Concerning chickens and attack ads

There's nothing wrong with attack ads as long as they are truthful.  Policies, even personal characteristics of politicians should be attacked if they are relevant to how we are governed and how we will be affected.

Attacking someone for their accent or for where their ancestors came from, for example, would be out of line since those things are not likely to affect how the person would govern.

But attacking someone for being autocratic, despotic, controlling, or cowardly to the extent they will not face voters, media, or debates out of fear of being exposed is not only valid, but a good thing.

harper wants our votes, wants to have the power to make decisions as to how we will live, but he won't answer questions and gets the tough guys with guns to remove anyone who could even possibly disagree with him at his rallies.  He wants to present his big lie to us, and he wants to shut us up.

And he wants to avoid dealing with anything or anyone who challenges him because he is afraid.

Hence, the chicken.  Portraying steve as a chicken, or a chicken in a bubble over and over is telling people over and over a truth about him, a truth many Canadians are slow to see because they are so used to short clips, catchy images...the kind of approach steve himself has encouraged for years.

While it would be much better if hard policy was debated and Canadians actually read and understood issues, that is not the reality of this campaign, and a lot of that is because of steve himself as he dodges policy questions, debates, media.

So we are stuck with trying to get people to understand what an anti-democratic beast harper is, and because of him and his preference for short elections, we have little time.  Also because of him, our venues are limited.

This is why making a valid point through images and short clips is necessary. 

Yes, there will be attack ads

Thomas Walkom suggests that if we have an election this spring, it will not be about the budget.  It will be about Harper.

In Canada, where we do not vote for the leader but for MPs by constituency, this should not be the case.  The Government of Canada should reflect the will of the people, and all elected MPs should be accountable to those they represent.  Everyone of them should be able to craft their own messages, consider their own ridings and the needs of their constituents all the while making sure that they are looking at how all ridings connect to form a whole country.

That doesn’t mean that MPs of the ruling party should ignore what their leader says, but they have a responsibility to speak for themselves and address the wishes of their constituents.

Opposition MPs must also have the opportunity to speak and to have the weight of their voices and votes in the House protected by the legislation that stops our government from undermining democracy.

In Canada, the Prime Minister is not the government. nor is the government his personal stage on which he is producer, director, scriptwriter, filmatographer and the only actor of importance.  The Government of Canada is the people’s government where the people send those they elect in their ridings to speak and act in their best interests.

That’s how it is supposed to be, but one man does not agree.  One megalomaniac who has managed to become and remain Prime Minister by backstabbing and lying to his own party, by bullying and ruling in fear, by silencing any dissent even in his own ranks, doesn’t believe in a government of the people.

Harper believes that the only voice that should have any say is his, and damn anyone who interferes with his self-appointed authority over the entire elected government, federal public service, independent agencies, and private citizens exercising their right to protest.

So Walkom is probably right.  The next election will most likely be about harper because he has shown us all over and over that his words and actions override those of everyone else - elected members, private citizens, journalists, oversight agencies, the Courts, legislation, the GG, the military.

Cappe, president of the Institute for Research in Public Policy in Montreal may think that only 600 people or so in Canada care about harper highjacking the name of the people’s government and claiming it for his own (I think even an informal, hastily thrown together petition online would prove him wrong), but he rightly says that’s not the issue.  He is concerned about the erosion of our understanding of our institutions and how that will affect credibility and respect for those institutions.

I see it as far more dangerous.  It undermines our democracy and our individual voices by making us come to accept a change in power structure, a change that was made without our consent or understanding, a take over by subterfuge.

Harper - the only election issue

When the leader of the country rebrands even the government of the people with his own name, when that leader repeatedly highjacks institution after institution by linking his name and image to them (stealing the military salute meant for the GG, creating his own Governor General Awards, acting and posing like Commander-in-chief of the military, then that leader makes any election about himself because we know that he will do as he damn well pleases regardless of what anyone else says.

We call such leaders of other countries dictators.

A person so controlling and hungry for absolute power will lie, induce fear, muzzle all dissent and opposition, destroy the reputation of his opponents, wear cuddly sweaters and trade them in the blink of an eye for military gear to obtain and hold onto power.

Harper has made any upcoming election about himself.  His current ads reflect that.   

Constantly drawing attention to himself as the Big Daddy of...everything reflects that.

Re-naming the government of the people after himself insists on that.

We need to keep examining issues and criticizing them as needed.  But since harper has aggressively tried to convince us that everything is about him, of him, by him, then we need to examine the man, expose what concerns us about him, and attack in him what we believe threatens our democracy and rights.

By re-naming the government of Canada after himself, harper has placed himself in a position where he cannot distance himself for the lies, corruption, legal violations, and blunders of his members of Parliament.  He cannot distance himself from any unfavourable or unpopular fallout that occurs as a result of decision made by the current government.

