Postcards of the Hanging

Referendums for Me, but Not for Thee!

2016-06-05T14:24:00.000-04:00

Editor's Note: It's been a really long time since I've written here. I figure that I'll give this another shot, but there's no guarantee that I'm going to sustain it. I stopped blogging a few years ago because I got incredibly tired of saying the same ten things over and over again, which hasn't changed. Let's see how this works on a day-to-day basis, okay? Baby steps.

This is an expanded version of a Facebook post from this morning. My apologies in advance to my Facebook friends who are being subjected to my animal ravings twice.

Since I last spoke to you teenagers, Canada has elected a new Liberal government headed by a semi-retarded child-king, but boy does he have pretty hair! The new government is moving forward with its idiot promise to reform Canada's electoral system. Having said that, they made no secret of their desire to do this, but the opposition ~~Harper~~ Conservative Party and its mouthbreathing partisans have reverted from their previous stance of "elections matter" to advocating for a binding referendum, mostly because your perspective tends to change when an entire country violently repudiates you.

Rex Murphy made the hackish case for a referendum in this morning's National Post.

For the record, I see no compelling reason to move away from First Past the Post. It's a system that has served this country since its founding. Furthermore, it's a dumb move for the Liberals politically. They've finally, finally managed to marginalize the NDP, both federally and in Ontario, and changing the electoral system could potentially throw that advantage away. After all, there is a reason that the New Democrats have been hungering for this for years.

Having said that, "democracy" based arguments in favor of a referendum are, at best, wrong and, at worst, dishonest. We don't live in a democracy, we live under a parliamentary system of representative government. The Charter itself wasn't enshrined as the result of a referendum. Both the Chretien Liberals and the Harper Conservatives have enacted, or tried to enact, constitutional reforms outside the existing amending formula - through the legislative process - without a referendum. Canada has been taken to war three times since 1982 without a referendum.

The Conservatives have joined the Liberals in saying that a majority victory in a referendum isn't sufficient for Quebec secession, so their commitment to "democracy" is deeply suspect. Indeed, during the last election campaign Harper (who won the support of 39.62% of 61.1% of the electorate in 2011) openly mocked the idea that "50% + 1" was a legitimate way to achieve Quebec independence. Actually, it's more insidious than that. Both Chretien and Harper declared that 50% + 1 wasn't enough for Ottawa to even negotiate the terms of separation.

To this day, I'm not aware of any elected Tory who has backed away from supporting the Clarity Act, which also wasn't subject to a referendum. To their minds, fundamentally transforming the threshold of the democratic will of a single province in the vaguest way possible is okay, absent a popular vote, but an overall change to the way federal elections are held isn't.

It's extremely difficult to debate people who can't or won't hold a consistent position. Why, if I was a more cynical man, I'd think that they planned it this way.

The fact is that electoral reform was a part of the Liberal platform, and the Liberals won the last election. Period. if the country didn't understand the ramifications of that, it certainly isn't Trudeau's fault. But it's disingenuous to suggest that voters didn't understand an election platform, but will understand a referendum question. I just don't see how "This will be the last election under the current system" can be misinterpreted by anyone with even a passing familiarity with the English language. If you weren't paying attention, or thought the Liberals were kidding; that's your problem, not the government's.

I would take Conservative arguments on this a lot more seriously if they themselves didn't use ranked balloting for their leadership conventions, a reform that was unilaterally implemented by their national executive and without a vote of their entire membership. In fact, during their decade in power, the Conservative government wasn't exactly famous for asking its own caucus for their opinion on fundamental reforms, let alone the country. Not once between 2006 and 2015 did a single member of the current Conservative caucus propose a referendum on anything, despite their stated desire to fundamentally change the country.

The Harper Party used its majority to force through a redefinition citizenship with C-24. and political free speech and the utility of the constitution itself in allowing the government to violate it without consequence in C-51. They tried and failed to reorganize the Senate, a constitutional body, before filling it with thieves, perverts and cokeheads. On none of these things did they seek the consent of the governed, preferring instead to say "We won. Fuck off." Hilariously, this attitude was later presented as evidence that they were against "the elites." And they'd be right, if "the elites" is broadly defined as "everybody who isn't in the Conservative caucus."

The Conservative interim leader, Rona Ambrose, won her position through the confidence of a few dozen people in the party's parliamentary caucus, which entitles her to live in a taxpayer-funded mansion without public consultation. She didn't even meet the minimal standard of winning the support of the less than one percent of the country that are Conservative Party members in a public vote, but she's demanding referendums.

The easiest way to explain the Tory position is that they want 50% plus one of the population to say that 39% of the of the vote is sufficient to hold almost unlimited power, unless you're a Quebec sovereigntist, in which case you have to get some unknown but dramatically higher margin of victory. But that only applies when the Conservative Party isn't in power. When they are, fuck you. They won.

Therefore, the nicest thing I can say about them is that they're hypocrites and shouldn't be taken seriously.

(Another Editor's Note: In this post, I linked to a National Post article, which means that they can see what I wrote here. Since Postmedia has what I understand to be a long and storied history of stealing blog posts and reprinting them as editorials without permission or remuneration, my way of preventing that has been through the liberal use of profanity. Therefore; shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits! )

Other Children's Blood, or "Why Dan Rather is Right"

2014-08-24T15:07:00.000-04:00

For almost all of my life, I've rather strenuously avoided taking Dan Rather's side on anything. Indeed, I can't see how the man made a career for himself other than making strange election night analogies that you'd have to be heavily medicated to even begin to understand.

Unlike most conservatives, I believe that bitching about vast, left-wing media conspiracies is mostly horseshit. And even if they were true, they were singularly ineffective. The media certainly didn't stop Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan from racking up spectacular victories. It was only when Republicans went further to the right than the traffic would bear that public opinion started to align with media opinion. Of course, conservatives will never admit that because we've become every bit as petulant and self-pitying as liberals used to be.

Having said that, there's little doubt that Dan Rather, especially in his later years, has become at least as much of a liberal activist as a journalist. Indeed, it was his promotion of manufactured evidence against George W. Bush that effectively ended his career.

But it's hard to shit-talk a guy when he's obviously right.

“All of these people on television, some of whom I have enormous respect for, it unsettles me to hear them say, listen, we the United States have to ‘do something’ in Ukraine, we have to ‘do something’ in Syria, we have to ‘do something’ in the waters around China, we have to ‘do something’ in Iraq, we have to ‘do something’ about ISIS. What they’re talking about are combat operations.

“My first question to anyone who’s on television saying ‘We have to get tough, we have to put boots on the ground, we have to go to war in one of these places’ is: I will hear you out if you tell me you are prepared to send your son, your daughter, your grandson, your granddaughter to that war for which you are beating the drums. If you aren’t I have no patience with you, and don’t even talk to me.”

It's obvious that no one has learned anything from the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Weinberger and Powell doctrines are seemingly long forgotten.

The warmongers in both parties now have ambitions far exceeding the current capability of the United States to achieve. If you take the statements of this element together, you very quickly come to realize that they advocate the forcible pacification of an area that extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the Hindu Kush Mountains, while also containing imperial ambitions up through former Soviet Central Asia to the Baltics and the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan.

In case you don't have a world map handy , I provided one above. You'd do well to take a look at the kind of territory that we're talking about here.

Here's the Middle East and South Asia.

That's an area roughly the size of what was liberated in Europe from the Nazis, but with two important exceptions;

1) That land mass isn't being invaded by foreign occupiers.

Unlike the Nazi invasions, in the Middle East and South Asia, these are people fighting over territory caused by disintegrating post-colonial borders. They are also mostly sectarian conflicts, none of which serve the West's long-term strategic interests. If the Sunnis win, there will likely be the establishment of a Caliphate to resist a resurgent Shiia nation. If the Shiia win, they will almost certainly be puppets of Tehran.

2) No one is willing to admit what it will take to "win."

Liberating Europe from Hitler required over 16 million (that's 16,000,000) on the Western Front alone. The war in the east was larger - and more viscous - by several degrees of magnitude. Upwards of 25 million Soviet civilians died in that conflict, not counting KIA, MIA or prisoners of war (which were the second largest group to die in the Holocaust) and German casualties.

ISIS isn't just a "terrorist group." It has prove itself as a very, very capable combat force against George Bush's Super Iraqi Army and the Kurdish Peshmurga. They've captured, held and governed significant chunks of territory in two countries, which is unheard of since the Vietnam War. And if the United States was so awesome at destroying Abu Zarquai's al-Qaeda in Iraq - with a 130,000 troop ground surge, ISIS wouldn't exist today.

On top of that, you have calls to "contain" or "take out" Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban (both in Afghanistan and Pakistan - sometimes including even the ISI) and the entire Iranian and Syrian governments and armed forces.

That's something of a scale that the Pentagon has never contemplated by conventional means before, which is why the MADD doctrine was promulgated against the Soviet Union. We're talking about a huge land mass with millions of crazy people that would like nothing better than to see dead Americans in their wastelands.

Look, I have no problem with going out and killing a ton of foreigners. But I am kind of insistent that something be accomplished by it. Bombing folks just for the sake of it makes another 9/11 more likely, not less.

But it's unfair to ask a few hundred thousand boys and girls to do the job that should take millions, especially when the rest of the country argues over what's the best way to cut taxes. The same people who said that the second Iraq War would only take 30 days, 100,000 troops and 25 billion dollars are now telling you that a significantly wider war can be done with less.

0.5% of the American people are going to be asked to do that because the rest of them are waiting with baited fucking breath to see if Jay Z and Beyonce break up, or if this is the year that we finally see Miley's asshole at the MTV Music Video Awards. And they're going to be paying LESS in taxes while they do it.

That's not only moral horseshit, it's exactly what led to the disaster in Vietnam.

I hate to say it, but Dan Rather is right. War is a much more serious business than Americans have been led to believe in the last 40 years.

Either suit your kids up, or shut the fuck up. You have no right to insist on other people's children dying to accomplish nothing.

On Taxing and Spending

2014-08-14T18:54:00.001-04:00

About a decade ago, I abandoned my ideological ideal, a government that does the few things that it absolutely has to, because it had prove to be impractical.

It proved to be impractical for two reasons;

Voters are selfish and stupid: Yes, they like the idea of small government and balanced budgets, but only so far as it doesn't effect the goodies that benefit them. Everybody is of the opinion that the sacrifices that create a Utopian society should be borne by everybody else.
Conservatives were never really serious about it in the first place: We saw this most recently with George W. Bush and Stephen Harper, both of whom gave away all of the money and loaded down the budget with electioneering hucksterism and exciting ways to destroy the military. This created endless deficits.

If given the choice between tax increases and deficits, one should always choose tax increases. Taxes merely stunt economic growth, whereas deficits are a slow-motion suicide in a globalized economy.

Tax cuts, combined with increased spending, are the worst path of all. The growth spurred by the cuts never covers the lost revenue, let alone the increased spending. Supposedly conservative governments have made up the difference by wanton borrowing. And when the business cycle goes south, those governments borrow even more. Luckily for conservatives, this usually results in the election of liberals, who can then be blamed for the whole mess, while pretending to maintain ideological purity.

In the last ten years, I've decided that I'll never get what I want, but I can insist that the nonsense that the idiot public wants be paid for, and that it be made crystal clear how it's going to be paid for.

You want the government to babysit your whelpish offspring? Fine. How are you going to pay for it? You want a subway stop in your basement, even though you live in the middle of nowhere? Fantastic. How are you going to pay for it? If you can't pay for it, don't do it, At this point, that's all I care about.

Rob Ford, in his semi-retarded genius, figured a way around that by lying and presuming that you're dumber than he is, which actually turned out to be true.

Etobicoke Slim, who made his name on city council by voting against everything, somehow came up with the idea that government can be Santa Claus. He told people, with a straight face, that if councilors had their office budgets slashed and we cut back on the gardening at City Hall, much pretty everybody would get their own shiny new subway train.

It was a little more complicated than that, but not much. You see, this was all predicated on "efficiencies." And to be fair to Ford, he did find those. The only problem was that they weren't enough. Not by a friggin' long shot.

So he started engaging in what I like to call "Enron accounting." If you put the numbers Ford did in a prospectus for a publicly-traded company, you would go right to jail. What he essentially did was roll over existing surpluses into current budgets. When that wasn't enough, he raided program reserve funds.

Yet, even that wasn't enough. Ford then started counting opposite things the same way to show "savings." Increasing user-fees for public use city resources was a "saving," but so too was cutting the vehicle registration fee.

What Ford and his idiot "Nation" won't tell you is that they didn't cut taxes or spending. In fact, he increased both. If you press them on that, they belligerently respond that those increases were less than the would be under David Miller, even though Miller wasn't on the ballot in 2010.

But the constant refrain is that "Toronto doesn't have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem!"

That is, of course, nonsense.

First, Toronto does not have a “spending problem” and its services compare well to other cities.

Expenditures are roughly the same as they were a decade ago, when inflation and population growth are taken into account. But the spending mix has changed: transit and roads have increased as a share of city expenditures; social and family services have declined; and the share of spending on police, fire and other services is about the same.

The amount of services Toronto provides and the costs compare well with those of other cities in most areas. Recent studies also suggest there is little room to find further “efficiencies” without reducing service levels, such as TTC routes or library hours, or selling assets like the Toronto Zoo.

Second, Toronto’s property taxes have actually been growing slowly and residents pay relatively low taxes.

Property taxes in Toronto have been growing at less than the rate of inflation — meaning the real property tax burden per household has actually been declining. Toronto residents, on average, pay low property taxes compared with residents of other Ontario cities, in large part because the tax burden continues to be higher on businesses.

The city has relied on increased revenues from user fees and charges, the land transfer tax and — most significantly — transfers from the provincial and federal governments. The provincial “uploading” of some social service costs since 2008 has also helped. Third, the city faces a major infrastructure funding shortfall, and will not be able to maintain the infrastructure it has or invest in what it needs without new, reliable revenues.

Toronto’s funding shortfall for maintaining existing assets in a state of good repair — such as TTC lines, roads and water and wastewater pipes — will grow to nearly $2.5 billion by 2020. In addition, Toronto Community Housing’s unfunded repair bill for social housing is approaching $1 billion. At the same time, there is no available funding for big new proposals, such as the much-talked-about transit investments, to accommodate the city’s growth and tackle congestion.

Please note that none of these numbers reflect the insane promises of the Ford brothers to build endless Subways to Nowhere. Also note that they aren't promising to cut any program spending.

Ford Nation assumes a number of things that aren't true;

That Rob Ford will be the special welfare boy of the provincial and federal governments: Under ideal circumstances, this wouldn't be true because everybody hates Toronto, largely because we're better than they are.

But Rob is, well, a crackhead, enmeshed in at least one criminal case right now. More are almost certain to follow. Stephen Harper has his own campaign next year, and the Ford brothers have been bad-mouthing the provincial Liberals for a decade now. Why do you think that either would expend credibility financing Crackhead Rob's vanity projects, especially when he insists on not being serious about the math? You think having his picture taken with Ford is going to win Harper any votes?
That he can get Council to do anything he wants: He can't, as was proven a year before his extracurricular activities were uncovered. It turns out that Etobicoke Slim doesn't play well with others.

Also, there's no guarantee that his mayoral powers will be returned to him. That's another misnomer from the Fords. The powers weren't removed from him, they were removed from the office of the mayor. His reelection, assuming that such a thing happens (which it won't,) is meaningless.
That the Subways to Nowhere will come in on time and on budget: The original Sheppard line didn't. I actually don't think any of them did. Major infrastructure projects never do.

It isn't enough that that our lying candidates and idiot citizens have a "serious conservation" about what goodies we want, we need to discuss how we're going to pay for them.

Because Rob Ford can't.

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2014-08-14T16:34:00.002-04:00

Joe Warmington, Stenographer Extraordinaire

2014-08-12T13:45:00.002-04:00

So, there was a bomb threat at Toronto city hall yesterday and, Rob Ford, being Rob Ford, did exactly the wrong thing, largely because he can always be expected to do the wrong thing. Etobicoke Slim went on TV and announced it, proving that he's monumentally stupid, insanely cynical, or both.

If you talk to anyone who knows anything about emergency management, they'll tell you that making announcement, especially on television, is the last thing you should do. The chances of there being a real, active device - especially at a high-profile target, like City Hall - is a fraction of one percent. However, the chances of causing a panic where one or more people get injured or killed is a great deal higher.

I don't expect Ford to know that because he's as weapons-grade moron with a long history of not thinking before going on television. But Toronto Police, City Hall security, and the City Manager's office all know it. So the mayor and his loudmouth brother either didn't bother talking to the experts before running to the nearest available camera, or they flagrantly ignored their expert advice.

I don't have any concrete data, but I'm willing to wager that a) City Hall gets a dozen or so bomb threats a year, and b) that number has gone up since Ford's election.

So why make an announcement about this threat when none of the others have been reported? A cynic would suggest that he did it to garner both attention and sympathy for his ridiculous and doomed re-election campaign. However, when His Worship and his equally dishonest brother lie about everything, cynicism isn't just warranted, it's smart.

So Robbie did what he always does when he does something suicidally stupid - he went to Joe Warmington of the Toronto Sun.

Ford has a serious allergy to talking to actual journalists, so he talks to Warmington almost exclusively. Joe is the best damn stenographer in the business. If he had pretty red hair, huge tits and a head that's 11% too small for the rest of his body, he could be the basis of AMC's next big hit. Because I'm classy, I won't say that Warmington is Ford's Joseph Goebbels, but you shouldn't infer from that that it isn't true, just that I'm shy.

Warmington famously refuses to ask tough (or even halfway serious) questions of Ford. If he did, he'd lose access. Allergies, you know.

Last night, Joe took his normal level of sycophancy and kicked it up a notch. Not only did he enable Crackhead Rob in his quest to make an act of terrorism all about himself, Warmington earned bonus points in making it about Joe, too!

It’s despicable that Toronto’s mayor has to face such disgusting circumstances. But it has been brewing for months.

The better he does at his recovery and attempted comeback, the angrier some become about it.

If you support the mayor, wish him well or just try to treat him fairly, one faces a barrage of insults and bullying.

The shun-and-shame campaign is in full swing.

And some are taking it to another level. The vitriol against Ford is out of control and it’s only a matter of time before something horrible happens.

Somebody has to say it.

Maybe I was wrong about Joe Warmington's professionalism. That's a lot of self-serving stupidity in very few words.

Rob Ford is not only the most divisive politician in the history of this city, he's made a career out anger, insults, bullying, shunning, shaming and vitriol. Oh, and lying. I almost forgot about the lying. But Ford and Warmington lunge to their fucking fainting couches when they get a tenth of what they've dished out.

