Everybody hates Vic

It's pretty funny how modern conservatives distrust and fear the government at record highs, but are more than willing to let it poke around in their private lives through communications technology.

It was revealed in 2005 that President Bush ordered the National Security Agency to engage in a "warrantless wiretapping" program years earlier. Not only was this contrary to the NSA's charter, it violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which specifically outlawed in the eavesdropping of foreigners in the United States without a warrant and listening in on American citizens anywhere in the world. It was easily the clearest example of an impeachable act since at least Iran-Contra, and perhaps even Watergate.

Republicans responded to this revealation with a truly awesome parade of half-truths and outright lies.

First, they reminded us that the President is the Commander-in-Chief, and therefore able to do anything he wants in wartime. However, there is nothing in the Constitution that permits the Executive Branch to violate the expressed will of the Legislative Branch, whether the country is at war or not. He cannot, for example, unilaterally increases taxes or shift domestic program spending to the military to fund a war. Before this year, it was generally accepted that the President could not kill an American citizen outside of direct combat in the absence of some sort of a trial.

Furthermore, Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution demands that the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." There is no "wartime exception" clause, nor does this section tend to support the ridiculous "Unitary Executive Theory," which even the GOP stopped giving lip service to when it invoked the War Powers Act against Obama earlier this year.

Bush's defenders tried to suggest that the program could only surveil Americans who were in direct contact with suspected terrorists, which deliberably ignores that this is not how the program works. The NSA physically installed "taps" on the fiber optic trunklines where they come onto American shores from the sea. This means that it has to monitor all electionic communications to find the few that they're interested in. The technical capability to eavesdrop on everyone at all times is the entire point of the system, otherwise it doesn't work at all. As was the case with the USA Patriot Act, which is almost never used in terrorism investigations, the NSA could very possibly become a branch of domestic law enforcement, destroying the Fourth Amendment forever.

Republicans also seem to have forgotten that Watergate itself grew from President Nixon's use of the supposed Commander-in-Chief power during wartime. The White House Plumbers were created by the Executive Office of the President to investigate the leak of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg in ways that the FBI could not. Prior to the forced entry into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, the Plumbers broke into the Los Angeles office of Ellsberg's physchatrist, an act that formed part of the Abuse of Power Article of Impeachment against Nixon. And the Ellsberg break-in was something that Nixon pointedly never denied authorizing. He said that he didn't remember doing so, but would have.

At least in theory, if you support the broad application of the Commander-in-Chief power the way modern Republicans want you to, you would have to support not only the Plumbers unit, but the abuse of the IRS in investigating and harassing war critics by the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations, if only because "When the president does it, it is not illegal."

But God help you if the government feels you up at the airport! No government should be allowed to touch your junk just because you might hijack a 767 and fly it into a highrise building in some nearby metropolis and you refuse to go into the full-body scanners that the Republicans themselves bought! Contrary to the orignialist sentiment of the GOP, you apparently have an unenumerated right to fly to Tampa for spring break to get felt up without getting felt up before getting there. But they can tap into your cell phone without a court order if your travel agent is sorta Arab sounding.

Canada's Conservative Government has taken this expansive view of intrusive government power to its bosom with the introduction of Bill C-30 by Public Safety Minister Vic Toews. C-30 allows not only for warrantless online searches of personal information, it also compels Internet Service Providers to create an electronic back door that allows the police to do pretty much whatever they want, again without a warrant.

This overlooks the fact that Canadian cops can already do pretty much whatever they want without a warrant. While there is an "exlusionary rule" in our law prohibiting the use of illegally obtained evidence, the courts only rarely apply it. The courts - including even the Supreme Court of Canada - have repeatedly ruled that excluding such evidence would "bring the administration of justice into disrepute. I would argue that allowing the evidence brings the administration of justice into disrepute because it means that justice is only rarely administred unto the police when fundamental constitutional guarantees of the citizenry are breached. But I'll concede that I'm a pretty weird guy that way, and probably in the tiny minority of Canadians who gives a shit about such things.

