The closer Shifty Steve Harper gets to the political gallows, the better, the richer and more fulsome his memory becomes. It all flows out in a progression of fables, each more obviously contrived than the last.
Fable One
When the Wright-Duffy scandal unexpectedly broke in the media, Steve said his prize assets - his top drawer chief of staff, Nigel Wright - had merely done the Wright thing in getting his "most valuable" senator, Mike Duffy, the funds to make good his debt to the Senate and Canadian taxpayers.
That's Steve getting caught off-balance, taken by surprise before he can conjure up a suitable fantasy that his base, the faithful Conservative gullibillies will swallow.
Fable Two
A few days after exonerating Nigel Wright, Shifty Steve said the guy had to go (as though that was Steve's decision - laugh, giggle). But Shifty assured Parliament and the Canadian people that Wright acted alone and that nobody else in the top tiers of his prime minister's office who could have, should have and would have tipped him off knew anything about Wright-Duffy. They didn't know so how could he, Shifty Steve?
Shifty was quick to add that the transaction between Wright and Duffy was unacceptable or worse and had he any inkling of it, he would have reared up on his hind legs in righteous indignation and put an immediate end to it.
Fable Three
As the scandal refused to just go away and continued to close on him, Shifty recanted Fable Two and admitted that Wright-Duffy wasn't quite the secret he had said a few months earlier. Shifty said there were a few people inside the PMO who knew of it but just not him.
Wait a minute, when Shifty rolled out Fable Two, he insisted that no one inside the PMO new anything about Wright-Duffy. No one as in no one, nobody, no staffer. It was all Wright's doing and he kept it secret. How could he make that claim unless he got all his little minions together and asked them? Did he not ask them or did they just lie their asses off to the nation's ultimate control freak? Of course there's a third possibility. Shifty Steve may have been lying through his teeth from the get go and is still telling whatever lie seems necessary to fit the constantly emerging facts and yet still prevent the scandal from morphing into Wright-Duffy-Harper.
At times like this it can be very helpful to look at how a person has behaved in the past. Hmm, let me see, let me see. Oh, I know, what about that guy, Bruce Carson? Yes, Bruce Carson, the disbarred lawyer, convicted fraudster, ex-jailbird that Shifty personally admitted to the top tier of his prime minister's office. The old geezer with the 22-year old 'former' escort girlfriend. Shifty's most valuable fixer.
Ah, yes. Bruce Carson. The guy who longtime Tory operative, then RCMP commish, Bubbles Elliott, swept through the security vetting despite five fraud convictions, disbarment, jail time and two bankruptcies - that Bruce Carson.
As your humble scribe wrote in April, 2011:
Harper says he didn't know, he was let down, Privy Council procedures failed. Maybe that sort of bullshit is palatable in Red Deer or Moose Jaw but don't try to peddle it in Ottawa. One of my Tory friends volunteered that there were repeated warnings given to Harper's staff. Apparently everybody failed, everybody that is except Harper.
Does this sound familiar? Discern any patterns yet? This is Bruce Carson, Fable One. Blame unnamed staffers and plead complete and total ignorance. Claim that if you had only known, none of this ever would have happened. You would have seen to that. Just add water, stir, and wait for the scandal to magically disappear.
But it was in the Bruce Carson affair, perhaps we should call it Carson-Harper, that we saw how effortlessly Shifty moved on to Fable Two when his first pack of lies wasn't quite enough to kill off the scandal. Within the month, Shifty's Fable One denial ran up on the rocks of reality and that's when Shifty Steve transitioned to Fable Two mode.
Suddenly Shifty came back with a straight face and said, well okay, he knew about some of Carson's criminal record, the fraud, the disbarment, the misappropriation, the jail time but he thought a stretch inside the Harper PMO would rehabilitate old Bruce. Yeah, right. Sending Carson to the PMO for rehab is sort of like sending a wayward girl to a brothel to mend her ways.