Warmington is also too cute by half when he implies that the bomb threat is reflective of those who oppose his Golden Calf. If someone were to suggest that the mayor's illegal and idiotic picnic in Scarborough degenerating into a "Choke a homo for RoFo" frenzy of bigoted stupidity was symbolic of everyone that supported Hizzoner, he would be typing a typhoon of self-important outrage.

That Ford is so popular at events he attends is not sitting well with some of his enemies, and anybody who follows Twitter sees the animosity daily.

Trashing Ford, or threatening his life and that of others is not going to change the fact that he has every right to run for office and those who support him are entitled to their vote, too.

No one has suggested that Ford doesn't have "right to run for office and those who support him are entitled to their vote, too." If the mayor wants to subject himself to that level of personal and professional humiliation, I'm all for it. It'll just make the evening of October 27th one of the greatest nights of my life.

I haven't once called for Ford's resignation. His emasculation by Council and marginalization by the public is even better. Even the most casual reader of this blog knows that I love a freakshow, and nothing has come even close to the one that Mayor Ford is putting on for the world.

I can't think of another politician in Ford's position that didn't have the brains to resign or, at a minimum, decline to run again. Marion Barry is an example that I've heard bandied about, but it's an inapt one. Toronto doesn't have anything close to the same percentage of angry white trash that D.C does of pissed-off blacks. Oh, and the bitch actually did set Barry up.

The fact that Warmington, like a good shill, equates "trashing Ford" with "threatening his life," along with putting the mayor's "recovery" in the same sentence with "his attempted comeback" hasn't escaped my notice. In both instances, one has nothing to do with the other. The list of things to "trash" Etobicoke Slim over is almost endless, yet the number of people who have threatened his life is not.

Like Richard Nixon before him, Rob Ford gave his enemies the sword that they stuck him with. Each and every time. And like Nixon, Ford would have done the same, were he in that position.

There is no logical reason for Ford to have gone on TV and announced that bomb threat yesterday. If he for a fact that they wouldn't have told him to go running toward the nearest available camera and announce it to the world.

If Ford "cared about people," as he and Warmington ridiculously contend, Ford would have spoken to the experts about the best way to keep those people safe. I know

At best, doing that encourages every lunatic in the city to send bomb threats to the Ford brothers, knowing that their terroristic work will be on television for an afternoon, and in the papers the following day. At worst, people panic and get seriously hurt or killed.

There are only two plausible reasons that Rob Ford did what he did yesterday; He's too stupid to be responsible for anyone's safety, or he was cynically trolling for votes. And if Joe Warmington was either halfway smart or honest, it would have occurred to him to even ask Ford about that. And he didn't.

One day, very soon, the city of Toronto will be done with Rob Ford. It's almost mathematically impossible to argue otherwise now. But Warmington will presumably have a job. How he does that when no one takes him seriously will be interesting to see.

The Decline and Fall of Olivia Chow and the Rise of John Tory

2014-08-08T15:02:00.002-04:00

Ah, it was all supposed to be so different, wasn't it? Partisans everywhere delighted in telling me that Crackhead Rob Ford's circus-like emergence from rehab was supposed to be the game-changer for both the Ford and Chow campaigns.

Etobicoke Slim was going to rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes and reclaim the chain of office that he's spent the last two years disgracing. For her part, the Merry Widow Layton was only going to benefit from the sideshow.That was the narrative, wasn't it?

Except that it didn't happen that way.

Three polls have come out in the last few weeks that show that the main beneficiary is ... John Tory. All of them are terrible news for Ford and Chow.

All of the polls show that Ford is utterly discredited. It would take a mathematical miracle for him to even crack 30% at this point, and there's no daylight in sight. Not only can he not win, he doesn't even do well enough to create a vote-split that hurts Tory.

Yes, Ford Nation delights in pointing out that people line up to have their pictures taken with their guy, but they have no answer when it's pointed out to them that O.J Simpson made his living that way for over a decade. I've seen folks wait all day for the opportunity to meet Kim Kardashian. Even the great Eye on a Crazy Planet and I stood around waiting to see Sammy fucking Hagar from a hundred feet away, and we're sophisticated, serious men on the rare occasion that we're sober! There's a profound difference between being a human oddity and a viable candidate, but you try telling Ford supporters that!

The "Choke a Homo for RoFo" picnics also are useless for political forecasting because we have no idea how many of the attendees are Toronto residents or even Canadian citizens, which you're expected to be to cast a ballot.

"Mistah Ford? He dead."

The polls, by Nanos, Maple Leaf Strategies and Forum (and I have a healthy distrust for anything Forum says, as I constantly point out) show Olivia Chow's candidacy disintegrating before our very eyes, which is not something I wasn't counting on happening, and definitely couldn't predict seeing in August.

The Maple Leaf poll shows Tory tied with Chow downtown and East York, which is lethal. Olivia doesn't just have to win in those places, she has to do so by 15 or 20 points to offset vote losses in the more conservative suburbs. The Chow folks can't even count on Ford draining Tory's support in Etobicoke, anymore, which itself is stunning. Outside of Scarborough, this is a Tory-Chow race, and Tory is winning or tied everywhere.

This morning's Forum poll (which, again, I don't trust, but the Chow people have always hung their hats on) is even more devastating.It shows Chow bleeding out 15% of women to Tory!

Do I believe that Tory is up by 15 with women? No, I do not. But if he's even behind Chow by as little as five points with women under 55, she has an insurmountable problem. Married women over 55 comfortably belong to Tory, which means that Olivia needs to win younger (and, preferably, single) women by double digits.

I don't think that Big John is up by ten. I think five or six is more realistic. Having said that, Karen Stintz isn't going stay in the race past Labour Day, if only because holding onto her Council seat is far preferable to finding a real job. Her vote - all of it - goes to Tory. Verily, he drinks her milkshake! HE DRINKS IT UP!

I also don't think that Chow's trailing Ford by any margin.Olivia Chow is so bad a politician that I believe that operas will be written about it someday, but I don't see a scenario where she loses to a lunatic crackhead with congenital honesty issues, either. Let's be real.

But, in both geography and demography, Chow is looking at a disaster. Gender, ethnicity and ideology - really the only three things she has going for her - are failing her. Badly

And that really wasn't supposed to happen! Toronto has already had two female mayors, it's a very liberal city with an explosive growth in the Chinese population, especially in Scarborough and North York. Worse, among all of those factors; female, Asian, and liberal, Olivia has had the field to herself, while the rest of the candidates are competing for the right-of-center vote. Plus, she's Canada's First Widow!

Well, Olivia Chow is an idiot. If you've seen The Candidate, you know that isn't, in and of itself itself, crippling. Morons win elections all the time. Just look at Rob Ford.

The seriously bad factor is that Olivia's strategists and communications experts are also idiots.

From even before she declared, the Chow team decided that it was going to use Rob Ford as a cudgel against John Tory. They also thought that they could use Tory's 2003 mayoral race and his leadership of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives against him.

Even a child could have told you how that was going to work.

In '03, Tory went from about 3% name recognition to within five points of beating David Miller, and he won huge swaths of the city. He fell just short of what he needed to win in North York and Scarborough to overcome Miller's huge leads downtown and in East York, despite carrying both handily. Remember, a liberal candidate needs only about 35% in Scarborough and 25% in North York, combined with huge numbers downtown and East York to win. Tory came much closer to climbing that mountain than anyone should have expected.

As for his time as PC leader, I'd argue that he was dragged down by his party, rather than him dragging his party down. The numbers tend to support that, too. The PCO has been run for 15 years by rural maniacs that think you can win provincially without winning where people actually live.

So, when you beat the drum that "John Tory can't beat Rob Ford," sensible people start asking "why?" The answers are lacking.

More importantly, Olivia Chow has a resume that's a mile wide and an inch deep. She's lost as many elections as Tory did, only without the mitigating factors; She's a horrible communicator, she's incredibly vague about almost all of her promises, and her central message is insane (When was the last time that toddlers even knew who the mayor was, let alone looked to him as an example for anything?).

Because Olivia hasn't actually won anything on her own before, and because she's never run anything, It's an open question as to whether she has the seriousness of purpose to fire the people that put her in the position that she's in. And make no mistake, people need to be publicly, brutally fired!

For the first seven months of this year, I was physically terrified of a Tory-Ford vote split electing Chow. The Chow team seemed to count on that, too.

That hasn't happened. We now have a trend of John Tory winning by substantial numbers. This is happening a little earlier than I'm comfortable with, but John Tory is beating Olivia Chow and Rob Ford by wider margins than anyone previously expected.

Am I ready to write Olivia Chow's political obituary?

Not yet, but soon.

Gene Simmons is a Simpleton

2014-08-06T15:10:00.000-04:00

So Gene Simmons from KISS (as he insists on introducing himself as) gave an incredibly weird and phenomenally ignorant interview about how life's supposed to work this week. And if you need life lessons, there a few better places to get them from a guy who made millions of dollars from wearing monster make-up, playing the bass badly, and writing songs about fucking children. I'm sure that his experience will translate seamlessly into yours.

Kiss vocalist-bassist Gene Simmons voiced his support of controversial Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, whose private, racist comments got him banned from the NBA for life earlier this year, in a Wall Street Journal interview. Additionally, he said he was on "Mel Gibson's side," when it came to getting flack for making questionable comments in private conversation. Although he did call Sterling "heinous," Simmons said that the difference between the Clippers owner and others who have made racist rants in private is that Sterling was caught.
"Everybody [says] jokes that are off- color, or when they're drunk...He was ambushed," Simmons said. "I think he should have done penance and paid a fine. Here's what's going to happen. They're going to go after Sterling and he's going to put a few million dollars out there, because he can afford it – and he's going to ask the paparazzi out there to find videos of all the other team members talking trash and racist rants. And then it's open season.
"And if, because you say an off-color joke or make a racist rant privately, that causes you to lose a job – nobody would have a job," he continued. "Black people do it, Jews do it, Christians do it – everybody does it. It's called America. Free speech. Even if free speech insults other people. Privately. Publicly, that's different. I'm on the side of free speech in the privacy of your own home or privacy of the situation. Big brother has finally crawled in bed with us."

For such a supposedly awesome businessman, Gene Simmons sure is a simpleton.

Look, I'm generally supportive of the idea that personal beliefs shouldn't be held against you professionally. On the other hand, people have the right to associate and do business with whomever they please.

Another thing that this wig-wearing humps forgets is that the Clippers are a franchise, and franchisees in any business are riddled with any number of covenants and contract stipulations. The best part is that Gene co-owns a sports franchise, so he knows that. Or his business manager does.

As for Mel Gibson, I don't know how to break this to you, but you don't have the constitutional right to a $100 million opening weekend, and anyone who thinks you do is an idiot. Being a titanic movie star is wholly dependent on the public's goodwill. Period.

From what I know about public relations, I'm pretty sure that telling your girlfriend that you'll burn her house down if she doesn't suck-start you before getting in the jacuzzi and that her fashion choices make her worthy of "getting gang-raped by a pack of niggers," or sharing your opinion that "Jews are responsible for all of the wars in the world" with the Malibu Police Department aren't in the handbook as positive examples.

By the way, all the folks who support Mel Gibson's "right" to be fed money by the rest of us sure don't seem happy with Penelope Cruz and what's-his-name this week.

Besides, if Tommy Thayer was secretly recorded saying that he felt like a fucking douche in another man's make-up, how long do you think it would be before Ace Frehley was back in KISS? 35 seconds? 40?

It might very well be that the terrible bass player with the demon make-up and enormous tongue isn't the greatest life coach that you're likely to find. Who knew?

This is as good a time as any to highlight the talents of the criminally underrated talents of Craig Gass, who i met in April.

An Open Letter to Ford Nation

2014-07-09T17:09:00.000-04:00

Over the past decade or so, I've become known for colorful political metaphors, specifically regarding my mayor, one Robert Bruce Ford.

Prior to 14 months ago, however, I never would have suggested that he might be smoking crack with Somali gunnrunners. That would have been too crazy, even for me. Yet the aforementioned Mr. Ford went on to prove that nothing regarding his life and tenure of office was too crazy, even fevered imaginations such as mine.

This has left the much ballyhooed "Ford Nation" a shadow of its former self. Crackhead Rob's former adherents aren't unlike Japanese soldiers, forgotten on some desolate Philippine island for some 30 years, waiting to defend against an American attack that never comes. Actually, that isn't fair to abandoned Japanese soldiers, who were honestly unaware that Tokyo had surrendered decades ago.

That's not to say that I thought much of Ford Nation as a political force in the first place. They had only beaten a scandalized former minister of a thoroughly discredited provincial government who never campaigned north of Eglinton Avenue, leaving well over half of Toronto uncontested.

Three different polls have been released in the last week and half, the first since Crackhead Rob's inglorious emergence from rehab, and all show the incumbent in third place. One of them has him behind by as much as 17 points.

Allow me a moment to explain just how bad things are for Etobicoke Slim. Last night I was out and about with our great and glorious Maximum Leader and his fine family, who had decamped from the Villainschloss to visit my fair city. All three of his children, between the ages of 10 and 16 and who live hundreds of miles away, were well acquainted with the rapidly collapsing House of Ford and its many follies. Their own former governor is in the process of going to the hoosegow, and they still knew about the sad and savage tale of my mayor than they did Bob McDonnell.

Mayor Rob Ford - arguably the most famous man in the world right now, with even bigger tits than Kim Kardashian - is running third. Worse, he's losing to a woman whose sole major accomplishment is being widowed by a former Opposition Leader and a guy with a sensational history of losing elections.

But, like the forgotten soldiers of Nippon of yore, there are holdouts who delusionally believe that the Rehab Cowboy is going to pull this one out. Several of them are friends of mine.

I'd ask them a simple question; "How?"

Peter Ustinov once described Toronto as "New York run by the Swiss," and that's a description that my fellow Torontonians took great pride in. Not for us the multiple brushes with bankruptcy of the Big Apple and the endless marriages of Rudy Giuliani, separated as they were by terrorist attacks. Of course that was was well before our civic leaders took to smoking crack with Somali gunrunners.

No sensible person thought that our civic affairs could sink lower than our Chief Magistrate smoking crack with Somali gunrunners. But Rob Ford continued, even in his retreat to the storied facility at GreeneStone, to defy our imaginations.

“Nobody sticks up for people like I do, every f---ing k--e, n----r, f---ing w-p, d-go, whatever the race. Nobody does. I’m the most racist guy around. I’m the mayor of Toronto.”Ford is behind the wheel and hammered. One constituent he calls that night recalls Ford slurring his words. The Star has heard audio of Ford and Bellissimo talking and both are slurring. (The Star has interviewed people who say it is nothing for Ford to down a 40-ouncer of vodka. The man who recorded the audio of Ford at Sully Gorman’s bar two weeks ago told the Star Ford’s ability to drink shots of tequila is “incredible.”

Ford has two ways of communicating as he drives — his cellular phone and his Onstar device, a General Motors product that acts as a cellphone. During one call as he drives that night, Ford is recorded as saying the following about Jews, blacks and Italians.

On a roll, Ford continues to spew invective that may be the worst published yet. At one point he makes a rude comment about his mother.

His tirade is interrupted by a call from Dennis Morris, Ford’s lawyer. Morris voices immediate concern that Ford is driving and tells him to pull over. Ford does not respond kindly. Morris suggests the police may be tailing him.“The cops are f---ing right behind me. They are, it’s fine,” Ford says.Morris tells Ford he cannot be driving drunk.To which Ford responds, “Yeah, you never had your f---ing kids taken away.”

Does this tale get better? Well, if by "better", you mean "more incredibly shocking and sad," why, yes. Yes it does.

The front walkway to the Ford house leads to a modest front door. At about 10 p.m. that night, Ford and his pals arrive. Ford has a bag of McDonald’s food in his hand. Ford jiggles the front door and then kicks the door open. He, Lisi, Bellissimo and another man step in.

“Don’t worry guys, my kids aren’t here,” Ford says.

For no apparent reason, Ford turns on Bellissimo and hits him squarely in the face twice — boom, boom — forgetting that he has a bagful of Big Macs in his hand. Burgers and fries scatter. Ford makes Bellissimo pick them up.

Down the stairs they go. Ford’s wife Renata is on the couch, a tired lounger that has been described to the Star by paramedics and firefighters who have attended calls at the house over the past two years. Renata is smoking a joint.

“You’re a f---ing idiot,” Renata says.

Enraged, Ford rummages for his Don Bosco coaching jacket. “It’s where I keep my weed,” he tells people in the room. Ford turns on his wife, screaming that she has taken his drugs. Standing there quietly are Lisi and Bellissimo.

To a visitor, Ford says, almost offhanded, “You can f--- her if you want, in front of me.”

Nobody speaks. The comment is ignored by Ford’s wife. Men in the room are shocked.

“It’s okay,” Ford burbles. “She lets me f--k girls in front of her all the time.”

Eyes flicked upward, to the rest of the house.

“It’s okay, my kids are not home,” Ford repeats.

Now, if such a story were printed about any other citizen, let alone public office holder, on earth, the courts would be clogged until the end of time dealing with the fallout. Rob Ford and his idiot savant brother, whose only notable talent is being an exceptionally transparent and shameless liar, can't even be bothered to deny it.

I can't stress this enough; Sandro Lisi and Bruno Bellisimo, two citizens who have spent a lifetime in front of the criminal bar, were shocked into silence by things that Rob Ford, his brother, his staff, or his personal stenographers at the Toronto Sun (Joe Warmington and Mike Strobel) can't even waste the oxygen to say aren't true.

I wasn't even a quarter of the way home from welcoming the Maximum Leader to my fair city before this story popped up in my Facebook feed.

Mayor Rob Ford [Open Rob Ford’s policard] pushed and scuffled with fellow rehab residents and was so verbally abusive that he was kicked out of his group therapy program, according to people who have knowledge of his two month stay atGreeneStone .

These accounts of what one person referred to as “destructive behaviour” stands in stark contrast to Ford’s recent public statements that he had a healthy experience and takes his recovery seriously.

“Ford broke things, got into fights with other residents,” said one source with knowledge of the mayor’s time in rehab at the resort-turned-drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility in Muskoka.

“Ford stopped people from sharing their stories, which is key to a successful rehab experience,” said another source. “Other residents felt intimidated. They felt he was a bully. He was always saying he did not belong there.”

Management was concerned Ford continued to use drugs or alcohol during his time in rehab. The Star was unable to determine if Ford abused any substances during his two month stint.

GreeneStone’s wooded property has a well known “nature walk” and a concern of staff is that some residents meet their drug dealers or people providing alcohol at the far end of the walk.

Police were called at least once to deal with an incident at GreeneStone during Ford’s time. It’s not known if the police visit was related to Ford. The OPP, which patrols the area, said that any information about police calls to GreeneStone could only be obtained by making a freedom of information request, a process that takes months.

