Somebody's watching you and other follies from week seven of the 2015 election -- A Left Chapter round-up

This is the seventh installment of our weekly election round-up of the inane, bizarre, humorous and unusually facile in the great show that is mainstream bourgeois politics in the EPIC election of 2015.


1) THEY ARE WATCHING EVERY SIGN PEOPLE!

Really? Really? The signs are under 24 hour surveillance? 

Only these paranoid drips would have come up with this spectacularly stupid idea.

2) Myself I prefer Molson Stock Ale

It is always a good sign when the Prime Minister hauls out an expression that seems to only be used by white supremacists and racists.  

This one has Lynton Crosby written all over it. There will be a LOT more of this dog-whistle shit to come. He is just getting rolling.

3) What? What do you mean this seems dubious?

Justin Trudeau is in real, real trouble in his own riding...says a poll with a huge margin of error commissioned by his opponents!

I mean, what seems not believable about that?

4) Well....if nobody actually likes you...

So...it turns out Harper and his crew are making absolutely, positively sure that you like them! That you like them a lot. That you like them on Facebook. Whether you would like to or not!

5) Why should the Conservatives be the only ones with a dog-whistle? I want one too!

Yes....that's right...some jackass NDP candidate -- this guy -- actually mused about changing the constitution of Canada to possibly ban the niqab. You read that correctly. He suggested changing the constitution. For real. 

The party has made him "back off"...but unlike Morgan Wheeldon while mild criticism of Israel taken out-of-context gets you removed, say this dog-whistle, gross bullshit and you are allowed to stay on.

Thus ends our seventh look at the Grand Farce. See you next week!

Got any suggestions for next week's round-up...send them to theleftchapter@outlook.com or post them to our Facebook page!

See also:  The wheels come off the bus and other follies of week six of the 2015 election -- A Left Chapter round-up

See also: Get the hell off Instagram and other follies from week five of the 2015 election -- A Left Chapter round-up

Harper's very bad, and very ugly, week

While they are, sadly, all-too-often successful, cynical political maneuvers do sometimes come back to bite their practitioners in the ass. And that is exactly what has happened this week to Stephen Harper and the Conservative reelection campaign.

Hoping to take advantage of deeper Conservative pockets, Harper called what was by far the longest election in modern Canadian political history and at the halfway mark, in a campaign that during a normal length election would have already ended, is beginning to be deluged by one damaging revelation or action after another by Conservative candidates or people associated with them.

This is especially ironic as the Conservatives charged out of the gate using "gotcha" political tactics by, for example, taking the quotes of opponent's candidates out of context or using comments they made as teenagers against them. 

The wheels have come off the Conservative bus -- prompting some clever person out there on the internet to even fake a widely shared and very funny picture purporting to show literally that! 

Among the avalanche of bad news is:

• Scarborough candidate Jerry Bance, who had owned a home renovation business, turning out to have been caught on hidden camera urinating in a client's coffee mug while on the job and in their house
• Toronto candidate Tim Dutaud who turns out to have been behind You Tube videos that involved pranks that were sexist and that mocked people with learning disabilities 
• An Ontario Conservative riding association director and campaigner who was dismissed after having been found to have made comments calling native people "self-loathing" and saying of them that "They’re allowed to break every law we have and bankrupt the country”, in addition to making disparaging comments about the new Mrs. Universe who is Cree
• Another Toronto area candidate, Konstantin Toubis, who shared a variety of Facebook posts in Russian that are full of sophomoric sexist and homophobic "advice" and who did so after becoming the candidate
• The surfacing of a very clear "pattern of anti-First Nations racism" in the actions and comments of two Conservative candidates as well as some Conservative staff 
• Just today, Conservative candidate Larry Miller, already notorious for some past dog-whistle comments about the niqab, tweeted a farcical set of supposed "Communist rules for revolution" so obviously fake that not even a member of the John Birch Society would be likely to take them at face value

This series of actions and comments that are some combination of crude, ugly, idiotic, racist, sexist or homophobic also serves to reinforce the picture of the Conservative mentality that came into focus during the same week that saw the Syrian refugee crisis explode onto the Canadian election scene after the death of toddler Alan Kurdi.

The Conservative response, from Chris Alexander's disastrous interview with Rosemary Barton, to Conservative efforts to obfuscate and distort what has, in fact, been their appalling record with regards to helping Syrian refugees find safety in Canada, to the almost unbelievably vile cry of "How many kids drowned in pools in Canada since last summer? Do you blame the government for that?" from a Conservative heckler trying to drown out a reporter's questions, has truly laid bare what the party and the government is really all about and what types of mindsets and mentalities can be rather easily found in abundance among its MPs, candidates and supporters. 

As a result of all of these factors the Conservative campaign, despite originally being so tightly scripted and managed and despite its fear-mongering, has begun to tank and the odds of its re-election are becoming smaller everyday. 

It should, then. come as no surprise that to help reinvigorate his slumping campaign Harper has turned to an Australian strategist, Lynton Crosby, who "Joan Bryden of the Canadian Press labelled...a master of "dog whistle politics,""

Of course he would. And we can anticipate that the rhetoric of fear, loathing and division will be ramped up to an ever higher fever pitch as election day approaches.