It was an audacious, bald-faced lie - and yet it worked. The prime ministerial lap dogs, a.k.a. the parliamentary press gallery, went back to their labours of rewriting government press releases, Carson hightailed it to Calgary and the whole thing died just like the stench eventually departs the dung heap. Shifty Steve didn't even have to make a ritual sacrifice of his top aides.
It must be pretty obvious that our prime minister is an inveterate liar who will say whatever he thinks he must to get himself out of a jam, tailoring his lies to conform to changing facts on the ground, confident that the media scribes are just too cowed to ever call "bullshit" on him. It's something of an artform for Shifty Steve. Wright-Duffy-Harper is an obvious carbon copy of Carson-Harper, only with one or two extra chapters.
11 comments:
Harper was Policy Chief for his, Northern Foundation of 1989. Harper even had the gall to, hire Wolfgang Droege and his Heritage Front as, security for Preston Manning.
Neo-Nazis donated to Harper's Alliance.
July 18/2002
www.stormfront.ca
Every Dictator and control freak through the ages, had their degenerates to do their dirty work for them. Harper needs the criminal element, to do his dirty work for him too. Harper's list of degenerates is as long as his arm.
Mulcair has tripped Harper up in Parliament, many times. Even scores of us have been watching Parliament. We have heard to our amazement, Harper has changed his stories as well. Harper has contradicted himself so much, he doesn't remember the first lie he told.
Harper's henchmen are, useless, spineless, gutless wonders. Shame on them.
MoS:
For me it was the way he handled the Grewal recordings back in 2005 that showed just how blatantly and completely he lies to suit his current needs (I won't rehash all the specifics right now, but if you want a fresh reminder my tomes on it are still at Saundrie, I never took my old blog down). It was why I spent a couple of years afterwards constantly making a stink about it long after everyone had left it behind, because it showed just how far Harper would go in his pursuit of power, and that if he would be this brazen about it while LOO, as PM he would be far worse given the powers and tools that come with that office. Carson was another good example of it, and like you I have been very frustrated with how our national political media develops these long term memory impairments when it comes to pointing out the ever changing stories Harper tells. What is worse is that these aren't minor fibs, no these are massive major out and out lies that carry serious consequences within them to other people who end up being directly harmed by them Before Grewal I thought Harper was an honest ideologue, still someone to stop and to fear, but at least with the courage of his convictions. Grewal proved to me that has not the case, and his record of dishonesty has only grown exactly as I said back then it would until we see what we see today.
Harper has shown himself to be the greatest fabulist of out political times. I never saw him as a great political strategist, although I've given him strong marks as a tactician, but his greatest strength has come mainly from breaching conventions other politicians and leaders would not, a more truly dishonourable party leader and PM I do not believe this nation has ever seen. Indeed, it is because so many people in this nation were used to even our politicians having that certain basic decency even within their corruption that they have given Harper so much benefit of the doubt/room to move with these deceptions, but as with all things an end comes, and it is hopefully looking like this business with Wright, Duffy, and the Senate may finally be that tipping point.
I freaked out on Grewal because it showed something we had never seen before, a party leader willing to lie about criminal allegations against a sitting government's ministers and by association Prime Minister, and when the truth came out about the edits he ran away from his absolute conformation of the authenticity and completeness of the recordings to saying it was all a media conspiracy and Liberal War Room trick (while still not answering who did the actual edits that were so obvious people caught them the first time they were played to the public, while during three weeks in his office supposedly authenticating them no one supposedly noticed, and that the chain of evidence went from a CPC MP to the CPC LOO to the public release of the edited material). So it is hardly a surprise that having gotten away with that sequence of lies and the many others that followed including the ones you refer to regarding Carson that he believes he can lie with impunity even on matters this serious, this obvious, and this blatant. Until the national political media starts really holding him to account and making sure the citizenry has a means of seeing for themselves just how massively this man lies he will likely still get away with it. Although, I do think there was some subtle erosion effect happening over the past few years, and this Duffy/Wright wave may be the one that comes in to sweep away the overhang that erosion created on Harper's credibility and trustworthiness. Time will tell.
