thetorontobulletin.com Blog

The benefits of being truthfully unethical

“I confess! I’ve had adulterous relationships with persons of both sexes, taken every illegal drug known to personkind, overindulged in booze, beaten my kids, been cruel to animals, discriminated against persons because of their race-gender-disability-creed-sexual orientation and I don’t do any of that stuff any more.”

That’s the new opening line to political victory speeches in the U.S. It’s a preemptive strike against predatory prosecutors out to make names for themselves by bringing down a politician. It’s the answer to muck-raking journalists out to aggrandize themselves and plump up their careers by siccing the dogs of prosecution on targets they designate.

It’s no longer enough to do as Bill Clinton did and admit in advance to taking a joint in his mouth without inhaling. And it’s no longer expected for one to deny dalliances, as did Bill when Monica Lewinsky took his joint in her mouth without swallowing. DNA on her frock from such a telltale sample trumped his denial.

Nowadays it’s political protocol to be human. To be stupid. To be flawed. To be George W. Bush. He’ll be so missed when he’s gone. His daddy George Sr. had a stand-in for Dubya in his own vice president: Dan Quayle. Dubya couldn’t find anyone dumber than he is, so he had to settle for a guy who’s really evil.

Can’t wait to hear the confessions and malapropisms of the new occupants in the White House. Will they confess that they are actually reptilian alien shape shifters, part of an Illuminati plot to stupefy humankind? Or will they just start another war to enrich their corporate masters?

Frank Touby

Fart-mouth Flaherty makes wind

Steve Harper’s typical type of choice for a finance minister, Jim Flaherty, is farting out his neocon solutions for the disaster heading Ontario’s way thanks to his own feckless mishandling of the federal budget. The miniature blowhard is criticizing Ontario’s new budget for not giving tax breaks to big business.

Having given federal tax breaks to his big business pals and taken surplus funds that should be aiding provinces in need and fixing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure—just to pay down debt at cheap interest rates—the diminutive buffoon is demanding that Ontario slash its revenue from business.

In Flaherty’s addled brain the less businesses pay in taxes, the more businesses will pay in taxes.

That’s because like other lackeys of big business, he promotes the big lie that the more corporations make, the more they’ll spend. And that will trickle down the economic ladder. They pee, we get to drink.

In reality, the more they make, the more Ontarians they’ll lay off so they can spend offshore where NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) sent Ontario’s jobs. And certainly the more they’ll pay their elite CEOs in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Like so many little creeps, Flaherty seems to suffer from the small-man syndrome: a bandy rooster always ready to battle better and bigger people. Some small persons are big men and women in all aspects of their lives.

Flaherty is a dangerous twerp. Neocons don’t accept taxes because they don’t care for the common good. It’s all about them: the virtue of selfishness. Everyone else can screw themselves.

Frank Touby

NAFTA is a disaster

It’s not hard to understand why the Toronto Star opines in an editorial that NAFTA (North America Free Trade Act) has been a good thing for Canada. The Star is a big business and it’s strictly for big business that NAFTA was invented.

For most of us, NAFTA is an unmitigated disaster. It has forced the loss of our manufacturing sector in Ontario to be off-loaded to Mexico and, inevitably, to China. Bill Clinton, when he was president, made sure China got the lion’s share of North American jobs. He was the one who gave China Most Favored Nations status with the U.S. (and thus, through NAFTA, with Canada).

The next imminent danger is that Canada will be forced to give up our precious water rights to multinational companies who can drain our lakes and destroy our resources.

That’s NAFTA. It’s wrong and should be abandoned.

Frank Touby

Glory-hound prosecutors disgrace justice

Eliot Spitzer was brought down by the same sort of scum he once was when he romped roughshod over people as a U.S. prosecutor. It’s the same sort of glory hound who persecuted bumptious Conrad Black, a poor rich boy who committed no offence aside from arrogance and is now in prison.

They’re the same sort of self-serving swine as those who framed O. J. Simpson and were defeated by a jury who saw through their contrivances. But O.J.’s fame-monger prosecutors ended up millionaires as authors and TV personalities, which took the sting off their rightful defeat in front of the jury. (That’s not to opine whether O.J. actually did the deed. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. The point is the prosecutors never had a case and knew damn well they had no case but knew they’d become celebrities for trying.)

Glory-seeking prosecutors are rife in North America, and that includes Mexico, which one might rightly argue is a band of warlords rather than a real nation with an honest legal system.

One might also argue that in large part there is no honourable system of justice in Canada or the U.S. After all, in Mexico even a peasant can avoid the excesses of the system with a simple bribe to bolster the wallet of an underpaid cop who is expected in that culture to use his franchise to extort enough to live on. It’s a kind of random tax.

Because theirs is a culture of family and connections, not laws, Mexicans have an innate understanding of such realities. (North Americans can’t get the same benefit unless they’re wealthy or well connected and tuned in to the mysteries of power.)

North Americans are led to believe in rule of law and that’s what we expect. Too often we don’t get that.

We get public officials bounty hunting celebrities or persons they dislike.

Spitzer, a bigheaded bozo, actually did that to prostitution rings of the very sort he patronized. Being a Democrat under the evil Republican regime that currently rules America, Spitzer should have kept it in his pants. He had to know they’d be hunting him down.

And of course the public would learn of his humiliation by the very slime who were prosecuting him and leaked the information to the media. Have they committed an offence? If so, they’ll never be punished for it in the American “system” of justice, which too often is neither systematic nor just.

For that matter, is anyone seriously thinking that disgraced and fired ex-RCMP boss Giuliano Zaccardelli will face criminal charges for disclosing during an election that an investigation was underway that might reflect badly on the Liberals and thus support the Tory regime of Canada’s dictator wannabe, Steve Harper? It’s axiomatic that those who don’t deserve to carry a badge eagerly support repressive measures and regimes. Surely a police official trying to influence an election is guilty of something more than being fired.

And surely prosecutors who pander to their own interests at the expense of persons wrongly accused are also guilty of something. But when does the law play a role?

Spitzer was brought down by another of his ilk in an unjust manner. That’s pretty close to the Mexican way of doing things. Too damn close for comfort.

Frank Touby

Drug ‘war’ funds covert operations

To fund its meddling in the internal affairs of other nations, the United States conducts the War on Drugs. The purpose is to enable American covert operatives to collect off-budget funds for those purposes.

After all, if you’re going to have, say, the CIA stick to its published budget, a foreign intelligence service would be able to guess from those figures what initiatives CIA might be taking at what prices. Clearly there have to be off-budget funds.

Making certain psychoactive and recreational drugs illegal is the most productive way to garner a dependable flow of narco-dollars into America’s covert-opps coffers.

We learned that from the Reagan Administration’s intrusions into Nicaragua that U.S. operatives cooperate with drug cartels.

Were it not for their being illegal, the majority of drugs would be practically worthless.

Marijuana, for instance, is a plant that can spread like the weed that it is. The only reason it costs money is that it’s illegal to grow or possess it.

So the War on Drugs is in place not to substantiate the sanctimonious moralizing its operatives pretend to believe, but to keep prices high so the government can break its own laws to fund secret operations.

Frank Touby