Monday, December 29, 2014

Oh What A Lovely War

It's kind of nice to see some indications that the rest of the right is catching up to your humble correspondent when it comes to the culture wars, but I hope you'll forgive me if I don't get up and dance a jig.

You see, in order for there to be a culture war, there needs to be an actual war, not a ridiculously lopsided curb stomping wherein one side blitzes the other's blind spots repeatedly. We're getting our asses kicked on battlegrounds we don't even understand, places that don't even look like battlegrounds until the Twitter and Tumblr mobs sweep over them. Toy stores, video games, movie theatres.

Furthermore, for there to be a war, there needs to be objectives, strategy, and something resembling an aim. Instead, we have various rampaging mobs who seem to have no goal beyond acquiring power for its own sake. Strongmen spread out across the world stage. Disease flares, claims lives, and disappears. Your nation's capital, or the quiet café where you stop for a coffee, might be the next site of an armed attack by a lunatic given new purpose by the terrifying ISIS. Powerful celebrity rapists stalk their prey, elected members and political parties sell out wholesale for the merest promise of advancement, and various cartels use the seat of government as a launching point for their products. And what do the ordinary folks have going for them? Petitions? Online comment threads? Stupid blogs like the one you're currently reading?

I look into the face of John Maguire, and I see a man who traded a life of anonymity for a chance to speak on behalf of something horrible and organic and frightening.  Exactly what do we have that could compete with that?

OK, OK. Maybe I'm aiming too high. Maybe doing something about ISIS and mobs of social justice warriors is just not in the cards right now. Let's set the bar lower. Way lower. Let's see if the good people of Alberta will take this Wildrose defection lying down, like Jim Prentice and Danielle Smith think they will.

Surely that's not too much to ask. We're not talking about Ontario here, where the Premier's Sudbury byelection stunt barely rates a whisper. In Ontario (so I'm told) they just accept outrageous behavior from governments as a matter of course. Not like those rootin', tootin', pop-gun shootin' Albertans, who virgin-birthed the Reform Party and made Canada what it is today in spite of those Eastern bums, goddamnit. The PC Party of Alberta is going to get tossed out on its ear in the next election.....ummmm.....well, at the very least, the defectors will lose their seats....uhhhhh....well, at least some of them will lose their seats? Maybe? Please??

Nuh-uh. We know what's going to happen. Danielle Smith knows what's going to happen. A broad-based distraction campaign will be launched, reminding people that electing anyone other than the PC Party of Alberta will spell doom for all, and it's going to work, because it always works. Nobody knows that better than Danielle Smith, who could have been Premier if these same chickenhawks who are presently so mightily outraged about her departure hadn't bolted back into the PC Party of Alberta fold when she waffled on some fool's homophobic blogpost. So, given the opportunity by Jim Prentice to exact bloody revenge on the voters, she took it. It was low, and mean of her, but you would have all done the same, because nothing is more liberating than the chance to vent your cruelty on those who have wronged you.

Don't worry though, because I've got good news for those angry Albertans. The PC Party of Alberta is indeed going to be smashed to atoms, but it won't be in an election, and it won't be on the say so of any right-thinking Alberta folks. When the world powers are done battling for supremacy, the biggest and the meanest of them is going to set their sights on Canada after they've eaten everything else.

Right now, my money is on ISIS, because they, above all, do not engage in Prentice-esque and Wynn-ian maneuvers where they cover their aggression and viciousness with platitudes and talking points. You might have noticed how they encourage their followers to rape, to kill, to oppress and subjugate. If you rewatch Mr. Maguire's fun little video message it becomes quite clear that this is a man who has given rise to his worst impulses, and what the writer of this piece misses entirely is that whatever benefits there are to living in Canada, you can't get the complete package- rape, murder, subjugation and oppression- anywhere else but in the Islamic State, which might be more properly called the Land of Do As You Please.

By the way, the ISIS top brass also knows that what they're up to doesn't have anything to do with Islam anyway, so anyone who makes that point is, unfortunately, missing the real point as well.

The social justice warriors cannot bring themselves to this level of naked, open, blatant power-lust. They do not condemn the actions of ISIS because they know ISIS is crazier than they are. Instead they go after the low hanging fruit, like scientists who make questionable fashion choices. Hell, even hackers from North Korea are playing small ball compared to ISIS, who would just have slaughtered James Franco and Seth Rogen, and the entire staff of Sony, and then burnt down every movie theater they could find for the lulz.

