What Americans Do Not Understand about Healthcare

What Americans Do Not Understand about Healthcare

 

I was intrigued to watch Charles Krauthammer’s extended interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show the other day.

 

Here’s the link (sorry if the link changes or whatever, but I don’t run the host site):

 

^{http://www.thecomedynetwork.ca/shows/thedailyshow?videoPackage=140192
I'm sorry.  The Daily Show is banned in Canada by the comedynetwork.  They prevent Daily Show content from being shown in Canada.  I'll offer a link to the first part of the interview that _can_ be shown in the U.S.: http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/g4whw7/exclusive---charles-krauthammer-extended-interview-pt--1  For similar shows, similar websites can be consulted.  The comedynetwork.ca, actually based out of Beijing, does not allow paying subscribers access to content (comedynetwork.ca observed "it was the last place in the world we could match up our initiatives with those of willing parties; we kind of like this Xi guy")/} 

 

(Krauthammer’s* a go-to right-wing Fox “News” flack who has written a book about himself, or summing up his thoughts in recent decades, or whatever.)

 

I was struck by how it was a mature discussion, the kind of thing you see/hear in America about as often as a ’58 Edsel (I was going to say “UFO,” but of course Americans on mass-popular overnight talk shows see those nightly and repeatedly, strangely unlike citizens of every other country on the planet, who instead tend to see things like stars and clouds).

 

Of course Krauthammer was against “Obamacare.”  He referred to it, constantly, as all on the right do, as an “entitlement.”  Going to the global well again, I can’t believe that there would be another country anywhere on the planet, even the poorest and without any tangible resources or means whatsoever, which would call “health” or “care” or the compound word “healthcare” an “entitlement.”  Americans are proud of their 200 years, but attitudes like Krauthammer’s could explain why it could take them another 200 to catch up with the rest of the world and stop seeing well-being not as an “entitlement,” but as a matter of civic concern and, ultimately, of tremendous fiscal import.  Krauthammer did allow in one vague moment that the really destitute should maybe get some care, somehow.

 

His key point about the Obamacare entitlement, though, was that it would bankrupt the nation.  He felt that adding yet another “entitlement,” on top of others, would just destroy the U.S. fiscally (as if it hadn’t, through its financial sector, made any efforts in that direction itself).  Krauthammer cited the example of “Europe,” in particular.  This one, of course, was laughable, but I guess Krauthammer could refer to “Europe” as some medical-basket-case-wasteland because most Americans couldn’t find it on a map, anyway.  What I was of course immediately thinking was, “are you honestly saying that Germany has bankrupted itself, while America hasn’t, over healthcare??”  Europe, with its socialized medicine, has actually done incredibly well, from Germany to Holland to Belgium to Switzerland and on an on—to say nothing whatsoever of the Scandinavian countries.  Those countries really in dire fiscal straits either already had them or were sent on the way by American fiscal precedents.  Look at what American financial deregulation did for Ireland—a fantasyland of growth for a brief period that ended up like California, with endless suburban homes with no-one to buy them or live in them once actual financial reality, instead of packaged debt sales, came home to roost.  Ireland’s gorging was so alluring even Iceland, a formerly stable place, tried to get in on the American act with its banks and now the whole country feels the shame and crippling debt that left behind.  Portugal and Spain?  Well, these are countries barely more than a generation out of fascism; they could hardly be expected to stand on the same footing as France or Britain.  Greece?  Well, it’s hard to think of Greece as “European,” but it’s got the same problem most basket-case countries like the U.S. have—a huge percentage of the populace doesn’t pay taxes.  And besides, why not also look at the central/east often landlocked European countries that are rapidly advancing, like Poland or Croatia or Slovenia or the Czech Republic or Slovakia—weird how they can embrace healthcare and have burgeoning economies even from very daunting circumstances.

