Sunday, April 03, 2011

Stephen Harper and the Angry Men





















He has always appealed to the darkest angels of the human soul, the most reactionary and crazed members of society. And his hypocrisy knows no limit. 

Now he's going after the women's vote, even though he has attacked women's rights like a rabid dog from the moment he came to office. As Antonia Zerbisias points out here.

Read that record of brutal assaults on the rights of women, and weep for our country.

Then ask yourself what kind of diseased leader would do that? To appeal to his deranged religious base, and the resentment of angry men.

“If you look at the workforce, the traditional male workplace, the union job, the blue collar job, that has taken a beating over the last several decades,” he says. “You’ll find that men who once would have worked at these relatively high-paying jobs are now working at places like Wal-Mart. That hurts economically.”

“But it can also make some men uncomfortable. It may make them angry. If men have turned angry in larger numbers, they tend to vote for that party that best articulates anger. And in the last generation, it’s the Reform/Alliance/Conservatives that have articulated anger quite well.


Because that's clearly who he is playing to, with his fancy jets, his mega prisons, his big guns, his anti-immigrant racism, his cheap patriotism. With every policy, every hollow campaign promise, carefully massaged by the theocons to put women in their place. 

This isn’t really a tax break for most people; it’s social policy: a tax break for people who fit the right-wing ideal of an upstanding family: dad makes a lot of money and mom stays home with the kids, as any good mother should, instead of relying on daycare.

The one and only sentence it dropped from the long-form census was that on unpaid work, effectively killing an effective measurement of how much women do in the home and as caregivers.

The irony is that nobody has done more to eliminate those blue collar jobs than Stephen Harper, with his Big Oil policies that are driving the dollar up and destroying the manufacturing sectors in Quebec and Ontario.

The tragedy is that women in this country are being loaded onto cattle cars for a journey back to the 1950s. Where a woman's place was in the kitchen.

And Big Daddy Knew Best...





















And the most outrageous thing is that so far in this campaign, Stephen Harper is getting away with this gender crime. And the voices of women are being silenced.

Oh boy. Do you think that progressive Canadians might get angry too? Just a little bit angry? About what's being done to their country. I think it's about time.

Stop that train in its tracks.

Defeat those foul misogynist Cons.

Before they wreck our Canada...

Recommend this post at Progressive Bloggers

2 comments:

Beijing York said...

Right on, Simon! This proposal is a dog whistle to his base.

I wish someone, like maybe a journalist, would ask him if he would take advantage of his proposed income splitting proposition.

Simon said...

hi Beijing...you know what horrifies me the most is the extremes these Cons will go to, to appease their base. And how they weave their bias into the tapestry to hide it from the eyes of the ignorant. I just can't BELIEVE this is happening in Canada eleven years into the 21st Century. I find it mindboggling and truly disturbing...