RoboKhan And Other Images

I hope you can make use of some of these cheeky images that could help depict the RoboCon Robocalls scandal that is sweeping the nation. Hey, our democracy is a worldwide joke, so we may as well laugh a little. Beats crying.

RoboKhaaaan!

*Saskboy takes a quick bow for the pun*

Hide!
Made in the USA by Republican Party

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And now for some very powerful articles, on the most serious Canadian crisis of democracy since The War Measures Act, or Meech Lake/Charlottetown Accord.

These articles fit together so well. I read Alison’s first, then Caplan’s in the Globe.
And holy poop, Caplan’s is a well written article. Read the first page too, it’s worth it. You’ll learn why there are many politically aware Canadians who distrust Harper, and what’s at stake.

RoboCon may come to be known as Robogate. Some of the criminals behind Watergate think that Robocon is worse than what they did.

Last word on this goes to Nixon Watergate dirty trickster Donald Segretti, yesterday.
His assessment? : “Worse than Watergate.”

“We never tried to do something that would, at the end of the day, take away the right of somebody to vote,” he said. “That goes beyond a prank. It’s just wrong, on many levels.”

Their dirty tricks campaign, Mr. Segretti claimed, was designed to disrupt the Democrats, not hoodwink voters.”

What does he know, eh?

Canada will contribute $5 million to the OAS’ Hemispheric Electoral Assistance Initiative, a program that seeks to help countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to improve the transparency and effectiveness of their elections, including organization, administration and spending. Support to the OAS will increase its ability to rapidly deploy election observers, leading to increased voter confidence in the democratic processes and institutions of their country.

(emphasis added)
$5 million that could have been put toward Elections Canada investigations last year! We spend millions to clean up other countries who have this sort of poop going on in their elections. Elections Canada told Canadians last year (and in 2008), that there was nothing they could do to catch or punish those responsible for fake Elections Canada robocalls.

We have Canadian Forces, and elections experts who assist other countries in conducting free and fair elections, where goons will not be allowed to intimidate or block people from voting. Meanwhile, we have shadowy forces in Canada blocking people, and harassing them under fraudulent identities, to prevent them from voting. Isn’t that a sign of contempt for our armed forces, our democracy, and our freedom, from whomever Pierre Poutine and their merry henchmen are? Send the army after Poutine. Pull out the stops. Our democracy is at stake! As Caplan noted, this is war.

Caplan:

The University of Ottawa’s Ralph Heintzman sums up this Harper credo: There is a “lack of sense of inner self-restraint on the part of the Prime Minister, a sense that it is some kind of war and therefore anything is legitimate, that it’s quite acceptable for a prime minister to lie, for example, about how our parliamentary democracy works.”

It’s within this context that Robo-gate should be viewed.

Would a party that believed in politics as war hesitate to use the latest technology to keep opponents – the enemy! – from voting? Would a party that has already systematically undermined many traditional parliamentary and democratic niceties, as The Globe’s Lawrence Martin has repeatedly documented, hesitate to violate accepted democratic limits? Does a party that has already been found guilty of violating the election laws and that deliberately attempted to destabilize a sitting Liberal MP deserve the benefit of the doubt?

Here’s the problem. Both sides know with certainty the answer to these questions. Those of us who wouldn’t trust Stephen Harper if he told us today was Friday have no doubt who organized Robo-gate. In fact, I’m informed by a former Conservative operative familiar with both the party and technology that there’s far more to be revealed in this saga. This is said specifically to involve close ties between the Harperites and American Republicans who have been constructing a terrifying, full-blown voter suppression machine, as The Nation magazine, among others, has well documented and CBC Radio’s The Current has noted. I have no idea if this will be found to be true, but based on the record, it is surely not implausible.

Yet Mr. Harper’s faithful base, that slightly-more-than-one-third of the electorate on whose behalf the entire government of Canada operates, knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is some kind of vicious Liberal frame-up and that their man is as innocent and pure as the driven white snow we occasionally still get.

Both sides can’t be right here. Let’s all pray mine is wrong.