Pity poor Tom Flanagan.

Had his verbal faux-pas occurred at any other conjuncture of the Harper dictatorship, a hastily-assembled crew of communications serfs would have nimbly cleaned up his mess.

But the CPC propaganda machine has been woefully stressed to the cracking point recently, and so Flanagan was unceremoniously jettisoned.

The first sign that his party had dumped him was a tweet from the PMO's Andrew MacDougall.

It was eventually followed by another tweet, this one quite terse, from Stephen Taylor stating that Flanagan had been dropped from the Manning Networking Conference's line-up of speakers at the annual media-savvy shin-dig.

This is not the first time the man described, by the forementioned Manning Institute as "a major intellectual figure in conservative circles", has opined with regard to the depiction of "child p0rn".

From Michael Harris' excellent piece at iPolitics:

In a bizarre exchange with a student caught on video, Flanagan said that he didn’t think people should go to jail for possessing child pornography.[...]

“A lot of people on my side of the spectrum, the conservative side of the spectrum, are on a kind of jihad against child pornography. I certainly have no sympathy for child molesters, but I do have some grave doubts about putting people in jail because of their taste in pictures.[...]

The student who confronted Flanagan also made reference to a quote attributed to Canada’s answer to Karl Rove when the Manitoba government was hurrying through tough new legislation on child pornography. At the time, Flanagan suggested the whole subject was debatable: “What’s wrong with pornography in the sense that it’s just pictures?”

As my co-blogger and virtual roomie fern hill pointed out, Flanagan's fall from the heights of Con cronyism happened as the result of sustained Idle No More vigilance, with respect to issues and concerns important to First Nations, Indigenous, Métis and Innu peoples.

The tweetstorm in response to Flanagan's insouciance has been informative. This article reinforces Harris' point about the criminality and the organized child exploitation required to produce this material.

Will the stench of the Flanagan scandal trail the MNC events next week?  For good measure, we should keep up the pressure and investigate what dodgy, hypocritical, fraudulent and possibly criminal elements the other Con speakers bring to the table.

Update: Apparently Flanagan has become a liability to the University of Calgary, too.

With so many scandals exposed, the CPC is vulnerable, and its propaganda machine's capacities stretched to the limit.  Otherwise, it would have found a way to sweep his comments under the carpet, likely by attacking the First Nations videographer who posted the damning YouTube interview, but instead they hung him out to dry.

Like vultures or hyenas, Harper's conservatives have turned on a pack member who exposed an individual weakness, for fear his action could make the whole group vulnerable to its *natural* enemies.

Stinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy

It was in late May of 2011, at an event organized by the Ottawa Citizen, that I first saw Stephen Taylor in person.

I'd heard about him and even written about him; he was the self-aggrandizing co-founder of an aggregator that gathered a shrieking blob of venomously partisan, unabashedly venal and obdurately ill-informed bloggers under the deceptively benign label "Blogging Tories".  Taylor was also a beneficiary of wingnut welfare, in the guise of funding that allowed him to attend the Manning Institute for the Suppression Study of Democracy.

Fresh from feasting upon the remains of a recent kill, Taylor preened and posed in the manner of a political operative, an up-and-coming jackal rising to the top of his pack.

Ensconced in the comfortable appointment that CPC patronage bestowed upon him, he glistened from all the admiring licks that sycophants administered.

He blocked me on Twitter months ago; I can only catch glimpses of his malevolence when he interacts with accounts that I follow.

I've recently captured some of his disingenuous and mean-spirited utterances which are representative of the quotidian meretriciousness from religious fundamentalists, neocon dissemblers and unreformed reformers that scurry about and jostle for advancement within the ranks of the CPC.

Hyena snarls and furtive nips are delivered to those identified by the former Canadian Reform Alliance Party as unlikely to vote for them.

Such target - young, educated, female, muslim - provides easy trolling opportunities for one of PMSHithead's Politburo Attack Parrots. Remember, Taylor openly dismissed Irwin Cotler's concerns and those of the LPC when a CON polling company tried to plant rumours that he was resigning his seat.

When those tactics were exposed, Taylor had no smug response to offer.

