Oh yeah, Harper is clever all right. Bank robber clever.

I am tired of constantly reading in the media about how "clever" Harper is.

Yeah, "clever" in much the same way that I suppose robbing a bank could be considered "clever"? Or how virtually all in the media thought Harper’s raiding of seniors’ nest eggs was “clever”.

For those in the media who are without a Thesaurus, might I suggest that a more apt descriptor of our little Stephen Harper friend would perhaps be any one of:

"sneaky, underhanded, conniving, cowardly, dishonest, fraudulent, base, contemptible, deceitful, devious, disingenuous, double-dealing, duplicitous, furtive, guileful, malicious, mean, nasty, recreant, shifty, slippery, sly, sneaking, snide, stealthy, surreptitious, tricky, unscrupulous, untrustworthy, self-serving".

Meanwhile, events like Harper’s attempted Cadman bribery would fall under the single descriptor of “criminal”, whereas his income trust tax and his hoax known as tax leakage would fall under the single descriptor of “fraudulent”.

It is through the use of terms like "clever" that the media is responsible for playing an active role in debasing Canada’s system of democracy and lowering the public's standards of acceptable behaviour on the part of our elected representatives, through such subliminal means, as the press attempts (and often succeeds) in transforming the intolerable into the tolerable, through the not so clever use of terms like clever, but rather through the malicious misuse of terms like clever, when words like duplicitous, criminal and fraudulent are called for.

How do you think Harper became PM, without the avid support of many in the press, and their constant misuse of the English language on his behalf?