I watched the sun go down for the last time on 2020, and it was as ugly and as threatening as the cursed year.
Which seemed right to me because it was the worst year I have ever known. One with more dead than anyone could count, more fear and more madness and the prospect of even more horror to come.
A year only the Grim Reaper could love.
And instead of making people feel safer, deciding instead to make a "cheery cheesecake."
But now it's worse.
I'm proud to say that not for one fleeting second, did I ever believe that Doug "Meatloaf" Ford was fit to be the Premier of Ontario.
And I've always considered the idea of that brutish dumb Con trying to lead the province through a murderous pandemic, the stuff of nightmares.
But not any longer. Now the nightmare is only too real.
For not only is the deadly virus surging out of control in Ontario, thanks to Ford's criminal incompetence and his absurd pre-Boxing Day mockdown.
His much touted vaccine program is going absolutely nowhere.
If everything had gone according to plan, or at least according to plan B, I might have been spending Christmas with my parents not far from Loch Ness in the Scottish highlands.
My original plan was to visit them in late June, and I had bought two tickets in January, so when the Covid monster struck I was left with two tickets to nowhere.
But thinking that by Christmas the lockdowns would be lifted by late December I started making plans to spend Christmas in Scotland.
And I was looking forward to spending the holidays with my parents for the first time in years, as well as taking in the wild Hogmanay celebrations in Edinburgh.
Justin Trudeau was apparently looking forward to a quieter 2020 than he had experienced the year before.
But the Year from Hell forced him to govern like he never had before.
Luckily for Canadians he was more than able to rise to the occasion.
And the photographer Adam Scotti was there to record the year in pictures.
In a better time with higher standards, Doug Ford would never have become the Premier of Canada's largest province.
And like many other Canadians, I did my best to warn people about him.
But the dumb Ford Nation went ahead and voted for him anyway.
And now many of them are dying of stupidity.
As we all know Donald Trump is having a very hard time accepting the results of the U.S. election.
So even though an American is dying of Covid every 33 seconds, all he does is rant and rave and tweet stuff like this:
GREATEST ELECTION FRAUD IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY!!!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 20, 2020
While desperately looking for ways to overturn the election results.
As you may recall, I never believed Erin O'Toole when after he became Con leader he claimed that he had changed.
Claimed that after pandering to racists, misogynists, homophobes, and other kooks to win the leadership, he wasn't really one of them.
He managed to fool a lot of Canadians but he never fooled me.
Time after time I was proved right, and now I've been proved right again.
There's a sign in my neighbourhood just by the closed ice rink that reads as follows:
"THIS IS WHERE WE WILL SING TOGETHER AGAIN. SEE YOU WHEN IT'S SAFE."
But sadly we won't be singing again anytime soon, because my neighbourhood is locked down.
And the coronavirus' second wave is surging all over Canada.
For weeks Erin O'Toole has been trying to scare Canadians into believing that Canada was going to be the last country in the world to receive Covid vaccines.
Taking advantage of their anxiety for crass political purposes, which is as low as you can go.
And growing a Pinocchio nose for lying like a thief, as only a Con could.
For this is outrageous...
I started pinning a Pinocchio nose on Erin O'Toole a few weeks ago because I was so angry at the way he lies all the time.
And so frustrated that our shabby Con media was allowing him to get away with murder.
But I'm feeling a lot better now.
For some in the media have started criticizing the ghastly serial liar, and his nose just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
As the days darken, and the pandemic surges, I sometimes have trouble remembering what day of the week it is, let alone the date.
But I never forget this date: December 6, 1989.
Because on that day in Montreal something horrifying happened.
I never thought the Cons could come up with another leader who could lie as much as Andrew Scheer.
For Scheer was the worst serial liar this country has ever known, and his Pinocchio nose just grew and grew until it was practically a weapon.
Nobody could beat that I thought.
But sadly, I was wrong.
It's getting bleak out there. The Great Darkness is descending upon us even as Covid cases are surging all over the country.
Many hospitals are close to being overwhelmed, the smell of death is in the air.
So it's not surprising that many Canadians are clinging desperately to the hope that vaccines will end our long nightmare.
Which only makes what our grubby Cons and their stooge media have been trying to do even more obscene.
It took Donald Trump a long time to even hint that he was finally ready to admit he lost the election.
He didn't dare. No doubt worried that if his rabid supporters didn't kill him, he might have to kill himself. It's THAT embarrassing eh?
But this is close enough.
So it's now at last possible to imagine Trump leaving the White House...
