Thursday, July 21, 2011

'Hating' as Leadership Strategy

Our Prime Minister and his Cabinet are, to use my teenage sister's favorite word, 'haters.' Think about it. If you really pay attention to the news lately, they've shifted focus from 'hating on' Ashcroft alone to attacking just about anybody, and worse than that, pitting everybody against everybody else. For example, the business community is under attack because it dared to question the government; the Bar Association too, and for the same reason, if not the same question. So then Mister Barrow makes the totally absurd comment that most of the Bar Association is PUP, while his bally Mister Finnegan tells the world that the business community wanted preventative detention. Considering that GST recently spent a few days chasing down and locking down non-Chinese and non-Indian business owners for non-payment of taxes, I doubt the businesspeople view preventative detention with any less suspicion than any of the rest of us do, but it's important that the government give the public someone to hate who isn't them. After all, if we really started to pay attention who knows what we'd discover about them, and if they learned nothing else from watching the Musa administration implode, they did learn that it's crucially important to keep everyone divided, and viciously so. Meanwhile they should publicly award a commendation to the Opposition for keeping itself divided and therefore crippled without any effort being necessary on the government's part. Thus endeth that lesson on the value of credibility.

Now, this preventative detention thing is nothing less than dangerous in an atmosphere where the government spends all its time attacking people and indulging vendettas. For example, should we really be this focused on Ashcroft? How many roads could we have built with the legal fees; how many jobs, besides those in the legal profession, have been created? I'm not saying we should have left The Lord alone completely, the man is a crooked sonuvagun after all, but isn't there more important stuff we could be doing? Instead of meaningful things like creating jobs, reducing crime and generally making life better, we're proposing to cement it into the Constitution that the government can, by way of preventative detention, make somebody disappear if they can trump up the barest excuse to haul him in. That can't make the Bar, the businesspeople, or any thinking person comfortable when you consider that this crowd spends their days coming up with accusations and threats against people who worry them, i.e. people who think for themselves.

The sad fact is, preventative detention will do nothing to reduce crime. What it will do is add water to the seeds of fear and hatred they've already sown. If the government and its Dear Leader truly wanted to tackle crime, they would strengthen the police force, hire more capable officers who would be incentivized to perform as proper custodians of the law, and run the corrupt cops out of there. Instead of making new laws that terrify everyone but the criminals, they can focus on enforcing all the boring, old-fashioned, yet quite useful laws already on the books. They could stop corruption, starting with the members of the Cabinet -get them arrested for contraband, tender-rigging, extortion and bribe solicitation, and all the other activities they are involved in. I could continue for pages and pages, but will end the list with this one: take all the legal fees Lois is getting and apply them to prosecution costs. Hell, I wouldn't object to having Lois paid, if she were a super-prosecutor and putting the criminals in jail just as aggressively as the government takes companies from unpopular foreigners.

I for one am a little tired of being told what to think, and I wish all the hating would stop, but I know it won't. The fact is, you have a corrupt, incompetent government that forgets why it was voted in to begin with, and they can only keep their power by distracting the masses and by provoking them into ripping each other to shreds. So the hating will continue, and it will distract you from the corruption, because it's their turn to feed at the trough; let nothing disturb them while they gorge.

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