SEPARATED AT BIRTH?

After hearing HARPER's latest set of promises I'm convinced that Charlie Sheen's character on "Two and a Half Men" - CHARLIE HARPER, and Canadian Prime Minister STEPHEN HARPER are twins, separated at birth.



How else can you explain the semi-incoherent ramblings? And I don't mean Charlie's, I'm talking about Stephen Harper's blathering here.

We've known for a long time now that Prime Integer Stephen "YOU CAN TELL I'M LYING BECAUSE MY LIPS ARE MOVING" Harper will say anything that his research staff tells him will get a majority, but surely someone stopped him at some point today to ask if he was really going ahead with today's whopper! Someone?

Here's what it comes down to.

The Reformers only talk populist. We know that, you know that, he knows that. So what are the hottest populist buttons to hit? You should know them because they're the CINO's greatest hits.

DEBT REDUCTION

The core Conservative isn't happy that Harper and his Finance Minister, Jim "NINE TOES AND COUNTING" Flaherty, who have racked up the largest per year deficit since World War II and completely wiped out the 12 years of Chretien/Martin belt-tightening, debt payments in a scant two and a half years. So one of the promises is to balance the budget. He's shown no ability to do anything like that in 5 years of leading but hey, anything's possible, right?

SMALLER GOVERNMENT

It ain't hard to convince the average voter that Government Employees have it too easy and there are too many of them, until you start gutting the services and the lines mushroom like a nuclear bomb blast. But that's "later talk" for now, Harpie wants his Majority so he's promising not to replace the majority of the soon to be retiring civil service jobs, which he claims number some 80,000 positions over the next 'few years'.

TAX BREAKS

Yup, Harpie's promising tax breaks. Not right away mind you, not even during this next term, and that's where the Prime Integer slips into Charlie Sheen - rambling while on crack territory.

Presuming its even possible to cut the government as much as he promises, without downloading services (which anyone in Ontario during the Mike Harris years will tell you is still causing problems), presuming he can cut costs, cut jobs and cut services enough to balance their overinflated budget, presuming all that, the promise comes with not 1 but 2 conditions... You've got to give him a majority now, and because the promised tax breaks won't come for 5 years and each term only lasts 4 and a half, you've got to give him another majority just before payday - 4 and a half years from now.

If that didn't make you say WTF then you're either brain dead or heading to a Harper Superprison. And you'll deserve it.

WHAT IS A CINO?

Before we get any further we need one term set up as common ground and I'm not referring to HARPERcrit which should be self-evident.

The term is CINO and it's the whole reason this blog exists. See the biggest issue real conservatives have with Harpercrits is that they're not Conservative. They speak Conservative (most of the time) but they vote Reform/Republican. And that bothers us because the Conservatives in Canada built this country. Conservatives set up the senate, developed the traditions, hewed a continent with little more than a belief in "Shared Sacrifice, Shared Reward" and the Reformers are dead set against all of that.

They're all bullies who don't like people that don't think EXACTLY like them standing anywhere near their tent. That's why they're filtering attendees at rallies across Canada during this election. Harper doesn't want anyone seeing him asked any tough questions, put on the spot, embarrassed, challenged, or ridiculed. It's bad enough he has to put up with most of Parliament doing that, he's not accepting it from Canadians.

Real Conservatives, or TRUE TORIES as we call them, prefer to debate and develop ideas, confident that the good ones are defensible, or at least that a reasonably effective leader can drum up the support of a majority of the Parliament to get them passed and made.

CINO's don't have any leadership skills so instead of actually being leaders they prefer to play leader. And how do you play leader? Well, you surround yourself with lots of people either paid to agree with you or which you've vetted to make sure they will agree with you and then you repeat things your Republican/Tea Pot overlords have said that got thunderous applause. That way you can point to your rallies as better attended and pretend that you are popular.

And sadly, it seems to be working.

But don't kid yourself. The Reform party may have got memberships in the Progressive Conservatives because they wanted to take it over (after all, even Harpie knows only Liberals and Conservatives have ever formed Government in Canada) but they never agreed with any of the policies. If they had then Lee "Preston Nail" Manning and Brian Mulroney would've gotten along, instead of Manning attacking the Conservatives and morally bankrupt and deaf to the will of the grass roots (which oddly describes Harpercrit to a tee!)

So, they are Conservative - In Name Only, or CINO, which you can pronounce "CHEE-NO" or "SEE-NO". We prefer See-No because it more accuratly describes the progress and achievements of the Harper Government these last five years - as in, we SEE NO accountability, fiscal responsibility, leadership or progress from the Harpercrits.

Maybe that's because they took the word Progress out of the party's name when they took it over. At least they were honest about that.