Ordinarily, I'd call a story like the last one out of bounds. But it seems evident that Robbie is going to make the redemption song of his stay at GreeneStone a central feature of his campaign narrative without the bother of actually entertaining questions about it, I'd put it just on the line of fair.

The fact of the matter is that no one is responsible for Rob Ford's situation other than Rob Ford. He's put himself into "the Tyson Zone." No one else did. At this point, it doesn't really matter who the half naked guys protesting Ford rallies are and what they believe. That ship sailed a long, long time ago. Even the craziest bastards in the city have at least a lucid case for demanding Etobicoke Slim's resignation. With all due respect to my great and good friend, Richard, any other argument is silly.

But let's get to the politics of this, shall we?

It has become increasingly clear to anyone that has been paying attention that Ford can't win.

Don't believe me? Look at this comment;

“Nobody sticks up for people like I do, every f---ing k--e, n----r, f---ing w-p, d-go, whatever the race. Nobody does. I’m the most racist guy around. I’m the mayor of Toronto.”

Do you really suppose that people are going to lining up to volunteer to knock on doors and man phone banks for that? In a city like Toronto? Really? Better yet, who'll donate to it? Of all of Ford's defenders that I've encountered, I have yet to see one volunteer that they've given him money. Not one. Nor are they knocking on doors or calling voters after work.

Almost two-thirds of the city view Etobicoke Slim as politically toxic, and that was true before the stories that he can't even be bothered to deny came out. It's almost impossible to see that number going down.

Now, If I'm the Merry Widow Layton, I'm loving this state of affairs. Even though I'm wildly underperforming everywhere (and especially downtown, where it matters most), it doesn't matter. All I need to do is count on Rob Ford to get 10-15% of the vote, and I win in a landslide.

While I don't believe that John Tory is six points ahead of Olivia Chow, I don't believe that he's six points behind her, either. I think that the race is pretty much even. But Ford changes that.

FORD: No, no, I don’t mind. Listen, I don’t mind … As long as they vote, I’d rather them vote against me than not vote at all. I’d rather lose to Olivia Chow than lose to anyone, man, because you know what? [The city’s] going to get fucked so bad, they’re going to say ‘thank you.’ Nah, I’m not coming back. Once I’m done, I’m done. I’m going to California.

Any questions?

Wasting Money We Don't Have

2013-09-30T08:31:00.001-04:00

I don't expect many of readers outside of Toronto to know this, but Scarborough is pretty much the asshole of the world. Were it up to me, we'd be building a wall around it, not subways into it.

But Scarborough is also a target-rich environment for huckster politicians looking to buy their way into new mandates, so it appears that it is subways that they will get.

Look, unlike most deviant cheerleaders for Toronto's crackhead mayor and Stephen Harper's supposedly "conservative" government, I'm an actual conservative, which means that I don't support buying shit we don't need with money that we don't have. And among the very last things we need is subways into Scarborough.

Don't get me wrong, pretty new subways that go right into my basement would be nice, but so would my having a fourteen foot cock. But neither is necessary and both would be hideously expensive.

Nobody in their right mind goes into Scarborough, which has all the charm of East Germany in the 70s. If we absolutely have to have new, unfinanced subways, we'd all be better off with a downtown relief line. Getting downtown at pretty much any time of the day is enough to induce a fucking stroke. And it should surprise no one that none of the subway suicides in this city occur on tracks leading away from the downtown core.

Downtown is an economic driver and most serious people couldn't come up with three reasons why Scarborough shouldn't be attacked with mustard gas. So guess who's getting a subway!

This is actually easy to understand, but only if you're willing to credit everything that's wrong with the human spirit. Ford and the Harper Tories know that there are no votes to be had downtown, so they want even bigger margins in the useless and ignorant parts of the city. And you'd be hard-pressed to be more useless and ignorant than Scarborough.

But Ontario's Liberal premier, Kathleen Wynne is behind this, too, isn't she?

Well, sorta. Wynne supports a much more restrained - and affordable - Scarborough line. She's also alone in trying to finance it, whereas Ford, Harper and his spending machine of a finance minister, Jim Flaherty, are all throwing around plans and numbers without regard to their actual cost.

But even Wynne is trying to buy people's votes with their own money. She presides over a minority government that could fall at any time, and she knows that if she loses seats in Scarborough, she'll be sexually humiliated by Andrea Horwath's NDP everywhere else. So Kathleen either supports the Scarborough or she starts fitting herself for a dildo gag and a gimp suit.

As for Crackhead Rob, he's not willing to kick in the bare minimum he needs to pay for this atrocity.

His own Council reported that he'd need a 2.5% property tax increase over 30 years to finance this mess, but he'll only commit to a fifth of that. And even with the federal and provincial giveaways, Ford's folly still comes up hundreds of millions of dollars short.

Harper and Flaherty have always treated financial responsibility like a bad joke. When shitheads like Grover Norquist and the editors of the National Review point to them as fiscal heroes, they only highlight that they don't know what they're fucking talking about.

Harper first pissed away a $13 billion surplus on electioneering nonsense, then dumped hundreds of billions more on his crazed "Canada's Action Plan" that he's unashamedly wasting millions more on advertising a full five years after the financial crisis. Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty have thrown away more money on useless shit than even Barack Obama. If you support Harper while condemning Obama, that's all the evidence I need that you're a twat and very probably a moron.

Metrolinx had a fully financed plan that Ford killed, literally filling a hole where the Sheppard LRT was going to be with $30 million that he didn't have, just like his spiritual father, Mike Harris, did with the Eglinton subway back in the 90s.

One of life's great ironies is that Rob Ford ran on "stopping the gravy train," But he also promised to spend hundreds of billions of dollars of other people's money on trains.

You can call that any number of things, but "conservative" isn't one of them.

Ted Cruz is Stupid, Cynical or Both, And I Want Him to be the Republican Presidential Nominee

2013-09-28T21:44:00.000-04:00

I've never met Ted Cruz, so I can't say as an absolute certainty that he's a psychopathic retard. But because he's a Republican and a Tea Partier, he can't honestly object to either characterization, since both are such a central part of his political base.

Republicans and Teapers get awfully pissy when I say things like that, but I'm hardly the one that's been in the trenches finding new and ever more self-defeating ways to turn superstition and stupidity into conservative virtues.

Even before the advent of the Tea Party, supposedly conservative politicians have equated self-promoting ignorance as folksiness, which explains the non-sexual appeal of Sarah Palin perfectly. Christ, when I try to explain to reasonable, intelligent people why I hold conservative positions, I have to bend over backwards to demonstrate that I'm not a fucking yahoo. And that's exhausting because people like Ted Cruz have made it their life's mission to make it exhausting.

I'm going to explain the antics of the junior senator from Neverland this week as succinctly as I can.

Cruz filibustered for 21 hours - reading Dr. Suess and comparing everyone that isn't him to the goddamned Nazis - on a day when there weren't any bills pending in the Senate, which makes it less of a filibuster and more a spectacular at of public masturbation. By the way, he did this on a measure that he said that he supported and ultimately wound up voting for. It was the single most bizarre spectacle I've witnessed in my 35 years of studying American politics.

Cruz has so entranced the stupid that Erick Erikson hasn't been able to get his head out of Ted's lap long enough to write a coherent blog post in over a month. He's made Mark Levin even more insufferably Mark Levin.

But people with normal cognitive functions - including most rational Republicans - have come to loathe Cruz with the power of a thousand suns. Jon Dickerson of Slate explains why;

He wasted precious time: Republicans don’t want to get the blame for a government shutdown. By soaking up valuable Senate time with no-win maneuvers, Cruz has left House leaders with less time to follow their legislative strategy—one that might have won limited concessions from White House. Or, with significantly more time, House Speaker Boehner might have been able to produce a funding bill that would have at least included a one-year delay of the Affordable Care Act. That would have put Democrats up for re-election in vulnerable states in a tough spot; at the very least, red state Democrats would have had to take an unpopular vote. Now the GOP looks fractured, time is short, and Boehner may only be able to pass the funding bill passed by the Senate Democrats—which he’ll almost certainly have to do with Democratic votes, offering even more leverage to the enemy.

Ego: He has used his colleagues to elevate himself in the furtherance of his 2016 presidential ambitions.

He made Obama’s critique look accurate: For years, President Obama has said a minority faction of zealots controls the Republican Party. By hijacking the system for a cause that had no chance of success, Cruz confirmed Obama’s cartoonish vision of a party controlled by a wing unconcerned about practical results.

He turned a tactical fight into a purity test: The majority of Republican senators agreed with Cruz on the importance of defunding Obamacare, but they disagreed with him on tactics. He characterized those with whom he had a tactical disagreement as ideological turncoats.

He blunted the GOP’s best plan of attack on Obamacare: The Affordable Care Act was falling under its own weight as stories of rickety implementation, layoffs, and companies dropping coverage of their employees continued to be published. By linking the “defunding effort” to continued funding of the government, Cruz distracted the public from Obamacare’s inherent problems. That distraction undermined Republican efforts to chip away at the legislation through smaller attacks, like a one-year delay that might have led to a full repeal if the GOP took back control of the Senate in 2014.

Let's try to look at this dispassionately, shall we? Cruz took something really unpopular (Obamacare) and attached it to something even more unpopular (a government shutdown.) The GOP is on the record as being against the former, but they know that they can be seen as favouring the latter.

This ain't 1995, teenagers. When Newt Gingrich convinced his party to commit ritualistic suicide back then, there were continuing resolutions to fund all but the most trivial parts of the government. America wasn't at war with three-quarters of the world and threatening to bomb the rest. And nobody was crazy enough to threaten to not raise the debt ceiling and destroy what's left of the world economy. Bill Clinton wasn't afraid of a government shutdown. Shit, he used it as a opportunity to get suck-started by the unpaid help.

The ramifications are so much worse now than they were then, and Senator Cruz and his shithead brigades couldn't care less. "We can let it burn now or later," is one refrain I've heard a lot from supposed "patriots" and "conservatives." These people are actually willing - no, eager - to drive their own interest rates through the fucking roof just to score points in some idiotic ideological beauty pageant. They honestly believe that the ruination of the full faith and credit of the United States is a credible electoral path. And shitheels like Erickson say that if Obama doesn't want a shutdown, he should just give the Tea Party everything they want, which would make him a fantastic terrorist whisperer.

They aren't just assholes, They're out of their fucking minds.

But what did Cruz actually accomplish this week? Well, he wasted time that serious people could have used to make a deal. Oh, and he was on TV a lot.

Aside from that, not much. He actually wound up voting for the cloture motion that he was supposed to be (but actually wasn't) filibustering. Everything he wanted is going to be eviscerated in conference, but now it's going to happen with malice. Ted Cruz is singularly a man without friends in Washington. Good luck with having a career that way.

On the other hand, he's now the number one choice for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination among people without teeth or common sense. And you know what? I'm with them 100%!

Establishment tool Jonah Goldberg thinks it unfair to compare Cruz to Tailgunner Joe McCarthy. I don't, because neither actually did anything to further their stated aims. McCarthy never actually named an actual communist and Cruz has done nothing in real terms in stopping Obamacare. McCarthy and Cruz are both third-rate demagogues who were just smart enough to know that they could only further their own careers by exciting mouthbreathers.

And that's exactly what the GOP needs in a presidential nominee this year. I wasn't so silent in wanting Sarah Palin to be the nominee last year, and I want Cruz for the same reasons.

There needs to be a Great Cleansing in a conservative movement, and that isn't going to come through the wingnuts forcing sane nominees to act like lunatics, as happened to John McCain and Mitt Romney. And Reagan wouldn't have passed the Tea Party's schizophrenic purity test. Neither would Barry Goldwater.

They want the first Bircher nominee, never mind that most of the country knew that was a horrible idea 65 years ago. Jesus, they've made Barack Obama - who would have fit well in Gerald Ford or George H.W Bush's Cabinets - into a Maoist Antichrist.

I'm suggesting that sensible conservatives give them exactly what they want and nominate Ted Cruz. The apocalypse will take care of the rest.

I figure that Boy Ted will lose about 39 states. In the last ten years, the GOP has seen Colorado, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia and Florida slip away. Indiana, Georgia and Arizona have all been tighter than they should be, and the demographics suggest that even Texas is going to start turning purple in the next decade.

I've spent three years trying to make a map where a Tea Partier wins the presidency, and I can't. In the last two cycles, those idiots have thrown away perfectly good Senate seats in Delaware, Colorado, Nevada, Indiana, Missouri and (if it weren't for Linda Murkowski running as an Independent,) Alaska - all of which, except Delaware, used to be pretty reliable Republican states.

There's no reason to believe that a Tea Party presidential nominee will be any more successful than their Senate nominees were in Republican-leaning states.

The Republican Party doesn't have many more elections in them to lose until they become the Whigs. The GOP only survived FDR because they Eisenhower was willing to save them. But no one with the seriousness of purpose of Ike would ever carry the idiotic standard of the Tea Party. Who needs to throw away their dignity with their professional prospects?

The Tea Party needs to run, win or lose, on their own. They can't be allowed any excuses, such as being hindered by a "moderate", which hasn't actually happened yet, or a lack of institutional support, which they say they don't want.

In an ordinary time, I'd support someone like Chris Christie, Jon Huntsman, Mitch Daniels or Jeb Bush (assuming that we could collectively forget who his brother is) - considered conservatives that can win - for president. Hell, I even like about half of what Rand Paul says, depending on my mood.

But I'm not. I'm tired of the Tea Party horseshit, and willing to give them their turn. Let them nominate a hack like Ted Cruz. It'll be fun to watch him struggle to win by 10 points in a cesspool like Mississippi, where the Republicans usually win by 25.

I don't want to see Cruz turned into Robert Taft, the serious conservative that wasn't given a chance. He needs to be Alf Landon, the guy who got beaten within an inch of his fucking life.

Then, and only then, does the Republican Party have a real chance of surviving the decade.

Besides, how bad could President Biden really be?

Rob Ford's Heroic Struggle

2013-08-23T00:20:00.002-04:00

So Toronto's mayor, Rob Ford, is supposed to arm-wrestle Hulk Hogan tomorrow morning. In most big cities, this would be something of a spectacle. In Toronto, we just hope Etobicoke Slim is sober.

A lot of folks who are interested in such things are probably betting on The Artist Formerly Known as Terry Gene Bollea to win, but I'm not so sure.

First, the Hulkster is 115 years old and to the best of my knowledge hasn't ever done anything that wasn't scripted in advance by Vince McMahon.

Second, Hizzoner is a celebrated crackhead, and those fucking people are wiry! And can anybody say with any certainty that he hasn't added meth to his training regimen in the last few weeks? I sure as shit can't. If Doug Ford is introduced from the ring as Rob's manager, "Jesse Pinkman," Hogan might start worrying.

We should all join together in congratulating the Heavyweight Champion of Pretend Sports for finding a figure every bit as ridiculous as he is to appear with. That couldn't have been easy.

But tomorrow won't be Ford's most heroic struggle. Not by a long shot. He is still in a titanic, almost Albert Speer-like Battle With Truth.

And so we tuned in to the Ford brothers’ Sunday radio program to hear something—if not the truth we might feel we are owed, then at least an explanation. Broadcasting live from the CNE, the program offered a heavy dose of Doug Ford as, for half the program, Rob was stuck in traffic after a family trip to Niagara. Or so brother Doug said. There’s no reason to doubt the story except for its source, whose increasing unreliability as a narrator became immediately evident.

For instance, on the show, Doug claimed that he and Rob “aren’t politicians,” which (at least lacking a modifier such as “normal” or “effective”) is a verifiable falsehood. That’s small potatoes, of course, but part of a pattern. At another point in the show, he said, “For the first time ever, in the history of Toronto, we have balanced the books.” He said it twice. In truth, Toronto has balanced its books in every single year of its history—it is forbidden by law to run an operating deficit.

Then Rob finally appeared, and claimed that by keeping tax increases below two per cent per year for three years, he and his brother had not only achieved the lowest tax increases in North America, but that such a small increase was “unheard of.” You don’t have to scour North American history to hear of such feats, though: In the city of Markham, tax rates were frozen for three years leading up to 2011, and increased 1.5 per cent in 2012 and 2013. Even here in Toronto, Mayor Mel Lastman delivered three years of tax freezes after amalgamation in 1998.

It went on: Doug claimed the St. Clair streetcar line was an example of LRTs like those planned in Scarborough (it is not) and that 80 per cent of people polled support the expansion of the island airport (in fact, recently published polls show the actual support at 47 per cent).

Later, Rob fielded a question from a listener who asked about the tight rental market, and the bidding wars it is creating. This has been headline news in these parts for a long while now—the lowest vacancy rates in decades are leading to skyrocketing rents, which raises a real concern about the affordability of the city for many residents. But Rob doesn’t share those concerns: “With interest rates so low now, landlords are begging for tenants…they’ll give you free parking, a free month’s rent…” he said. False. He maybe got that impression by seeing some ads, but it’s very transparently not backed up by the official numbers from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, numbers that are readily available to (and should be a key concern for) the mayor of the city.

And that, my friends, is the Rob Ford I know. Even when he isn't talking about his heroic propensity for getting fucked up on crack and Russian Prince vodka, his first instinct is always to lie. Always.

No matter what happens tomorrow morning, Hulk Hogan can walk away secure in the knowledge that Ford could never cuckold Bubba the Love Sponge as thoroughly as he has. Christ, the mayor can hardly be in the same room as his wife for ten minutes without one of them calling 911. If Hizzoner got within thirty five feet, of Heather Clem, he'd almost immediately suicide, knowing that he has nothing close to what "appears to be the size of a thermos you'd find in a child's lunchbox" between his legs.

Long story short, that's why I'm sad that Ford isn't arm-wrestling Heather tomorrow. Conservatives, and the city, would be better off.

Reince Priebus isn't Very Bright

2013-08-09T14:13:00.000-04:00

You what a good sign that the Republican party has finally gotten it's shit together would be? When they stop running against the media.

Too many of my fellow conservatives embrace the conflicting positions that the mainstream media is dead and ignored by everybody, yet still powerful and nefarious enough to foil the GOP at every turn. You can believe one or the other, but not both.

Well, I guess that's not entirely true. You can argue both positions if you're appealing solely to inbred yokels and the recently head injured. They loves them as much anti-intellectual populist fuckheadery as they can stuff inside their little pin heads.

And that brings me to Reince Priebus, the singularly ineffective chairman of the Republican National Committee. I thought that anyone would have been an improvement after Michael Steele's reign of error at the RNC. I thought wrong.

Priebus was supposed to be the Godhead brought to earth. Under his stewardship, the GOP was supposed to expand its margin in the House, win control of the Senate and banish forever the vulnerable Barack Obama from 1600 Pennsylvania Boulevard.