Added: Unbelievably, Rob Anders woke up and spoke; his CONspiracy accusations temporarily eclipsed Taylor's odiousness.

Stephen Taylor gets Twitter smackdown

Nobody deserves it more than he does, and nobody is better equiped to smack down dickheads than @kady is.

This, of course, is all about the PMSHithead MASSIVELY mispoken observation that triggered the #HarperHistory hashtag.

More at the Toronto Star, via @SusanDelacourt and others, here, here and here.

Click on small pic to get enlargement.

Stephen Taylor is *Indignant*

The director of the National Citizens Coalition wants Harper to cut up the "taxpayer credit card" that has been loaned to Bev Oda because she has demonstrated little respect for ... hold on!

What exactly has Oda done that Cashmere Tony, Christian Paradis (here and here), Peter MacKay (here and here) and Bruce Carson have ^NOT in their own way done, so much more spectacularly and worth a helluva lot more of taxpayers' money than a $16 glass of orange juice at the Savoy Hotel?

Oh. Wait. Bev Oda is a female cabinet minister. I'd forgotten that PMSHithead and his band of CON bullies established quite a different standard of accountability and transparence for them. Ask Helena Guergis.

Note: I would link to Taylor's tweet but it appears that he has blocked me, after one or perhaps one hundred too many snarky bon mots lobbed in his direction.

This is the best I can do. For folks without a magnifying glass, just click on the screen cap below to see a larger version.

With a grand merci to my co-blogger fh, an expert in the use of the Capture app. for Macbooks.

Did Con candidate go rogue?

According to the Contempt Party's sycophant-in-chief and BT herder

Stephen Taylor, candidate Maxime Bernier's campaign slogan is "A guy from Beauce who does politics differently". Um, yeah. And unlike what happened to his former colleague Helena Guergis, Bernier was not shamed, blamed and thrown to the wolves excluded from the Con caucus.

He left unsecured classified NATO documents in a private residence, not his own. And he has proclaimed a number of personal & political opinions that may or may not have been vetted by the PMO's politburo, at his blog, and in public.

It seems that Bernier's MASSIVE ego is tailor-made to match his designer suits (or vice-versa). This guy from Beauce is clearly gunning for leadership of the Contempt Party and he displays all the obfuscating skills required for the job.

Out of the mouth of the Con-adjusted.

Via Canadian Cynic, we learn of Stephen Taylor's disingenuous deconstruction of the attack ads campaign the HarperCons initiated to discredit Stéphane Dion.

When Stephane Dion was leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, the Conservatives did their best to define the man and then allowed that definition to shine through the Conservative-adjusted lenses of the news media and electorate.

Now there's a pile of verbosity that could be summed up in fewer words: spin, disinformation and malevolence.

Chutzpah's just another word for an expression we use in francophone Canada - "Du front tout l'tour d'la tête" - coming and going. Especially going.

Only time can tell when the accumulated arrogance, smug narcissism and authoritarism will spell out another word: hubris.

It looks like there's no "fun" in fundamentalists.

It’s a rare moment when a RepubliCon wannabe pundit hits the right funny note. As observed at Canadian Cynic, this is not one of those moments. Why are Con sycophants tone-deaf, when it comes to playing in the scale of wit and humour? They persist in banging out flat, discordant notes in the misguided belief that they are amusing. Besides the glaring spelling mistakes, errors in fact, and mis-use of the word ‘satiate’ (unless the meaning intended is "to supply with anything to excess, so as to disgust or weary"), is there anything remotely interesting in the Blogging Tories' head cheerleader

Stephen Taylor's plodding piece?

Sandra Buckler as a Senator? Wouldn’t that force her to leave her job in the lucrative lobbyist industry?

As for Québec, surely there must be one or two decrepit Union Nationale relics to be found, not yet 75, who could keep the Senate seats warm for future RepubliCon appointments.

Yup, it sure looks like there's no "fun" in fundamentalists. But then, was there ever?

After snark: Bill Shatner is one of the senatorial candidates suggested by Stephen "Stevie" Taylor. Will he share his crowning glory secrets with Mike Duffy?