Mitch McConnell, meanwhile...

...channels his inner spirit animal for the American Fourth of July break, to beguile and charm fellow Republican senators into supporting his greatest-hits version of the the Trump Wealthcare Bill...

An End to Fear, Loathing, And All That...?

What a hell of an election campaign. Bearing down hard on the "hell".

Despite the fact that we semimythical coyotes watched our 6,000th birthday skitter away on the slipstream in the rearview awhile back, and thus have an, ummm, elastic take on time and reality, we're glad the rotten neverending thing is near barbecued. And if common wisdom says HarperCo counts on voter disengagement to haywire together an ill-earned plurality in parliament, most of the late signs look good for the rest of us.

But there's no denying that I'll feel more secure if we can slog ghrough Monday without those last poll figures upending, or rampant yet strangely untraceable dirty tricks arising, or in the aftermath, some evilly twisted, desperate attempt at a constitution- and/or convention-flouting end-run occurs. You know, to hang onto the keys to the PMO far longer than is seemly or legal, because Canada was supposed to be locked in as a Conservative satrap, and losing now would obviously mean The End Times.

Oh. And it'd be nice to see notarized witness statements attesting that a wood tent peg has been hammered through whatever passes for a certain rat-bastard heart. Without those, we who do not share whatever passes for Conservative "values" these days are gonna need a vintage red convertible trunkload of booze and random hallucinogenics -- including the ether -- to claw our way through the next four years. Because it has transpired that the soon-to-be-ex PM has an even more startlingly irresponsible take on, ummm, reality than I...

That I even consider any the above might come to pass disturbs me profoundly. Well, except for the private polling firm screwup scenario. Enough thinly-veiled partisan upstarts now exploit that loophole in the telecommunications legislation that the Coyotephone's call display started smokin' from overuse weeks ago. The pollsters can be wrong any way they like, as long as it doesn't get the Cons another majority. Then they can go back to the ring of hell (heh...) reserved especially for all telemarketers and phone solicitors.

I digress. It's an old habit. Cut me a little slack! At the moment, the sweet smell of blessed change seems to be starting to dispel the black, sulfurous reek of flopsweat, desperation and despair billowing from the Tory war room's smokestacks. And since I've become well-practiced during most of the last decade, I'm pretty sure I can hold my doggy nose long enough to suck in purer air sometime real soon.

Now, for crissakes: Dunno if all those big black flittering nightmares swirling round the Peace Tower are flying monkeys or just big freakin' bats -- but help me whack 'em away before I hafta scream...

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'...

Vote...

Parked as we are atop a few clawed mittsful of cute, furry food chains, us coyotes got no illusions that life is guaranteed to be fair. Or to make sense.

Still, with the ballot countdown now in the hours, I gotta raise a fuzzy eyebrow at Stephen Harper's last shot of gall and wormwood-twisty logic: commanding lefties to vote for him, or, ummmm, dangerous lefties will screw up the stable government that only he can give us.

From his gang's performance to date, I think it must be the kind of stable that needs regular shoveling out.

Con strategists, as in previous kicks at that increasingly dented can full of majority, were counting on their voter base being the only one motivated enough to show. Everybody else was supposed to feel so disheartened and discouraged by the gutter politics of late that they just blew off the balloting. If you didn't vote tomorrow, then they'd win.

That clever script's obviously had an emergency rewrite. And semimythical coyotes -- uncharacteristically -- have little to say about that, except this:

If Liberals vote Conservative to stave off the NDP... then the Toryists win.

Workout Wednesday

The Oranjestad Edition