None of which actually happened. Republicans wound up losing two seats in the Senate, eight in the House and Obama put Mitt Romney down like a rabid cur. Oh, and the party came out of last November looking more like wild-eyed dipshits coming out of the election than they did going in. Not a spectacular result, to say the least.

So Republicans did what they always do: Blame the media for their own bad performance.

Now Priebus is getting pre-emptive with his retatded nonsense, declaring the RNC won't partner with NBC or CNN for the 2016 primary debates if the networks go forward with planned Hillary Clinton-centric projects.

The liberal media is on notice: If you’re in the business of spending millions to promote Hillary Clinton, you will not take part in Republicans’ primary debates in the 2016 presidential election.

On Monday, I sent letters to NBC and CNN informing them that the RNC will not sanction any primary debates they sponsor if they do not cancel their plans to promote Hillary Clinton.

NBC is planning a miniseries, CNN a documentary. If they don’t cancel these poorly disguised political ads by August 14, they can plan on watching Republican debates on networks other than their own.

Oh, fucking spare me.

I'll ignore for a moment CNN, which no one watches. But it should be pointed out that young Reince wasn't bitching too hard when CNN ran a Mitt Romney documentary last year.

The NBC mini-series (starring the always hot as fuck Diane Lane as Dame Clinton) is being produced by NBC's entertainment, which is a largely separate entity from the news division. You know how I know that? The entertainment division is located in Hollywood and news is run out of New York.

Moreover, who gives a shit if the RNC doesn't play with the networks? I can almost assure you that the networks don't.

The freakshow primary debates are expensive to produce, a nightmare to coordinate and don't do much in the way of ratings. There's a reason the broadcast networks stopped running them years ago. They can make more money with re-runs of a snuff movie or Saved By the Bell. The only reason that they run the hour a night of the convention coverage that they do is because their FCC licenses demand it.

The presidential debates between the nominees are vapid and pointless enough. The primary debates are little more than an excuse for the candidates to show off how dumb and psychotic they are. And there are literally dozens of the fucking things now.

From there, Priebus just starts lying outright.

I called out NBC and CNN because I refuse to let biased networks turn the 2016 debates into the same traveling circus they caused the 2012 debates to be. This is just one step toward creating a better, fairer debate system. But this is also an opportunity for us to begin to do something even bigger.

The networks didn't turn the 2012 debates into a "traveling circus." The candidates did more than an adequate job of that all on their own.

The fact is that all of the halfway smart Republicans stayed as far the fuck away from the 2012 nomination as they possibly could. The '12 primaries were so sad that at various times the main challengers to Mitt Romney were Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, some pizza lobbyist who likes pussy, and the stupid and stoned governor of Texas. How can that be anything but a travelling circus?

Furthermore, the shithead base of the GOP, as exemplified by blogs like RedState, has served only to force the candidates to marginalize themselves - and their party - to the point that they're almost incapable of winning a presidential election. People watch the Republican primaries for the same reason they stop to gawk at car accidents; Because blood has a certain glimmer to it when it's mixed with gasoline.

The fact is that you can't put a dozen third-tier mutants like Michele Bachmann together on stage and not expect people - including even the media - to not point out that they're third-tier mutants.

Were it up to me, the primaries would be abolished in their entirety and the nomination would be decided in the "smoke filled rooms" of yore, by people who at least have some idea of how government and politics work. No party that considers people like Erick Erickson power brokers can be taken seriously by anyone else.

But I think we all know that I'm not going to get my way, don't we? I rarely do.

However, there is a way to make the primary debates at least a little less self-destructive

1. Have fewer of them: Look, whoever decided that having upwards of two dozen debates that no one watches should be committed.

Dozens of debates serve only to provide dozens of opportunities for the eventual nominee to make mistakes that will kill him or her in the fall. Or the losing candidates will launch attacks that will cripple the nominee later.

As much as Republicans like to pretend otherwise, the Democrats didn't make Romney's ties to Bain Capital an issue, Newt Gingrich did. And Rick Perry, not Barack Obama, coined the phrase "Vulture Capitalism." They set Obama up for the layup that destroyed Mitt Romney forever.

2. Have no more than five: Primary debates are no being held upwards of seven months because the first primary, which is insane. All that does is take unelectable misfits like Bachmann and Herman Cain and make them national figures with access to the money they need to cause irreparable harm to the party. Say what you will about the Democrats, but they've never run a collection of monsters like the Republicans did last year.

If you deny the real freaks national TV time, you deny them the money to keep their campaigns going. And if they're out, you allow yourself to present what passes for your party's best face right from the get-go. That wouldn't have stopped Gingrich and Santorum from clearing that bar last year, but I suspect that 2016 will be different.

Since there are only five primaries that matter, there should only be five debates. Those would be within two weeks of voting in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and Super Tuesday. If the nominee isn't decided on Super Tuesday, the party has problems that will only be amplified by more debates.

3. Have the most antagonistic moderator you can find, or none at all: Political swine and their shithead consultant-lobbyist enablers aren't really interested in debates, they want an infomercial. That's why Priebus wants them turned into ball-washing exercises conducted by idiots like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin.

But that doesn't prepare you for a general election. Sure, it'll thrill the practically retarded primary base of the party, but it doesn't get the nominee ready for the attacks that they'll face from increasingly disciplined Democratic nominees.

If it were up to me, I'd find the smartest, most viciously liberal Harvard professor in all of Christendom to moderate the Republican debates. Or I'd have no moderator at all, and just let the candidates beat each other to death with their podiums.

The Conventions became infomercials after 1976, and the broadcast networks carry the minimal amount they can get away with, and the cable networks only carry them because they're starved for content. That will happen to the debates if fuckheads like Reince Piebus get their way.

On Morsi, Democracy and the "Freedom Agenda"

2013-07-04T21:05:00.000-04:00

What better day than the Fourth of July to discuss yesterday's events in Cairo, which saw Egypt's first elected president deposed.

I carry no water for the Muslim Brotherhood, but there's no shortage of supposedly conservative nonsense out there that begs responding to. Fox News Republicans and their moronic fellow travelers in the idiot blogosphere have managed over the last year, and especially in the last 24 hours, to be both hypocritical and hysterical. And like most bitches with the vapors, they need to be sent to their fainting couches for a good long time.

Although I thought it would have something to do with a change in foreign policy toward Israel, I predicted that the Egyptian military would depose Mohammed Morsi since he was first elected. Most of my freedom loving friends thought me a knave, a fool, or both. Y'know, because Obama.

The unmitigated balls of some of these people, talking about freedom in the Middle East! The simple fact is that the single greatest retarding factor for democracy in the Muslim world has been American foreign policy. But lets look at places where "freedom" has been imposed at gunpoint, specifically Iraq and Afghanistan. Are things looking good in either country? I think the consensus is that they are not. Any country that requires a massive foreign military presence to sustain its "freedom," absent third-party aggression, is ultimately doomed.

My friend Richard at Eye on a Crazy Planet wrote about this earlier today. Sadly, he was almost spectacularly wrong and wildly ahistorical on almost all of his points.

Richard does hint at a couple of things that I generally agree with, specifically that some dictatorships are better than others and that freedom just isn't for everyone, but he never actually comes out and says so. Instead, he seems to believe that the rest of the world should get a vote on the kind of government a given country should have, Israel excepted.

Here are some of his sillier points;

Though bolstered by support from the foolish and ineffectual administration of US President Obama, Morsi's slip into acting like a democratically elected dictator made him more popular in The White House than it did in Cairo. Massive nightly demonstrations that exceeded those at the end of the reign of Hosni Mubarak were proof of the popular discontent in Egypt.

Um, not exactly. The U.S foreign aid under Obama changed not at all than that from Nixon through Bush 43, meaning that the overwhelming majority of it went to the military. Oh, and that's the same military that deposed Morsi yesterday. Think that would happen with its money cut off? I don't. And didn't most of the Right go ape when Obama "abandoned" Mubarak, when it wasn't giving credit for the Arab Spring to President Bush?

Something to remember when considering that is that elections don't always lead to democracy. The other duly elected Muslim Brotherhood government, that of Hamas in Gaza, proves that once in power, Islamists, like fascists before them, will suspend democracy to retain their power for as long as they can hold on to it by force.

Though the so called "Arab Spring" in Egypt happened in the 21st Century, that country was less prepared for democracy than the American Colonies were more than two centuries earlier.

When was Hamas elected again? Oh right, in 2005, when the Bush White House ignored the protestations of both Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon as part of his idiotic "freedom agenda."

And why was Egypt "less prepared for democracy than the American colonies were more than two centuries earlier"?

Well, in part, that's because the American colonies didn't have the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA constantly subverting the necessary conditions for democracy in the decades prior to 1776.

Furthermore, lets not pretend that the early days of the Republic, where anyone other than landowning white males were disenfranchised for decades was particularly Athenian.

But things are different now, right? They sure are. There are no shortage of people howling about a supposedly unreconstructed Kenyan Marxist routinely steal elections through the offices of the ACORN and the New Black Panther Party.

Jokes aside, history is sort of import here. And the history is chilling.

Institutions that are essential to democracy, like an educated population, a healthy system of rival political parties, a constitution that safeguards rights and an independent judiciary are all democratic facets Egypt had. The only political organization that was organized was the Muslim Brotherhood, which used mosques and madrassas to force-feed subservience to the faithful and a country that is more than 95% Muslim. Rural Egyptians welcomed Morsi's tyranny of devout Islamism that was a bludgeon to the cosmopolitan citizens of Cairo who have spent the last weeks protesting en masse.

The embarrassing fall-out of the Egyptian coup is that after decades of the west acting superior and lecturing the Muslim world about democracy, the reality is that both they and we are better off if, in Egypt, it takes a time-out.

Until the death of GamAl Nasser, Egypt was in the Soviet sphere of influence. When the United States took over as its patron, Nasser's designated successor, Anwar Sadat, was give the same free reign to suppress his people by Washington that Moscow had. In fact, the CIA had trained Egypt's secret police to crush any democratic alternatives to regimes of Sadat and Mubarak. That left only groups like the Muslim Brotherhood as any kind of governing alternative.

Because of Cold War politics, America foreign aid was never predicated on Egypt's developing the kind of social conditions necessary for the kind of democracy that it took the United States 180 years to perfect. Successive American administrations - and especially traditionally conservative ones - wanted a police state in Egypt.

This is exactly what we saw in Iran, after the United States overthrew the only democratic government it ever had. As the great Dan Carlin has said, when you replace Mossedegh with the Shah, you wind up with Khomeini.

Richard's idea of a democratic "time-out" is as adorable to me as it is fascinating. After all, it's worked out so well in Pakistan, with its eight military coups in sixty years. On top of all their fantastic democracy, we also have their nuclear weapons and the Taliban, all subsidized - albeit indirectly - by the American taxpayer.

What Richard doesn't do is show us where a democratic time-out has worked in anybody's interests, particularly the country being put in the corner. That certainly wasn't true in Iran.

But, Richard tells us ... Hitler!

Morsi is a maniac who adheres to the murderous Muslim Brotherhood creed. Though we seem hypocrites to welcome his removal, what if the same had happened in Germany in 1934?

Adolf Hitler came to power the year before that in a fair election. The last fair election Germany was to have until after the Second World War and the millions of deaths to which the result of that election eventually led.

Certainly there would have been an outcry from some quarters in the west if the German Army, seeing Hitler's insanity, had chosen to remove him the year after he was elected. But millions of innocent lives and untold devastation would have been averted if the Wehrmacht had taken such a bold step.

There are a few problems with this theory.

First, Weimar Germany was an almost total democracy that didn't persecute democratic alternatives to the existing government, which was the case in Egypt.

Secondly, the rise of the Nazi Party was due entirely to economic conditions, not political ones. Absent hyperinflation and the Depression, it's unlikely that an Austrian misfit like Hitler would have ever come close to power in Berlin.

Third, the Treaty of Versailles made such a theoretical coup by the German military, which was limited to 100,000 troops, impossible. The army was actually outnumbered by Hitler's political army, the SA, which was three million strong.

It was only after Hitler's clandestine remilitarization of Germany that he disposed of the SA on the Night of the Long Knives, at which point, the SS was a professional military force sworn personally to him.

Lastly, there's no guarantee that if Hitler hadn't subverted Germany, the communists wouldn't have. The economic conditions in 1930s Germany made democracy all but impossible. And since remilitarization was the clearest path to economic recovery, as it was under the Nazis, it's difficult to see how a gutted army would revolt against that.

I really don't want to be a prick to Richard, who I actually like a lot, but history is sort of import in discussing matters like this.

In Praise of Bob Rae. A Goodbye to a Good Man

2013-06-19T21:17:00.000-04:00

On the day that he announces his political retirement, I come not to bury Bob Rae, but to praise him.

Not only did I vote against Rae twice when he was leader of the Ontario NDP, I actually enjoyed doing it. But I don't vote for someone as much as I vote against everybody else. Indeed, the proudest ballot I ever cast was for a transvestite to be mayor or Toronto, so convinced was I that he/she would be less embarrassing than Mel Lastman.

Having said that, there's much to respect and even admire about Rae.

He's easily one of the smartest people in Canadian elective office in my lifetime. Even those that disagree with him, as I repeatedly did, acknowledge that he's a heavyweight. And that's something that's profoundly lacking in public life today, where stupidity is too often considered a virtue.

Rae also engaged in the single greatest act of political bravery in my lifetime. For all intents and purposes, he pulled the plug on his time at Queens Park because he thought it was necessary.

Shithead conservative bloggers and dishonest Sun Media hacks, like Brian Lilley, enjoy pummelling Rae for Rae Days, all the while heaping praise on Republicans like Scott Walker for doing essentially the same thing.

Rae Days requires absolutely no courage for conservatives, since that's what their base vocally wants, anyway. However, the public sector unions were Rae's political base, and he knew it. And he still immolated himself doing what was right. If that's not bravery, I have no idea what is. Moreover, it speaks to the bald hypocrisy of his critics.

Speaking of hacks like Lilley, (who, full disclosure, is apparently a friend of my ex-girlfriend) He joyously posted this retarded and fundamentally dishonest chart from Sun News on his Facebook page this evening.

Did Premier Rae spend a literal shit-ton of money in the face of what was then considered a brutal recession? He sure did. And that's the primary reason I voted against his government in 1995.

What is nicely left out is the fact that there was a worldwide recession during Rae's tenure at Queens Park. What those lying fucks at the Sun neglect to point out are the federal and U.S employment and deficit figures at the time.

Why is that? I suspect that it's because the prime minister of Canada during the worst of it was Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney and the president of the United States was Republican George H.W Bush, who to varying degrees, did pretty much exactly what Rae did as premier of Ontario. All three raised taxes, all three had high unemployment, and all three had massive deficits.

But Rae is studied not only in isolation from the context of the time, the figures also leave out what his conservative peers were doing at the time.

By the way, why does Sun poster boy Stephen Harper get a pass? Unlike Rae, Harper started out with a $13 billion surplus, which he immediately pissed away on electioneering hucksterism. Then, in the guise of his Keynesian "Action Plan," he created tens of billions of dollars in new deficits, which he spends millions more advertising on television, five years after the fact. And none of that happened twenty years ago, when Keynesian economics were the the accepted wisdom, Harper's doing it now.

I point that out not to defend Rae, but to highlight the intellectual dishonesty and gullibility of what passes for the Right these days. Not only can we not win on our merits when we engage in nonsense like this, we don't deserve to.

I made no secret of my opinion that Bob Rae was the Liberal party's last, best chance of surviving, if not actually winning power. He was uniquely qualified to call the Harper government on its own bullshit. Rae was not only smarter than the rest than the rest of the federal leaders, he was more politically experienced and intimately familiar with the pitfalls of having headed a party and a government before.

If Rae compared his record in Toronto to Harper's in Ottawa, I believe it would have been devastating ... for Harper. And I think the Tories knew that, too.

But the Liberals insisted on being the Liberals. They continue to hate one another more than they hate Harper, and they refuse to renounce their addiction to stunt leaders, like Michael Ignatieff and Justin Trudeau. And that's precisely why "Canada's Natural Governing Party" is going to cease to exist by the end of the decade. By forcing Rae out of the permanent leadership race last year, I think they signed their own death warrant.

Although I opposed almost everything that he did in public life, I never doubted Rae's sincerity. I believe him to be someone who actually got into politics to serve what he thought was the greater good, rather than personal enrichment or self-aggrandizement.

Unlike most of the ward-heelers out there, I'm of the opinion that Bob Rae will better off without politics. Sadly, politics will be worse without Bob Rae.

I never voted for him and I never would, but I wish the man well in private life.

Scott Reid States the Obvious, Is Still Wrong

2013-06-17T21:07:00.001-04:00

Here I go again, saying something utterly uncontroversial to anyone that isn't three years old, a partisan fuck, or an abject idiot.

People in politics, as a general rule, don't enter the life to serve you. And they really haven't for about thirty years.

Politics has become a laboratory for mediocrities to see how rich they can make themselves off of the public teat.

There's no greater example of that than the revolving door between politics and lobbying. This is nothing more than a legal version of influence peddling and trading in on public service. I actually have more respect for those that actually have the balls to steal taxpayer money without the pretence of serving anyone other than themselves. Were it up to me, politicians, their appointees, and the senior civil service would be banned from lobbying for life.

Actually, that's not true. The only reason I wouldn't advocate stuffing the lot of them in a bag and drowning them like cats is that it would be impossible to find a big enough bag. So a lobbying ban will have to do.

The more mediocre a staffer you are, the more likely you are to moonlight in opinion journalism, especially in Canada. You almost never see the real kingmakers on TV or writing columns that even third-graders know are horseshit. Instead, you get the worst sycophants imaginable pretending to know "how it really works."

Which brings me to Scott Reid, the former Paul Martin consigliere. In 2005, Reid said the single most balls-out stupid thing I've heard in thirty years of studying politics.

You see, then-Opposition leader Stephen Harper was hoping to steal the Liberal issue of a national daycare credit from out from the Grits. So he offered a $1,200 a year tax credit to families as a way of ward-heeling himself into office.

Now, if you opposed the Tories, there were any number of ways to attack the proposal. For example, you do what I did: call it an unaffordable welfare program for the middle class and an example of hucksterism at its worst. The left is always going to oppose Harper's programs. If you want to beat him, you need to turn fiscal conservatives around from voting for him. I thought everybody knew that.

Apparently, Scotty didn't. That's why he said this ...

The "beer and popcorn" debacle reinforced the long held and richly deserved Liberal reputation for unbridled arrogance. Even when its true, you never tell the public that the government can spend their money better than they can. And, unsurprisingly, Harper made the Liberal Party wear that remark for years.

That's why I'm amazed that anyone listens to anything Reid has to say about politics. On the other hand, a lot of people are very fucking stupid.

On Friday, he published this in the Ottawa Citizen, and it stands as an example of how you can be right, while still being completely ignorant of a history that you yourself lived through. It really is a remarkable read.

