You’ll Never Read This.

Listed on humor-blogs.com…

There’s great sanctity for free speech in my house. Well, at least in my house when I’m alone because the lovely and erudite Mrs. Sinister has a long list of things I can’t say in front of the kids. Oddly, many of the prohibited phrases have her as their subject.

But barring this, and my X-rated poetry about Brit TV chef Nigella Lawson, we hold the tenet of free expression in high regard. Among consenting adults very little is too offensive, too risqué, too inflammatory or too obviously naughty to be censored.

This protection does not extend to things that are too boring. I will vociferously defend your right to claim that you should be permitted to form amorous relations with Hoffmann’s Two-Toed Sloth. However, if you bore me while doing it, I’ll plant you in the muck like a gangland snitch.

Despite my best intentions and several hours mumbling to myself at the mall I have violated this first principle of not being exceptionally boring.

What I mean by this is that I have decided to write about Canadian politics. I can actually hear you leaving through my interweb tubes…come back! I can be funny and write about Canadian politics!

Hey guess what? The Prime Minister farted! He farted in the Privy Council! Isn’t that hilarious? In the Privy Council? Privy…he did it in the Privy Council…that’s like a joke…sort of. Damn it.

Anyway, this past week had by-elections for three seats in the federal Parliament from the province of Québec. It occurs to me that the previous sentence is about ten hours worth of civics lessons for many of you but these elections were somewhat important. At very least they were indicative. So are plague buboes, incidentally.

Canada has generationally swung back and forth between the Liberal Party of Canada and the subtly unnerving synthesis party that is now simply known as the Conservative Party of Canada. It’s like The Blob in navy blue suits.

Since 1900, the Liberals have been the most successful elected, national political party in the world. They win and they win a lot. The Conservatives in their various forms have only elected two Prime Ministers into office with majorities since 1958. When this last happened in 1984, they went from the biggest electoral win ever to the new leader losing all but two seats and locking herself in the bathroom with a bottle of Jägermeister.

The Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper is, according to his wife, and early Soong-type android. Stéphane Dion (yes, he’s Céline’s dad) is the current leader of the Liberals, who are in the Official Opposition against the Conservative Party who form the government with the most seats in Parliament, but not a majority of them.

This happens, because unlike the US, we have more than two parties. To be fair, these extra parties are probably kidding and just don’t have the heart to tell us despite the fact that many people vote for them. However, they do keep the Grits and the Tories (a reader from Kentucky just died) from forming the majority needed to guarantee a full, five-year term. There has been no serious prospect for a majority government since 2000, when the two conservative parties got tired of polling each other’s electorate.

So this by-election thingy is a big deal. Any shift in electability puts the political class on election watch. Ever see the sleazy guys at a bar watching the girls drink in hopes that they will get so gooned that they put out? It’s exactly (and I mean exactly!) like that.

The province of Québec is a mystical land full of highways and things near highways. This at least is my experience driving through it. Québec is also French, and French is Serious Business. The Liberals picked Mr. Dion because (it is speculated) he’d win Québec. He’s smart, he’s a gifted policy wonk and he’s very, very Quebecois.

So of course, he lost all three seats. To add insult to injury, they even lost to the New Democratic Party, a group of pseudo-socialists whose official color is orange.

Orange? What were you thinking? How do you vote for orange? The NDP claim it’s because they, like most of Québec, are against the Afghan War. I think it’s because they handed out free flats of Labatt’s 50 and were secretly funded by the citrus lobby.

So we’re now faced with the specter of another election in which Canada’s leaders will debate about very little, but become animated like greased weasels while doing so. Harper’s sophisticated language software will seem smooth compared to Dion’s broken English and in any French events, it won’t matter because apparently Mr. Dion shares the same level of popularity with head lice.

This is depressing. I should have stuck with fart jokes.

 

 

 

 

Live Free or Go To Humor-Blogs.com !!