfunctional and needs to be addressed or these killings will continue regardless of how much we punish or how much security we put in place.

The other thing Trudeau mentions is how we don’t want to create a culture of fear, and we most certainly will if we only address security and punishment.  That implies that terrorists and mass murderers are just a part of society, a fact we need to accept and deal with, and they could spring out at us from any shadow, in any human shape.

This type of society plays well to the conservatives and republicans since a lot of tax dollars can go to security firms, weapons manufacturers, private prisons…Also, a population in fear of that shadowy enemy is easier to control, and the government can more easily justify stomping all over our rights – in the name of security.
Feeding off the Boston tragedy to suck up to harper, the brown-nosed Jonathan Kay goes on to say “For a variety of reasons, ranging from abortion to shark-fin soup, a lot of wavering Conservative supporters are trying to like Justin Trudeau, and to brush off the Tory charge that “he’s in way over his head.” That task just got harder. And Trudeau has only himself to blame.”

Well, no.  In fact, that Trudeau can see more than the immediate need to round up and punish the Boston killers shows that in fact, his waters run pretty damn deep compared to the cons.  You might say he’s showing he has…what’s that word?  Substance.

And if you have any doubt that cons can obscenely finger-point while engaging in some bizarre form of blindness to their own atrocious, callous behavior to the point of cashing in politically on a tragedy, read Barbara Kay’s words: “The Conservative Party should have held off on their attack ads against Justin Trudeau until they had something of substance to attack him with. Now they do.”   Yeah, harper sure got lucky, eh, Barbara?

Sick.  J&B Kay.  You can almost feel the glee seeping off their words.