He’s a little man, with a little man’s perpetual sense of grievance.  So when he practically invites credit agencies to downgrade Canada’s largest economy, and when he takes potshots at Dalton McGuinty and Dwight Duncan, as he did again today, it’s only because he still possesses a little man’s rage that he has been beaten – every time – by men who were smarter and better than him.

Conservatives keep hoping he’ll come back to Toronto to take over the wreck that is the Ontario PCs.  I hope he will, too, and not just because of the endless entertainment it’ll provide.

Flaherty won’t ever slink back, however, because he knows we’ll grind his face in the dirt, just like we did every time before.

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Angelo Persichilli is my big brother, as I wrote once before, and I’m a bit biased, but I would suggest that the Harper government’s relationship with the national press gallery markedly improved during his brief tenure as Director of Communications at PMO. Unlike all of his predecessors, Angelo’s life had been devoted to journalism, not the Conservative Party. He understood the job his former colleagues had to do, and he didn’t bitch or whine when they did it.

We spoke every week, sometimes more than that. Not once did he ever reveal a secret.  Not once did he complain about the news media. And not once did he object to anything I’ve written about his bosses’ party – even though I have come to thoroughly detest it, as the Robocon scandal has unfolded.

As noted in this story by Stephen Maher – the guy who has made actual election fraud an issue in Canada, for the first time our history, by unveiling Robocon – the staff work load at PMO is extraordinary. It’s bigger and tougher than anyone could ever imagine. Angelo remarked to me often that it’s a younger man’s (or woman’s) game, and it is. When he took the job, I told him he was crazy – not because it wouldn’t be fun or educational, but because it is potentially lethal for one’s family and one’s health.

In our last phone call, I told him he had done a very good job.  As usual, he demurred.  “Name one story that’s been done, since you’ve arrived, talking about the bad relations between Harper and the media,” I said.  “You’ve made it a more professional relationship.”

And, in a democracy, that’s all you can ask for, I think: a professional relationship between the watchers and the watched.

Angelo Persichilli is a good man, and I hope all the partisans will permit me to say this to my big brother: welcome home.

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Snip:

They rolled him out in a wheelchair with hot nurses and a drip bottle of Jaegermeister. So badass. I was surprised at how entertained I was by their performance, I’m not a punk music junkie but I love a good live show.

They exuded a comedic confidence you don’t see in younger bands. Some of their songs are “Horny Single Mom, F*ck Buddy, Super Poke, Onterrible dedicated to MP Tim Hudak (whom they detest), and Double Bubble Trouble inspired by the bubble girl at the G20 last year. They had a full on industrial bubble machine too.

They made me think about getting older, we’re always getting older. Now. Now. Now. Oop, there slips another moment of your precious life. Don’t waste it people. You never know what is going to happen from one day to the next. So, why waste time feeling like crap, being lazy, grumpy or old? If these guys can rock a full crowd’s socks off the night before open heart surgery at 50 on a Wednesday night, you can do anything.

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The surgery was a success! He’s moving to I.C.U. shortly, and will be playing geriatric punk rock again before you know it!

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Whoever advised Hudak to vote against the budget – without even having read a word of it – is no friend of the hapless Ontario PC leader.  As one senior Ontario Liberal told me this morning:  “Whoever advised him to take that position is doing so because it’s an easy way to get rid of him.  If he defeats the government four months after the election, he’s done.”

Personally, I’m all for it.  Winning four elections in a row – and this one’ll be a majority, I guarantee it – will be fun.  Seeing the end of Tea Party Tim’s leadership will be a bonus, too.

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Craaazy night, last night at the Bovine Sex Club, attended as it was by 100+ miscreants, and we sold out of records, too!  It was nutty, it was wacky, and the three “nurses” in spandex were a big hit. The pic on top was taken by our Daisy colleague Byrne Furlong – who, last time we saw her, was body surfing in the pit – and the one below was taken by another Daisy stalwart, Katherine Fidani, who ensured that everyone was using the right talking points.  Click on the photos to buy Why Do You Hate Me today!

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Tonight at the Bovine Sex Club, 542 Queen Street West! SFH (finally) releases the greatest album in the history of, er, the last ten minutes: Why Do You Hate Me!  Free album with cost of admission!  And it even features a tune as written from Timmy Hudak’s perspective on his home province!

Debauchery! Depravity! Dissipation! Dissoluteness! La Dolce Vita!  You’ll get it all tonight, folks!  And world-famous rock video director George Vale will be there shooting a vid, and you or  your body parts could be in it!

Come dig our big gig, as Jesse Jackson might say: the very next morning, Ritalin Boy is going in for heart surgery (seriously).  We’re raising money for Heart and Stroke, and we’re raising his spirits, too!  Come say good luck (and, possibly, goodbye) to Ritalin Boy!

And now, here, for the first time ever on the Interweeb, is the WDYHM album cover – click on it to get the download, get merch, and get involved with the hottest musical sensation since Emo and Hair Metal!  It’s worth it! For, as the critics say:

• “[Shit From Hell] is most dead-on accurate band name of all time…” 
• “Drooling delinquents in the bodies of bitter, fat, middle-aged doucherinos…” 
• “Sounding not quite as good as a jet engine sucking a family of raccoons through the intake, but still better than Sum 41.”

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Before he even read the 2012 budget, this is what Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak said:

“[The] PC party cannot support this budget.”

The Ontario NDP, meanwhile, isn’t saying. But every PC trained seal is going to vote against it, Hudak says.

If there is an election – just four months after the last one – it’ll be on the head of the smirking frat boy named Tim Hudak. That’s a promise.

And we’ll win a majority. That, too, is a promise.

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In democratic politics, every leader is a direct response to the leader who immediately preceded them.

Thus, Brian Mulroney’s folksy Irish blarney was a reaction to Pierre Trudeau’s aloof asceticism. Jean Chretien’s populist federalism was an answer to the Mulroney regime’s flirtations with Quebec separatists and corporate elites.

Paul Martin’s government tilted anti-federalist and to the right, in the way that his predecessor Chretien had been an unapologetic federalist and progressive. Stephen Harper’s small-town Canada, hockey-loving, Tim Hortons affectation was deployed effectively, and brilliantly, against Martin’s millions, as well as the two ivory-tower types who followed, Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff.

U.S. President Barack Obama was the polar opposite to George W. Bush; Bush could not have been more dissimilar to Bill Clinton; Clinton was completely unlike Bush’s father, George Sr., and so on and so on.

In politics, opposites attract votes. What, then, are we to make of Thomas Mulcair?

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