American friends might not know that we still have Mini-George-Bush as our Prime Minister – a fossil of a guy with a once neo-con underpinning. Although his free market ideals were burned a long time ago with varying disasterous market interventions: if you want someone to fuck up government, install a leader who doesn’t believe good government is possible. You’ll get all sorts of random jackassery from them.

Anyway, now, because we’re in hot water due to mistreatment of Afghan prisoners, with Peter McKay cawing in Parliment that ‘our soldiers would never never never transfer prisoners to torture and how can anyone think that they would? Such a thought is disgusting!’, Mr. Harper and his colleagues have decided that the best possible way to deal with their job is simply stay away from it all together. Go home, crawl under the covers, and not come out ’til March.

(( I must say that, tho’ I do, in fact, think most soldiers are out there doing the best and most humane job they can, Peter McKay’s crowing is either naive or blinded: war is war. People are shitty in war, because they spend a lot of time watching friends and enemies alike get their heads splattered in the most disturbing and heartbreaking ways. Anyone who doesn’t know that cruelty and dehumanization is a likely outcome for some in the theatre of war is a person not bright and/or empathetic and/or informed enough to be credible. By denying anything could ever happen – because our troops are all Superhumans? – he essentially destroys his own credibility to make an argument that in THIS situation, nothing untoward was going on. ))

‘Cept, by March, Flaherty the finance guy is going to have to deal with CMHC’s subprime mortgage problem, and interest rates will be going up; there’ll likely be no substantial change in suspicions re: Afghan detainees, even if it drops in importance, but there will be more issues in the Canadian economy.

Nice that Harper’s deciding to be out of work in solidarity with all the Canadians who are similarly without work to go to. Too bad he’s still drawing a paycheque. I think he’ll find his position problematic.

Beautifully done... Had to share.