Who You Gonna Call?

Bed bugs are all the rage these days...

Should I ever need mattress protectors, I know what company to call now. But, I would certainly not want them parked in front of my house.

P.S. Don't forget to mouse over the photo...

Darkly dreaming of dirty work at the crossroads

One niggling issue with buying a brain is that it is - so far, anyway - only an aftermarket accessory. I expect that will change at some point, but at the moment, Mayor Larry's attempt to bolt on some kinda political savvy is hampered by the fact that his actual, own brain is still the one hooked directly to his mouth. Mouth-shooting neurons being as speedy as they are, he can say all kindsa crap before the hired brain can, ummm, hit the Emergency Crash Override button.

So it was, with the Ottawa Stun's editorial board yesterday. Larry blurted that he had a hard time not thinking, as unnamed "more suspicious people" apparently already have, that former regional chairman Andy Haydon's entry into the mayoral race was engineered by front-runner Jim Watson to bleed off Larry fans and cause his ultimate mayoral demise.

Apparently, any unelection event would so not be Larry's fault. Also apparently, Larry fans, while ummm, legion, can't tell two bald guys apart. I'll take a moment to point out to fiscal conservative types who might be duped by such nefariosity that Haydon, while indeed partly bald, is an actual practicing fiscal conservative who knows how to do that kinda thing successfully. He is also capable of pithiness. Unlike me. I just digressed again.

Larry's campaign manager, Robert Thompson was in there yanking the leash. But it musta have been one of those spring-loaded thingies I see on all the posher domestic doggies: you know, the ones that can unreel to about 10 metres like taut clotheslines, to trip ya up. The leasher can theoretically thumb a brake button to shorten the line, and head off the leashee's intemperate darts into heavy traffic or other disasters - say, an unfortunate roll in something really smelly and unpleasant - but would have to be damnably quick on the draw* to slow down His Nibs.

So it was only after the blurtage that Thompson managed to yank that leash and tell Larry to STFU and get back onto the media line script. Carefully crafted by someone who's not Larry. A new, improved Larry 2.0 indeed. Two, ummm, too, bad about that legacy code...

* Mental digression: some freakishly-quick gamer with years of practice on X-Box or Playstation controllers might have developed the lightning reflexes needed. But I doubt they'd have the interest.

How dumb am I supposed to be, again...?

I'm on a roll. While I sucked my paws over the state of federal politics yesterday, the incumbent mayor, in what I imagine he hoped was a display of charming candour, finally admitted out loud what sentient Ottawattamies have pretty much realized since their last municipal election-night hangovers hit: that his first half-term was a disaster cratered with "rookie mistakes".

Oh, that his nibs finally got anything even half right is fairly momentous. But us semimythical coyotes still find him charmless. Being played for a simpleton by someone who lacks the chops to do the job right does that to us... I digress. That phrase is getting to be such a trademark that I'm gonna put that on a baseball cap and market it. I digress again...

It may be that the mayor figured that if he copped to his record of awfulness, he could then, whenever after it comes up, do what spin doctors call "changing channels". This is saying, in effect, "I've already dealt with that, it's ancient news, now let's just move on and talk about what really matters. Which is anything but that.". Watch for it.

It was also the sort of calculated move that suggests the guy is temporarily listening to his store-bought brain instead of the winging it that is his wont. Polling at less than half the support of your leading rival apparently focuses even the most scattered mind. Oh, he fondly imagines himself as a big ideas guy, but he's just scattered.

And what are we to make of what David Reevely calls "Larry 2.0"? The things he imagines to be his latter-day signature victories - like flogging the very public Lansdowne Park to the first very private commercial developers that had the balls to just ask for it, whilst shredding due process - are, well, who he is.

Self-proclaimed 2.0 status aside, worrying signs of that problematic unselfaware hubris remain. The guy who thought he was going to ride into Dodge City and change things all by hisself didn't even know what he didn't know then. He has never grasped important nuances. Driving a city this size on a learner's permit is dangerous egotism. And he's still more than a little hung up on how important being a 'multimillionaire' makes him - in multiple statements. (Read 'em if ya have the stomach.)

It takes more than a bunch of hired mouthpieces who are all about an election-year surface wax & buff to change the fact of a man whose flaws are deeply embedded in his personality. Four more years of Larry has a very high probability of being four more years of the same, no matter what he - or the backroom - think they're floggin'.

"Smartest guy in the room"

We coyotes understand that reviewers of Stately Glob columnist Lawrence Martin's new book about Stephen Harper have latched onto the PM's venom toward small and large-L liberals as noteworthy.

It is, not because it's anything new, but because it helps begin to explain the current malaise in this country's political landscape. The fact that Conservatives' main rebuttal so far is to label Mr. Martin a "large-L liberal sympathizer", like that alone should fully explain and dismiss his findings, just underlines it.

The PM, portrayed by his fan(s?) as the "smartest guy in the room" is indeed a great one for convoluted trickiness. Yet uncompromising tactics ranging from within the pale to, ummm, less so, all aimed at, quote, "killing the Liberal brand", have done little but shoot up his feet, and the rest of the place. That's a problem, not just for his political fellows who lust after that elusive parliamentary majority, but for the country.

Us coyotes have seen plenty of smartest guys in the room screw up royally through lack of wisdom. I could get all semimythically pedantic here about the ginormous abyss separating "smart" and "wise", but just gimme that one for argument's sake. I'm busy making a point, here.

Which is that any political guy who's so heavily invested in the tenet that all other political stripes in a democracy are the work of the Antichrist, to be seared from the face of the earth with brimstone, is no friend of the nation. Kicking that warm, fuzzy little dream out to its (il)logical extreme, while no doubt heady to some party hacks, has little to do with democracy. Or the reasonable checks and balances on power that help sustain it. For the democratic experiment to remain on the level, conservative yin needs liberal yang. Or vice versa. We coyotes are hazy on eastern religious concepts. We come from someplace else.

The parliamentary democracy that has evolved over the better part of a thousand years works best when players are flexible. That means taking the time to understand other viewpoints, respect for those outside your policy hothouse, and seeing the good of the nation - and all the diverse people and viewpoints it comprises - as the big-picture goal.

We coyotes like to keep our yellow eyes fixed on the big picture. Ya kinda hafta, watching six millenniums' worth of evolving human shenanigans. It's that, or rump of skunk and madness.

One of that grande vista's truisms is that any one national leader seldom bears in huge ways on citizens' personal lives, unless he/she is truly, determinedly awful. Oh. And true awfulness can be attained by chasing partisan goals to the exclusion of everything else, including actual, considered governance. Considered governance which, one might think, would be the point of being a prime minister.

I'm just sayin'...

Court strikes down prostitution law...

...Tories react predictably

Original story here.
Zoom's cogent analysis here.