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The Pod People strike again

The more you pay attention to politicians the more you realize Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a political movie.
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The more you pay attention to politicians the more you realize Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a political movie. Ostensibly a sci-fi flick about alien invaders who replace humans with lookalike Pod People - sorry Steve - with the intention of taking over humanity, perhaps so they could enjoy fast cars, fast food and cold beer, none of which they ever seem to have on invading aliens' home planets, the Podsters give themselves away by their utter lack of emotion and their single-minded, cold-hearted approach to accomplishing their task.

Sound like anyone you know?

Little Stevie Hapless, prime minister of all Canadians - at least those living west of Ontario - has long been suspected of being a PP. Emotionless to the point of being inert, Stevie goes about the business of remaking Canada in his alien image with an aura of detachment and plasticity that makes Barbie seem warm and human. His expressionless face, Pillsbury Doughboy shape and Ken doll hair belie a coldly calculating mind, seemingly bent on seeking out and destroying threats to the body politic, whether coming from within or without. As with powder days, there are no friends in Podworld.

Having surrounded himself with others transformed similarly, notably Peter "The Weasel" MacKay, several top-ranking military men, a phalanx of yes-men civil servants, they've closed ranks to seek out and destroy one who just wouldn't complacently fall asleep and be absorbed, Richard Colvin.

Seemingly immune to the conforming powers of the Pod, Mr. Colvin, who served 17 months as a diplomat in the cesspool known as Afghanistan and who is currently posted to the Canadian embassy in the U.S., has not only failed to assimilate, he's committed the ultimate PC sin: he's spoken truth to power.

The truth he spoke was that Canadian forces - long basking under the umbrella of peaceful policemen - had rounded up Afghanis in seemingly wholesale fashion and turned them over to Afghan security forces. Afghan security forces, having only a passing and somewhat incomplete understanding of the modern concept of rule of law, went all medieval on the detainee terrorist farmers and tortured them. Quelle surprise.

Not satisfied to state the obvious, Mr. Colvin went on to say Canada was complicit in this torture because we - our soldier representatives - knew, okay, maybe strongly suspected or at least had heard well-placed rumours, that torture was indeed the fate awaiting the transferred terrorist tailors. Quelle surprise.

Had he stopped there, he would have simply been an enemy of the Pod who had to be silenced. But he didn't. He described how those up the chain of command showed indifference to his reports outlining this un-peacekeeperlike activity and how that indifference turned into obstruction and attempts to shut him up. Quelle surprise.

While this was going on, various members of Stevie's podernment, notably the Weasel himself - who was Minister of Foreign Affairs during much of the time Mr. Colvin was writing his reports, and as it turns out, sending them to the minister's office - ran point and said they didn't know nothing 'bout being complicit in torturing Afghanis and, besides, they'd tightened up government policy about torture by proxy a few years back when they hammered out a revised prisoner-transfer agreement with the Karzai organized crime family, the details of which made don't ask-don't tell look like a model of transparency. Ironically, it was Colvin's reports, the ones they'd never seen, that motivated this tightened up policy. Quelle surprise.

So while they say they didn't know about this, it seems the problem is, they did. Presto-chango, in the blink of an eye, plausible deniability has begun to vanish and the pod's gone into survival mode, which is to say they've fired up the Attack the Messenger Machine. They've trotted out generals and diplomats, senior civil servants and wonks, all of whom are suggesting, in varying degrees of specificity, that Mr. Colvin doesn't know what he is talking about. While not actually labeling him Taliban himself, they strongly suggest he's been duped by that merry band of butchers into believing their propaganda instead of believing his own government's propaganda. Undoubtedly they have low-level clerks in CSIS working to uncover photoshopped images of Mr. Colvin having sex with chickens, picking his nose while O Canada is playing or palming communion wafers - oops, wrong guy - something, anything to discredit him.

And yes, for those of you with a particularly good memory, this is the same party that promised to protect whistleblowers when they were in opposition and looking for somebody to blow the whistle on the Liberals over the sponsorship scandal, an unnecessary tactic once Pauly Martin blew the whistle himself.

So the question - surely rhetorical - is asked, what is it about political office that seems to strip the humanity, reason and ethical gyroscope out of a person? Why is it so hard to admit you screwed up, apologize, learn your lesson and try to do better? Why does a strategy of denial, cover up and attack seem like the path of least resistance?

Rather than cut their losses and suck up the consequences, Stevie and his band of merry men are turning this into a public works project - they're digging a deeper hole. There will be more testimony today (Wednesday) from, among others, retired general Rick Hillier, who's already suggested Colvin has problems differentiating his head from his posterior. The drama continues; the stench grows.

As, apparently, it does closer to home. Now that it's time to pony up the second deposit on Cheakamus Crossing homes, some of the purchasers have become aware of the tarry scent of asphalt in their neighbourhood-to-be. "It stinks," as one of them so succinctly put it. That wasn't an issue when the sewage treatment plant and the landfill stunk worse. But it is now, particularly since the plant producing the stink has applied for rezoning to make its presence conforming and legal. And there's no clean way out of this one for our own merry poditicians.

They can deny the application and shut the plant down, issue a temporary TCUP and keep the plant running, or tell the homeowners to hold their noses. Whatever the outcome, it's likely to be expensive for Whistler taxpayers. I know, what isn't?

Perhaps the best approach is to tell the IOC the fumes are likely to keep the athletes staying in the new neighbourhood from testing negative for doping. They seem to be able to deal with these sticky situations. Maybe they can call in the Afghani security forces to deal with (a) the complaining neighbours, or (b) the plant operator. Tempting as it is, (c) council, will have to remain a write-in choice.