Stephen Harper is gradually turning into Jean Chrétien.

From Teflon to tinpot, from insuperable to insurrection, the two leaders appear to be travelling remarkably similar paths in the second half of their time as prime minister.

That's demonstrably not true. Harper was Chretien from as far back as 2005, well before he moved into 24 Sussex drive.

This is because Harper heads a party populated mostly with lunatics and fetus fetishists. Hyper-religious "Big Government Conservatives" are not only fewer in number in Canada than in the United States, they also tend to be more geographically isolated and don't carry as many seats as they do in the U.S Congress. Majority governments do not rely on these people's support.

But they can fuck up the chance of winning one, as we saw in 2004. The Conservatives were enjoying a 10 point lead over the majority Liberals, when their candidates started spouting off about abortion, gay marriage, and other shit that sane people don't give a shit about. The Tory hopes of a majority evaporated and Liberals were only reduced to a minority, instead of being physically destroyed.

When the Martin minority government was defeated in the fall of '05, Harper knew that he had to muzzle those psychopaths, lest he be humiliated again. Not only did he vow not to legislate on those issues, he imposed brutal message discipline on his candidates. Since nothing succeeds like success, it shouldn't surprise anyone that he carried that discipline into government.

Chretien's experience was different. As a minister in the Trudeau government, he was routinely humiliated by the Prime Minister's Office. The Sun King once went so far as to rewrite one Chretien's budgets and release it to the public without consulting him first.

Then there's the nature of the Liberal Party itself, which is based almost entirely on regicide. Since about 1975, every Grit leader has had a powerful leader plotting behind the scenes to relieve him of his job. And Chretien knew that Paul Martin (who Scott Reid worked for, remember?) would do to him exactly what he did to John Turner, as he in fact later did.

Similarities in the personal styles of the two leaders have long been noted — and many of the qualities they share are admirable. They are both good at winning elections. They each lack any shred of indecision. And they both hold their ground stoutly. Perhaps most important of all, they understand who they are, what they stand for, and the importance of communicating consistency.

Each of those points are demonstrably false.

Both Chretien and Harper won their elections as a result of hopelessly divided governments. The Progressive Conservative coalition built by Brian Mulroney was destroyed by 1993, and Harper beat (albeit, only barely) a Liberal Party in a state of open civil war. Neither was a fantastic political accomplishment.

Furthermore, neither stands for anything at all. Chretien ran on the tired platform of "free shit for everyone," opposing the GST and NAFTA, only to head the most fiscally conservative, globalist government in Canadian history. Chretien successfully carried out Mulroney's legacy.

Harper, on the other hand, ran as a manager and a fiscal conservative. Once in office, however, he blew up the deficit faster and bigger than anyone since Trudeau himself, mostly on ward-heeling nonsense that the Liberals invented.

Neither communicated consistency, and only a moron would suggest they did. Both transparently lied to the public and dared them to vote for someone else, knowing that realistic alternatives didn't exist.

Increasingly, it is not just character but circumstance that begs the comparison of Harper with Chrétien.

The most top-of-mind parallel is caucus unrest. Brent Rathgeber, until his recent resignation, was as unknown to Canadians as the whereabouts of Mike Duffy’s dignity. Suddenly, we are to believe his departure heralds the evaporation of Harper’s control over his own backbench. That would be a gross overstatement.

But it is plain that a number of government MPs are no longer content to suffer in silence. Their personal ambitions are stagnating. Their ideological itch is going unscratched.

And they’re sick of taking orders from the hired help while getting the high hand from the prime minister.

Christ, Reid can't really believe that nonsense, can he? The facts are very different, and they go to the fundamental differences between the Liberal and Conservative parties.

The Tories are generally more disciplined when it comes to caucus and messaging generally. They are also much better team players until things become intolerable, as they did in the latter Mulroney years.

The Conservatives also never have a very deep bench. There's rarely a clear successor to power that everyone knows can win an election, which is why they've never enjoyed party dynasties, like the Liberals used to.

The Grits, on the other hand, tend to have very deep benches of talent. The problem is that they all think that they should be prime minister right away. Since Lester Pearson died, they've devoted themselves to stabbing one another in the back more than they have to actually governing. Whenever the the Tories have shown even a modicum of discipline, they've kicked the shit out of the Grits.

And if Reid is right, there's a Paul Martin in the Tory benches ready to take over when Harper is done in by his own hubris. If there is, I don't see one. Harper's most likely successor is Jason Kenney, and I can't think of anyone who wouldn't be able to beat the snot out of that greasy prick.

I will say one thing about Scott Reid's column. It has the worst people in the world publicly furious, and demonstrates as clearly as anything can that the Liberal civil war is far from over. Those crazed bastards are going to continue to going into elections devoting more time and energy hobbling each other than they do the Conservatives. And they're going to keep doing it until they cease to exist at all.

If there's anything at all the Conservative government can take comfort in during these dark days, it's that.

Things Fall Apart: Rob Ford's Continuing Crack-Up

2013-06-14T08:18:00.000-04:00

At his last press conference, President Dwight David Eisenhower was asked if he felt that he was treated fairly by the press. Eisenhower responded by simply saying, "Well, when you come down to it, I don’t see that a reporter could do much to a president, do you?"

That quote goes a long way in why explaining why I stopped my association with the modern conservative movement years ago.

Sure, the movement not only goes out of its way to not only defend the psychopathic bullshit that pops out of the pieholes of its most marginal members, it increasingly embraces it and attempts to mainstream it. There has also been a movement to make stupidity a conservative virtue, which I will neither support or defend.

But my single biggest issue with movement conservatives is that they're such whiny cocksuckers. Overpoweringly, insufferably bitchy little cunts.

To listen to those assholes, you'd think that everyone was out to get them, especially the dreaded mainstream media. Oh, on one hand, they can't stop crowing about the death of the professional press, but they still can't help but be foiled by it at every turn.

Politicians and pundits embrace this narrative because idiots can't get enough of it. And idiots are the prime force of the conservative base, proudly nominating guys who suggest that yoga leads to Satanism. When these deeply odd statements, directed to a delusional and borderline retarded base, are pointed out to the general public, conservatives howl about media conspiracies. It's deeply cynical and phenomenally moronic all at once.

And, in a nutshell, it is the leitmotif of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's career.

It doesn't take long to notice a pattern. Ford does something scandalous - usually driven by drunkenness, hubris, old-fashioned, home-cooked stupidity, or all three - and gets caught. He then follows his inevitable first instinct, which is to lie about the conduct. When presented with incontrovertible evidence of his rampant fuck-uppery, Ford finally admits the truth, but still manages to blame the press, most often the Toronto Star. This has happened so frequently that even Ford's most strident defenders can't explain it away, so they usually ignore it.

That this narrative would be deployed yet again when it turned out that Etobicoke Slim is a titanic crackhead was as predictable as it is tiresome.

The Star is often described as Marxist by people who don't have even the most basic understanding of what Marxism is, which is of course why they hate Ford. They publish "lies," even though no one can point to one that's been verified by anyone who doesn't use tin foil as a fashion accessory.

Nor can they adequately explain why underpaid reporters in their twenties and early thirties would destroy their careers just to bring down a politician who will be gone soon enough. Why Torstar Corporation would repeatedly expose itself to potentially ruinous libel judgements is also never addressed, even though Canada is one of the Western world's most plaintiff-friendly jurisdictions. The idea that a for-profit business would endanger its very existence for ideological reasons is profoundly silly.

So you get semi-lucid nonsense like this.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford should not resign. Nobody has proved that he’s done anything wrong.

Make no mistake about it — the protests in front of Toronto’s City Hall, the calls for his resignation, the constant invasion of his privacy by media types lurking outside his home, or hanging around his cottage, are not really about some ephemeral, possibly doctored video which allegedly shows Ford smoking crack cocaine. All the rackety protests and all the resignation calls and all the hounding by the media are about one thing — a hatred for Ford’s right-wing politics and an inability to accept that their fellow Torontonians voted him into office.

These people are unclear on a basic concept of democracy, which most individuals understand when they go to the polls: Somebody else’s favoured candidate might win over theirs. In fact, Ford won 47 per cent of the vote, slightly more than Calgary’s mayor, Naheed Nenshi, who garnered 40 per cent of the vote. (Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson took 53 per cent of the vote in 2011.)

One of the protesters at a rally in front of Toronto City Hall the other day held up a sign calling for a “Fordless Toronto.” That says it all — this is clearly all about politics. It’s about an overweight and rather rumpled Rob Ford not being what these self-appointed elitists think Toronto should look like, or think like, or be like. So, they’re desperately grasping at the flimsiest straws they can find, to force him out of office.

There's your logic-deficient argument of the day.

As a matter of fact, Ford may have actually put on a lab coat and invented the appearance of wrongdoing. Shit, he only barely survived a judicial order for his removal just six months ago.

Moreover, far too many conservatives don't believe that a "right to privacy" even exists ... unless of course the attempts of folks like Ford and Rush Limbaugh to live like Keith Richards is at issue. And the Canadian media has been altogether too restrained regarding Hizzoner's private life. The numerous 911 calls from his home haven't gotten anywhere near the attention that they would have anywhere else in the world.

As for "media types lurking outside his home, or hanging around his cottage," all we really have to rely on this is the word of Rob and his dumber brother, Doug, neither of whom have bothered to actually document any of it. And it bears repeating that the Ford family has a rather loose relationship with the truth.

The constant braying of Ford's supporters aside, I can't see a compelling case that he's actually "a right-winger" at all. The two things he points to most often are his desire to build a subway system that he doesn't want to pay for and a budget surplus that exists entirely because of a land-transfer tax that he's vowed to abolish. He's a Huey Long populist, lacking even the most basic understanding of both mathematics and political reality.

The argument that this is an assault on democracy itself is one of the most fucking laughable things I've ever heard. It implies an licence to break the law with impunity, simply by virtue of being elected to something. Of course, that only applies to conservatives. Liberals with far fewer brushes with the law than Ford are routinely called upon to resign or be otherwise removed from office, often by the same people defending Ford.

Furthermore, it isn't Ford's opponents that keep saying that they want an election right now. It's the Ford brothers themselves. And resignation is the only path to get that.

But let's address the crack-hogging video, shall we?

The Calgary Herald repeats the Ford party line about " some ephemeral, possibly doctored video which allegedly shows Ford smoking crack cocaine," which doesn't exist and was manipulated if it does.

The deeply dishonest and possibly brain-injured Ford Nation would have you believe that Robyn Doolittle and Kevin Donovan made the whole thing up, in conjunction with Gawker, which is silly on its face.

Maybe this will help.

CTV News has learned that Toronto Police were investigating the existence of an alleged video involving Mayor Rob Ford, several weeks before the story first appeared in the Toronto Star. As part of the investigation leading to the raids on Thursday, officers obtained telephone wire-tap evidence.

A highly-placed source confirms to CTV News that on those wiretaps, persons of interest discussed that video in detail, and referred to the mayor's alleged presence in the video.

Coincidentally, the places raided yesterday morning include the apartment where Ford allegedly told his staff the video could be found and the house where Ford was photographed lovingly embracing a few Somali gang-bangers, two of whom were subsequently shot.

This is obviously something of a pickle for the shitheads in Ford Nation. You can't exactly present yourself as a "law and order conservative" while accusing the police of joining - or even drawing - the Toronto Star in a political conspiracy, can you?

On the other hand, those dickheads refused to address the resignations or firings of over a half dozen of Ford's immediate staff in days after the Star report, nor do you hear much from them about Nick Kouvalis saying, Ford's 2010 campaign strategist and chief of staff, saying that he wouldn't work to re-elect the Mayor until he gets his shit together.

To believe the Ford brothers and their defenders, you necessarily have to believe in the most wide-ranging conspiracy I've ever herd - one that encompasses Gawker (who had likely never heard of Ford or the Star before last month,) The Star, CTV, the Toronto Police (up to and including the Chief,) and over a third of Hizzoner's recent staff, along with his former campaign manager.

That's pretty impressive, as far as conspiracies go. In my opinion, the Mayor's office and its defenders would be better off by saying "Isn't coke supposed to keep you thin?"

Rob Ford is a certified fuck up and all of the available circumstantial evidence suggests that he's a drunk and drug fiend. Or the rest of the world is lying.

And you know what? I don't care whether he resigns or not. He's routinely been shithammered by Council for the last two years, effectively stopping him from doing anything too stupid. Even if he's re-elected, which I suspect he will be, he'll still be singularly ineffective in doing anything because he won't have any coattails at all next year.

Besides, he entertains me. I've always wondered what it would be like to be governed by a more out-of-control version of Axl Rose, and now I'm finding out.

On the other hand, he's enormously destructive to conservativism generally. There's no way that Ontario Progressive Conservatives win any seats in 416 with Ford at City Hall, and it's entirely possible that the federal party loses the seats that they won here in 2011.

But Tim Hudak is the dumbest motherfucker that I've ever been within 10 feet of, and Stephen Harper has governed well to the left of Barack Obama. So who gives a shit if either of them win or retain power? I'd be fine with Ford destroying both of them. God knows that having rank and file conservatives defending the right of demonstrated fucking criminals to keep and hold office isn't going to exactly help either party.

There's a conservative apocalypse coming. And rather than holding it off, defending hubristic monsters like Rob Ford is enabling it.

If the strange and savage love affair between the Right and Rob Ford demonstrates anything, it's that we've utterly abandoned the core conservative principle of accountability. Christ, we insisted on the utter annihilation of the federal Liberals because of a sponsorship scandal that involved a few of their bureaucrats only to defend this when we finally did it? Really?

So long as we're willing to man the barricades for the right of our guys to be stoned and stupid, we essentially forfeit the right call anyone else on their own sleaziness.

If this is the hill that the movement wants to die on, it's almost impossible to argue that it doesn't deserve to die. At least not with a straight face.

Plowing Through More Republican Horseshit, IRS and NSA Edition

2013-06-06T22:57:00.000-04:00

Most of you remember my old blog, dont'cha? I spent shitloads of time there from 2005-2008 bitching endlessly about the power of the US federal government and the potential abuse thereof.

And you know what I got for my fucking trouble? A endless amount of nonsense about the Unitary Executive Theory and the righteousness of George W. Bush. Most of those people would describe themselves as Tea Partiers today, and not readily admitting to knowing who Bush even was, let alone ever having supported him so throatily.

Then there's the Citizens United decision, which I've always had a mighty bug up my ass about.

I'm on the record as having said that political activity should get no preferential treatment under the tax code, from deducting lobbying costs right on down to deducting political contributions from your taxes. Shit, I don't even support the charitable deductions for charities that actually accomplish something other than shitty commercials.

If you're interested in knowing why, I'll tell you.

The more deductions you allow in the tax code, the higher the rates have to be to generate the revenue the government needs to operate. And if you want a government with the capability of both providing accessable health care to everyone and being prepared to bomb everyone from Jakarta to Winnipeg, we're talking about a fair bit of revenue.

Advocates of a flat tax have never been able to answer that basic fact. The more you deduct for yourself, the more everyone pays in higher rates. And this is what made the Ryan-Romney tax proposals last year such a bad fucking joke to anyone with a basic grasp of arithmetic.

My personal hero, Velociman, has one of the most misguided things I've ever seen up here.

A Redress of Grievances
That was, and is, the crime of the Tea Party groups. They are loose, and unaffiliated. When anyone attempts to wrest control of the Tea Parties at any level above the community they are whipsawed, and lashed.
That was the fearful thing. That is what keeps Obama awake at night. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of assembly and the right to redress grievances not as a sop of government, but as a natural right of man. From God, if you will. The Tea Parties were actually fomenting during the Bush bailout leading up to the 2008 election. They have never been specifically anti-Obama. Merely anti-spending. And yet they have been targeted and reviled as mutants, and racists.

There are any number of factual errors in those paragraphs, not least of which is that the Tea Party isn't almost wholly constituted by mutants.

Firstly, nothing calling itself the "Party Party" existed before Rick Santelli's retarded rant of February 2009, and that addressed relief to underwater homeowners under the thumb of the cocksucker banks, who themselves were just bailed out. And that Santelli said this from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade went almost completed unnoticed by everyone that isn't me.

Second, it's almost impossible to know if Tea Party groups are "loose, and unaffiliated" in light of Citizens United, which restricted disclosure of their donor base.

Thirdly, this isn't about a redress of grievances or even the First Amendment.

Let me repeat that. This isn't about a redress of grievances or even the First Amendment. The Obama administration never shut down the right of Tea Party groups to speak and, if they tried, they did a godawful job of it, since I couldn't escape those mutants last year.

It's actually about administrative tax law.

The Tea Parties weren't asserting a right, they were seeking a favour from the government in the form of non-profit tax status. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not aware of the right to tax-exempt status for anyone but Indians in the Constitution. Anyone who suggests otherwise is either ignorant of lying.

My ultimate problem with these shithead Republicans is that they want other taxpayers to subsidize the cost of their bitching about how taxes are so high. Their right to free speech isn't inhibited as much their ability to get other people to pay for it is, so fuck them.

Now, do I think that that the administration specifically targeted conservative groups through the IRS? Sure I do.

Is that "Watergate," like so many idiots suggest it is? No, it is not.

President Nixon specifically targeted individuals for IRS harassment, just as Johnson and Kennedy did before him. The difference is that they weren't organized groups seeking deductions in a post-Citizens United world, which begs such scrutiny. Nixon went after individual members of groups, journalists and sundry political enemies, which is a clear abuse of power and something no one has accused Obama of.

Then there's the recent NSA scandal, to which I ask ...... What did you think was going to happen?

Most of you will remember that I went apeshit when I first heard about the Bush NSA program that was implemented in secret, without congressional authorization, after 9/11. I went on about it for years, actually.

But the people who were fine with it then - and in some cases demanded the prosecution of journalists that reported on it - are out of their tiny pinheads about it now. Of course, these are almost universally the same twats that want a secret war in Syria, so go figure.

However there are a couple of important distinctions.

First, Obama sought a FISA warrant for the records, which Bush never did, and Republicans insisted that he didn't have to under Unitary Executive Theory, the Authorization to Use Military Force Resolution of 2001 and the "Because ....Lincoln!" argument that they deploy whenever it fucking suits them.

Second, the GOP voted to change the law to to allow for exactly what Obama is doing today. Something I would advocate impeaching Obama for, Republicans legitimized way back when.

And that goes back to the tax case. Do you want to pay higher tax rates just because shiityy people with dishonest thinking don't wantto pay any at all?

The Slow Suicide of Rob Ford

2013-05-31T03:33:00.000-04:00

Look, I don't especially give a shit if Mayor Rob Ford injects himself with horse tranquillizer, Ibogaine and erectile medication every morning, let alone smokes a little crack. As I'm sure you recall, Whitney Houston's ruminations on crack were well known, for all the good they did her.