 

I guess Krauthammer could also have referred to Canada, which, at least until the unsound economic policies of the Harper government, had conquered its deficit problems and had begun to gnaw furtively at its giant debt.  But Krauthammer probably didn’t want to do that, because Canada was maybe just close enough that a few Americans might have known something about it.  Then again, perhaps not.  I’ve had American colleagues for years, highly educated university professors and the like, who still actually look at me from behind their coke-bottle glasses and brown teeth and declare that they could never allow themselves to be in situations in which “they could not choose their own doctors.”  The vein of ignorance amongst even the most educated Americans is so deep that they probably ought to mine it for shale gas and pay their premiums that way.  (Stewart did later obliquely bring up Germany.)

 

Stewart observed that “Obamacare” was actually a Republican idea Republicans were now repudiating barely a decade later, that it was actually a half-measure thing that was nothing like more single-payer models used in advanced democracies, that it would still allow American insurance companies to rape and pillage Americans, that only a fraction of Americans might benefit, and that all Americans could still choose their own health plans, and so on.  Comically, Krauthammer gestured to American businesses like chain restaurants that were now cutting down workers’ hours so those businesses weren’t hurt by draconian employer healthcare premiums.  Ah yes, those McDonaldian workers’ paradises, now threatened by Obamacare!!  Krauthammer was really just looking out for people he’d never met before, and if that isn’t a gesture of altruism, I just don’t know what is.  In fact, it may be the most purely American gesture there is: thinking about others you have never broken bread with and then advancing proposals based on what you think.

 

The elephant in the room that was never brought up in this discussion, though, was that Americans, and the American government, already pays the highest costs for the least healthcare in the developed world.  There is nowhere, nowhere that the gap between money paid and health results gained is lower than in the U.S.  For a quick primer, look no further than the exhaustive TIME article by Steven Brill.

 

(This link:

 

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2136864,00.html

 

is just to TIME and the article page.)

 

Stewart actually had Brill on his show, and expressed amazement that an organ such as TIME would even attempt something like long-form journalism.  I was so astonished after seeing Stewart that I asked my dad a province away to hang on to a copy for me.  And Brill’s piece is one long, long piece on health care; many Americans might spend almost as much time reading it as filling out insurance forms.  It took me more than a few turns of the treadmill to get through it.  It was repetitive and too long, but it observed basic journalistic tropes: focus on a few individuals, extrapolate, research, do some interviews, offer on tiptoe faint conclusions actually bellowed by your research.  Anyone outside the U.S. would wonder why it was so long, but, well, you have to consider the audience.  To get it past editors, and then people, Brill must have had to amass so much evidence that it would be like proving a Sasquatch sighting (Damn.  I forget Americans see them everyday, too.  I’m all mixed up on my mixed metaphors.)  Anyway, things Brill observed were that Americans paid massively more for the most basic services than anyone else in the world.  An aspirin that costs .69 in France cost $69 in the U.S.; a Q-Tip costs nothing in Romania, but $50 in the U.S., and so on.  And, whenever Medicaid was involved, bureaucrats were tough bargainers and costs were massively reduced everywhere, with the government introducing competition and sanity that helped every taxpayer.  And if a company that willingly sells a drug into France for $2/pill, but says in America that it can’t keep afloat if it can’t charge $100/pill, then someone—obviously never Charles Krauthammer—ought to be asking questions.  Someone has to help the American people.  They’re good people, and they can’t help themselves.

 

Well, it doesn’t matter, in the end.  Americans, in the end, will go on paying much more for worse healthcare than any other advanced democracies.  It is hard-wired into American DNA.  It will not change.  Obamacare is simply an incrementalist approach; it’s one president (and any credit probably goes to people like Pelosi, not Obama) trying to get one little thing done so as to help to show Americans that medicare can actually work and bring up in large relief just how massively Americans are paying for a stunningly cost-ineffective system.  If America’s Medicaid system had simply been larger, its government treasury, and the health of its citizens, would have been billions and millions of dollars and hearts better.  But what does it say on the American dollar bill?  “Ideology before reason.”

 

The cute elephant in the room in all of this is—what if Americans actually were healthy and productive?  That would be good for competition and business and so on, surely.  What if more Americans were healthy?  I mean, how can anyone pretend that being healthy isn’t on a direct line to workplace productivity?  Well, I’m sure Americans have an answer for that one, too, how being fat and addicted to cheeseburgers and 86 oz. Cokes is actually a way of warding off government plots to take away guns, and so on.  Talk about defending yourself by killing yourself.

 

Any posts here are obviously written mainly for a Canadian audience,**and I strenuously try not to address American topics, for various reasons not dilated on here.  However, when American issues obviously inflict Canadian ones, one feels a need to say something.

 

It doesn’t matter how much I love American people; in the cold, hard light of day, they are trying to bankrupt themselves by shutting down their government and making sure that many of them can’t access healthcare, and that those who do pay much more for it than anywhere else—this just isn’t good.  If you share “the world’s longest undefended border” (and that one is really in quotation marks now. . .quick note to Americans—Canadians are not in charge of admitting terrorists to America; Americans are), then it’s a concern.  If Americans can’t buy Canadian stuff, let alone Chinese, then that’s a problem.  And if Canadians can’t get high-quality American goods made by Americans because all American jobs have been shipped overseas, that’s a problem.

 

If anyone has actually gotten down this far on the post—if anyone has actually read this far, well, then, I owe you one of my Croatian burgers.  But let me close like this.  This issue is of extreme moment to Canadians and Canadian taxpayers.  One of the comparatively apparently small, but hugely, hugely rapidly increasing cost factors in health care is drug costs.  Krauthammer not only said that healthcare was an “entitlement” (which I disagree with), but he also did sound an alarm that many have been sounding, that healthcare costs have been going up astronomically because of technology and, yes, drugs.  Look, no-one anywhere expects their tax dollars to pay for a Mayo Clinic.  Life isn’t that complicated.  You get born, you grow up, you age, you die.  The idea that we should all have millions shed on us when we’re 50 or 60+ is perverse—it would have been utterly perverse to Tommy Douglas.  That’s where the “care,” not the “health” part comes in.  First you have “health,” then you have “care.”  The more you have “health,” the less you need “care.” No-one ought to suggest that in between these two there ought to be a 30-year bonus gap where billions are spent on life-extendency, and so on.  The idea that ALL people can have their bodies cryogenically frozen and have access to the same healthcare that Tom Cruise does is ludicrous.  But that all people should have access to decent healthcare?  That’s a plausible and desirable goal.

 

However, it’s yet one more goal that is being attacked by the Harper government.  Apparently, a trade-off in the vaunted European free-trade negotiations is that the Harper government will extend, yet again***, the ability of multi-national pharmaceutical companies to jack up charges on their drugs and throttle any generics.  Of course, this will mainly hit seniors, but in their clinical political caluculi, the Harperites have gathered that most of their voters are already so rich or too poor that they’ll like or not vote enough to know what Harper has done (Harper needn’t worry about his own family, since he is not really one of us or a Canadian taxpayer).  Even the most moderate of commentators on the right-right Canadian media spectrum has touted that the Canada-Europe free-trade deal will be a great thing.  These people are obviously so rich and unconcerned that they’d leave their kids with Clifford Olson if they knew they’d have a chance to shag someone they were interested in at a Hallowe’en party.  Since when does an advanced government leave its people utterly, utterly in the dark about a major trade deal?  Since when?    And since when is it a good thing to bargain from a position of weakness?  Harper isn’t just negotiating against Lichtenstein; he’s negotiating against the European Union.  That includes a lot of players, and they can trade off amongst themselves like musical chairs.  Meanwhile, Canada has a domestic government desperate to fend off opposition at home and “change the channel.”  This, this puts us in a good trade negotiation situation?  Is this what Andrew Coyne’s dad taught him, that negotiating from a point of abject weakness and keeping your family in the dark is a good thing?  Sadly, I guess it is, if Andrew and Andrew himself can find a new hair dye and effective comb-over.  Canadians ought not to be held hostage to ephemeral political imperatives, but we are, and pundits like Coyne abet the government and harm Canadian history by so doing.

 

And so it goes—Canada threatens to withdraw from the Commonwealth because it thinks there are enough Tamils in Toronto to sway a riding; Canada votes against the UN small arms treaty (http://www.un.org/disarmament/convarms/SALW/) that even the US voted for, in some sort of misguided and drunken effort to please gun-owners in Canada.  Canada blindly, like no other country in the world, addresses the Middle East peace process by uncritically supporting only one side (oh yeah, that’s always sure to get a resolution).  One cannot imagine Diefenbaker or Stanfield or even Mulroney peering over the border so as to determine what domestic action they ought to take, but it’s what the Harperites take to heart—what did Karl Rove say? What did Ayn Rand say?  Back in the day, Canada used to breed its own Conservatives; now it breeds only American wannabes like Presto Manning and Stephen Harper, who learned from Texans and pundits who couldn’t get a job in America like Tom Flanagan and Margaret Wente.  Canada has become the backwater where frustrated bottom-feeders go to preach ideologies they can’t preach effectually enough or get rich off enough in their home countries.  Cheap drones, is probably the American intelligence file on it.

 

Healthcare isn’t an “entitlement.”  It’s not a “privilege,” obviously, and it may not even be a “right,” whatever that is.  Are doctors poorly paid?  Are they paid strikingly more than doctors with similar or greater educations in other fields?  Do doctors resent having to doctor to poor people?  Do doctors simply hate the fact that they are called upon to treat people who can’t pay their fees?  Should medicine be taken out of universities entirely so that people like doctors could not profit obscenely from the misery of others?  Ask yourself: which doctor is the one you want: the one that can charge the highest fees, or the one who demonstrates an interest in healing you?   An advanced democracy struggles eternally with this equation.  Only once in a blue moon will you actually hear a doctor address this issue because, well, doctors aren’t really interested in medicine or in healing others; they’re interested in protecting and advancing the massive wealth they can accrue.  They’ll talk about “oh, well, I have to run an office, and so on, and I have to pay taxes, and so on,” but notably, it’s never actually about what they were trained for—supposedly, medicine.  No, if you hang out with doctors, what they’re chiefly obsessed about is not keeping up with the literature or knowing something about medicine; it’s actually about rent and taxes and staff costs and profit margins. That’s the key for medicine, from a doctor’s standpoint.  How many people can I cycle in and out and get paid for the most.  Forget helping anyone; it’s about trying to maximize profit and minimize time spent; I dare any doctor to contradict me.  I dare any doctor.

 

--zr

 

*Obviously I’ve seen Krauthammer’s, ah, memorable face before, but I really didn’t know anything about him, not getting Fox “News” and so on.  I didn’t know that his formative years were Canadian, that he started out liberal, and so on.

 

**though I’m considering going back what I originally intended, just some sort of miscellany in the spirit of what I took this now-antique form, the blog, to be.  Maybe I’m just too fat n’ lazy.

 

***The first was under Conservative minister Harvie Andre in 1986.  In latter age, but knowing he could benefit from it while future Canadians could not, Andre agreed to extend patents for European pharmaceutical giants so that generics could not compete and enter the marketplace.  In this way, Andre helped to kill off many Canadians prematurely, the while enjoying massive benefits for overseeing a deal that damaged thousands of Canadians and helping. . . ?  Perhaps in his casket, Andre wore a sash saying “Yeah, I helped to kill off a lot of poor people who probably didn’t donate to us, but man what a ride it was.”

Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, Stands Up and Lies in the Country’s Official Political Chamber – and No-One Cares

Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, Stands Up and Lies in the Country’s Official Political Chamber – and No-One Cares

 What if the leader of a mature democratic country got up, routinely, in the official political forum of his/her country and lied, over and over?  Wouldn’t that have consequences?  Admittedly, perhaps not in every country, since voting, like politics itself, is about prioritizing, choosing lesser evils over greater, being guided by ideology and gut sentiments, and so on.  (And Canada in 2013 is clearly a different place than Canada during other eras, when altruism and idealism may have figured more largely than they do today.)  But one simply has to believe that, in many advanced countries, the public would not tolerate a national leader who got up in the nation’s foremost political body and lied, repeatedly and without compunctions.

 So the Senate scandal wends its tawdry, time-consuming, costly way.  The Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, remains locked into his “deny, deny, deny” strategy, pretending—no, obviously, duh, lying—that he knew nothing about what everyone in his office—his top assistant, strategists, lawyers, party executives, communications people, etc. etc. all knew—that the government was making illegal payments to Senator Mike Duffy.  He got up in the House of Parliament and said that Senator Pamela Wallin’s expense claims were just peachy, something neither the public nor the Royal Canadian Mounted Police nor auditors from Deloitte accept.  All this from possibly the most controlling, calculating leader the country has ever seen.  Why has this story not turned?  Why are no pundits going from disbelief that they won’t state for fear of legal ramifications, to asking outright just how the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, could be so astonishingly out of the loop that a baker’s dozen or more of his closest officials knew what he didn’t?  If Harper didn’t know, then who, just who, is minding Canada’s store? Has Stephen Harper got a hobby we don’t know about?  Does he do Sudoku 15 hours a day?

 Buuuuut. . . so what. . . . 

Sure, the Tories are down a bit in the polls, but the Tories know that all they need is the base +5%, so, so what?  CTV’s Todd Battis visited the riding of Provencher, MB, Vic Toews’ old riding, and found that most people there imagined a Tory would win again.  In other words, Canadians in Provencher are so ideological that they support lying and, if they are Tory donors, don’t mind submitting money to the Conservative Party so that it can pay off Mike Duffy’s illegal expenses.   If I were a Tory, sending money to the Tory party, knowing it was going to pay off Mike Duffy, would I be happy?  Apparently many Tories are.  You wonder about these people. Having a lying Prime Minister is bad; having thousands of voters who condone and support lying is beyond depressing.  How do these people bring up their children?   

Don’t answer.  I don’t think I want to know.  I’ll be old soon, and unless I can get a Senate appointment, I’m going to need health care.  (Can anyone believe the crocodile tears of Duffy and Wallin on how they need health plans?  Didn’t they say their greatest honours were to serve in the august body of the Senate?  Where is the vaunted “Private Sector” on this one?  Shouldn’t Wallin and Duffy be in the same boat as most Canadians, depending on Medicare to help them when they ail?  Apparently not.  No, no matter how much Duffy and Wallin say they were wronged, they still believe they were exclusively entitled to medical plans, via the Senate, that the vast majority of Canadians do not enjoy.  Funny that didn’t bother them in the slightest when they were sitting politicians touting the private sector.  And how can they possibly, possibly have frittered away the millions they have accumulated during their careers?  Are they represented by Mike Tyson’s agent?  No-one can accuse Stephen Harper of sound judgment, but if you were considering someone who had made millions for a top appointment, and that person indicated that s/he was so dirt-poor that they didn’t have a pot to pee in, wouldn’t that kind of go to their characters and arouse a little uncertainty about their personalities and stability?  I mean, how does Pamela Wallin’s mother, or people in Wadena, SK, get by?  How do they do it if Pamela can’t?  Precisely who is Pamela Wallin collecting money for, and who is she putting down in her will to receive it?  Are there any journalists out there willing to ask the questions only bloggers like me will as to where all the money went?  Any?  Nope.  So the next time you see a journalist complaining about unqualified bloggers, remember that that journalist, in Canada, is in the pay of owners who donate to and support the Conservative Party of Canada.)  All Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy expressed was that they were entitled to their entitlements, sentiments that, in another, but recent, time did huge political damage.  Why doesn’t anyone care now?

 Let’s be honest: the “sponsorship scandal” that had such devastating consequences for the Liberal party was a tempest in a teapot.  Morally and fiscally, it was penny-ante stuff compared to what the Conservatives have done.  But, somehow, that “scandal” found the mean and petty streak in many Canadians.  Who knows—maybe it really was a racist thing on English Canadians’ part—those Quebecois again.  I hope not, but the more I try to understand it, the fewer answers I find, and the more I believe that maybe it was English racism.  But the only thing that often seems to bug English Canadians more than Quebec is the thought that Quebec would actually separate.  Chretien faced a situation in which the country might break up; maybe he threw some money at it.  What leader would not do the same?  What leader would want to go down in history as overseeing the demise of his/her country because s/he didn’t pull out every stop to avert it?  How does Stephen Harper use your hard-earned tax dollars?  He uses it on blanket TV, radio, and internet ads virtually every Canadian with electricity hears numerous times every single day.  This is what happens in fascist dictatorships, not democratic countries.  (Besides, by slicing and dicing and gerrymandering in ludicrously corrupt ways as in Regina, Harper has avoided the issue of having to appeal to most Canadians by deciding to appeal to just 1/3 and stay in power that way.) I was never a Paul Martin supporter, but I acknowledge his achievements and ultimately believe that he did, as a public servant, have Canada’s best interests at heart and in his own mind.  He didn’t need to just keep being Prime Minister, like Stephen Harper, who wouldn’t go back to being a billionaire business tycoon, like Martin, if he quit politics today.  I admired Martin when he confronted the “sponsorship scandal” head-on by appointing an inquiry; I really didn’t think it was all about just getting back at the Chretien supporters (I may be Pollyanna-ish here to Liberal supporters, but I really think Martin was appealing to the Canadian public even more—misguidedly and hopefully, perhaps, but appealing to them all the same).  But I also realized it was also probably political suicide, and it was.  It is a terrible, terrible shame, and it says something terrible about us as Canadians that, when a leader of the very same party appoints an inquiry into corruption, we punish him by electing a government that promises to do things differently, but then behaves arguably more corruptly than any government in Canadian history, and we keep on electing it and apparently not caring as the legacy of abuse and corruption builds and builds, seemingly almost daily.  It is as if 35% of the 60-70% of Canadians who vote are saying “here, here are my tax dollars—please, please do something corrupt and venal and dishonest with them and spend them on self-promotion.  But whatever you do, whether it’s helicopters or orange juice, never, ever tell me the truth, because, while I don’t mind my money being wasted, the one thing I cannot countenance is having my ideology unsettled.”

 Let’s face it: Harper cannot and will not tell the truth about his work on the Duffy and Wallin and corrupt Senate appointees files.  It’s sad because he pitches himself as a family man and a religious man, and so on, and all along he probably rationalizes that he’s teaching his kids what he thinks is real private-sector know-how, real realpolitik--yet really it has a simpler name, lying.  Most parents do not want their kids to lie, if only for purely selfish reasons—parents don’t want to be lied to by their own offspring.  Theoretically, Canadians should not want their leaders to lie to them, but so jaded and partisan have we become that we actually hug the knees of those who lie to us and use our tax dollars for their private purposes.  If Stephen Harper thought he would step down any time soon, he might consider telling the truth.  But Harper can’t; he has never actually had a career-based private-sector job or done any work of any kind that is not of a political nature.  If he weren’t a politician, he would have to re-invent himself as someone who wasn’t, and who is taking odds on Stephen Harper re-inventing himself?  Therefore, he will keep on lying, and playing the only game he knows: politics.  It would be nice to think that Harper could at least slightly tell the truth and say something like: “well, I knew some things but I had to keep the best interests of the country in mind so I made the best decision I could out of a range of bad ones.”  (That’s what he initially started out trying to say—anyone remember “protect the taxpayer”?) I mean, if one regards the lengths he went to to concoct a story that he wasn’t lying, then you’d have to believe that he could kick back for a few minutes when he’s not doing handshake photo-ops with his staff and concoct a plausible story about how he was lying, but how it was really the right thing to do, under the circumstances.  If, heads on their pillows, he and Laureen talk at night, surely he must do this all the time.  But—and this is actually probably a huge point—Harper is probably personally incredibly stung that these people to whom he gave plum appointments and emoluments—Wallin and Duffy (what, what, what in the what would “Patrick Brazeau” ever, ever do in real life if he weren’t a senator???—or what does he do when he is a senator???) that these people who he’d showered with riches got caught acting badly.  Harper probably thought: “Look, I’m giving you people a license to fleece Canadian taxpayers, so I know you’ll thank me.”  When the calls from Duffy started coming in, asking for private cars and so on, Harper probably thought “Honestly, I’ve given you people enough already.”  A lot of people would somewhat understand if Harper actually was honest and said that he did a bad thing but it was the best of a range of bad alternatives (though he did appoint them, he was hardly the first PM to appoint toadies).  Or at least they would have, once upon a time.  Once upon a time, most people would have said, “well, politics is a dirty game, and sometimes you just have to do something you know is not ideal, but it’s the best thing to do at the time.”  But Harper just keeps on lying, and will keep on lying.  He knows he will never be held to account, and he is creating new federal Tory ridings to assist his lying.  No doubt every voter in those ridings knows that, in exchange for their votes and wasted tax dollars, they, too, will at least get a few gazebos and some roads out of the deal.

 Since Harper will just keep on lying to Canadians, the opposition will never really get anywhere.  Seemingly within hours of Andrew Coyne’s comments on CBC’s _At Issue_, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair adopted a serious and brief approach to questioning.  As with those Canadians who would like to see their elected representatives act like adults, I was more or less in favour.  The media called this, ad infinitum, a “prosecutorial” approach.  Well, of course, “prosecutorial” only works if there is at least some onus on the questionee to tell the truth.  Such onus does not exist in the Parliament of Canada, though it ought to be the one place in the land where it does.  One almost thinks, now, that the opposition should go back to the idiotic grandstanding they always used to do, for at least that would get them in tv clips, instead of letting the media play the bland, deflective non-answers and lies of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.   In the latest rotation of Harper TV supporters, we see that, for this scandal in particular, he has brought out the dyed-blonde nubiles in his caucus, some with scandals of their own—but if it’s a nubile blonde, who cares, right?  If one has seen tapings of parliaments in places like Britain or Australia or New Zealand, one sees much less of the instant leaping-to-one’s-feet to applaud slavishly and juvenilely than one does in Canada.  The Conservative TV caucus never ceases to amaze me in their child-like ability to sit firm and rooted and studious when THE MAN speaks, but then, the minute his shoulders soften, spring U-shaped to their feet and start grinning and clapping, tongues lolling, like kindergarten kids on sugar highs or dogs who haven’t seen their owners or food in days.  These, these are supposed to be adults.  If an alien saw this, an alien would surely think that the Speaker was holding a big placard that said “CLAP!!!”   Honestly, if I were these Conservatives on TV, I really don’t know what I’d regret more, later in life: selfies of me doing silly things nude that I’d only imagined one or a few people might see, or actual tv clips of me rocketing out of my seat grinning like a drunken game-show winner to support a lie my grey-haired sugar-daddy had said.  It is to wonder.

As for Justin Trudeau, the heir with the hair, he’s still dyed in the pur-laine of politics.  He asked the Prime Minister to “testify under oath” about what the PM knew about the senate scandal.  These questions are so throwaway that taxpayers’ teeth should grate as they hear yet more politicians stand up for cameras only, while the nation’s business is beggared, to ask pointless rhetorical questions.

Nevertheless, it did cross my mind as I saw Trudeau, “what if Harper testified under oath”?  And the sad answer was, well, Prime Minister Stephen Harper would just keep on lying.  And this is sad for Canada and Canadians, and really for the world, if you believe that Canada is an advanced democracy that can be an influence for good in the world.  We’re in a situation now in which Canada has a liar for a leader, and that just isn’t good for anyone.  It’s just really dismaying.  To think that the Tory base derives joy out of its leader’s lies because, in their minds, there’s something worse than lying suggests to me how unevolved we are, or have become.  I get liking the military, liking guns, liking tax cuts, and so on—I get all that.  But is having a gun so important to you that you have to vote for lying?   Sadly, apparently yes.  Shoot first, lie later, and never forget you’re from the proud 35% of Provencher.

 --zr