So you think Stephen Harper runs a nasty election campaign?

He’s got nothing on our erstwhile NATO ally, the wily Erdogan.

Big Steve has shown he’s not averse to a bit of hate-mongering and a little race-baiting to give his political fortunes a boost ahead of the next election. But that’s nothing!

Erdogan has literally set his country on fire in hopes that his AKP will win a majority in the November 1 election, effectively making him the fire chief in charge of extinguishing the inferno he has unleashed.

That’s ballsy!

What could go wrong?…

Hmm…

The current conflagration has his roots in the election of last June, where for the first time in recent memory the AKP failed to win a majority. None of that namby-pamby coalition government nonsense for Edorgan… no siree, he want the whole enchilada!

So he calls a new election for November. Then is rips a few pages out of Netanyahu’s playbook.

How best to convince the electorate that they need a strongman at the helm in these dangerous times?

Why, make these dangerous times exponentially more dangerous, of course!

Conveniently, a suicide bombing in the Turkish city of Suruc came along in the nick of time. Next day ISIS took credit, and voila!

The Turks were off to the war on terror against ISIS!

Except they weren’t. Even though the 30 Turkish citizens who died in the Suruc bombing were Kurds, Erdogan’s war on terror has focused not on ISIS, but on Kurdish sovereignty groups!

That’s an unfortunate fact which leads many to conclude that the wily Erdogan has been in cahoots with ISIS all along.

See, Big Steve’s not such a bad guy after all.