I remember Grewal quite well, Scotian. I chose Carson because that was clear corruption right inside the PMO.
To me, Carson was Harper's last 'get out of jail free' card for the PMO. After that he had to wear whatever came out of his office. Yet the parallels between Carson and Wright-Duffy are eerie.
Let us not forget the disgrace of the Cadman bribe, offered and refused. But Steve isn't just shifty, he is greasy and so far this has helped him slide away from his sins.
I wonder how much Chuck's widow demanded to sell her soul......IIRC she too was offended in the beginning.
I suspect that perhaps the Grewal affair is the same thing....my bad. I forgot who actually went to Chuck Cadman and proffered the offer and mainly remember hearing the recording and still admire the integrity of the former patriarch of the Cadman family.
But Slimy Steve is so successful at convincing barely enough Canadians that honour doesn't matter and I heartily agree with the statement from Scotian that:
" his greatest strength has come mainly from breaching conventions other politicians and leaders would not, a more truly dishonourable party leader and PM I do not believe this nation has ever seen. "
The manner in which he was successful in painting the possibility of a coalition virtually a treasonous attempt at a non-military coup, when he had been willing to engage with even the Bloc to do the same thing previously, I must admit gobsmacked me bigtime. I finally came to the conclusion that even though I was educated in the U.S (mostly) I was more knowledgeable about the nature of Canadian or Parliamentary government than at least those sad excuses for Canadians who believe Slimy Steve is the greatest P.M. post WWII if not ever!
MoS:
Fair enough, and I see your point in regards to its illustrating clear corruption within Harper's PMO being the better comparison to what we currently have before us. My point on Grewal is more that it was the first time Harper showed just how far into deception he was willing to go, spin and rhetoric is one thing, but to level criminal allegations against Ministers and a Prime Minister, vouch for the evidence, have that evidence not just be shown to have been tampered with but very clumsily tampered with to create a basis for that accusation and so incredibly obvious to the naked ear at that, a chain of custody that proves beyond any doubt the editing was done by someone within the CPC, and then totally deny any of it was true once the unedited version proves it was a manufactured scandal/accusation by his political enemies in the LibWar Room and that all pervasive media conspiracy against him and Conservatives is something quite else again. For me it showed something within Harper I had not seen prior to that point, and frankly it terrified me to see it at all.
I expect politicians and party leaders to be shall we say creative at times with the truth/reality, it comes with the job. However, there is a large and fundamental difference between spin/rhetoric and what Harper does. Indeed, I mentioned to my wife earlier today as we watched CTV's Question Period that in terms of corruption from within a PMO the difference between Harper and Mulroney was like the difference in light from a candle to a lighthouse. Worse, I wasn't even slightly joking. As bad as the access corruption was back in his day it so pales by comparison to what Harper has been doing since he entered the PMO is so much worse than any prior PMs (possibly even all his predecessors combined).
so true about the level of corruption Harper engages in. It drives me insane that anyone can believe he is a good PM...I mean on what level. The guy campaigned on law and order( and the economy of course whilst spending us into the poorhouse)...and scoffed at ordinary canadians caring about all the legal mumbojumbo and parlilamentary process( his proroguing of parliament among other miniscandals).
He then has set about breaking all the rules and quite a few laws...while still calling his criminal activities a distraction. I mean it was astonishing to watch him during the debates and since his majority, the scandals keep piling up.
Sociopathic in his lies and his deceit. I guess he is a good PM in that he convinced many people to vote for him( even though he has spent more then most PMs and seems hellbent on showing how laws and rules dont apply to him)...but I am so hoping his house of cards are ready to collapse. Too bad the media didnt do a better job over the years in reminding the public of all the scandalous behaviour.
Explain LOO and IIRC to me and all others who are not in the abreviation loop.
I think I get it, Steve, LOO - leader of the official opposition. IIRC - no help on tht one.
IIRC = If I Recall Correctly
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