Of course, the cops are saying that they support C-30 but that shouldn't surprise anyone. Police officers are like anyone else. If they're offered a tool that makes their job easier, they'd be foolish not to take it. But while child pornography is pretty bad, the police cannot provide a single example of an investigation that was curtailed by the inability to get a warrant. Not one in the entire country. On the other hand, establishing probable cause is a mighty big pain in the ass and has been known to cut into donut breaks.

The police also aren't famous for believing that when government power expands at the expense of fundamental individual liberty, fundamental individual liberty effectively ceases to exist. Well, I suppose that they might believe that, but there's no evidence to suggest that they care. Besides, being on the side of the cops hardly mattered to the Tories when it came to the long-gun registry, now did it? And I supported the Tories on that, even though I don't care much about guns one way or the other.

Towes introduced the measure saying that it is being introduced to combat child pornography, although it is barely mentioned in the legislation outside of its title. Toews further said in the House of Commons that opponents of this draconian and unconstitutional expansion of state power against the individual were "with the child pornographers."

This isn't the first time that the Conservatives went to the kiddie porn well to smear their opponents. During the 2004 campaign, the Tories issued a press release titled "Paul Martin Supports Child Pornography?" For my foreign readers, Paul Martin was then the Prime Minister of Canada. Not only did then-Opposition Leader Stephen Harper not denounce the release (even after the campaign withdrew it), he doubled down on the attack. This is widely seen as one of the things that cost Harper that election.

I've come to understand that that most folks don't like being equated with something as vile as child pornography by hack politicians just because they oppose their mouth-breathing agenda. They just don't seem to cotton to it. Not only because it's morally offensive and borderline libelous, but because it's an amateurish rhetorical trick and intellectually insulting.

However, if you're a prominent politician - especially a Cabinet minister - and you absolutely insist on deameaning your own office by calling your opponents pedophiles, you had better fucking well be as pure as the driven snow because a new day is dawning, especially on Twitter.

First, C-30 itself was reduced to an object of ridicule by the meme #TellVicEverything, which absolutely  devestated the bill and virtually guaranteed that it wouldn't be passed as currently written. Serious legislation cannot be taken seriously when a good chunk of the country,  particularly the younger and more technologically savvy chunk, has reduced it to a great puncline.

Then libertarian-leaning conservatives - among them, many of Harper's own backbenchers - piled on and undercut the government with an important (though frequently ignored and insulted by Harper and his vile cronies) part of its own base. The C-30 debacle found the Tories knocked onto their asses for the first time in a long time, and even undermined Harper's reputation for managerial competence.

The coup-de-grace was delivered unto Towes himself, who - with his longstanding and well-deserved reputation as a beligerrent, half-bright hack  - is roundly despised by right-thinking people of all political stripes. Vic Toews might be the most atavistic beast in politics today, recalling a time when superstitious stupidity wasn't just encouraged, but rewarded. Toews is the sort of guy that would have defended burning witches well into 1920s just because it worked in the United States 250 years earlier. He's spent most of his ward-heeling career angling for a judgeship, where he wouldn't have to work very hard or fear the Enlightenment ever reaching Provincher.

Another Twitter thread, called Vikileaks (since taken down, so I can't link to it) dumped his wife's divorce pleadings onto our laps. And, oh, what a story they tell. They reveal Toews to be, if not the sleaziest monster in all of Christendom, at least in the top five. Also, we learned that he appears  to be possessed with a pathological babysitter fetish. His reputation is fundamentally destroyed in ways that can probably never be repaired. And this was done entirely by his own hand.

Toews could has presented his constitutionally pornograghic bill as a civil human being, but he's just not fucking built that way. Vic is programmed more like a minx, given to going for the throat, eating its young and shitting all over the place until it dies in its own filth. If you believe in God, you almost have to believe that the Fall and Decline of Vic Toews was devinely ordained. He's shit in his own nest - and through the Parliament of Canada, ours - so often that he's finally being buried in it.

The originiating IP address for Vikileaks appears to be from the Parliament Hill, so the Conservatives are blaming the NDP for it. This is because the Conservatives are opportunistic fuckheads. This is the Liberals at work, but the Grits are dying a slow and thoroughly enjoyable death, so the Tories want to pin it on the Dippers. They can't even defend the supposed honour of one of their own without lying, which tells you more about the Conservative Party of Canada than I ever could. They're self-righteous delusional cunts with an almost animal instinct for dissembling, which is to say that they've become the Liberals. And that goes a long way in explaining why nobody misses the Liberals all that much.