I have never seen Justin Trudeau looking so grim as when he came out of his Rideau cottage today.
And who could blame him?
Covid cases are surging all over Canada, and models suggest that we are heading for a human catastrophe, where sickness and death are everywhere.
So when Trudeau addressed Canadians he spoke straight from the heart.
It's hard to believe, and even harder to accept, how much things have changed since COVID-19 started killing Canadians.
Back in that fatal Spring we were united. We followed doctor's orders, we applauded the medical workers risking their lives, we loudly and proudly proclaimed that we were all in this together.
And for a while we were, and in most parts of Canada, we did manage to at least temporarily beat down the curve.
But pandemic fatigue took its toll, all that solidarity went down like the Hindenburg, and now I'm living in a Red Zone.
Covid-19 is surging again all over the place, and threatening to overwhelm our hospitals.
As the second wave of coronavirus continues to surge across much of Canada, patients are starting to fill up hospital beds and overwhelm a healthcare system already under strain.
And doctors warn that if the trend continues, healthcare workers will soon have to face a grim decision in the intensive care unit (ICU) — triaging who lives and who dies.
Which can only lead to the worse human catastrophe in Canada since the 1918 flu pandemic, with more dead people than anybody can count, and tens of thousands of others scarred for life.And while I blame those who just don't get the message.
When I saw this picture of Donald Trump the other day, I almost felt sorry for him.
He had been playing golf when he found out that the TV networks had finally called the election, and that he was now officially a loser.
And I had never seen him look so beaten, so broken, and so human.
But then I took a closer look and I was horrified.
He couldn't accept that he had lost. He thought he could change the election result with one desperate tweet after the other.
I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2020
But only an hour after he tweeted that one, as he played golf, his time finally ran out.
The dirty old Trump was finally defeated.
And Joseph R. Biden was finally declared to be the winner of the U.S. presidential election.
I started this post early yesterday morning as the first results of the U.S. election were coming in.
But I couldn't keep writing. I had to stop.
For at that time it looked as if Donald Trump was going to be re-elected.
And the idea of that was so awful I felt like vomiting.
Long after America's long nightmare of the soul is over I'll remember this picture. The degenerate ape Trump pretending he would make America great again.
And millions of Americans on their knees in despair, wondering how a monster like that ever became their president.
For he is a monster, he has debased himself and his country.
And now he's threatening to set it on fire.
They say Donald Trump has never looked more tired or more desperate. Three days before the election his polls are sagging, the coronavirus is surging.
He doesn't have the energy for long speeches, and some of the things he's saying are even crazier than usual.
Like this clip, where he distorts the truth to mock those who wear masks.
It couldn't be a worse combination. The coronavirus is surging, and may kill even more Canadians than it did during its first deadly wave.
Even as pandemic fatigue sets in, and many people are too tired, or too numb, or too depressed to fight it.
And if our leaders can't overcome that wave of fatigue, the virus could explode out of control, and slaughter old and vulnerable Canadians from one end of the country to the other.
So the last thing we need is Michelle Rempel Garner and her ghastly Cons trying to bring down Team Canada, by turning the health committee into a fascist circus.
Ever since Erin O'Toole was elected Con leader, the shabby media in this country have been giving him a political honeymoon, which can only be compared to a full body massage.
They claim he's a really nice guy, slurp slurp. They claim he's a political moderate, and not at all like the nasty Andrew Scheer, slurp, slurp.
When in fact the truth couldn't be uglier.
Pierre Poilievre and Erin O'Toole must have thought they had Justin Trudeau where where they wanted him, judging by the way their feathers were flying.
They had drafted a grotesque bill to create a so-called Anti-Corruption Committee, which they hoped would revive the corpse of the fake WE scandal, and take down Team Canada.
So they could blame the deaths of thousands of Canadians on the Trudeau government.
And of course go after Margaret Trudeau again.
It's hard to believe, but it's now been five years since the night that changed Canada forever.
The night a decade of darkness finally ended.
The night Stephen Harper set out to destroy Justin Trudeau, the man he hated more than any other.
Only to end up flat on his face.
In my last post I wondered how long Erin O'Toole would be able to fool Canadians into believing that he was a really nice guy.
And not the two-faced leader of Canada's far-right Bigot Party.
And sadly I have to report that O'Toole desperate bid for respectability did not last long.
For he just couldn't help channelling his hero Donald Trump.
Try as I might, I just can't trust two-face Erin O'Toole as far as I can spit.
The reason I say that, is because O'Toole is pulling out all the stops trying to fool dumb Canadians into believing he's a nice guy who shares our values.
