The Unbearable Lie-ness of Being Stephen J. Harper

Let me start by digressing: a new low, even for me. My Uncle Donny was a flake, even by coyote standards. Hell, prairie chickens thought he was clueless, which you'd know to be pure insult if you'd ever seen one of their Mensa meetings.

Anyway, Uncle Donny used to obsess about climbing those skeletal old paddle blade windmills you once saw on most prairie farms. The kind that pumped water into cattle watering tanks and such, on any number of home quarters. He figured if he could get up high enough, being able to see further than anything else would be an advantage.

Dogs ain't really climbers. With supercanine effort, he could scrabble about a third of the way up the tower. Then his fear of heights would kick in, his brain would go "tilt", he'd have a vertigo attack and fall off. Usually on his head.

"There goes Don Coyote, tilting off windmills again," the prairie chickens would say.

Here (finally, you might say...) is the point: sometimes, despite Uncle Donny's kinda-concussed example, I too feel the urge to tilt off windmills. It's a coyote thing.  And careful readers of this space know I've tilted at The Right Honorable Prime Minister Stephen Joseph Harper since his first minority government.

We'd like to welcome a recent crapload of national pundits and columnists to this soiree. Because, hey, better late than never. Us semimythical coyotes have been well-placed to see plenty of cases of prairie populism. We expect to see more. They're all characterized by true believers, chugging deep from a heady brew of opportunism, mendacity and batshit-crazy. And us coyotes are of the considered opinion that of the lowdown, lyin' rattlesnakes that have led these movements, the PM is right, ummm, down there.

Now he, and this week's human furniture up at the PMO, wish us to think that a highly controlling PM was about the only person in the PMO who was not party to the strangely large and desperate scheme to pay off Senator-in-Disgrace Mike Duffy to, maybe, shut up and put up.

Since Duffy loudly and serially did not, everything about the PM's story has, ummm, evolved. Except for that one item about him having nothing to do with it. Kinda odd, for a guy obsessed with talking point discipline. And an unholy titanic sales job is going into making us buy this talking point above all others. I expect the calculation is, that the waxed, buffed, yet still-strangely-unattractive face of the Harper Government must cling to plausible deniability, no matter how implausible, for the party to survive.

For a man with Mr. Harper's record of high moral rectitude and avowed strong views on openness, transparency, accountability and responsibility in government, I'm sure such disappointing evidence of all this unethical lying and chicanery among his hand-picked political and administrative types would be so unbearable that he would quit politics in disgust. Except, ummm, oh, wait...!

At some point, I wonder if any of the cast (surely of thousands by now...) that have been forcibly frog-marched off the Plank, or the large stock of pliant, fresh noobs lining up for their turn,  might begin to think that the party would actually fare better without the guy who's doing the shoving.

Yeah, he brought 'em to the promised land. But they're now well past that particular hallelujah.  Are they not at least beginning to wonder if anybody will be left to be the party except him?  I mean, after he knifes 'em all in the back to save his face, his implausible deniability, and remaining shreds of his reputation?

From where I sit, about a third of the way up this old windmill, the guy looks willing to kill the party he leads, to keep keep his illusions of self-respect. Kinda like another lyin' rattlesnake oil purveyor who, a couple of decades back, totally trashed an earlier mark of Tories. Whom Mr. Harper, if memory serves, froze out when he started to smell like tainted goods. Yet again.

Against type, them true believers might want to take notes and learn.  In case.

Just sayin'...