And if we were even in the least way serious about fighting a "culture war," then we would also be out to prove that we were crazier than ISIS. There would be no question about the correctness of capitalism or Western culture. We would meet them with the purest form of imperialism and grind them and all their apologists to dust.

That will not happen, because we are a polite society who apologizes for wrongs before repeating them.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

O Come All Ye Faithful

Queen Wynne-ceslas looked out after feasting on Stephen Harper for the past couple of weeks and realized that it's been a while since she utterly humiliated the Dippers, so she reached out to the NDP MP for Sudbury and, in a Christmas miracle, turned him into an instant Liberal.

Cue righteously indignated oranginas screaming about the "allure of power" while everyone else rolled their eyes. We were treated to the spectacle of the famously useless lump of an MPP Gilles Bisson, the very textbook definition of an NDP opposition lifer, a man so utterly addicted to taxpayer funded perks and so committed to keeping his constituents on the merry-go-round that the Liberals and the PC's once teamed up around election time to try and get him fired, going off about "cynical politics". The man's tongue should have voted for an immediate strike action against his brain after that one and hit the picket line, but principles are hard to come by these days, even for usually inanimate body parts. Irene Mathyssen, whose party once forced her to stifle her objection to women supposedly being objectified in the House, still found it possible to wag her finger about Wynne's government not being progressive.

As if every one of these gravy boats, these walking, talking monuments to low expectations who will forever remember that glorious day in 2011 when they managed to not come in third, wouldn't dash across the floor as soon as a real politician gave them a call. Before I believed that this Christmas pantomime had anything to do with principles, I'd guess they were mad that Wynne hasn't ever reached out to them to run as Liberals.

On the very same day, so that we conservatives didn't get too high and mighty, came the news that after kicking and screaming for years about deficits and other stuff nobody cares about, the Wildrose Alliance has finally decided to pack it in and rejoin the PC Party of Alberta so they can go right back to blowing money as fast as humanly possible. I can't really blame Danielle Smith, though, because if I went out on a limb against a visibly corrupt government in 2012 and then I got left standing by a bunch of so-called true blue Albertans who see fit to lecture the rest of the country on fiscal management and then bolt back to safety at the first sign of trouble, I'd also be willing to toss up two middle fingers and leave them without a voice in government.

Meanwhile back at the Hall of Justice, the Conservative Party of Canada is no doubt baffled by Justin Trudeau's unwillingness to die despite being declared dead by them for the 164th time. I had more than one smug staffer get in my face over the past couple of months for not being sufficiently over Justin. And I have to admit- I really thought this Pacetti/Andrews harassment mess was the final straw, and that I was wrong. I really thought that the Liberal faithful would have seen Justin putting two of his own down like dogs without even giving a moment's consideration to the benefit of the doubt (which is after all their legal right no matter what kind of hateful, disgusting human beings they might be IRL) and realized that Justin dices with their fates the way the gods do with mortals. He actually would suspend the right of due process, without waiting for the facts, because historically people haven't believed rape victims.

(The really sick thing is,  Liberals have always been fine with due process going out the window so long as that only applied to conservatives, but now that they might suffer the same consequences, well...that took some getting over.)

And, to bring it back full circle, we have Kathleen Wynne, leading the entire province around by its collective nose. We just had a damning Auditor General's report that she handwaved by picking another fight with Stephen Harper. We have a PCPO leadership race that she just dropped a bomb on by forcing the entire party to worry about a byelection. (And we'll get to that leadership race very, very soon.) Hell, this rope-a-Dipper-dope ploy she's pulled isn't even new- she did the same thing in the London West by-election last year, but now since Andrea Horwath blew her shot at the big time and alienated Big Labour, she might actually get away with it. Unless the NDP nominate a candidate that is 100% union tested and approved and promise never ever to mention the word "taxpayer" again, they might be in a leadership race of their own come March!

How does she do it? She knows that deep down, everyone wants to be a Liberal and vote Liberal, and that everyone who isn't a Liberal has a really tough time of it trying to justify themselves to voters who get really mad at the way things are but will do anything to avoid an actual change. Just like the song says:

Therefore, Christian men, be sure
Wealth or rank possessing
Ye who now will bless the poor
Shall yourselves find blessing.

Merry Christmas!