Thursday, August 23, 2018

The Monstrous Cons and the New Old Racist Game



It's the kind of thing that can ruin your evening. You come home, you turn on the TV, and there's Michelle Rempel, the new take no prisoners/ don't f**k with me Rempel, auditioning for the part of Canada's Marine Le Pen. 

It doesn't get much worse than that. 

But Rempel's performance yesterday was actually quite entertaining, when she suddenly announced that the Cons had a new immigration plan.  

Only to derail her own launch by going after Maxime Bernier. 

But then who can blame her?

Mad Max is on a rampage.



With just one day to go before the Con convention opens, he's not just going after "extreme multiculturalism." 

Or stoking the fires of white supremacy.

Now he's going after Andrew Scheer.


And sounding crazier by the minute...



You might think that Mad Max would have been fired long ago, before he turns the convention into a Nuremberg rally in Halifax, or a madhouse.

But the problem for Scheer is that a lot of Cons support Bernier. 

Former leadership candidate Maxime Bernier is facing a showdown with fellow Conservative MPs for publicly commenting on issues of diversity and immigration without the party’s blessing, but there appears to be significant grassroots support for keeping him within caucus.

“I don’t think you’re going to find that a large percentage of the party disagrees with what he has to say,” said Marjorie Nielsen, president of the Markham-Stouffville riding northeast of Toronto.


So Blandy Andy is scared to expel him from the Con caucus. 

Not just because he's widely considered a coward, as Martin Patriquin points out here. 



One of the prevailing narratives as to why Maxime Bernier remains in the Conservative Party caucus despite his xenophobic spleen venting about the alleged ills of “extreme multiculturalism” begins and ends with Andrew Scheer’s fortitude. 

Unlike his predecessor Stephen Harper, the current Conservative Party leader has none. Bernier can run roughshod over the Conservative narrative at will as a result, comfortable in the knowledge that his boss is a Cuckservative at heart and in his Twizzler-like backbone. This very well may be true.

But also because for Scheer, Rempel, and many other Cons, Bernier is a useful idiot. 

Perhaps Bernier remains nestled at the bosom of the Conservative Party because his only offense, according to Scheer, is that Bernier explicitly spelled out what Conservatives have been pushing for the last 18 months. That is to say, the stream of migrants arriving in Canada is nothing short of a “crisis” fomented by the current Liberal government.

In short, Bernier is only saying out loud what many of his colleagues have long whispered. For Scheer, that’s hardly a firing offence.

Which is of course is the really bad news. 

For it means that the Cons will almost certainly use racism to try to win the next election.

And this is just a re-run of a really bad movie...



Except that this movie is running in the Age of Trump so it could do a lot more damage to this country and its values.

And even Andrew Coyne is forced to admit that the Cons are playing a dangerous game.

Legitimate questions are one thing. But Conservative rhetoric on what they insist is a “crisis” is so monomaniacal, so out of proportion to its actual significance, that no one should be fooled.

There is nothing wrong with the desire that a society should have some common ideals, ambitions and yes, values to hold it together. But when this is bound up in conspiratorial suggestions that certain parties are attempting to subvert or destroy these, and even more when this is attached to immigration, as the instrument of this supposed campaign, the argument veers onto dangerous ground.

Not that the Cons care, because that's who they are.

And so is this. 

CTV News has obtained audio of a robocall made on behalf of a Conservative riding association that tried to pitch party memberships by citing a Liberal MP’s cancer diagnosis.

Great eh? 

You know when Lisa Raitt once declared that "cancer is sexy," I thought that was something only a Con could say. And I wondered whether they would learn from that ghastly mistake.

But they haven't, they haven't learned a thing. They're still the same dirty old Cons.

And if we don't finish them off in the next election, they will set this country on fire...



10 comments:

  1. Jackie Blue12:22 PM

    Meanwhile Trump, and Turnbull's deputy ding-dong Dutton in Australia, have expressed a desire to take up the white man's burden (for other white men) and help out the plight of the poor Afrikaners. Blain basically called Trudeau himself a mud-blood of impure roots, as the latest posting on Anti-Racist Canada's blog points out. Twitter user Heather Haughton compared Blain's rant to a famous speech made by Pierre Trudeau when PQ founder Rene Levesque mocked his middle name for not being "Quebec enough."

    BTW, speaking of nomenclature, I looked up the name Blain in a names dictionary online. It's actually Scottish (!) meaning yellow (i.e., blonde), but more like a disgusting, pus-filled yellow than the ideal Aryan coiffure. It actually comes from an old English word meaning a person suffering from blisters or boils. Looks like Diane isn't as pure as she thought she was. If anything, she's the carrier of a plague.

    https://www.ancestry.co.uk/name-origin?surname=blain


    The last gasps of white supremacy (much of which is a leftover export from the U.S. and the psychotic reaction to Barack Obama that produced Trump) won't be pretty in the least, but hopefully it won't escalate to the levels that it did in the 1930s, where 100 million people died in the Eugenics Wars that pitted the original Antifa against the Slytherin super-soldiers last time around.

    Someone should ask Michelle Le Pen there if her blonde roots are pure, or if she's willing to dye for the cause. One way or another, I can't wait until their diseased delusions about miscegenation and swarthy hordes are reduced to little more than a rotted Trump stump.

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    1. Actually Blain is ALSO a French name, most common around Lyon so not Breton. However, it does have Germanic origins, as I suspect the Scottish name does, not Celtic or Latin ones in either case.

      I suspect Lévesque and Trudeau père simply hated each other; René was not a racist and rejected such overtures in PQ ranks; moreover several PQ members had Irish or Scottish surnames and one PQ cabinet member was actually from England (David Payne). Gilles Duceppe's maternal grandfather was an English home child (lots of jokes about the "Bloke québécois").

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  2. Anonymous12:49 PM

    “Want to ensure ‘Canadians’ get the first shot at jobs”. Just ask our southern cousins how that’s working out for them. Businesses that have relied on foreign workers for decades are on the verge of going out of business because they can’t get visas for their foreign workers. Americans don’t want the jobs. Meanwhile, Trump businesses continue to hire all the foreign workers they need.

    UU

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    1. Anonymous4:09 PM

      Small correction: American workers don't want the jobs at the pay and working conditions being offered.

      Somehow the freemarketeers don't like the free market solution to those problems!

      Delete
  3. Well, the latest news is that Bernier has taken his toys out of the game and gone home to found a new party. Doubt this would work as rustic nativists would also tend to support supply management to protect the dairy industry, very important in rural Québec.

    Anonymous, either the USians don't want the jobs or they are specialised jobs and simply not enough qualified local workers.

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  4. Anonymous1:48 PM

    The Cons are screwed. They are now more like a cult than a party. And Scheer is too cowardly to be the leader of any Canadian party. If Bernier manages to steal any seats from the Cons in Quebec , Scheer and company won’t have a chance of winning the next election...

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  5. The weird thing is that Bernier's base would be drawn from voters similar to the long-ago supporters of the Créditistes, but Bernier's Randian outlook is at odds with Social Credit, a very different strain of rightwing thought.

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  6. Anonymous2:15 PM

    I still can’t believe that the Cons could treat a person with cancer like that. It’s so horrible. I can’t believe that any half decent Canadian could vote for them ever again.They make me sick!

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  7. at the end of the day not much of this really matters. Most people dont give a good god damm about politics. They are going to vote for buck a beer and a tax cut. So to win you have to engage this people at a differant level. Thats why liberals are the party that must be twice as good as the left and the right to win.

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  8. Not to mention what the left must do! Québec solidaire's advocacy for dental care seems to echo here.

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