Yes, teenagers, a new day has truly dawned. This is a day that you don't propose laws that would wipe out the privacy of the citizenry, call those who disagree with your approach kidfuckers, and still get to keep your own skeletons safely in the closet. If the government aims to destroy our privacy, I have no problem whatsoever with annhilating theirs first. Let us finally establish who is supposed to answer to who in a goddamned democracy. Do we have to take this from the inbred shitheels that we elect and pay? We own these assholes, they don't own us!

They say that sunshine is the best disinfectant, but "they" aren't particularly gifted in turning a phrase. I prefer to say that the truth is an antibiotic that flushes parasitic microbes like Vic from our body politic before they can destroy us from our own innards.

I'm entirely too inclined toward common sense and human decency to praise Vic Toews, or even call for his proper political burial. But I think that we all have a common interest in ensuring that the dumb fucker stays dead and that his degenerate example serves as a warning to the more savage insticts of his tribe.

Newt Gingrich is an exceptionally bad liar, perhaps retarded

One of the great joys of my life has been watching the rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and fall of Newt Gingrich. Few things are as truly beautiful to see as a guy who thinks that he's three times smarter than he actually is let a weak presidential front-runner elevate his already laughably unrealistic sense of self-importance. It is to laugh.

Better still is to take an accounting of who supports the erstwhile Speaker and who opposes him. He is roundly opposed by everyone with brains, who correctly fear that his nomination would bring about a historic rout for the Republican Party, likely cost them a gimmie takeover of the Senate and very possibly cause the loss of the House. On the other hand, Newt is bolstered by the Tea Party, which doesn't appear to be aware that Medicare is a socialist government program and wants the size of government reduced, the colonization of the fucking moon notwithstanding. If you haven't got a goddamned clue what you're talking about, chances are that you're on Team Newt.

Speaker Gingrich fancies himself a historian, although his only real-world experience in the field was teaching at some clown college in the backwoods of Georgia, where the majority of the student body was majoring in raping Ned Beatty. And he couldn't get tenured there, essentially shaming him into a career in politics.

As someone who knows little, if anything, about actual history, Newt doesn't recognize his place in it. Gingrich was carried to prominence by the mess of the first 18 months of President Clinton's term in office. Like Bill Clinton himself, Gingrich was an accident of history, who stupidly mistook his good fortune and the poor decisions of his opponent as some kind of bizarre benediction by history.

I've been re-reading David Marainss' and Michael Weisskopf's majestically named 1996 book, "Tell Newt to Shut Up!", of late and it brings back the good times. As soon as he took control of the House, Gingrich started esposing awesomely irrational theories and presentng them as fact. For example, did you know that Susan Smith's children were actually drowned by the Democratic Party, which merely used Ms. Smith as its murderous vehicle of mayhem? Or that women are unfit for combat entirely because they get infections and men were born to hunt giraffe? Now you do.

Oh, and then there was Newt's inglorious quest to impeach an adulterous president whilst getting his own knob polished by a government employee from his office. That a man who is on his third wife and second religion is the darling of the family-values Tea Party crowd says everything that you need to know about the Tea Party.

Those of you old enough to remember the 1996 presidential election will note that the Clinton White House never campaigned against Bob Dole as much they did Gingrich. They were careful never to show a picture of Dole that didn't have a scowling Newt in the foreground. They actually came right out and said that to vote for Bob Dole was to put Newt Gingrich in the Oval Office. And it worked because it scared the bejesus out of everybody but the godamned daredevils among us.

Sure, you can say that Dole ran a shitty campaign, but I'm note sure that even a masterful politician like Ronald Reagan would have been able to survive having a political suicide machine like Newt chained to his ankle. Ginrich sunk the good ship GOP to the point where it had no where else to turn other than a half-wit Yale cheerleader and bankruptcy generator like George W. Bush to keep it afloat for a time.

