Category: Government

Sacked?

As most likely know by now, maverick Tory MP Garth Turner has been suspended from the caucus today and, surprise surprise, the blogosphere is all over it like a cheap suit:

Garth non grata… Turner gets suspended from Tory caucus
Garth Turner
Garth Gets The Boot
Garth Turner has been suspended!
Garth Turner Booted?
Garth suspended!
Garth Turner Gets the Boot

That should be enough reading on the subject to keep ya busy for a while. 😀

BOO!

Well, kids, the political game of musical chairs in London just keeps on keepin’ on these days, doesn’t it? First, it was Joey Bananas leaving Ottawa to come back and run for mayor in London, creating a socialist vacuum in the area that threatened to suck in everything from Martha Hall Findlay to Bob Rae. Now, former mayor Dianne Haskett has announced that she’s going to be making a run at the Tory nomination for London North Centre. I guess she figured that, since Joe was after her old job, she could return the favour.

Haskett might be the best bet the Tories are going to find around here, too. A solid social conservative (remember the stink raised when she refused to proclaim a gay pride proclamation in 1995 because of her religious beliefs?), Haskett has an equally solid reputation in the London area as someone that will stick to her guns, even if they’re pointed at her. She also has a solid reputation for winning; in the 1997 mayoral race, she beat the competition by a margin of 2 to 1.

“I have a sense that in my future I’m meant to continue in political leadership and that this period of time, presumably about five years, is a hiatus period. I feel led to a life in the future which I feel will include political leadership in the federal arena.” — Haskett Oct. 19, 2000, as her family leaves for Washington D.C. area.

I love when this happens.  Here we are, smack in the middle of the Librano$’ leadership race, with the whole country supposedly eagerly eyeing who the new leader of the Natural Governing Party (and therefore presumably the next PM) is going to be, canoe.ca puts up a poll that kinda pops the little liberal baloon:

It’s enough to make a guy feel all warm & fuzzy inside…

To absolutely nobody’s surprise, Ontario Premier Dolt McSquinty is once again proving, for all the world to see, that some white men really do speak with a forked tongue. The man who has been utterly MIA throughout the ongoing anarchy in Caledonia has seemingly suddenly come to the realisation that there are right ways and wrong ways to do things in this province (if you’re white, that is) and that a protest planned to take place in Caledonia this weekend should be held in Toronto instead. Everybody’s nobody’s favourite extraterrestrial kittyvore must have eaten a few too many kittens lately. How else to explain his hacking up this lovely little hairball of hypocricy:

“I think it’s important for all of us to recognize that if somebody has a particular beef with a government there is a legitimate way to give expression to that criticism, and I would encourage that individual to come to the front lawn of Queen’s Park,” McGuinty said yesterday.

Well, now; isn’t that just nice? And I wonder what his message to the Natives will be when it comes to ” a legitimate way to give expression to that criticism?” Not much, obviously. The Ontario Librano$ have been paralysed throughout the entire Caledonia affair, terrified of having an “Ipperwash incident” of their own (which would be a hell of a lot of egg on their faces, considering all their handwringing and mudslinging at former premier Mike Harris over that).

Gary McHale, the man behind the Caledonia Wakeup Call website and the organizer of a rally to be held at the disputed site this weekend, gets the message loud and clear: play by the rules so we can ignore you.

“Politicians won’t pay attention unless we go to Caledonia — that’s the only reason they’re talking about it,” McHale said. “So I don’t see the purpose of coming to Queen’s Park.”

The Fiberal government went on to wail that police should deal with the protestors (but not the Natives, of course) and even found time to throw in a vague threat (and unwitting admission of its assesment of the Native so-called “occupiers”) from the piehole of David Ramsay, the minister for aboriginal affairs:

“In fact, by coming out you potentially put your own life in danger, so it’s better if people just stay home.”

Gee whiz, don’t come out and exercise your lawful right to set foot on public land and complain about the nice, peaceful, law-abiding Natives; something might kill you. But not a nice, peaceful, law-abiding Native, of course. Tell me, Dave, just where is this mortal danger coming from, hmmm?

Mayor Marie Trainer of Haldimand County isn’t much better, either. She’s ready to declare a state of emergency. Not because of the Natives, mind you, but because of all those nasty Caledonia Wakeup types that are going to be showing up.