Harper is the Word, and the Word is harper.

That is what must be attacked in the upcoming election.  Linked to issues, over and over, the man who would be absolute ruler must be aggressively attacked.

"I wish my country were a little better."

So do I.  So does any Canadian who sees: the growing divide between rich and poor; the undermining of what once were independent oversight agencies put in place to protect public interests; the biggest deficit our country has ever had; decline in education; aboriginal rights still sorely trounced; growing reports of police brutality; access to information increasingly denied; failure to address poverty; a Parliament that ignores policy for politics; a Parliament that engages in vicious, personal attacks rather than intelligent debate; a country being fed the propaganda of fear more and more; a paranoid government that constantly seeks ways to invade our privacy and limit our right to protest...

It's a good thing for a leader to point out his or her country could use some improvement, and quite another to bash it as harper did for the entertainment of American businessmen, stating as fact that "Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it," and that "(i)n terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half, don't feel particularly bad for many of these people. They don't feel bad about it themselves, as long as they're receiving generous social assistance and unemployment insurance." 

The title of this blog is a quote by Ignatieff, inserted into harper's latest attack ads in which stevie is trying to say that Ignatieff does not support his country.

The latest harper attack ads (but remember, these can't possibly be election ads because stevie says he's not in election mode) are nothing more than a worn out ensemble of the same old garbage harper has been saying for the past two years.

But lying sociopath that harper and his idiot servants are, they really missfire with this latest batch of immature nose-thumbing.

I want a leader who aspires to making our country better than it is.  I want a Prime Minister who can publicly acknowledge that not all is perfect and that change is needed, sometimes unpopular measures as well.

Most reasonalbe Canadians know that tax money is needed to provide services, security, government, education health care, and most know that if you cut taxes, some of those things will have to be cut.  Honestly addressing the reality of taxes despite how unpopular that topic may be is showing respect for voters.

The harper attacks ads tell us more about harper than about Ignatieff, Layton, or Duceppe.  Not only do they show stevie to be unimaginative and prone to adolescent taunts, they show he has little grasp of what a leader should be by attacking some of those very qualities in other leaders.

Something else I think really fails the CPC in these ads: the graphics.  Ignatieff actually looks pretty good - warm, friendly, human.  And the very bizarre choice of background, the hazy images heavily toned in red...I can only specualte as to why stevie approved that - supposed to represent hell-fire?  It sure isn't Liberal red, but maybe that's what they were aiming for.  It's more of a burgundy which is pleasant to the eye.

And predictably, not a thing from harper in any of the ads on what he will do to make Canada better.

A Harper decision, impetuous?

Hill Times, February 8, 2010 - Angelo Persichilli

Despite that the decision to prorogue Parliament was initially welcomed by most of the Conservative caucus members, there is now a lingering disappointment with the decision. Some are trying to blame the Prime Minister and the PMO. These feelings, gently, but openly emerged during the GTA and Quebec Conservatives' caucus meetings held in the last few weeks. 

Some Conservative MPs, even if not against the decision to prorogue Parliament, were not happy with the PMO's communications plan, or lack of one, to explain to Canadians the reasons for the prorogation. I'm sure that, by now, they have realized that the decision was not in the best interests of the government, and/or its execution was faulty.

Stop trying to cause a reversal of a Harper decision!

Still, they believe that it's too late to go back for two reasons. They don't want Canadians to think the Prime Minister is a weak leader who changes his views with the polls and the Throne Speech is not ready.

So instead Steve does something even dumber. The master strategist sets a fiendishly clever and subtle trap that Professor Moriarty would surely envy:  the clever part - he announces that he will cancel two weeks of parliamentary breaks this spring to try to make up for the six weeks of work he personally cost Parliament when he decided to prorogue it and hopes no one will ask him why the hell he doesn't just go back to work now?

And the brilliantly fiendish part, as delivered by the slavish Gordon O'Connor: "Quite frankly, we would be surprised if the opposition disagreed."

riiiiight....

In which abdominous Steve out-manoeuvres himself.

Still trying to outsmart me, aren't you, mule-skinner. You want me to think that you don't want me to go down there but the subtle truth is you really don't want me to go down there.

Not only did the opposition agree to cancel the breaks, they took the opportunity to say how they have been working even during prorogation, and to shake their heads and ask why the government didn't just go back to work now, if there is so much work to do.


But they don't know that I intend to attack them without mercy!

And it's back to the pathetic, unimaginative, vulgar, dishonest ten percenters misused as attack ads.  (h/t Impolitical)

Sure, Steve, you just keep heading down into that coulee.  Don't let anyone ever, ever cause a reversal of a Harper decision.