That greasy bastard is to big time politics what basement Thai cockfighting is to the NFL. Sure, he beat the spread once in awhile, but only because roosters are entirely unpredictable beasts and given to opportunism. Clinton was a child-president in a White House run by children in 1994. And the only reason that Gingrich lived to prevail in South Carolina was that Mitt Romney was too dumbly genteel to finish the job when he had his boot firmly on Newt's throat in Iowa. If you want to know why Romney is going to have his as handed to him in the fall, now you do. He has no instinct for the throat. Venture capitalists don't understand a fucking thing about politics that their cocksucker lobbyists don't explain to them in Powerpoint demostrations.

Of course, Newt Gingrich is about where most sane people expected him to be: Broke and with the national favourability rating of a Peeping Tom. You could write the most delusionally perverted slander about him, and at least half of the American public would believe that the accusations were at least plausible. This, good people, is the House that Newt built and it's collapsing on him at last.

But even that's not stopping him from launching yet another torrent of horeshit onto everyone's porch. I got this in my e-mail yesterday from Human Events.

America needs three goals in energy:

• Independence from dictatorships so no American President ever again bows to a Saudi king.

• Enough energy that Iranian efforts to disrupt the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz have no impact on America.

• Enough production to bring down the cost of gasoline for American motorists.

All three goals can be achieved with an all-of-the- above American energy plan.

During the four years I was speaker, the average price for a gallon of gasoline was $1.13. When President Obama took office in January 2009, the average price nationwide was $1.89 a gallon. Three years into the Obama presidency, the average is $3.47 a gallon.

Today, prices like those we enjoyed three years ago seem like a fantasy—and under the president’s current policies, they are. But these were prices Americans paid in the relatively recent past. Many Americans used to pay just $35 to fill up the very same cars that are today costing them over $60.

While some of the increase in gas prices comes from growing demand, the demand pressures on price can and should be offset by increasing domestic supplies. Yet the Obama administration’s ideological refusal to expand American energy production continues to block the development of resources which could lower prices dramatically. As we saw most recently with the administration’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline, the president is more interested in playing favorites with environmental extremists rather than embracing the “all-of-the-above” strategy that could achieve energy independence and help all Americans now.

Ever hear about the sin of omission being as bad as the sin comission? Well, Gingrich is right, in a particularly Clintonian way. If you read each word verbaitum, there's nothing demonstrably false in there. But it's what he leaves out in his ridiculous fucking argument that really tells the story.

Comparing the national average prices of gasoline in 1994-'99, 2009 and today is a cute ploy. But it misses something that you might remember, the entire second term of President Bush.

On June 8, 2008 CNN reported that the national average price of gasoline reached $4 a gallon for the first and only time in American history. Oil was trading about $140 a barrel at the time, which had a lot to do with the Great Collpase of Ought-Eight. The impending ruination of the banks detroyed the credit markets, but oil prices wrecked consumer confidence, which in turn took out the commodity markets. If everybody moves their money from oil to Treasuries, of course the cost of oil is going to go down.

You know how I can prove that? Because the book Gingrich shameless hawks at the bottom of his Human Events column was pubished in 2008, which means that it was probably written in 2007

Also noteworthy is the fact that Alaska's insipid fuckdoll of a governor used skyrocketing oil prices to screw the oil companies into paying higher royalties to the state, and then proceeded to give the money away in $1,300 chunks. thereby "spreading the wealth around." Drivers in the other 49 states were therefore subsidizing Sarah Palin's vote-buying scheme. Funny how Newt doesn't point that out, huh?

The price spike had nothing to do with supply and demand, or production. America  historically relied on less oil production and still paid lower prices. Oil price inflation had everything to do devaluation of the U.S dollar as a consequence of Bush's ruinous economic policies. As the world's reserve currency, the dollar is used to trade commodities on the world market. And if the dollar goes to shit, it naturally follows that those commodities are going to cost more dollars.

So the very premise of Gingrich's policy is based on a bright, shining lie. Gasoline prices were considerably higher before Obama took office than they are now. Demand has increased, as Newt notes, but only because of the economic recovery that the Republican Party is determined to avoid admitting the existence of.

This is a lot like blaming the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and ignoring the reign of Adolf Hitler and all of the Second World War completely.  It an make sense ... but only if you're very stupid.