I'm on the record as supporting recreational drug use, and I further think that cocaine should be reclassified as a food group. And all things being equal, it could very well be that drugs make Rob Ford a better person. God knows that he could hardly be any dumber.

It isn't the drugs that bother me so much about the latest of la Ford follies. It's the hypocrisy and the arrogance. If there's one thing that's almost certain to set me off, it's the combination of arrogance and stupidity in a single person. I'd say that it's almost a chemical reaction, but that might be the blow talking.

More importantly, this entire clusterfuck reinforces an already well-established narrative of what a balls-out disaster this mayor has been. He can't do anything right, not even something as innocuous as handling the fallout of smoking crack with a gang of Somali narcotic peddlers.

Ford wasn't even bothering to deny this one for an entire week, which is unusual. Whenever he creates a giant mess of things, which happens about every other week, he gets out front and denies it, even though he's always lying. He did call the reporting of Gawker and the Toronto Star ridiculous, but that's not exactly a denial. There very probably are things in the story that are ridiculous, but Ford didn't actually address the core allegations in them.

When he finally did make a public statement last Friday, he went directly to the Clinton playbook, saying, "I do not use crack cocaine, nor am I am I an addict of crack cocaine." The use of the present tense is notable. And in fairness, a glass pipe was seen nowhere near the podium.

The only reason I think this story is important at all - outside of the obvious factor of Hizzoner's inability to deal with it prudently - is because this is the same stupid bastard who once demanded that convicted criminals be subjected to a Stalinist regime of internal exile for convicted criminals. And given that he can now be fairly classified as a one-man crime spree himself, Rob Ford has got to go.

Do I think that he will? Short answer? No, I don't.

Etobicoke Slim has too much pride and too few brains. He insists that he's willing to put himself up for election, but he isn't willing to do the one thing that could force one: resigning and declaring his candidacy in a by-election.

I howled like a retard at the prospect of a by-election last fall when it looked as if Ford's other contraventions of the law would force his removal, and I oppose one now. The idea of wasting seven to ten million dollars to feed Ford's demented hubris is anathema to me, and it should be to any fiscal conservative.

In the last seven days, no fewer than five of Etobicoke Slim's senior staff have quit or been fired. That the people closest to him have lost faith in the mayor should send a strong message to the public and, more importantly, Council.

Hizzoner hasn't accomplished much of anything after his first six months in office, two years ago. He's routinely humiliated by Council. The only person there who'll regularly side with the Brothers Ford is a brain-damaged Gino Boy like Georgio Mammolitti.

It doesn't matter if Rob Ford stays in office or not. In fact, it doesn't matter if he wins the next election, which is a distinct possibility. Oh, he'll destroy conservatism in this city for a fucking generation by way of his continuing and increasingly lunatic shenanigans.

The guy is a chronic fuck-up, a congenital liar and his only claim to conservatism is that he can pay for a massive subway expansion with nothing more than unicorn farts. The fact that he's doing crack might be the least objectionable thing about Rob Ford.

This is where modern conservatives always fall down. They love the rhetoric of their mongoloid figureheads more than they pay attention to their actions. You see that happening over and over again, and that's why winnable elections are being routinely lost.

By instinctively defending the shitheads on our side, we marginalize not only ourselves, but our ideas. By making heroes out people like Rob Ford and Sarah Palin, we pretty much make our agenda unelectable. In doing that, we guarantee that our base isn't broadened enough to win elections.

Sure, you can point to the 2010 U.S congressional elections and Ford's own victory, but that only proves that you aren't paying attention. Those victories came only because the governing Left overreached, not because of the merits of any argument put forward by the Right.

And no sooner than the Right was elected, they began overreaching. Look at the classically ignorant Tea Party. They presented themselves as libertarians, but as soon as they took office they started trying to legislate shit like birth control and effectively destroyed themselves. Most of the Tea Party governors elected in 2010 are on a trajectory to get annihilated next year.

Liberals aren't stupid. They learned important lessons from the way that conservatives marginalized them in the 1970s and '80s. And they've pretty much been on a winning streak ever since. When George W. Bush, Stephen Harper and even Rob Ford were elected, it was partly because they promised to preserve or even expand social spending. All three campaigned on that idea.

Mitt Romney and John McCain ran to the Republican base and suffered the worst defeats of any GOP presidential candidate where there wasn't a third-party candidate since 1964. The Wildrose Party in Alberta threw away a sure thing in Alberta by doing the same thing last year.

Now, if you listen to Mayor Ford and his impossibly dumb brother, you get the idea that they're just dying to fight an election over this scandal.

Well, here's the good news. They can. Any time they want. They'd just have to resign and declare their candidacies in a by-election. In Doug's case, the by-election would be automatic. In the case of the mayor, Council could appoint an interim mayor to fill out Ford's term, but if the demand was there, there'd almost certainly be an election.

But they're lying. That's why they haven't resigned yet.

Toronto is a very liberal city, I may not like it, but that's a fact. Ford won for two reasons; he was unopposed on the right (if you don't count the joke candidacy of Rocco Rossi) and roughly a dozen people ran to his left.

If a snap election were called tomorrow, the field would be narrowed down to about three candidates: Ford, John Tory and Oliva Chow. Chow would be alone on the Left in her ability to raise money and build an organization in a short period of time, say 60 days. And it's safe to say that "the Orientals" would "work like dogs" to elect her, in an effort to "take over."

As I write this, Etobicoke Slim's approval rating is at about 37%. The only way to win under those circumstances is to run against a divided left. And if Tory runs, that cuts down on Ford's support from conservatives who aren't abject idiots.

Rob Ford can't win a snap election, which is further proof of their bluster and abject fucking lying.

The Big Crack Up

2013-05-17T03:10:00.000-04:00

Hey, can we all stop pretending that Toronto mayor Rob Ford isn't the most spectacular fuck-up in human history? Because that'd be great.

I'm addressing that question to braying mob of liberal shitheads out there, who seemingly aren't smart enough to just stand back and let their enemies die on their own. There's just no talking to those assholes.

No, I'm asking this of my fellow conservatives, who almost to a man are determined to be repeatedly humiliated with Ford and his unending follies, both personal and professional.

Not only is Ford a repellent and disastrously ignorant human being, he's endlessly damaging to conservatism. At this point, it's hard not to see how how Etobicoke Slim's only lasting legacy will be inflicting Olivia Chow on the City of Toronto as mayor next year because of his chronic inability to keep his mouth shut and his shit together. And you know what? Conservatives will have no one to blame but themselves.

Look, I don't know for a fact that this morning's allegations of Ford smoking crack in the last six months are true or not. But I'm inclined to believe that they are.

After all, this isn't Hizzoner's first time at the pharmaceutical rodeo.

Ford was actually arrested in Miami 14 years ago for drunk driving and marijuana possession. Any foreigner carrying pot in a jurisdiction as savage as fucking Florida can only be described as hubris-crazed retard. That's ballsy to the point of stupidity. Hadn't that motherfucker ever seen Midnight Express? Florida's a little more merciful than Turkey toward drug offenders, but not much.

Of course, Ford lied about it.

Then there was the story of Ford promising to get OxyContin for some HIV positive lunatic.

In case you were worried, there are multiple stories about Ford's booze-fuelled craziness, too.

Given the record, it's hard not to believe the crack story. There's just too much history out there now to write it off a fantasy driven by the Goddamned Liberal Media. And as much as my friends on the Right like to pretend otherwise, the Toronto Star isn't in the business of committing professional suicide or setting themselves up to get get sued out of existence.

Yes, the story started with Gawker. And yes, Gawker has a ... dodgy history. But, at this point, Ford can't just rail against the media if these stories are false, he needs to sue. And he needs to sue Gawker in an American court, under the Sullivan v. New York Times Co. standard. As I and my conservative friends have said over and over again, Canadian libel laws are entirely too friendly to the plaintiff.

I can almost guarantee you that by 9 am, Team Ford and their sycophantic bloggers are going to be playing this as another instance of "The media is out to get us." Know up front that that's horseshit.

The fact is that Hizzoner keeps putting himself in the middle of the scandals. When he's not having his picture taken with obvious gangbangers, he's posing with Latvian Nazis. He keeps doing this to himself. There has yet to be a Rob Ford scandal that hasn't started with Rob Ford's conduct. Not one. Its well past time that conservatives start admitting that.

The "Ford Nation" comprises about the thirty percent of the city that has suffered a grievous head injury. They'll support him if he campaigns in a loincloth made entirely of dead babies. It's become clear that they'll excuse anything from him.

That's enough for Ford to win, assuming that the Left insists on being the Left and runs a dozen candidates.

But what if they don't? What if they decide that Etobicoke Slim is entirely too much of a menace to stay in office, and clear the field for Olivia Chow?

I can see a scenario where she wins pretty big in a head to head race. She'd sweep the downtown core, and pick up more than enough heavily Chinese suburban wards to put her over the top.

Conservatives are playing a dangerous game in a left-wing city, assuming that liberals are just going to let Ford get re-elected in a cakewalk

I'm not. I'm assuming the worst - the the Left will get behind Chow and beat the shit out of Hizzoner, possibly in an asshole blowout. Conservatives that continue to support Ford are potentially voting for the Widow Layton.

Let's see how well that works out for us.

We need someone like John Tory or Doug Holyday to push Ford out of the race, soonest.

Rob Ford Made a Sexy Time

2013-03-09T09:01:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure I've been clear enough enough about this. If given the choice between voting my incumbent mayor, Rob Ford, and Phil Spector, I'd have to go with Spector. Even with the goofy fucking wigs and demonstrated ability to blow a b-movie actresses' goddamed noggin off, Phil still causes less embarrassment to himself and everyone around him than Ford does in the first 20 minutes of a given day. The only advantage Ford has over Spector is a slightly better track record in court.

Look, everyone knows that nothing raises the pheromones quite like an evening with the Canadian Jewish Public Affairs Committee. There can be no denying the almost palpable sexual tension that overwhelms any and all of their functions. I personally blame them for the teen pregnancy crisis of the 1980s.

Thursday was an exciting day for everybody. The weather started not sucking so bad and it was the great and good Dr. Reverend's birthday. It was CJPAC. Former mayoral rival Sarah Thomson was there in her newly dreadlocked and fine-assed glory and, y'know, things happen.

She joined people queuing to meet and have photos taken with Ford, whom she frequently debated as rival candidate during the 2010 civic election, and then chided him for not attending her recent transit forum.

“He told me he was in Florida and I should have been with him because his wife wasn’t there,” Thomson told the Star on Friday. “I didn’t expect that. Rob doesn’t normally act that way towards women, so I was a little bit shocked, and then we posed to get our picture taken and he grabbed my ass during the pose.”

As I said, these things happen. There are times in our lives when passion rules and when it causes us to dare, we dare greatly. It might not always play out the way we'd prefer, but when passion rewards us, it rewards us greatly. That's just the way love works, people.

Far be it from me to criminalize romance, like the Goddamned Liberal Media continually insists on doing, but hasn't Etobicoke Slim caused himself enough trouble?

That's not to say that the oafish shithead is admitting anything. That's fucking crazy talk. Nope, within hours of the story breaking, Boy Rob reached deep into his Nixonian soul and denied everything.

“Last night I had the pleasure of attending a wonderful event to support the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee.

“This is an event that is attended by numerous political leaders and where I have been a guest in the past.

“Early this morning, false allegations were made regarding a number of disgusting actions. I am shocked, dismayed and surprised. I can say without hesitation that they are absolutely, completely false.

“What is more surprising is that a woman who has aspired to be a civic leader would cry wolf on a day where we should be celebrating women across the globe.

“This is a day we should all take the time to reflect upon the women in our lives and in our society. It is a day when we can envision the changes we want to make in our communities to ensure that all people are equal and that violence and discrimination against women comes to an end.”

In my opinion, everyone would've been better off if he just said something like this ...

Lookee, bitches, don't you know who I am? I have a literal shit-ton of money and a cool job. Those are the kind of things that broads go for. Oh sure, they'll say they don't, but they're just as shallow as the fucking voters. Talk sternly and promise them enough cool shit, and both are yours.

By the way, just look at me, will ya? What skirt in her right mind could say no to a doughy, entitled dope that sweats from the sternum? Dykes, that's fucking who! Did I mention that I coach football for would-be thugs and serial rapists? I'm not saying that I'm a great guy, I'm saying that I'm the best guy ever!

Listen to the socialists moan about how I tried to get my pecker wet the night before International Women's Day, fer chrissakes! Well, I was celebrating, too. Just a few hours early. More importantly, I'm of the considered opinion that every day is a day worth celebrating poontang! Especially when my crazy fucking wife isn't around.

Goddamn, I need a drink! And can we get some R. Kelly up in this motherfucker? Mayor Daddy needs to dance!

Anyone who peruses my archives knows that I endorsed Sarah Thomson in 2010 and voted for her, even when she dropped out and endorsed George Smitherman. My loathing for Hizzoner is also nothing short of legendary. Some of my best recent writing has detailed that hatred at length. Not only am I better writer for hating Rob Ford, I'm a better man.

But neither of things colour my opinion all that much. The real question is: "Why would Sarah Thomson lie?"

Thomson is enough of a big shot in this town that she can get media attention pretty much whenever she wants it. And even though I voted for her, I'm not exactly hearing a Moby Dick-like drum chorus for a repeat performance.

Even if she is laying the groundwork for another run, this is the kind of allegation you drop two days before an election, not two years. Who's even going to remember this story in the fall of 2014, especially given Hizzoner's legion of other fuck-ups; past, present and future?

On the other hand, she might be nuts. This is, after all, a woman in mid-40s with dreadlocks and isn't known to have sired children with Bob Marley, or even Peter Tosh. It seems unlikely, but the possibility can't be entirely ruled out.

But what does Ford have going for him? Even the Mayor's staunchest defenders aren't stupid enough to seriously suggest that he's actually innocent of anything anymore. Instead, they just argue that he isn't scuzzy enough to be thrown out of office because of it.

I'm personally inclined to believe Thomson's story, if only because it perfectly fits a narrative that Ford's own conduct over twelve years has assiduously built. It's almost impossible to imagine a level of assholerly that this idiot won't stoop to. If you told me that he wanted to buy that park next to his house because he had run out burial space for freshly murdered whores on his own property, I wouldn't dismiss it as quickly as you might think I would.

That's the problem with Ford. Each and every negative story about him has been true enough to make the next one at least plausible. The only question that arises now is, "Is this worth forcing a new election over?"

And you know what? It's well past time that conservatives stop defending this asshole. While it helps him mightily, it only destroys conservatism in this city.

There's pretty much no saving Ontario Provincial Conservative leader, Tim Hudak, who is going to face his second almost fetishized humiliation this spring. But Stephen Harper faces the very real possibility of having his Toronto seats divided up between the NDP and Liberals in 2015, a possibility that's more likely if a self-destructive Rob Ford is still in office.

The Ford phenomenon isn't unlike what's happening with the Republicans in the United States. Their loonier candidates discourses on the merits of rape babies makes it difficult for well-meaning voters to elect rational conservatives who could give a shit about such nonsense. So the left wins by default.

Because of the way that the left works, I'd say that Ford is still the favourite to win in 2014. But that isn't going to help Tim Hudak, who has maybe a dozen chromosomes too many, and it will almost certainly hurt Harper in area code 416, and possibly 905.

Don't forget, Toronto is still a fundamentally liberal city. We only elect conservatives when the left implodes on itself. But we're still, far and away, the biggest and most important city in the country. We carried Jean Chretien to victory three times in a row. Harper only won his majority when he started carrying seats in the Greater Toronto Area.

Want an even more liberal Harper government? Keep Ford in office and let the Liberals and the NDP run against him, instead of Harper. If you think that Harper won the GTA seats that he did last time for any reason other than the Liberals were in a state of national collapse, you're fucking kidding yourselves.

Even if he's re-elected, Ford will be the last "conservative" mayor of Toronto in a good long time. At some point, you have to count on the left getting their all their shit in one sock. If Olivia Chow loses in 2014, she'll have a virtually lock on 2018. And who will we have?

Ford has to be stopped from running again, and only conservatives can do that. His amen choir in the media and the stupid fucking blogosphere has to understanding that this is about something bigger than Rob Ford. I understand the urge to protect him from removal during his elective term, but anything after that is an act of self-mutilation.

When Ford becomes shorthand for conservative in this city, conservatives are fucked, both municipally and provincially. And we're going to be handicapped more than we have to be federally.

Worse than that, we destroy ourselves on the one thing that's supposed to matter - principle. It's bad enough that Conservatives have rallied around Harper's spending spree and pretended that it's something other than what it is. Defending Ford's continued self-destructive behaviour instead of calling him on it is an open invitation for no self-respecting person to take our calls for personal responsibility seriously ever again.

If nothing is ever Ford's fault, why is anything anyone else's fault?

At that point, what conservatism even mean?

The worst part of the Sarah Tompson allegations is that they buried this story, which should horrify anyone that knows anything about anything. If you want to truly estroy the conceptof good government, turn they keys over to the fucking lobbyists. I can't think of a faster way to do it.

Rob Ford Has Got to be Fucking Kidding

2013-03-01T05:02:00.000-05:00

Ever notice how O.J Simpson never remarried? I wish my mayor was as bright as the erstwhile Juice

I spent a good chunk of last fall writing about Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's latest - and most egregious- fuck up, the conflict of interest beef that very nearly had his tubby ass shoved out of office with a frontloader.

Long story short; As a city councillor, Etobicoke Slim used city letterhead to hit up scumbag lobbyists for donations to his silly fucking football foundation. The city's integrity commissioner agreed and ordered Ford to return the money. City council later voted to so order the same.

After Ford became mayor, Council voted on the stupid fucking mess again. This time, Ford spoke and voted on the matter, prompting a guy named Paul Magder to sue Hizzoner under the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act. Madger won at trial and Ford was ordered removed from office. That decision was reversed on appeal in January.

As I said throughout this stupid nightmare, I didn't think that Hizzoner's speech and vote constituted enough of a conflict to warrant removal, but that I would take it. Nor was I expect Justice Hackland to rule the way that he did. However, when the initial ruling came down, I did expect it to be upheld by the Superior Court.

The worst and most unforgivable sin was the solicitation from lobbyists. Were I writing the laws, that would have resulted in immediate expulsion and lifetime disqualification from holding higher office.

I've said this dozens of times in this space: Lobbyists are the root of all evil in modern democracy. Both conservatives and liberals should feel this way because lobbies fuck up all of their dream policies. Conservatives can't get rational tax reform because of special interest loopholes, and liberals can't get much of anything without those same interests finding a way to pervert it into a means of self-enrichment.

