Robert Budd Dwyer (November 21, 1939 – January 22, 1987) was the 30th State Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He served from 1971 to 1981 as a Republican member of the Pennsylvania State Senate representing the state’s 50th district. He then served as the 30th Treasurer of Pennsylvania from January 20, 1981, until his death.
On January 22, 1987, Dwyer called a news conference in the Pennsylvania state capital of Harrisburg where he killed himself in front of the gathered reporters, by shooting himself in the mouth with a .357 Magnum revolver.[4] Dwyer’s suicide was broadcast later that day to a wide television audience across Pennsylvania.
[From Budd Dwyer’s Wikipedia page]
The last couple of days have upped the ante on the trope of the televised political suicide spectacle with two scenes unfolding at the same time in Ottawa and Washington. Politics has fully morphed into a Netflix series. Whatever one’s ideological needs, the spectacle of watching someone with a classic gangster stooge, New York accent painting the POTUS as a local crime boss and/or Tammany Hall political hack, is no richer than watching some Kevin Spacey type inhabiting a snakeskin in a field of unsuspecting frogs. Everybody plays their roles, from upstanding truth seeking politicians ready to help a fallen person rehabilitate, to outraged moralists castigated a liar waiting for the inevitable book deal. This latter over worn cliché was the best the Republicans could raise as a cudgel, completely disregarding that we have already lived so much degradation of civil culture that profiting from telling one’s melodrama is a rather venal sin. What remains is the ceremonial theatre of scapegoating in a world of, if not exclusively white men, then political and economic privilege.
In contrast, in Ottawa, we have another kind pageant taking place where an Indigenous woman, for reasons that are yet unclear, kneecaps a number of white men aiming to protect a social-political order . The upshot is that another bunch of even more reprehensible [mostly] white men will be the recipients of the fruit of this political carnage. Sadly, in a world where folks feel incapable of breaking out of a binary response, and the agencies that could parse the details of the situation [media and the schools] make a living from furthering the either-or thinking, Wilson-Raybould is delivering the nation to the Conservatives in effectively the same way that a naive hotel clerk might direct a client to a trafficked victim’s room.
In America it’s an over the top grind house mob tale. In Canada, a pathetic comedy of errors.
In the meanwhile, reality is so much more complex, detailed and desperate, overwhelming the logic political talking points try to hide. I was floored by the various paradoxical and hidden stories recounted by the researchers and activists in On the Move: Commuting, life, work. In these accounts, all kinds of working people are shown to be savaged by the current socio-economic-political order. A white underclass is used as a political instrument to deliver underpaid and ill-treated brown temporary migrants to an industrial meat-grinder, serving the needs of the moneyed class. It is all happening under the radar. It is normalized by government, media and schools. Participation in this abusive precariat economy is moralizingly encouraged by all three, with the perverse effects well-hidden, with not the least of it accomplished by the concentrated focus on these gladiatorial extravaganzas.
What is Wilson-Raybould’s dust-up with the PMO really about?
Two columnists at the Nat Post weigh in:
‘a few heads on pikes would fix things’ by andrew coyne:
https://www.pressreader.com/canada/windsor-star/20190302/282291026531851
‘how wilson-rayboulds indigenous identity swayed her thinking’ by gabriel friedman:
https://www.pressreader.com/canada/calgary-herald/20190302/281840054965907
All this is about unequal justice, and this is a involves a corrupt impulse that cannot be stopped in normal practice.
“Can you imagine anything more embarrassing than this case not being settled, it going to trial, and the government losing?” said Joe Groia, a former Ontario Securities Commission attorney who now defends white collar criminals. “That would be almost an unspeakable result from the government’s perspective.”
Is this guy kidding? This is exactly what will happen, or some variant where they will plea bargain for / be found guilty of a misdemeanor. This is exactly what the gov’t wants. No real difference in outcome with a DP. The boss got out on a technicality — the inept, loose functioning of the justice system. Same deal coming up. This is so standard, this is why JT, Butts, Wernick couldn’t / can’t figure it. Jody hasn’t a clue how things work. There is so much room up and down the system for cheats, a cheat will be the result. The deferred prosecution is just a way to regularize this process. Makes everybody look like they’re doing something positive, and is that much harder to track. Not a free pass, but a ticket to play.
The aboriginal thing may indeed be on Jody’s mind. Fine, but get ready to have all politicians, media, lobby groups, and conservative nationalists circle the wagons and shoot it down. Or, at least, militantly ignore it. What she did may be important to her and some native folk, but it has zero effect on the purposeful leakiness of system oriented to protect the wealthy and powerful from justice. Perhaps, the fact that nothing will come from this will be a useful learning moment for native activism.
Right now, I am almost rooting for Meng Wanzhou. The Chinese are a sick bunch, but at least they are clear that it is all political. Justice is for fools. I am tired of Canadian sanctimony in the face of such obvious pretence and fraud.
As far as Coyne is concerned, more of the same upright conservative bullshit. Anyone who has watched this guy knows that if this happened to Harper and his crew, they would have lied, cried “smear campaign” and stonewalled. Coyne and all other Canadian so-called journalists would have whined a bit and repeated the lies as if they were truth. Since Duffy, I cannot take most of the Canadian press seriously. Coyne’s an opportunistic, preening con asshole.
It’s only cuz the Libs brand requires to them to pretend they care about social justice that it leaves them open to condemnation. Inevitably, they expose themselves. On the other hand, the Cons don’t give a shit about anybody, or anything other than themselves, just like the folks who vote for them. Other than an occasional bit of David Brooks style hand-wringing, Coyne and the rest of the j-crew are utterly feckless in confronting them. It took 10 years for enough regular folks to say this has to stop.
I have listened to a fair amount of phone-ins. Most folks want this to go away and see that the jobs are protected. They pay lip service to the noble native trope, but take the fraud in stride. Bribery and abetting corruption in Third World countries means shit to them, especially if it can secure jobs here. Sad.