"Lie And Cry" - The John Baird Edition

Back there, Transport Minister John Baird (yes - this same John Baird) was caught privately encouraging Canada's big airlines to step up their lobby campaign in order to kill a proposed "passenger bill of right" while his predecessor, then-Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon, publicly supported such legislation - in the name of the Harper government, of course.

Like the true incompetent that he is, Baird's reaction to being so caught was not to apologize profusely and making an honest mea culpa, but rather to enact full tilt the Fourth Principle of Incompetence:

Incompetents never take responsibility for their wrongdoings, or those of other incompetents within their "circle". This is what I wrote before: "Incompetents will do and say anything to defend themselves and other incompetents, including disassembling, obfuscating, lying and blaming others". Here's something else that I also wrote previously: "They lie, they misrepresent, they use decoy arguments and make ad hominem attacks. For them, the use of duplicity, of secrecy, of arguments of (non-existent) conspiracy, of fact (and non-fact) selectivity/cherry-picking, of quacks/fake experts, as well as putting forth logical fallacies, are simply means to an end." For incompetents, everything is about spin and truthiness - never about facts and truth. Even when they are blatantly caught, incompetents continue to react and reason with their intellectual sloth-driven infantile/adolescent immaturity - they will deny that they did anything wrong or that they have lied, then they will blame/attack (read: character assassinate) their "accusers". I call this: "Lie and Cry".

And here is the evidence to that effect (emphasis added):

Transport Minister John Baird says he didn't pander to airlines with passenger bill

Transport Minister John Baird on Wednesday denied any collusion with the major airlines to stymie a passenger bill of rights, saying the government has simply "been working constructively" with the industry.

Internal government documents obtained by Canwest News Service show the transport minister's office privately pleaded with Canada's major airlines to step up their lobby campaign "to stop this motion in its tracks" even as the minister at the time, Lawrence Cannon, publicly supported it.

The motion passed unanimously in the House of Commons in June 2008 with the support of Cannon and Baird, who failed to bring forward legislation when he succeeded Cannon as transport minister in October 2008.

(...) Baird said there's nothing nefarious about the relationship, adding "we're been working constructively with the airlines."

"Working constructively with the airlines"? To kill the bill, yes indeed.

Here is tangible proof again:

Let us pay closer attention to the very first sentence of the first highlighted paragraph in this email of Baird to airline VIPs:

You're going to have to do some lobbying to stop this motion in its tracks.

Now, let us look at this other sentence in the same email:

If you don't lobby the grits and the Block, we're going to find ourselves in a position where we are outvoted by the Opposition Parties.

So what do we have here?

A) a minister (Baird ) is telling airline VIPs what to do in order to kill a motion regarding a "passenger bill of rights";

B) said same minister (Baird), is explaining to those same airline VIPs why the minority government of which he is part can't by itself kill the motion, and thus explains why this requires airline lobbying of MPs from Opposition Parties in order to ensure that a majority of MPs would end up turning down the motion - all the while keeping the minority Harper government "in the clear". In other words: "help us help you".

Put A and B together, and what you have here is a bona fides "behind-the-door" (i.e. secret) agreement between two parties for a deceitful purpose.

A connivance.

And in the reality-based world we live in, folks, that is the very definition of collusion!

Period.

If for whatever reason you remain unconvinced of this, then here's the clincher (emphasis added):

The (Harper minority) Conservative government launched Flight Rights Canada last September to inform air travellers of their rights, but only after airline executives reviewed several drafts, provided input, approved the final product, and signed off on the minister's speech to launch the program — a process that raised the ire of a top bureaucrat involved, the documents show.

(...) In the House of Commons, Baird confirmed Wednesday he doesn't support the bill, but defended the Tory record on the file, saying the government has "put forward new public policy" (Flight Rights) in the area of passenger rights.

Once again, what we have here is "a secret agreement between two or more parties for a deceitful purpose".

A connivance.

A collusion.

And what Baird is now doing is lying and crying about it.

The Harper Government: a sorry gang of pathetic, hypocritical, mendacious, ideology-driven incompetents who are clueless and keep on making (sh)it up as they go along?

Absolutely.

Definitely.