When in fact he leads the most far right and most American party in Canadian history.
And his Con thugs are hard at work trying to destroy everything we love about this country...
Donald Trump might have been spewing Covid in every direction, but he just couldn't stay away from that balcony.
He had to be there. He had to feel the love of his Trumpanzees, even if it killed him, or them.
And now I know why.
Maybe it was pandemic fatigue that left so many feeling apathetic and demotivated. Too tired to fight a virus that could kill them and their loved ones.
Or maybe it was base ignorance, that made them believe that COVID wasn't that dangerous, and that even if they got it they would survive.
Or maybe they thought it was a joke and didn't give a damn about the lives of others.
But whatever the reason, the second wave is here, the virus is surging all over the world from Montreal to Moscow.
When I saw Donald Trump on a balcony at the White House the other night I wasn't sure what he was doing there.
For a moment he looked like he was about to burst into song, or start channelling Mussolini.
Then I noticed that they were shooting a political ad.
And I realized who Trump was really channelling, and the full horror of his monstrous message.
He has become COVITA, the deranged coronavirus denier, and his message is simple but brutal:
Don't cry for me America, I am fine, I beat the bug, I know more than the doctors. So don't let Biden and his Antifa communists scare you. Because I'm your everlasting leader, and I'm not going ANYWHERE #!!@
Which as the Lincoln Project points out is not only bad news for the country, it's especially bad for those who can't get away from his potentially fatal breath...
Spreading COVID all over the place, while trying to claim that it's nothing, so you shouldn't worry if you get it.
And shouldn't bother to wear a mask, because real men like Trump don't wear them...
Even though as Tom Friedman writes, Trump is not a Superman, he's just a superspreader.
The verdict is in: He cast himself as Superman, but he turns out to have been Superspreader — not only of a virus but of a whole way of looking at the world in a pandemic that was dangerously wrong for himself and our nation. To re-elect him would be an act of collective madness.
Once he was just a clown.
Now he has become DEATH...
OK, first the bad news. Trump is still alive and back at the White House channelling Mussolini.
He's encouraging Americans not to wear masks,
And he made his return to the Covid House look like the return of The Messiah.
The first thing I did this morning when I got up, was check to see whether Donald Trump had died.
He looked so bad in a video he made at the hospital, I thought it was only a matter of time before he would have to be moved into an ICU, and put on a respirator.
And I know Covid.
So you can imagine how shocked I was to see this.
Ever since Erin O'Toole became Con leader, thanks to the support of alt right extremists and social conservatives, he has been trying to claim that he's changed and so has his party.
Now he claims he's a "moderate" and that his Cons should from now on be known as the Compassionate Party.
And with the help of our shabby media, he's even tried to brainwash Canadians into believing he's Mr Nice Guy.
Or Mr Handyman...
But sadly for O'Toole his actions speak louder than his hollow words.
So when the Liberal government recently reintroduced a bill banning so-called conversion therapy, the barbarous practice of torturing LGBT kids to try to make them "normal."
A practice Justin Trudeau said has no place in Canada...
For no good reason.
Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole’s worry that a conversion therapy ban could criminalize parents or preachers talking to kids about gender and sexuality is a “total red herring,” according to professor and advocate Kristopher Wells.
Except to pleasure the SoCons in his caucus and other far right supporters.
The ones who believe they have the divine right to torture gay kids...
Even if conversion therapy doesn't work, and can drive some young people to suicide.
So-called “conversion therapy,” sometimes known as “reparative therapy,” is a range of dangerous and discredited practices that falsely claim to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity or expression. Such practices have been rejected by every mainstream medical and mental health organization for decades, but due to continuing discrimination and societal bias against LGBTQ people, some practitioners continue to conduct conversion therapy. Minors are especially vulnerable, and conversion therapy can lead to depression, anxiety, drug use, homelessness, and suicide.
Which makes what O'Toole is doing, not only disgusting but cowardly.
Failing to properly condemn the torture of LGBTQ kids....
For crass political purposes.
And for those who might say wait, didn't he promise to march in a Pride parade?
Dale Smith has this reminder:
Great eh?
The Con media can't decide whether to polish his head or his ass.
So much for Mr Nice Guy.
So much for Mr Handymonster....
But let's be clear, Erin O'Toole is not a moderate, he's as evil and as cruel as all the others.
And the Cons are not the Compassionate Party.
They are still the more American than Canadian Bigot Party.
And are still a mortal threat to this country and it's values...