The fact that Americans must cope with ballooning gas prices and energy vulnerability while living in a country with some of the richest untapped energy resources on the planet is an absurdity that can only be accomplished by bad government. By unleashing the American people from regulations and bureaucracy designed to promote the agenda of radical environmentalists, we can tap our enormous oil and natural gas supplies to drive fuel prices down.

Most Americans have no idea that the United States is sitting on enough technically recoverable oil to power us at current rates of consumption for over 250 years. We are estimated to have 1.4 trillion barrels of oil—or 1.7 trillion, adding in the resources of Canada and Mexico.

This is based on another fundamentally retarded premise - that the natural resources of Canada and Mexico belong to the United States.

Firstly, the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations have pissed all over NAFTA to the point that the treaty is meaningless. I called for Canada's withdrawal from the treaty as far back as seven years ago.

I also opposed Keystone because I want Canada to diversify it's markets and not tie ourselves so closely to the sinking ship of the long term American economy.To the extent that we can bypass the U.S market, Canada probably should.  If that means selling to the murderous Chinese, so be it. President Obama did Canada the biggest favour imaginable in rejecting Keystone.

Gingrich drones on and fucking on, ignoring the fact that none of his proposals meet any of his goals, at least in the near term. Those goals, as we remember, are as follows;

• Independence from dictatorships so no American President ever again bows to a Saudi king.

• Enough energy that Iranian efforts to disrupt the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz have no impact on America.

• Enough production to bring down the cost of gasoline for American motorists.

Lets address those one at a time, shall we?

• Even if you eliminate Arab oil from the American marketplace tomorrow, you'll still have American presidents bowing to Saudi kings.Oil isn't the primary objective of American Middle East policy - especially in Republican circles - Israel is. And since neither Israel or the United States has ever expressed a desire to sign a mutual defense treaty, both are going to have to continue praying to Mecca for the forseeable future.
• Even if the Unied States achieves energy independence - which demographics, economics and common sense all dictate is unlikely - the Strait of Hormuz is still going to be the major energy conduit of America's allies and major trading partners, Of course, Russia or China could take up America's slack in that area, but I doubt that Washington would like it very much.
• Ah, to live in Newt world, where if you so much as touch the ground with a fucking spoon, you become the Beverly Hillbillies. Life doesn't work that way. Finding oil, drilling it, refining it and bringing it to market in any meaningful way takes about ten years. By the way, increased exploration and drilling will, of course, be subsidized by American motorists because Republicans and oil industry lobbyists will fuck around with the tax code to enough make it so.

 In reality, American motorists will pay more today, so that they can pay even more tomorrow.

Remember how Republicans always tell you that money is fungible when it comes to things like private dinations to Planned Parenthood? If Rick Santorum, the argument goes, gives a few bucks to the Susan Komen for the Cure Foundation, it inevitably goes to building an almost industrial abortion factory on his paperboy's front yard.

Well, the same is true of oil. It's just as likely that any discovered oil will be sold to emerging markets like India and China than it is to drive domestic prices down. The Gingrich case seems to be premisd on the idea that foreign growth and demand will remain static or decline, as America's is free to continue growing unabated. And that ignores the reality that the reverse is far more likely.

If you've suffered a head injury, love assaulting common sense, or just hate people who know stuff, Newt Gingrich isn't just the candidate for you, but your kind of intellectual as well. And since you're the very same folks that had the unmitigated fucking balls to mock the "reality-based community" less than a decade ago, you're welcome to him.

Oh hi, LIndsay!

It really doesn't matter to me that Lindsay Lohan is a drunk, coke-addled, unemployable and more familiar with courtrooms than Hollywood premiers, and it shouldn't matter to you, either. In fact, these are things that right-thinking people everywhere consider "character building exercises." A beautiful woman, after all, can still be ungodly boring, even if she does have huge tits and an allergy to brassieres.

Besides, Lindsay almost instinctively knows that in life - as in the business of show - that presentation is everything. And as we learned in the leaked outtakes from her photo shoot this week for Love magazine, Lohan's presentation skills are get more awesome as she gets older. It truly is a delightful thing to behold.

The ability to present - or as some call it, putting your best face forward - is instrumental to achieving the important things in life, being it fame, success or love. While success seems to have escaped her powdery hands forever, Lindsay knows how to ensure that I'll always love her.

