Steve Jong-un, Canada's Closet Croucher

I'll bet if Steve Harper and Kim Jong-un were marooned on an island together for a few weeks they would discover they had more in common than they might have imagined.

Both are incredibly autocratic, skilled practitioners of one-man rule.  Both share the same approach to governance; secrecy and deceit.  Both harness the power of the state to control dissent and monitor their critics.  Both unhesitatingly throw underlings beneath any available bus as a diversion to allow them to distance themselves from scandal and failure although, as far as is known, Steve doesn't get to send his to the firing squad, at least not yet.  Both depend on a highly-confused and easily misled population.  Neither has much use for democracy or free and fair elections.  The list goes on.

I expect if Kim Jong-un had been in the caucus room with Steve and his Conservative MPs when gunfire broke out you would have needed a stop watch to tell whether Harper or Kim made it to the closet first.

By the way, I touched a nerve with my old-time Tory buddies, both of them, when I told them that I thought Harper diving for cover in the closet was rank cowardice.  Oooh, they don't like that.

One compared it to 9/11 when the CIA had to hustle a "reluctant" Dick Cheney away from the White House.  The Dickster didn't want to abandon his post but he had to do as security demanded.  Harper was thus only following orders.

I pointed out that the United States has a constitutional order of succession and it also has something else - the world's largest nuclear strike force that is commanded by the executive branch.  Steve, by contrast, is the constitutional commander of his ensuite washroom.

My impression is that this is a story they would like long forgotten before Canadians go to the polls and any mention that might refresh memories is decidedly unwelcome.