I've spent years listening to assholes moan about the corrosive effect of money in politics, which is unmitigated bullshit. Don't believe me? Ask Karl Rove, who spent north of $200 million in the last U.S election and sending exactly no one to Washington. Or Sheldon Adelson, who did pretty much the same thing with the same result. Even with an awesomely stupid electorate, money didn't accomplish anything close to what it was supposed to.

The truly corrupting thing in politics is politicians or their staffers decamping to lucrative lobbying gigs. And it's shocking how often lobbyists wind up running campaigns, supposed because they're just that civic-minded.

Ford's a guy who made his name railing against the "gravy train." Lobbyists exist only to ensure that that train stops at their stations, and those of their well-heeled clients, as frequently as possible.

The fact that the solicitation of favors from lobbyists by elected officials in this province isn't a crime in this province is nothing less than stunning to me. And remember, l'affaire Ford began with solicitations to lobbyists.

So what's Etobicoke Slim been doing with his time lately?

Mayor Rob Ford is still asking registered lobbyists to donate to his football foundation — a practice that violates the city’s code of conduct and led to the court case that nearly forced him out of office.

Two lobbyists showed the Star fundraising letters Ford sent them within the past two months on behalf of the foundation. Ford hand-signed both letters.

Of course he is. Of fucking course he is.

Oh, it gets better, too.

Andy Manahan, executive director of the Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario, said he received a letter on Jan. 28 — only three days after Ford won his appeal in the conflict of interest saga that began with his decision to solicit donations from lobbyists in 2009. (Ed: emphasis mine)

(...)

Manahan said he has not met with Ford but has met with a member of his staff.

The second registered lobbyist asked not to be named for fear of alienating the Ford administration. He said, “I think it’s kind of suspicious. The only interactions I’ve had with him were on city business or as a lobbyist registrant.”

He added: “It goes back to: are you allowed to use names and contact information from business dealings to raise funds? Is that permitted? It sure seems strange.”

(...)

Ford also sent a fundraising letter in the past two months to a non-lobbyist who does business with the city and whose fortunes he could directly influence: Brian Ashton, president of the Canadian National Exhibition Association, which stages the annual fair.

Ashton received a letter from Ford on Jan. 10 — three days after Ford’s lawyer argued his appeal in court but before the judges released their decision.

As mayor, Ford is automatically a member of the association board; if Ashton seeks re-election, Ford could vote for or against him. Under its new governance model, the association will pay rent of more than $3 million to the city in 2013.

“It’s awkward because if you’re doing business with the city in any fashion, do you feel a sense of obligation?” said Ashton, a former centrist councillor who retired from politics in 2010. “If you don’t (donate), will that influence his impression or support of your organization?”

Ashton is currently urging council members not to put a casino at Exhibition Place. He said the fundraising letters are “unnerving” because “the Fords are very powerful in Toronto.”

“I just hope that (Rob Ford) separates the two and doesn’t allow fundraising efforts to influence decisions with respect to the casino or any other CNE business,” Ashton said

Ford's defenders, several of whom have been friendly to me and this blog, have suggested that what Ford's doing is okay because it's for charity and not for him. This is misguided on several counts.

First, the Rob Ford Football Foundation is something that he's repeatedly cited in his campaigns. Therefore, regardless of its intention or the work it does, it is a political tool of the mayor's.

Second, it's clearly very important to Ford personally. That being the case, what's the difference between his asking lobbyists for foundation donations or asking for them to buy him a car?

Third, the appearance of and potential for corruption remain. What if a lobbyist who gives receives decisions from the city favourable to his clients? What if a lobbyist who refuses doesn't?

Fourth, he's still using city time and resources to work for the Ford Foundation. Despite everything, he continues to insist on doing exactly what started all the chaos the city went through in the first place.

The mayor's hubris is undeniable, but it's hardly unbelievable. He's a guy who celebrates a near-death experience by standing on his roof in a lightning storm with a fucking golf club. It's amazing to watch, but it isn't especially surprising.

As much as his defenders like to suggest otherwise, the constant controversies surrounding Etobicoke Slim aren't inventions of the media or some dubious leftist cabal. Almost without exception, he's brought them on himself by his own conduct. His enemies haven't done themselves any favors by congregating around a certain law firm whose clients include a lobbyist who worked on the campaign of one of Ford's 2010 opponents, but almost everything that has happened to Ford in office is something that he's done to himself.

I'm something of a prophet, which I don't get recognized for enough. So I'll remind you of something I said in November.

Hoping that he changes his attitude is a fool's errand. Rob Ford's entire life is a textbook exercise in entitlement. Since he inherited his money and his political career, there's no reason to believe that he's going to re-evaluate his character at this late date. After his near-constant, self-inflicted humiliations, he still blames everyone but himself.

It took Hizzoner three days after only barely surviving in office to return to the behaviour that nearly cost him his job in the first place. Three days. Christ, Toronto doesn't have a respected statesman running our affairs, we elected Lindsay Lohan.

And you know what? We're almost certainly going to get another six years of this.

Because liberals insist on being liberals, they'll do what the did last time, which is run a dozen different candidates against Ford. Ford's political polling floor seems to be about 25%. If a dead child prostitute is found in Rob's bed, a quarter of the electorate will believe that George Smitherman put her there and vote accordingly. He could lose half of his 2010 vote and still conceivably have a path to victory.

The only way that Rob Ford is going anywhere in 2014 is if a solid, adult conservative challenges him. But conservatives tend to be disciplined and the fear that challenging Ford would only elect Olivia Chow would stop most of them from doing it.

You think Ford is going to grow the fuck up after he's re-elected? I don't. He's already busy laying the groundwork for the next half-dozen scandals that will prevent him from doing anything at all as mayor.

And when conservatism is wiped out once and for all in this city, conservatives will have no one to blame but themselves for having supported that dickhead in the first place.

More likely, he'll create a Watergate-sized scandal that the courts and Council simply can't ignore.

Things Fall Apart: Ben Shapiro, Chuck Hagel and Friends of Hamas

2013-02-22T03:15:00.000-05:00

Look, I'm not going to lie to you and say that I don't watch Fox News. The fact is that I do. A lot. What's important is why I watch it.

First, I'm love with my own anger, and few things make me as angry as what the ridiculous talking head culture has done to conservatism as an intellectual movement. Not only do liberals deride conservatives as mouth-breathing fuckheads, so does everybody else. And all you have to do is look at the "skewed polls" debacle leading up to last year's presidential election and any reasonable person will understand that that they're not wrong.

Then there's Benghazi, where four Americans were tragically killed. The same people who spent a year resisting any investigation into 9/11 - where three thousand Americans were murdered in the streets of their own country - want to derail Cabinet confirmations of national security officials until they find out who edited Sunday show talking points.

Second, I like to masturbate while watching Megyn Kelly get pointlessly, stupidly angry about her right to maternity leave. She seems to think that it's okay for the government to dictate that employers give paid leave to new mothers but not for, y'know, health care. You can argue for both or neither, but advocating one over the other is amazingly stupid. And stupidity in pretty packages makes me hard. I'm pretty kinky, I know.

But I can't take Fox seriously as a "news" source simply because they get so many of their stories from Brietbart. com.

Whenever someone cites a Brietbart story to me to support an argument, I generally stay silent. I do this because I know as a matter of absolute certainty that it's always a matter of minutes, if not seconds, before the Brietbart material is exposed as a deliberate fraud. No one has ever gotten rich betting on the accuracy of a Brietbart story. The people who work there are stupid or lying, and very often both.

Brietbart is one of the primary reasons that I distrust bloggers who portray themselves as journalists. Bloggers, and especially conservative ones, have spent years bitching about journalism's lack of objectivity, so they built an entire model out of the very thing that they were bitching about in the first fucking place.

The difference between bloggers and the mainstream media is accountability. Mainstream media companies are, as a general rule, publicly traded entities. They are also answerable to advertisers. Those two things are not usually true of bloggers, who can always resort to begging their gullible readers for money when shit goes sideways. Bad journalists get fired, whereas shitty bloggers get jobs at Brietbart.com.

I took a special interest in Brietbart's Ben Shapiro when he was Adam Carolla's podcast a couple of weeks ago. Shapiro was plugging his silly book, Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America.

The central premise of Bullies, that liberals shut down debate by panting anyone who opposes them as racists or worse, is factually sound. But Shapiro's solution is equally destructive to the public discourse and borderline retarded, besides. Basically, he advocates retaliating in kind.

Again, this is another example of building a model from the very thing that you were bitching about in the first place, which is hypocrisy.

Second, it cedes the moral high ground. By retaliating in kind to demonic liberal tactics, you essentially allow that your underlying ideas are equal to those of your opponents, when they should be better. If you can't argue your way through those charges, the chances are that your ideas are worthless, anyway.

Third, It undermines any condemnation of actual racism. This is why I've always despised liberals for playing the race card so loosely. When everybody's a racist, how bad can racism actually be? With very few exceptions, I've always thought that liberal anti-racist crusaders are far more interested in money, power or self-glorification than they actually are with confronting racism.

As conservatives increasingly associate themselves with that tactic, I increasingly disassociate myself with conservatism.

In a roundabout way, this brings me to Chuck Hagel.

Hagel presents a perfect opportunity for debate amongst conservative foreign policy thinkers, of which there are basically two schools: Taft-Eisenhower-Reagan non-interventionists and the neocon Bush 43 thinkers.

That's a debate very much worth having. But the neocons want to avoid it all costs. While whining that America is going broke, they also want to argue that the United States needs to have a wildly interventionist and expensive foreign policy. They know that this makes no sense in any economic way, so they resort to charges of racism.

Because he has questioned the way that America is involved in the Middle East, Senator Hagel's enemies have decided to paint him as an anti-Semite. That's where stories like this come from;

On Thursday, Senate sources told Breitbart News exclusively that they have been informed that one of the reasons that President Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has not turned over requested documents on his sources of foreign funding is that one of the names listed is a group purportedly called “Friends of Hamas.

Small problem: "Friends of Hamas" doesn't actually exist. Here's how the clusterfuck came to be.

The revelation could have doomed President Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense: He gave a paid speech to a group called “Friends of Hamas.”

Fortunately for Hagel, this claim, which galloped across the Internet, was bogus. I know, because I was the unwitting source.

In the process, I became part of an inadvertent demonstration of how quickly partisan agendas and the Internet can transform an obvious joke into a Washington talking point used by senators and presidential wannabes.

Here’s what happened: When rumors swirled that Hagel received speaking fees from controversial organizations, I attempted to check them out.

On Feb. 6, I called a Republican aide on Capitol Hill with a question: Did Hagel’s Senate critics know of controversial groups that he had addressed?

Hagel was in hot water for alleged hostility to Israel. So, I asked my source, had Hagel given a speech to, say, the “Junior League of Hezbollah, in France”? And: What about “Friends of Hamas”?

The names were so over-the-top, so linked to terrorism in the Middle East, that it was clear I was talking hypothetically and hyperbolically. No one could take seriously the idea that organizations with those names existed — let alone that a former senator would speak to them.

Or so I thought.

Basically, what happened is that a Hill staffer repeated a reporter's question as fact to Shapiro and Shapiro published it as fact.

Not only did Ben Shapiro not bother to get multiple sources, he didn't even google "Friends of Hamas," which would have pretty conclusively proved that they don't exist.

I get that there are honest disagreements about Hagel's views on foreign policy, and I'm not against an honest about them. But selective reporting - if Shapiro's "Friends of Hamas" story can even be called that - is something else altogether.

Syria is Awfully Complicated

2013-02-16T05:40:00.001-05:00

It's hard to take seriously those who don't understand even recent history. Even worse are those who consciously ignore it, or worse still, lie about it. All three groups of ahistorical shitheads are overly represented in today's Republican Party.

The neoconservative ideology was tested in Iraq and was found lacking by any sane and fair observer. If you want to decide whether to take a given Republican seriously about current foreign policy challenges, I'd advise you to take a look at what they say about Iraq.

First, the U.S invasion did not bring democracy to Mesopotamia, but it did bring more than it's fair share of chaos. Democracy was always a foolish goal in an unnatural country comprised of competing ethnic and religious groups. As soon as you lift out of tyranny those who very much want to kill one another, you shouldn't be at all surprised when they actually start killing one another.

Second, like everything else about the Iraq War, the 2007 "surge" did not accomplish it's stated aims. If you look back on the statements of the surge's supporters, you learn that the aim was to provide enough security in the country (and especially the famously murderous "Sunni Triangle") to allow for political reconciliation. That did not occur. Suicide bombings that kill hundreds of civilians are routine in Iraq.

What the surge did create was what the Nixon Administration called a "decent interval" in Vietnam that allowed the United States to withdraw without being humiliated.

Third, President Obama didn't withdraw from Iraq, President Bush did. In the summer of 2008, Bush signed a status of forces agreement that called for the last American troops to depart by 2011. There was to be no residual force left behind because the Iraqis would not exempt U.S forces and contractors from Iraqi law. Obama merely implemented that agreement, although you'd never know it from listening to Fox News or reading Republican blogs.

Then there's the Arab Spring. During the entirety of the Bush years, Republicans contended that the liberation of Iraq would speed the growth of democracy through the Middle East. In the earliest days of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, they actually sought to take credit for it.

But democracy didn't work out exactly the way they had planned, and Islamist-leaning governments were elected, just as Hamas had been in 2005 elections in the Palestinian Authority that Bush insisted on, despite the protests of Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas.

Anyone who thought that a Thomas Jefferson was going to rise up in the region is a fool. The true Democrats had long ago been murdered or exiled by the (often American-supported) tyrannies that the revolutions displaced. Just as nature does, politics abhors a vacuum, and the most organized forces were destined to win the democratic elections, and that the most organized forces were affiliated with the Islamist movement was the most predictable thing in the world to anyone that was paying attention.

So the neocons did exactly what they did in the wake of their failure in Iraq; they blamed Obama.

Now moron Republicans like John McCain want to make Syria an issue.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta acknowledged that he and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, had supported a plan last year to arm carefully vetted Syrian rebels. But it was ultimately vetoed by the White House, Mr. Panetta said, although it was developed by David H. Petraeus, the C.I.A. director at the time, and backed by Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the secretary of state.

“How many more have to die before you recommend military action?” Mr. McCain asked Mr. Panetta on Thursday, noting that an estimated 60,000 Syrians had been killed in the fighting.

And did the Pentagon, Mr. McCain continued, support the recommendation by Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Petraeus “that we provide weapons to the resistance in Syria? Did you support that?”

“We did,” Mr. Panetta said.

“You did support that,” Mr. McCain said.

“We did,” General Dempsey added.

Of course, the implication is that Obama isn't listening to his national security team, which in this case, he thankfully isn't. And Obama isn't alone among presidents in this regard. Had President Truman listened to his national security advisers, the United States would not have recognized the State of Israel.

There are a couple of points that most Republicans won't make about Syria that you should hear;

There is no shortage of weapons in Syria.
The civil war there is already a regional proxy war that American allies in Turkey and Saudi Arabia are already hip deep in.

Too many people who don't know what they're talking about say that when the House of Assad falls, it will precipitate the same kind of chaos that overwhelmed Iraq a decade ago. That's actually not true. The fall of Assad will more exactly precipitate the kind of chaos that overwhelmed Afghanistan twenty years ago.

When the Soviet-sponsored regime of Mohammad Najibullah disintegrated in 1992, the various rebel groups that toppled it immediately went to war with one another. Most of the factions were sponsored by foreign intelligence services, most notably Pakistan's ISI and the CIA.

Those in the cult of St. Ronald of Reagan prefer to ignore this inconvenient truth today, but the Reagan Administration's poster boy of the Afghan "freedom fighters" was one Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The fact that Hekmatyar rallied his troops into battle with Soviet forces chanting "Death to America" was somehow overlooked at the time. Hekmatyar is now wanted by the United States as a war criminal and a close associate of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

In wanting to arm Syrian factions, people like McCain risk doing the same thing all over again. And please don't tell me that the United States will rally around a figure like Ahmad Massoud because there likely isn't one, and the U.S pointedly ignored Massoud until the closing days of the Clinton Administration, nearly a decade later.

Just as happened in Afghanistan, American aims in Syria are at odds with the other regional players. . In the 1980s, the Carter and Reagan Administration, along with the Chinese, sought to humiliate the Soviets, whereas the Pakistanis wanted Afghanistan to use as "strategic depth" in a possible future war with India.

The U.S wants stability and a possible Syrian accommodation with Israel. What the Turks, Saudis and Iranians want is for their preferred ethnic allies to prevail. The Turks and Saudis want a Sunni power base in Damascus, whether or not its jihadi is a secondary concern. The Iranians want to maintain their Alawite ally, and their Syrian bridge to both Lebanon and the Israeli-Occupied Territories.

In any event, none of the Syrian rebels share American national security aims and, to one degree or another, all of them will probably seek thwart them at some point in the not too distant future. While it's a fable of the left that the United States created the Taliban or al-Qaeda in the 80's, it did directly arm and train more than a few of their allied groups.

Toppling Assad is not going to stop the killing. Indeed, his overthrow is almost certain accelerate it as the competing rebel groups go to war with one another in a battle to control the country. Just as they did in Afghanistan, the neocons and liberal supporters of intervention steadfastly refuse to recognize that horrible reality.

Having said that, Syria threatens to destroy the very delicate situations in both Lebanon and Iraq. That's something that the United States should do everything in its power to avoid, either with air forces or, in a worst case scenario, ground troops. Neither country can seal their borders on their own.

If McCain wants to be somehow useful, he can introduce a resolution in the Senate holding Turkey and Saudi Arabia responsible for the actions of their proxies if they take the fight outside of Syria. Their American aid can be held hostage, along with Turkey's NATO membership.

The U.S has tried playing Great Game politics in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and failed miserably both times, to the great benefit of the Pakistanis and Iranians.

Republicans universally mocked the 2006 Biden-Gelb Plan, which would have divided Iraq into a loose federation of three countries. What they've chosen to ignore is that the Iraqis themselves have essentially implemented it on their own.

Because it should be by now apparent that you cannot have democracy or stability in artificial nations comprised of tribal ethnic groups that want autonomy from one another, Biden-Gelb should be at least looked at as a model for most of the Middle East.

With the exception of Israel, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, these countries were political creations of the various Versailles Conferences of 1919-1922 and maintained as expedient client states during the Cold War. They will eventually disintegrate on their own, the only question is how.

If the United States wants to extract itself from the morass of the Middle East, which it very much should, it should use its diplomatic influence to hasten the creation of a new, more homogeneous Arab states that better represent the national aspirations of their people.

Anyone who knows anything about the isolationist nature of American history should know that Americans are the very last people who should be involved in the poisonous pit of Arab politics. The region is likely to be eventually dominated by Egyptian and Iranian "superpowers" anyway, so why not expedite that?