It's as if she read my mind and began studying the porno sluts that I've cherished since childhood. Everything I truly needed to learn about life was gleaned from the issues of Penthouse that my late father had strewn everywhere, from the bathroom floor to the kitchen table. Of course that was back in the 1970s, but my father honoured and was awed by the vast collection of pornography that I had accumulated here in the Fucktorium; VHS tapes the stretched from floor to ceiling, hundreds of DVDs, a library of smutty magazines from the ages, and terabyte after terabyte of spray-tanned deities presenting and displaying their gifts, both natural and unnatural.

Because Lindsay Lohan knows these things, she'll always have a place in my heart. Whenever I shove my hand down my pants and squeeze my junk until my fucking knuckles turn white, she can know that I'll be thinking of her, her giant knockers and her tiny alabaster ass cheeks.

And if that's not love, I just don't know what is. I only wish that I had first seen these pictures on Valentine's Day.

Special thanks to What Would Tyler Durden Do (SFW) and Drunken Stepfather (NSFW)

A Tale of Two Hacks

Those of you who have been reading me over the last nine years might have noticed a theme throughout my writing. That would be that what passes for conservatism these days really isn't all that conservative. It is, on the other hand, a triumph of style over a substance. "Conservatives" can call themselves conservative and a bunch of halfwit voters and bloggers that don't know any better believe them. If you even casually go through my assaults on these assholes over the years, you'll notice that I almost never attack them from the left. I don't despise them because I'm a liberal, I despise them because they're something other than what they advertise themselves as.

Liberalism has failed because liberals are dishonest shitheels and suck at communications, besides. Did you know, for example, that President Bush promised a trillion dollars more spending at his 2004 convention speech than John Kerry did at his? Of course you didn't, because Senator Kerry was too awesomely fucking dumb to point that out.

Make no mistake, Barack Obama didn't win the presidency because he was so Christ-like. At the beginning of September 2008, John McCain was ahead of him by three points. But Lehman Brothers collapsed six weeks before election, beginning what a number of serious people thought looked like the end of the world. And McCain was out there, without a solitary idea of what to do, and a half-wit of a running mate that thought that screaming shrilly about Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers was a winning tactic.

After taking office, Obama's approval ratings were basically drowned in an orgy of misdirected spending. How did Republicans respond to this? By lying a lot, promising a shit-ton of immediate and expensive tax cuts, and proposing program reforms that don't take effect for at least fifteen years.

Think that through for a minute. On one hand, they argue that the deficits and debt - the overwhelming majority of which "conservatives" created because they're structural in nature - are a threat to the continuing existence of the nation itself. But on the other hand, they want to defer any serious program spending for nearly a generation, while front-loading tax cuts and defense spending that expand gigantic deficits into almost cosmic ones. Anyone who takes that kind of thinking seriously cannot themselves be taken seriously.

That kind of thinking is so easy to disassemble that I just did it in a paragraph. But you'll almost never see a fucking liberal do that because they're so wedded to their own shitheaded demagoguery. They want to say that this revolutionary (as opposed to conservative) Republican (again, as opposed to conservative) agenda hurts their constituents immediately, which it doesn't. Serious program cuts don't happen for at least a decade, if they happen at all. But that agenda does create a metric fuckload of immediate debt.

If liberals wanted to undermine these "conservatives", they'd point out that they don't take deficits and debt anywhere near as seriously as their rhetoric suggests. But to do that, liberals would have to themselves take deficits and debt seriously, which they don't. They intellectually know that reversing monstrously stupid tax cuts and defense spending increases is nothing more than a good way to start attacking the debt issue. The real work involves scaling back structural entitlements, and doing so in a way that affects current recipients. Progressives are at least smart enough to know that's a political loser, so they'd rather join modern conservatives in lying about everything.

I don't want to imly that this is exclusive to American Republicans, because it ain't. Not by a long shot.

I have a mayor here in Toronto that took Republican ignorance and dishonesty and threw it into hyper-drive. Rob Ford campaigned promising to cut taxes, build billions of dollars worth of subways that go everywhere, and pay for it by basically scaling back on the fucking gardening at City Hall. He swore up and down that social spending would stay where it is, if not actually increase.

