Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- If anybody hasn't yet seen Bruce Anderson's critique of the Cons' dirty tricks, it's well worth a read - especially in emphasizing how a party supposedly built around morals and ethics is so quick to declare that anything goes when it comes to political manipulations:

Eventually, Government House Leader Peter Van Loan admitted that this was being done on an organized basis by the Conservatives. A sad, cynical enough moment in Canadian politics. Then he took cynicism to a new, jaw dropping level.

No mumbling the normal apologies about “overzealous workers, blah, blah, blah, won’t happen again, etc.” Instead, Canadians were told that this kind of grime should be considered vital free speech – and must be protected, not prevented, by our laws. Efforts to rein it in would have worse consequences than letting it continue. This was the sound of a politician who had left home without an ethical or moral compass that morning.
...
This truly isn’t complicated. If our children tell lies about schoolmates, we punish them not shrug it off. When it happens on the Internet, we call it cyber bullying and bemoan how young people seem to have grown up without decent values. Conservative Christian groups presumably recognize this as something hard to square with the “Golden Rule.”

How exactly does this kind of behaviour, and its subsequent defence, fit within a party that wants to be known as the champion of law and order? I’m not suggesting the acts were illegal, only that it seemed the point of a law-and-order agenda was proclaiming a larger idea along the lines of “We conservatives get right and wrong.”

And this is wrong. Not clever, not amusing, not evidence of a more sophisticated political machine that works all the angles while others are asleep at the switch. Just wrong on every level.

- Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt puts Anderson's comments in context alongside some of the Cons' other defences of shady tactics. And the Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal weighs in on Peter MacKay's sense of entitlement and strategy of deception.

- Sixth Estate unveils the Weekly Flack Award for outstanding achievement in the field of Con PR hackery. But is one award a week really enough to cover the sheer volume of substance-free self-congratulation being generated by thousands of politically-oriented communications staff?

- Finally, Brett Hodnett reproduces Chelsea Vowel's breakdown of the Cons' spin about funding to Attawapiskat, showing that there's been nowhere near enough funding to put even a small dent in the cost of providing housing. And Romeo Saganash comments on the federal government's deliberate choices to assimilate First Nations rather than allowing them to function as communities.

[Update: Fixed attribution to Chelsea Vowel as per comments.]