All the status quo is likely to produce is more frequent revolutions that will be impossible to manage from outside the region. Such revolutions will make it impossible for Israel to have anything other than a war economy and remain forever dependent on an American ally that is rapidly approaching bankruptcy and irrelevance.

The map is eventually going to shake itself out. It is much better for everyone if it does so unopposed from the outside.

When Moshiach Comes, Will He Give Me an iPad Mini?

2013-02-08T02:53:00.000-05:00

As you all know, I'm not a religious man. Since I was six, my position has been that if I absolutely must subscribe to intellectually unsupportable superstitious nonsense, it should at least be intellectually unsupportable superstitious nonsense that gets me laid. If some borderline cult gets my faith, energy, time and money then I should at least get stinky fingers out of it. That only seems fair.

Having said that, I acknowledge that I could be wrong. It's rare that I am, but I'd be less than wholly honest if I said it never happened. And, as a general rule, I rather enjoy folks with viewpoints different that mine. It keeps life interesting, and people who believe everything I do bore me terribly.

That's why I'm lucky to have a friend like the good and great Dr. Reverend, my closest friend and spiritual advisor of some two decades. I'd encourage you all to get to know him, but he likes people even less than I do.

From time to time, my phone will ring and I'll instinctively know that Herr Doktor is on the other end of the line, seeking to improve the condition of my immortal soul.

"You scumbag," he'll holler into the receiver. "You're too preoccupied with cocaine, Chivas Regal and orgies! Those things are all fine, if messy when taken in combination, but you need to read your fucking bible! Exactly what are you going to do when Moshiach comes? You think He's going to be impressed with you thick wang and ability to snort a three-mile line of blow? Well, he might, but that's not the point. You need to get right with the Lord, son!"

Not only are the Doctor's tirades impressive performance art, they have a ring of Truth to them.

As I said earlier, I could very well be wrong about the existence of a Higher Power. I don't think I am, but stranger things have happened. So I've decided to cover my bases. In financial circles, they call it hedging.

While I was raised Catholic, I just can't get behind Jesus. He's simply not trending the way he should. When the only person who relates to you is Chris Brown, you've got what can only be considered a serious branding problem. Besides, look what happens every time He makes a personal appearance.

That's right. If a group of crazed Italians don't get you, then some homeless Dudebro with a hatchet will. And I just can't rely on that when the End Times come. You're free to, but I have a feeling it won't end the way you want it to.

Besides, Christians haven't faced any serious adversity since roughly the second century. How do you know that He'll have your back when shit gets real?

The Jews are different. They've been fucked over by everyone wherever they've gone since the dawn of recorded history. They can't even be in a room with each other without a violent disagreement breaking out. Yet they've persevered, which tells me that they have a Friend in High Place.

So I've concluded that if there's anything at all to this superstitious nonsense about an afterlife, Dr. Reverend is likely right and Moshiach is the way to go. And that's why I'm helping him spread his righteous message.

The Good Doctor is spreading that message in the most modern of evangelical ways; on a t-shirt. If you want Moshiach to immediately recognize you as a believer upon His vengeful arrival, you don't just want this shirt, you need it. It just might be the best fifteen bucks you've ever spent. After all, this is your soul we're talking about, people!

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that there's something in it for me. I've been advised that if the Doctor sells 200 of these shirts, he'll use the proceeds to buy me an iPad mini. And I desperately need one of those. There are about 1,500 of you here every day, and I suspect that a healthy majority of you have souls in dire need of saving.

And you know what, iPad Minis just don't buy themselves. So help a couple of brothers out.

"... Condemned to Repeat It:" The Cuban Missile Crisis in Perspective

2013-01-29T04:08:00.000-05:00

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

- George Santayana

History is important, but what people do with that history is more important. To mythologize history is to make it important and, worse, may cause it's worst mistakes to be repeated.

For a president who didn't do all that much, the mythologising of John F. Kennedy is a little odd and a lot terrifying. Most people, when pressed, can't name three things that he did in office and several of them count his assassination twice.

The assassination perverted the history of a man who shouldn't have been president at all. He was a liar and a thief. The evidence strongly suggests, although doesn't definitively prove, that the 1960 election was stolen through wholesale vote-rigging in Cook County, Illinois and South Texas, where Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson stole his Senate seat twelve years earlier.

It wasn't known at the time, but when Kennedy commenced his campaign for the Democratic nomination, he had been administered the last rites of the Catholic Church four times. We also now now that the 35th president of the United States and Commander-In-Chief was regularly dosing himself with a combination of steroids and amphetamine. This was not yet twenty years after another president who hid the perilous state of his health from the American people, Franklin D. Roosevelt, died suddenly as the country was preparing to use nuclear weapons for the first time.

The American people seem to know none of this, or not care if they do. Poll after poll of non-historians regularly puts JFK in the top four chief executives, above George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. Given the paucity of Kennedy's accomplishments, it represents the triumph of style over substance more than anything else in modern history.

Other than his murder in Dallas, the event most often associated with JFK is the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Benjamin Schwarz writes about in great detail in this month's Atlantic.

On October 16, 1962, John F. Kennedy and his advisers were stunned to learn that the Soviet Union was, without provocation, installing nuclear-armed medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. With these offensive weapons, which represented a new and existential threat to America, Moscow significantly raised the ante in the nuclear rivalry between the superpowers—a gambit that forced the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. On October 22, the president, with no other recourse, proclaimed in a televised address that his administration knew of the illegal missiles, and delivered an ultimatum insisting on their removal, announcing an American “quarantine” of Cuba to force compliance with his demands. While carefully avoiding provocative action and coolly calibrating each Soviet countermeasure, Kennedy and his lieutenants brooked no compromise; they held firm, despite Moscow’s efforts to link a resolution to extrinsic issues and despite predictable Soviet blustering about American aggression and violation of international law. In the tense 13‑day crisis, the Americans and Soviets went eyeball-to-eyeball. Thanks to the Kennedy administration’s placid resolve and prudent crisis management—thanks to what Kennedy’s special assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. characterized as the president’s “combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that [it] dazzled the world”—the Soviet leadership blinked: Moscow dismantled the missiles, and a cataclysm was averted.

Every sentence in the above paragraph describing the Cuban missile crisis is misleading or erroneous. But this was the rendition of events that the Kennedy administration fed to a credulous press; this was the history that the participants in Washington promulgated in their memoirs; and this is the story that has insinuated itself into the national memory—as the pundits’ commentaries and media coverage marking the 50th anniversary of the crisis attested.

The first time I had seen the official mediation of the Missile Crisis challenged was in Gary Wills' The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Mediation on Power, which was first published in 1982. Since then, more and better literature has come out, including Kennedy's own secret presidential recordings. But the narrative remains mostly intact, due largely to a continuing flood of adoring Kennedy biographies and a singular unwillingness of Americans to study their own history.

Very few American non-scholars have bothered asking even the most basic questions about the Missile Crisis. "What's behind the half-century long obsession with a piss-ant country like Cuba?" "Why would Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev place the missiles there?" "Could the United States have resolved the crisis in a way that didn't risk a nuclear holocaust?" "What were the long-term consequences of it?"

Richard Nixon was remembered as a world-class red-baiter. In his first political campaign, Nixon tied his opponent, Representative Jerry Voorhis to the suspected Communist infiltrated Congress of Industrial Organizations' Political Action Committee (PAC,) although Voorhis refused to accept their endorsement. In his 1950 campaign for the Senate, Nixon called Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas "pink right down to her underwear" and compared her voting record to that of the avowed Socialist New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio.

In 1960, it was NIxon's turn to be red-baited in a particularly insidious way. From roughly 1948 onward, the GOP enjoyed an edge on national security issues, due largely to the "loss" of China, the successful testing of a nuclear bomb by the Soviets and the stalemate of the Korean War.

During President Eisenhower's second term, the Democrats invented a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union out of whole cloth. Had they bothered to ask the Pentagon or the CIA, they would have learned that the United States had a vast ICBM superiority that would last, ironically, into the presidency of Richard Nixon. But the news media and the public believed it.

Kennedy sought to capitalize on the missile gap by making Cuba an issue. He insisted during the presidential debates that he would do more to roll back communism in Cuba than would Nixon. Kennedy was the first presidential candidate to receive classified CIA briefings. He knew that the Agency under Eisenhower was planning just that. Determined not to reveal that, Vice President Nixon publicly argued against Cuban intervention, even though he was its strongest advocate in the government.

Once he was sworn in as president, Kennedy was stuck with, and haunted by, the issues of the missile gap and Cuba. JFK immediately began the largest peacetime defense build-up in American history up to that time. He also dramatically increased the nuclear arsenal, despite the U.S having as many as nine times the warheads the U.S.S.R had. In what was perhaps the most fateful decision of his presidency, he ordered Jupiter missiles deployed to Turkey, near the Soviet border.

The Jupiter missiles were an exceptionally vexing component of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Because they sat above ground, were immobile, and required a long time to prepare for launch, they were extremely vulnerable. Of no value as a deterrent, they appeared to be weapons meant for a disarming first strike—and thus greatly undermined deterrence, because they encouraged a preemptive Soviet strike against them. The Jupiters’ destabilizing effect was widely recognized among defense experts within and outside the U.S. government and even by congressional leaders. For instance, Senator Albert Gore Sr., an ally of the administration, told Secretary of State Dean Rusk that they were a “provocation” in a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1961 (more than a year and a half before the missile crisis), adding, “I wonder what our attitude would be” if the Soviets deployed nuclear-armed missiles to Cuba. Senator Claiborne Pell raised an identical argument in a memo passed on to Kennedy in May 1961.

Given America’s powerful nuclear superiority, as well as the deployment of the Jupiter missiles, Moscow suspected that Washington viewed a nuclear first strike as an attractive option. They were right to be suspicious. The archives reveal that in fact the Kennedy administration had strongly considered this option during the Berlin crisis in 1961.

It’s little wonder, then, that, as Stern asserts—drawing on a plethora of scholarship including, most convincingly, the historian Philip Nash’s elegant 1997 study, The Other Missiles of October—Kennedy’s deployment of the Jupiter missiles “was a key reason for Khrushchev’s decision to send nuclear missiles to Cuba.” Khrushchev reportedly made that decision in May 1962, declaring to a confidant that the Americans “have surrounded us with bases on all sides” and that missiles in Cuba would help to counter an “intolerable provocation.” Keeping the deployment secret in order to present the U.S. with a fait accompli, Khrushchev may very well have assumed America’s response would be similar to his reaction to the Jupiter missiles—rhetorical denouncement but no threat or action to thwart the deployment with a military attack, nuclear or otherwise. (In retirement, Khrushchev explained his reasoning to the American journalist Strobe Talbott: Americans “would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you; we’d be doing nothing more than giving them a little of their own medicine.”)

At about the same time that Kennedy deployed the Jupiters, he ordered the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation, thereby giving Khrushchev the predicate he needed to give the Americans " a little of their own medicine" by moving their own missiles into Cuba.

As for Castro, he would have been crazy to refuse the missiles after after the Bay of Pigs and the numerous subsequent assassination attempts by the CIA known as Operation Mongoose. When he learned about it after becoming president, Lyndon Johnson said "We had been operating a damned Murder, Inc., in the Caribbean." Needless to say, a foreign plot - let alone several attempts - to assassinate a sitting American president would be seen as an act of war and responded to forcefully. That they didn't see their attempts on Castro's life similarly is but one of America's interesting post-war double standards.

Moreover, as Schwarz reports, the Cuban missiles didn't change the strategic balance a bit and Kennedy's Executive Committee (ExComm) knew it.

Kennedy and his civilian advisers understood that the missiles in Cuba did not alter the strategic nuclear balance. Although Kennedy asserted in his October 22 televised address that the missiles were “an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas,” he in fact appreciated, as he told the ExComm on the first day of the crisis, that “it doesn’t make any difference if you get blown up by an ICBM flying from the Soviet Union or one that was 90 miles away. Geography doesn’t mean that much.” America’s European allies, Kennedy continued, “will argue that taken at its worst the presence of these missiles really doesn’t change” the nuclear balance.

That the missiles were close to the United States was, as the president conceded, immaterial: the negligible difference in flight times between Soviet Union–based ICBMs and Cuba-based missiles wouldn’t change the consequences when the missiles hit their targets, and in any event, the flight times of Soviet SLBMs were already as short as or shorter than the flight times of the missiles in Cuba would be, because those weapons already lurked in submarines off the American coast (as of course did American SLBMs off the Soviet coast). Moreover, unlike Soviet ICBMs, the missiles in Cuba required several hours to be prepared for launch. Given the effectiveness of America’s aerial and satellite reconnaissance (amply demonstrated by the images of missiles in the U.S.S.R. and Cuba that they yielded), the U.S. almost certainly would have had far more time to detect and respond to an imminent Soviet missile strike from Cuba than to attacks from Soviet bombers, ICBMs, or SLBMs.

“A missile is a missile,” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara asserted. “It makes no great difference whether you are killed by a missile from the Soviet Union or Cuba.” On that first day of the ExComm meetings, Bundy asked directly, “What is the strategic impact on the position of the United States of MRBMs in Cuba? How gravely does this change the strategic balance?” McNamara answered, “Not at all”—a verdict that Bundy then said he fully supported. The following day, Special Counsel Theodore Sorensen summarized the views of the ExComm in a memorandum to Kennedy. “It is generally agreed,” he noted, “that these missiles, even when fully operational, do not significantly alter the balance of power—i.e., they do not significantly increase the potential megatonnage capable of being unleashed on American soil, even after a surprise American nuclear strike.”

Sorensen’s comment about a surprise attack reminds us that while the missiles in Cuba did not add appreciably to the nuclear menace, they could have somewhat complicated America’s planning for a successful first strike—which may well have been part of Khrushchev’s rationale for deploying them. If so, the missiles paradoxically could have enhanced deterrence between the superpowers, and thereby reduced the risk of nuclear war.

It stands to reason that the whole matter could have been dealt with through quiet diplomacy. Kennedy wanted the Soviet missiles out of Cuba and Khrushchev wanted to be rid of the provocative Jupiters on his doorstep. In fact, that was the deal they ultimately reached, but only after the world was taken to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Moscow was unaware that the missiles had been discovered until Kennedy announced it to the world in a televised address to the nation on October 22, 1962 and announced a naval blockade of Cuba. Knowing that the blockade was an act of war and that the missiles were legal under international law, the United States referred to it as a "quarantine," instead.

Wouldn't it have been easier (to say nothing of less dangerous) to have sent a back-channel message to the Kremlin that the Cuban installations were unacceptable to the United States? Nikita Krushchev himself offered to trade the Cuban missiles for the Jupiters in Turkey in the wake of Kennedy's October 22 address.

But Kennedy had cynically used both the missile gap and Cuba as wedge issues in the 1960 election and he was going to be publicly seen as having solved them, even after he knew just how catastrophic the slightest miscalculation might have been.

And it was nothing short of a miracle that there wasn't a miscalculation because JFK's negotiating posture seemed to be designed to humiliate the Soviets. Even when the trade of the Cuban missiles for the Jupiters was agreed to secretly, through Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, the Kennedy brothers insisted that the Jupiter part of the agreement not be announced publicly, fearing that such an agreement would politically damage the president.

Amazingly, Krushchev agreed to it. And he was removed from power less than 18 months later, becoming the first (and until Gorbachev, the only) Soviet leader to leave office alive. It isn't a stretch to assume that sent a powerful message to Nikita Krushchev's successors. They would not be played by the Americans. Superpower relations went into a deep-freeze for a decade afterward.

Prior to Kruschev's March, 1964 removal, the Soviets were basically conservative in the conduct of foreign policy. Yes, they sponsored revolutionary movements; most notably in China, Korea and Vietnam, but the only used their own military within what they considered their traditional sphere of influence to put down uprisings. Beginning with Brezhnev, the Soviets become much more aggressive and far more intractable.

Would that have been the case absent the missile crisis? There's no reason to believe so.

As Schwarz points out in the Atlantic, the missile crisis had even greater consequences on the conduct of U.S foreign policy.

Although Kennedy in fact agreed to the missile swap and, with Khrushchev, helped settle the confrontation maturely, the legacy of that confrontation was nonetheless pernicious. By successfully hiding the deal from the vice president, from a generation of foreign-policy makers and strategists, and from the American public, Kennedy and his team reinforced the dangerous notion that firmness in the face of what the United States construes as aggression, and the graduated escalation of military threats and action in countering that aggression, makes for a successful national-security strategy—really, all but defines it.

The president and his advisers also reinforced the concomitant view that America should define a threat not merely as circumstances and forces that directly jeopardize the safety of the country, but as circumstances and forces that might indirectly compel potential allies or enemies to question America’s resolve. This recondite calculation led to the American disaster in Vietnam: in attempting to explain how the loss of the strategically inconsequential country of South Vietnam might weaken American credibility and thereby threaten the country’s security, one of McNamara’s closest aides, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, allowed that “it takes some sophistication to see how Vietnam automatically involves” our vital interests. Kennedy said in his address to the nation during the missile crisis that “aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” He explained that “if our courage and our commitments are ever to be trusted again by either friend or foe,” then the United States could not tolerate such conduct by the Soviets—even though, again, he had privately acknowledged that the deployment of the missiles did not change the nuclear balance.

This notion that standing up to aggression (however loosely and broadly defined) will deter future aggression (however loosely and broadly defined) fails to weather historical scrutiny. After all, America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq didn’t deter Muammar Qaddafi; America’s war against Yugoslavia didn’t deter Saddam Hussein in 2003; America’s liberation of Kuwait did not deter Slobodan Milošević; America’s intervention in Panama did not deter Saddam Hussein in 1991; America’s intervention in Grenada did not deter Manuel Noriega; America’s war against North Vietnam did not deter Grenada’s strongman, Hudson Austin; and JFK’s confrontation with Khrushchev over missiles in Cuba certainly did not deter Ho Chi Minh.

How many American troops would have been spared in the last half century were it not for Kennedy's duplicity before, during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis? U.S policymakers learned exactly the wrong lesson from the October crisis. And the brinkmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis is almost exactly what we're seeing today in relation to Iran's nuclear program, albeit in slow motion.

The United States has had bad presidents both before and after John Kennedy, but none nearly ended life on earth as a result of his own deliberate and cynical machinations. In that, he might be the most dangerous man ever to have lived.

Yet he remains a hero to tens of millions of Americans and a worldwide icon, due largely to the machinations of his own lies and the personality cult developed over several decades by his palace guard.

Unless the real history of the Cuban Missile Crisis is more widely known, there's a very real chance that there will someday be another president as reckless as John Fitzgerald Kennedy. As George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The next time we might not be so lucky.

Benjamin Schwarz's piece in the Atlantic is actually a book review of The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality by Sheldon Stern, which I very much look forward to reading. However, Schwarz's article is impressive on its own and can be read for free here, which I encourage you all to do.