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Stephen Harper: How very Nixon of him

The Parliamentary precinct is beginning to smell like a steaming pile of horse manure.
There's no escaping it.
Everybody -- the media, the cops, the politicians -- has a fork in it and they're all trying to find the Prime Minister.
He says he didn't make the mess. His pals did. But that doesn't cut it with Canadians.
Harper may not have created the shit, but it's on his shoes and anyone who's ever stepped in shit knows what that feels like. You try to wipe it off and it sticks to your hands and you can never, ever, get rid of the smell.
It's sickening what's happening in Ottawa. And it's stopped being funny.
Well, in truth, it's still a little bit funny.
It's great to see Oz, the Great and Powerful, squirming in his seat, answering the Opposition questions in that same robotic tone until he can't take it anymore then hands it off to the Chief Parliamentary Clown Paul Calandra who would have made an excellent warm-up comic on the Price is Right.
On the outside, Harper still has the flat demeanor which has made television crews furious for years -- the Husky baby blues long dead and without sparkle, the thin lips of the determined dictator, the head with not a hair out of place. But there are signs of crackle.
The once confident Mr. Harper is having a hard time speaking French, clear evidence that The Inquisitor Tom Mulcair is getting under his skin. The second language is the first to go under pressure.
This may go on forever, but with the release of yesterday's RCMP report, the cops may have finally put a fork in it.
However long it goes, to quote Harper, one thing is clear.
The Prime Minister is a dead man walking and he's having a hard time accepting it.
He's still stuck in the denial phase.
It may be true that Harper didn't exactly know about the goings on of his chief henchman, Nigel Wright, or about his deal with that little nugget Mike Duffy. But it doesn't matter anymore.
Paul Martin had no part in the Sponsorship Scandal, but it took down his government anyway.
The end will come when his own Party takes out the knives and divvies up what is left of his stinking carcass. Even true believers get tired of smelling manure and want it carted out.
What's taking down Stephen Harper is not the Three Amigos in the Senate. It's not Mike Duffy's reimagining of the Seven Deadly Sins. It's the fact that Stephen Harper has shown himself to be a coward, and nobody likes a coward.
Harper is unable and unwilling to take responsibility for the manure pile.
As far as he's concerned, it's not his even his, though it's clearly on his land.
That's not very prime ministerial.
A real prime minister, no a real man, would have stood up in the House of Commons and accepted responsibility.
He would have apologized  to the Canadian people for the Senate scandal and for the transgressions of the 13 odd staff members who concocted a cover-up of the Mike Duffy affair.
Instead, he continues to stand up in the House of Commons, everyday, sounding like a broken record.

It's not my fault.
Blame the fat guy. Blame the skinny guy.
It wasn't me.
I didn't know.

How very Nixon of him.
 

Comments

  1. I think the current Senate "scandal" is much ado about nothing. The "scandal" was created in attempting to give money back to the taxpayers, and that is what people will remember about Harper. Why should someone (you know a "real man") accept responsibility if in fact they were not involved?

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