It all boils down to the same crap: Natives can get away with whatever the hell they want but everybody else should obey the law. The law, which is supposed to hold everyone to the same standard. Is anyone else getting sick and tired of all this two-faced, liberal, double standard bullshit?

I know, I know; I grump and complain a lot here, but what’s the point of being conservative if you can’t be a grouch? I consider it one of the benefits. But man cannot live on grump alone, so every now and then, I like to post something that just tickles my funnybone. You know, silly stuff. Like this right here:

They say that nobody’s perfect, and I guess this kinda proves that old adage out. Anybody with their cranium clear of their colon already knows that I’m quite the fan of Stephen Harper. I like the idea of having someone in charge who a) does what he said he would do and b) doesn’t steep himself headfirst in a bunch of namby-pamby, feelgood bullcrap whilst actually doing nothing about anything the way the Grits did for over a decade. But it must have been baked beans and chili dogs for ol’ Steve’s intellectual lunch the other day because, as brainfarts go, this one could peel the paint off the walls:

VANCOUVER — Prime Minister Stephen Harper is calling on the United Nations to impose sanctions against North Korea for its purported nuclear test.

Harper condemned the test blast and said the UN must make a “a meaningful and substantial response.”

Where the hell did that come from? This is the kind of wussese that I would expect out of the Librano$, or maybe the Dippers, but I expect better from Harper. This is the guy who stood up in the Gerneral Assembly in New York not that long ago and declared the very relevance of the UN was being tested and has, at times, vaguely hinted that he understands that the UN is long past any useful purpose and that it’s days are irrevocably numbered.

Let’s face it: the UN never accomplishes anything. It was useless in Bosnia, useless in Somalia, useless in Rwanda, and it’s useless in the Sudan. The last shred of respect that I had for that organisation vanished when it put Libya in charge of human rights. Maybe Harper hasn’t forgotten any of this and he’s giving them one last chance to prove their worth. I hope that’s it; I really do. But just in case I’m wrong and just in case Harper somehow (though I can’t imagine how) doesn’t really get it, I’m going to put it into terms so damned simple that anyone could figure it out (even me):

SATURDAY MORNINGS AND WORLD AFFAIRS
-OR-
Everything I Need To Know, I Learned From The Hitman

Okay, here we go. Think back to when you were a kid. Remember watchin rasslin’ on Saturdays? No, I don’t mean wrestling. Wrestling is an olympic sport. I’m talking about the figure-four leglock, the flying elbow smash and heads rammed into turnbuckles. Are ya with me now? Good.

Now, think back to those Saturday mornings when you used to watch the greats of the day stride into the squared circle. Back to the days when good guys like Rick “Quick-Draw McGraw, the Boogie-Woogie Man and Dusty Rhodes used to keep the world safe from scumbags like the Iron Sheik, Ted “The Million Dollar Man” Dibiase and Greg “The Hammer” Valentine while other guys like Rowdy Roddy Piper would just kick the crap out of whoever happened to be handy at the time. Still with me? Cool.

My favourites were always the tag-team matches. Whenever one of those was on the card you knew there would be some good mayhem someplace before the show was done. My all-time favourites would have to be the Hart Foundation, with Mike Rotundo & Barry Windham a close second.

The matches always followed the same formula, but we watched them anyway (hey, we were young; give us a break). It would go, with a few little variations here and there, something like this:

Good guy A would be in the ring, pounding the crap out of bad guy A (or B) so hard that his grandkids were going to be born dizzy. The bad guys’ manager (because bad guys always had managers) would then pull some stunt while the ref wasn’t looking, usually a cheap shot, to get good guy A off-balance for a few seconds. Good guy B would holler at the ref to do something about it and the ref would go over and demand an explanation from the manager, who would shrug with a “what, me?” look on his face while bad guys A and B would drag good guy A over to their corner behind the ref’s back and proceed to double-team the crap out of him. This would go on until good guy B finally lost his cool and jumped into the ring to help his buddy, at which point the ref would suddenly finish with being distracted by the evil manager and jump over, grab good guy B and herd him back to his own corner while good guy A was still getting stomped by bad guy A, bad guy B and the manager across the ring. No matter how much the crowd would scream and point, the ref never managed to look the right way and catch the skulldiggery that was going on just a few feet away and it was always the good guy that got admonished for jumping in when he wasn’t supposed to.

What the heck does all this have to do with world affairs, you ask?

It’s simple: the UN is the ref.