One of our PM Harper's former mentors and advisers, Tom Flanagan, suggested during an interview on CBC that Obama should target Assange for assassination. The CBC was deluged with emails objecting to Flanagan's remarks and the CBC's seeming acceptance of them. They issued a weak "apology" as did Flanagan a day or so later.
Tom Flanagan teaches political science at the University of Calgary. Oh, good.
Can you imagine what the reaction would have been if Assange had made a similar remark? The hounds of hell would have been sent after him.
But Flanagan has shown that he is a complete waste of space before. This was from an article he wrote advising Harper how to manipulate parliament to get what he wanted.
"By using confidence measures more aggressively," Flanagan wrote, "the Conservatives can benefit politically." If the opposition backs down, Harper gets his laws passed. If not, Tories "get an election for which they are the best prepared."
Flanagan concluded: "'Fortune is a woman'," Machiavelli wrote in a now politically incorrect aphorism, 'and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force.' It is time for the government to take advantage of its advantages."
From Alexander Cockburn on the Counterpunch site today:
"The irony is that the thousands of diplomatic communications released by WikiLeaks contain no earth-shaking disclosures that undermine the security of the American empire. The bulk of them merely illustrate the well-known fact that in every capital city round the world there is a building known as the U.S. Embassy inhabited by people whose prime function is to vanquish informed assessment of local conditions with swaddling cloths of ignorance and prejudice instilled in them by what passes for higher education in the United States, whose governing elites are now more ignorant of what is really happening in the outside world that at any time in the nation’s history."
One of our PM Harper's former mentors and advisers, Tom Flanagan, suggested during an interview on CBC that Obama should target Assange for assassination. The CBC was deluged with emails objecting to Flanagan's remarks and the CBC's seeming acceptance of them. They issued a weak "apology" as did Flanagan a day or so later.
ReplyDeleteTom Flanagan teaches political science at the University of Calgary. Oh, good.
Can you imagine what the reaction would have been if Assange had made a similar remark? The hounds of hell would have been sent after him.
But Flanagan has shown that he is a complete waste of space before. This was from an article he wrote advising Harper how to manipulate parliament to get what he wanted.
"By using confidence measures more aggressively," Flanagan wrote, "the Conservatives can benefit politically." If the opposition backs down, Harper gets his laws passed. If not, Tories "get an election for which they are the best prepared."
Flanagan concluded: "'Fortune is a woman'," Machiavelli wrote in a now politically incorrect aphorism, 'and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force.' It is time for the government to take advantage of its advantages."
Flanagan, Harper and Machiavelli
Not wrong, not brutish, not criminal - simply politically incorrect.
From Alexander Cockburn on the Counterpunch site today:
ReplyDelete"The irony is that the thousands of diplomatic communications released by WikiLeaks contain no earth-shaking disclosures that undermine the security of the American empire. The bulk of them merely illustrate the well-known fact that in every capital city round the world there is a building known as the U.S. Embassy inhabited by people whose prime function is to vanquish informed assessment of local conditions with swaddling cloths of ignorance and prejudice instilled in them by what passes for higher education in the United States, whose governing elites are now more ignorant of what is really happening in the outside world that at any time in the nation’s history."
Alexander Cockburn on US diplomats