2013-05-30

Coyote's Clueless Question Period

It's been a rich week in this town. Too rich.

The last couple of days, parliament's opposition leader, Thomas Mulcair, patiently, methodically dismantled Prime Minister Stephen Harper's tin plated ass, kicked it around the (Centre) block and handed it back to him so dented that it's unlikely it'll ever fit right again, even after his political handlers rivet it back on.

Mulcair's cross-examination was a text book classic. No word was wasted.

The PM mimed dismissiveness and tried to channel his habitual imperial contempt for parliament. The best he could do was cling grimly to a pre-scripted talking point that disavowed all knowledge of anything guilty-looking. He also projected one of the sweatiest auras since Nixon in the 1960 US presidential debate.

Mulcair did a full hatchet job with scalpel cuts, and the PM knew it. A CBC poll showed just five percent of responses thought Harper was believable. Ninety-five percent didn't. No fence-sitters.

The exercise showed - again - the real limits under pressure of the ReformaTories' one-dimensional narrative scripting. Pierre Poilievre, for one, now knows all about that. Doubtful he'll take the lesson, though. I digress.

Down the hall, Senate leader and long time Tory footsoldier lickspittle Marjory LeBreton mounted a sideshow calculated to sate the mob by hitting what looked like the right notes.  While strenuously armwaving and fingerpointing away from the prime minister's office and by implication, a notoriously control-freakazoid PM. She tossed mud at journalists that won't buy her party's Kool-Aid, then kicked a few senators, notably Cons Duffy and Wallin, further under the bus.

In a sideshow to the sideshow, newly minted ReformaTory senator (and former Ottawa police chief) Vern White chose that moment to declare himself appalled in a boy scout kinda way, and spread the joy by pointing further digits at Liberal senator Pana Merchant and her husband, Tony, whose iffy-looking ownership of offshore accounts was leaked to media last month.

I don't even have time to get into a recent Federal Court judgement that illegal robocalls relied on the Conservative Party's vaunted CIMS database. His Honour, a stickler for evidence, didn't say outright that the Cons did it, but gently led one to ask who, exactly, would have keys to a top-secret thingy that's guarded like a central gold reposiTory - on account of they use it to win elections. One way or another.

See, I'm just a dumb coyote, but the aforementioned armwaving and fingerpointing, to my jaundiced yellow eye, might be calculated to misdirect one's gaze away from the man behind the curtain, ummm, all the smoke from all the smoking guns now billowing exuberantly out from beneath the locked door of the Prime Minister's Office.

It's the only thing on this accumulating trash heap that you should watch. Soon, somebody will have to crack it to clear their streaming eyes and lungs. Watch that door.  Because nameless people would like you to be looking somewhere else, at some (any!) other distraction, when it cracks. . .


No comments: