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You'll understand if I don't agree with the modifier employed by Macleans Magazine when, with typical hand-wringing, it labelled May, 2013 "The worst month in the history of Canadian politics.
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You'll understand if I don't agree with the modifier employed by Macleans Magazine when, with typical hand-wringing, it labelled May, 2013 "The worst month in the history of Canadian politics."

Crawford Kilian, however, in the May 18 edition of TheTyee.ca, perfectly captured the current that has flowed us through these bright days of spring. In his brilliantly titled "The Conservative Party of Canada as Performance Art," Kilian wrote: "Connoisseurs of schadenfreude — those who take joy in others' misery — have had a wonderful week."

All of comedy is based in schadenfreude. And conservatives serve up comedy in ways that centrist and left-wing politicians cannot dream of. Television shows like This Hour has 22 Minutes and The Mercer Report remind us how Canada's other political parties have never hauled the likes of a Stockwell Day or Preston Manning onto the national stage, let alone left the bloated remains of a Mike Duffy or Rob Ford to wash ashore and rot on the beaches of public opinion.

Still, the ever-swelling Duffygate scandal seems straightforward enough. In order to shut down the politically embarrassing public audit of over-entitled conservative senator Mike Duffy, the Prime Minister's — the PM's! — multimillionaire chief of staff Nigel Wright took the "national interest" into his own hands and "secretly" wrote a personal cheque to make the audit go away. The PM was very angry, in a faux-dramatic kind of way, and voiced his great displeasure to his flock of shee... er, minions and ministers, disavowing knowledge of the deed and summarily throwing Wright under the bus. Followed swiftly by Duffy and the also-under-audit Pamela Wallin, who joined a third conservative senator under audit—Patrick Brazeau—previously tossed from caucus because of charges of sexual assault etc. etc. ad nauseam. It's crowded under the conservative bus these days and about to get a whole lot cozier with the addition of Stephen Harper's great pal and unabashed supporter, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford.

Ford has been unable to stay out of trouble since the election that brought him to power on promises to "stop the gravy train" at City Hall (except, clearly, in the cafeteria), but his litany of other transgressions pale in comparison to that which will accrue if an alleged video depicting him smoking crack with drug dealers turns out to be true. Especially since it has been suggested that people may have been killed over the video that was offered to news outlets like website Gawker and the Toronto Star newspaper for a mere $200 K. (It's not lost on most that the main reason for publicly shilling the video would be to force Ford to up-bid. "He resigns as mayor or he's dead in a ditch — I don't know what comes first," a Ford ex-staffer is quoted in a revealing Maclean's article.)

Other developments are equally telling. The Toronto Catholic District School Board fired the portly mayor from his beloved position as coach of a high school football team, leaving the titular head of Toronto distraught enough to want to retrieve thousands of dollars of football equipment he'd donated to the high school, a move his chief of staff Mark Towhey advised Ford was "... a bad idea, a mistake... you need to sober up." Naturally Towhey was canned.

At this point one imagines that the Canadian conservative machine has ordered a Monster Bus with balloon tires big enough to not only flatten Brazeau, Wright, and Wallin, but with enough clearance to bump over the blimp-like carcasses of Ford and Duffy.

Conservatives aren't all the heartless, ignorant people we think they are. But an inordinate number of heartless, ignorant people are conservatives. And an inordinate number of conservatives, smug with misguided indignation despite their long record of faulty analysis and inaccurate predictions, choosing to belittle or disparage instead of defending their own ideas, fall prey to a holier-than-thou self-importance. Look no further than Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell and sundry other criminal frauds to see why conservatives fall so frequently and so far: they repeatedly stake out moral and political positions that are inherently inhuman and impossible to fulfill — conservatives' clarion call to the precious economy being a case in point. In "Is Economics a Form of Brain Damage?" futurist, evolutionary economist, and author Hazel Henderson outlines how, despite science having disproven all economic theory, markets continue to represent the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Electorates that continue to put disconnected-from-reality conservatives into power effect the same gambit, and can expect consistent humour in return.

Even if there were a God — and there most certainly isn't — one assumes this entity/idea would be as much concerned with justice on earth as the setting in motion of humanity's generally shambling, scandalous ways. Into the court of transgressions against (his, her, its) laws (created not by any supernatural being but by collective delusion that substitutes for common sense and civility) then must stride the worst of those who consistently cow, sin against and suppress their fellow man. And here is the biggest, yet most satisfying joke of all. Although you can never sell the ridiculousness of the God idea to the Godless, in contrast, the God-fearing clearly have an unhealthy appetite for the very Godlessness they eschew: by demeanour and deed, conservatives seem laughably incapable of steering clear of acts of moral turpitude.

Which is why May 2013 was the best month ever in the history of Canadian politics.