The Nigel Wright Stuff

Desperate to leverage the First World War centenary...

...into a political poll bump as a world of Senate unpleasantness and assorted ideological policy failures threatened to come home to roost in his personal office chair, Steverino ordered his fibreglas helmet maker, ummm, hairstylist, to get him rockin' The Full Robert Borden for the big commemoration ceremony.

Then someone told him that Sir Robert had been prime minister at the head of a Union government during the war, and he felt like a very, very foolish Little Trained Economist...

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'...

Harper to Con-Vention: "Hey, come into the Kool-Aid Jacuzzi...!"

This weekend, ReformaTory faithful will finally gather in the cold light of post-Hallowe'en Calgary to convene triumphantly eat humble pie and consider their party's dubious future.

They might wonder, with cause, if the floods of biblical proportion (heh) that scrammed the original convention back in May were a dark portent. They might wonder, with cause, whether their god-like leader is actually a tin idol trying to smudge out a long series of sizable fibs with the kind of linguistic technicalities that allow him to think to his own self that he's still telling something resembling the truth. They might wonder, with cause, why, the tighter the PM squeezes down on message control the more crap squirts out between his fingers. They might wonder, with cause, why the hell the wheels are grinding off of their deadly bus. They might wonder, with cause, whether the foundation of their strong stable Conservative majority, ummm, moral certitudes, is become purest runny Jello.

They might. Some of the more prominent rats in and around the old blue machine are blinking nervously in the harsh glare of unaccustomed daylight. But they have not quite yet broken into full disorderly retreat. I digress. Slightly.

So it seems more likely that most of The Base may grudgingly accept their leaders' slightly sweaty and trembling invitation to ignore that distracting senate scandal (among myriad others...) and take a flying leap long, warm bubbly soak in the party's patented Kool-Aid Jacuzzi. And feel free to drink a little of it. Actually a lot.

It may help those base delegates to ignore the even baser clouds of flying monkeys in short pants PMO kids. who will be frantically trying to winch together both their crumpled leader's mojo and the tattered curtain that they would really, really like to be shrouding the unpleasantness of Duffster*uck.

It might work. . . because, you know, those amoral, lying lefties ain't fit to run the country.

On the other hand, they might just be left with a bad aftertaste, and the nagging suspicion that 'somebody' very senior in the Prime Minister's Office has been peeing copiously into the hot tub, all along. . .

They might.

Burlesque, yes. Tawdry, no.

Probably more than he can chew: Coyote's photo (yes, he has opposable paw digits) of Spartacat was taken, appropriately enough, at a Phoenix Coyotes game

Photo: Coyote

Remember, keep your brush on the ice

City hockey fans have yet to recover from the whooping that Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins inflicted on the Ottawa Senators in the playoffs last spring.

Now we hear that Sid the Kid recently took time out from being a shinny phenom to create some art for a charity auction to benefit people stricken with Parkinson's disease.

Is there nothing those penguins can't do? Apparently not.

Behold Patrick, flightless bird, artist, philanthropist. The little critter's work will be part of next Tuesday's Art by Animals auction sponsored by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Maybe the on-ice Penguins can put the NHL Senators to shame. But charity or no, we can't let real penguins show up our genuine senators.

Colin Kenny, surely you have some etchings that could fetch a few bucks on eBay for a good cause?