My tone can be harsh, and my barbs can be sharp.

To read my material, one could reasonably assume that I was one miserable human being.  Depending on the day and the topic, one could reasonably be correct in that assessment.  And I completely get that.

By my account anyways, I’m kind of a good guy.  If this was a movie, I’d want to be one of the fellers riding along with the loveable but crusty old  sheriff in pursuit of Black Bart, that bastard who robbed the bank and shot up Miss Kitty’s saloon.

So why the tone?

It’s sometimes an uncomfortable reality that, when you’re fighting the “bad guys,” even the good guys have to employ the kind of tactics that the opposition use to advance their own causes, to use language that they might not appreciate. 

If these were people who could be reached through rational, good-faith  discussion, then sign me up, I could do that all day.  But many of these types are well below that bar, are dismissive of rational argument, and couldn’t give a fig about what we may think. 

To get their attention, you have to piss them off.  And to piss them off, you have to get under their skin, expose their anger, flush them out of their smug certainty that being the loudest voice in the room is the one that ultimately prevails.

It’s tough to land a punch on people like this.  And sometimes, with some of them, you have to take the elevator to the basement to even get within range of landing a punch.

So welcome to the basement.

Continue reading “ANGER AS A CHOICE” →

Am I detecting a little bit of discomfort with Pierre Poilievre?

I sure hope so.

The adolescent leader of the federal Conservatives had the prime minister’s chair all sized-up and had already pictured the office furnishings and drapes, although there are blinds in the prime minister’s Parliament Hill office.  But what a corker it would be if this guy gets nowhere near that office, ever.  But that might be asking an awful lot.

That I don’t like him is obvious.  That I’ve never liked him is more obvious still.  That’s because there is absolutely nothing to like about this man, who behaves like a miserable little bully who loves to throw insults and taunts on the school yard but somehow manages not to get beaten up.  Or reined in by whoever has yard duty or answers the phones in the office.

He’s had a bit of a crisis recently, but not one that he’d ever admit to.

Continue reading “POILIEVRE” →

Après moi, le déluge.

Attributed to French King Louis XV, the statement is generally taken to mean that, once Louis and his acolytes are gone and swept away, then the stink is really gonna hit the fan.  The biblical reference to a flood is a nice touch, but I don’t think Louis had the flood as a cleansing event, but rather as a drowning event, but I suppose that’s up for debate and dependant upon perspective.

Today is the day I do something I ought not to do, not because it would be wrong or improper, but because it will be ridiculed and dismissed as completely out of touch.  But then again, imagine me being completely out of touch, yet correct in the end?  The first part happens more than often, the second I can only hope for, although it’s another one of those cases where I desperately don’t want to be right.

I never voted for Pierre Trudeau but recognized his merits despite everyone at the time being in hate with him.  I did vote for Brian Mulroney, twice in fact, and maintained that he was a good prime minister when he was the Political Bandito #1 at the end of his two terms.  Historians now view both men, despite their weaknesses, perceived or real, to be among the best of our prime ministers.  It took me thirty years to be right on one of them, and forty to be right on the other, but lets’s face it, the present lasts for a second, while the past stretches back forever.  As they say, hindsight has 20/20 vision, but in my case it took decades for that vision to become more acceptable.

I don’t feel I have another thirty or forty years to play with, although there might be an outside chance at the former, so I don’t have the luxury of hanging around and being vindicated by the passage of time and history.  So I’ll make my remarks right now, and predictably take dump trucks worth of scorn from all the people in the world smarter than me, which is apparently everyone.  I may even lose readers because of this, but there it is.  The guy in Nigeria has seemingly left me, so all is lost anyways.

Continue reading “Après moi, le déluge.” →