Many Of Today’s Leaders Are Putting The ‘Con’ In Conservative.

Back in the day (70s and 80s), I worked for ad agencies that were aligned with both the Liberal & Conservative parties, provincially and federally in Canada. As a result I got to interact directly with a number of ministers and deputies in those governments.

Back then it didn’t really matter much who you were dealing with. They were all basically well-intentioned and dedicated people. And when you have that intention and dedication, the differences in ideologies are narrowed, so it was much easier for them find common ground,  gain consensus and get things done.

But with the turn of the century, (and I’m really just talking about Canada and the US), politics, especially conservatism, took a real turn for the worse.

That is not to say there wasn’t enough ‘turn for the worse’ to infect all parties. My belief is that it confused them, and for the past 20 years we have been trying to think our way out of this confusion.

Greed Has Changed Everything

The trouble is that, in both countries, this confusion gave way to to something dark and scary and politics, instead of attracting true leaders as it had been, now started to attract opportunists…the kind of people who take advantage of the chaos that exists out there from things like terrorism and pure market greed and use it to their own advantage, or the advantage of their key supporters.

Guys like George W Bush and Dick Cheney are the real archetypes of this larceny. Bush appeared to be kinda dim on the surface, developing the war on terror after the events of 9/11.

But this was basically a rationale for making more weapons and arming both sides in any of the dozen or so serious ongoing conflicts and those that arose as a result of the war on terror.

And where did all the money go? Well, a massive amount of it  went right into the military industrial complex, where the Bushes and Cheneys not coincedentally, were major players.

This is the same kind of shit that Donald Trump is trying to pull off now, by selling billions in arms to Saudi Arabia, who in turn, will use those arms to support genocides and terrorist attacks all over the world.

And why would anybody in their right mind try something like this?

Well, in Trump’s case, it really has to do a lot with how all the power he has has gone to his head. I believe he honestly now thinks he is a monarch, or at the very least a fascist dictator.

Trouble is that he is so stupid and runs his mouth so much on camera and on Twitter that anyone with half a brain can see that he is completely deranged.

The ones who don’t see this, or choose to ignore it, are basically people who share Trump’s values, morally bankrupt as they are, and have committed to following him into hell. This has come about as a result of extreme gullibility. They are, to use a term from the far past, the rubes, who have been sold a bill of goods by a con artist and are now waiting for the land of milk and honey that he promised them to materialize.

The US Is The Model, But It’s Not Unique

The US is not the only place where this sort of is happening.

Here in my country, Conservatives are gaining momentum both federally and provincially. And believe it or not, they are stupid enough to allow themselves to be inspired by the antics of the Trump regime.

Doug Ford, who was recently elected premier of Ontario, is a bush league clone of Trump. He's all about cutting and slashing costs, many of which are supporting essential services in Ontario, while at the same time giving huge tax breaks to the rich.

He has also been attacking the city of Toronto, which is really the economic engine of the country, out of sheer spite against all the city politicians who never really took him, or his brother, a former mayor, cut from the same cloth, seriously. These are the antics of petulant 12 year old, just like his infamous American idol.

Ford has now aligned himself with the federal Conservative party, which is headed by a little deadhead named Andrew Scheer, a disciple of a former Prime Minister of Canada named Stephen Harper, who is probably the politician that Donald Trump most closely resembles from an ideological standpoint.

Again, the rubes bought the bullshit of making Ontario great again, when actually, more through the efforts of Toronto Mayor John Tory, and the efforts of the former Liberal government, Ontario is doing just fine, from an business and growth point of view.

The majority of people in Ontario, in Canada, just as the majority of US are, for the most part, smart, honest, industrious people who really just want to work hard, enjoy their success and live free.

But currently, this totally twisted Conservative ethos is one that seeks to take a lot of that opportunity away from the people. Through greed, de-regulation lust for power, and through the visceral fear of not doing the bidding of the people who put them in power in the first place.

Change Is Coming, Despite Conservative Obstructionism

We are going through a very transitory period in our culture here in North America. One which is eroding the foundations upon which our societies were built, for the sake of greed.

But anyone who has even a modicum of awareness knows that the world powered by fossil fuel-based industry and transportation is quickly coming to an end. And as the new renewable world takes hold, many ideas that are being held back by conservatism will start to develop and flourish.

Right now it really just feels like the current opportunists in power are trying to delay this transition for as long as possible, mostly at the behest of the industries that will be made obsolete or have to completely re-tool to keep pace with this inevitability. But none of this is good for the economy or the planet. Because the longer we keep spewing toxins into the atmosphere, the more we will experience the consequences of these action, and the more it will cost us in human terms.

The world needs to change in order to survive. We all know the story by now. There are many people who acknowledge that and a relative few who refuse, either out of greed or stupidity or both, to accept it.

They would rather just keep on conning everyone into thinking that what is real and inevitable is just some sort of fake news story created by the Radical Left.

It would all be quite hysterically funny, if it wasn’t so pathetic.