Monday, May 30, 2011

Afghanistan Mission - A "Great Success"

We have to look at this mission
as a Great Success
At least that's how Furious Leader wants us to see the hapless campaign in Afghanistan.   Our Ruler showed up in Kandahar with Mutt MacKay at his side to pronounce Canada's mission to Afghanistan a "great success."  Or did he?

Actually our Ruler said that we "have to look at" the mission as a great success.  Of course a fundamentalist lunatic can see anything any way he imagines it.  That sort of intellectual sleight of hand is second nature in the faith-based community.  To them, reality is anything you say it is.

As Murray Dobbin recently pointed out in The Tyee, Harperland is all about "irrational reality."

It shows up everywhere:


Over a dozen new crime bills and billions on prisons when the science tells him crime is on a steady downward trend.

A determination to close Insite, Vancouver's safe injection site, despite several studies that show it saves lives and gets people into treatment (and off heroin).

An obsession with ending the long-gun registry, despite its constant use by (and support from) every police force in the country.


Massive cuts to science funding agencies, which promoted scores of critical studies and helped keep Canada in the forefront of several disciplines.

 A foreign policy driven not by a rational determination of Canada's interests, but by a kind of visceral and absolute dedication to the interests of another country, Israel. 

...Dismissive to the point of contempt, Harper gives the impression that the facts are little more than an irrelevant annoyance -- just another opposition tactic aimed at interfering with his agenda.
 
Harper sees himself as one of history's actors -- creating a new reality vis-à-vis crime by passing a raft of new laws that will result in a huge increase in incarceration rates, regardless of the fact that incarceration does not reduce crime, that crime rates are falling, that with a $50 billion dollar deficit we cannot afford to build new prisons, and the fact that crime experts from police to academics decry the policy direction. 

5 comments:

thwap said...

Let him give free reign to his delusions and his stupidity.

It's not like we have any choice in the matter.

sharonapple88 said...

It's not like we have any choice in the matter.

Well, we had one, but that was almost a month ago. :P

It's important though to call Harper up on some of this because his delusions can become our delusions in time.

sharonapple88 said...

The last part -- watch the Tea Party in the US and how they parrot Conservative talking points at times.

susansmith said...

The choice a month ago sharonapple88 is that the Liberals brought Canadians into Afghanistan, and con't to agree to extend the mission, so instead of Harper saying this is "success" we would have Iggy saying this is "success". Same old, same old - out of Afghanistan!

Beijing York said...

What a mess. F*ck all the parties.

Very few politicians stood up for what I believe in for the last decade. Self-preservation was far more important than this wholesale massive shift to the right and degradation of everything we used to value.