In one of the only instances where I overestimated the intelligence of the electorate, I predicted that Ford would lose. But everything I predicted subsequent to that is happening as I write this. Ford's still married to tax cuts and subways, but he now understands that he can't actually pay for any of it without cutting city services. City Council is in pretty much open revolt, including his own allies, and his approval ratings are cratering.

Look, I don't give a shit about libraries, swimming pools or hockey rinks. I don't believe that entertaining the whelpish asshole kids of the upper and middle classes is a proper function of government. Fuck them and their overly-entitled parents. If it were up to me, all of it would be burned to the fucking ground and replaced with casinos, mega-whorehouses and opium dens. Do you have any idea how many whores and hookas you could stuff into the library at Fairview Mall? Neither do I, but I'd like to find out!

Having said that, Ford deserves every inch of the reprobation he's getting for cynically (or stupidly) promising things that he couldn't deliver on, more so because he made those fantastical promises in the name of fiscal responsibility. That asshole deserves every inch of it, and I hope that this city votes Rob Ford out and replaces him with the goddamned Khmer Rouge. They're about equally realistic.

Which brings me to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Harper surprises me because he's a personally cautious fellow, a conservative by disposition, if not politics.

When Harper was out whoring for his majority this past spring, he and his bankruptcy machine of a Finance Minister were promising to eliminate the deficit that they themselves created in four years. And they'd do it without anybody getting hurt.

I knew that they were lying, but I figured that they were lying on the side of ignoring the deficit.

Oops.

My previous point is key, here. Unlike Ford, who actually inherited a spending orgy and consciously chose to make a bad political situation even worse, Harper came into office with a great big surplus, which he promptly pissed away on a consumption tax cut that accomplished absolutely nothing and various social-engineering of the tax code to make those middle-class soccer moms and fucking hockey dads cream in their unmentionables. "Babysitters for everybody!" was the battle cry of the day.

And when the Lehan Brothers collapse came, the surplus was gone. So Harper spent hundreds of billions of dollars more in a stimulus that dwarfed Barack Obama's. The fact that Newt Gingrich repeatedly refers to Stephen Harper as a conservative tells me everything I need to know ... about Gingrich.

Well, it took about nine months, but "nobody gets hurt" has turned into "Pay up, grandpa!" Except not really.

While the Harper-Flaherty budget hasn't been released yet, I don't expect current retirees to take any kind of a hit whatsoever. It's going to be the current soccer moms and fucking hockey dads that it in the nuts. Y'know, exactly the same folks that Harper spent a fortune on in his first two governments.

The Greatest Generation, who voted themselves all manner of free shit are going to die comfortably. The Boomer cocksuckers, who voted for even more free shit, are pretty immune to the laws of economics and nature. But if you're in your thirties ot forties - the key "conservative" demographic - you, my friend, are well and truly going to take a pile-driver of an ass-reaming.

And it couldn't happen to a more deserving crowd. We knew that the day of reckoning was coming. But we still insisted on voting for more spending and less taxes. It's not like Harper puled a GST cut and federally subsidized goalie pads out of his ass. He focus-grouped the fuck out of those ideas. And my generation - the most awesomely fucking stupid grouping in human history - voted to pile on even more debt when there was no one left to pass it on to.

Up until the Bush-Harper era, I liked blaming the Boomers for everything. It was fun and factually correct. But then my contemporaries starting voting themselves more and progressively more expensive shit that made the system unsustainable. And the fact that we did it with nominally "conservative" politicians is an irony that should escape no one. Liberals wanted this nonsense, but it was conservatives that passed it. And we get to fucking pay for it in our golden years.

I'm nearly 42, but I almost certainly won't live to see 50, so I don't give a shit. Moreover, I don't have a pot to piss in. But my contemporaries, who are probably going to wind up worse off than their parents did, are going to live to see millionaire Boomer scumbags taking their kids to public hockey rinks while we scramble to figure out how to properly flavour cat food in our retirement.

And we can't blame it on the Boomers anymore. By voting for these assholes, from 1980 onward, we did it to ourselves.

The buck stops here, folks. Deal with it.



Link and inspiration lovingly stolen from The Tiger on Politics, who owes me a drink.