Truth is absolute within the context of the language or symbology used to express it: water is wet, 1+1 = 2; and so on. "Smart", however, is always relative to some set of goals or other evaluation criteria.
For example, I drive a Volvo: it's expensive, all maintenance is routine but costs are insane, and it eats tires - so is that a smart choice or is it stupid? Well, it's quite stupid if the goal is to haul logs out of the B.C. interior or set new records at the race track - but if you understand that every time my wife makes a return flight reservation she might as well be scheduling an Alberta blizzard (the airport is 240km away, think -30C, 40km/hr cross winds, and heavy snow) you should agree it's smart because the thing gets me there on time, every time, with no fuss and little stress.
(And yes, safety: my son tried having his hit by a red light runner at 64km/hr - he's driving it today, the Toyota SUV wasn't even towable.)
In the example the smart/stupid evaluation is with respect to my values and goals and that makes things very simple and very clear. In contrast when evaluating political actions we generally know neither who the intended beneficiaries are, nor what the intended benefits are. As a result we tend to evaluate political policy in terms of the goals and values the political actor pretends to share with us. In Canada, for example, we're currently blessed with a prime minister who claims to be acting for Canada, for Canadians - and, on that basis, any sane person is going to evaluate his policy choices as profoundly, astoundingly, stupid.
As a result our hypothetical sane observer - i.e. someone not possessed by Trump derangement syndrome - is left facing a choice: either consider Carney moronic or assume there's a third party pulling his strings and look for the benefit that third party gets from his actions.
Unfortunately that third party doesn't have to be a simple Soros-class bond villain clutching a cat - it could be a group of people all pulling in slightly different directions to get kind of a vector sum of benefits, a mental disease like anti-Semitism affecting the politician directly, or some combination of those.
That works well in the U.S. where people like AOC are obviously just actors fronting for third parties, and in Europe where it's easy to discern the puppet masters behind things like Boris Johnson's scuppering the Ukraine-Russia peace agreement or Germany's decision to shutdown both coal and nuclear generation - but it doesn't seem to work for Canada's Mark Carney because you have to assume the puppet masters are working toward rational goals but his actions don't seem to serve anyone.
I see Carney using TDS to hold power, using taxpayer monies to control the media, and maintaining his majority in parliament by buying the occasional opposition MP - but the fascist impulse alone is not enough to explain his actions. For that, I lean toward the mental illness theory in a very specific form.
Many years ago I had the unhappy experience of having to work with someone whose general behavior I see as broadly similar to Carney's. Scum_bucket was (or maybe is, I've no idea) very smart but in an odd way he wasn't really there at all - his talent (and it was awesome in its way) was to get people deeply committed to completely opposite views to think he agreed whole heartedly with them - sometimes in the same room at the same time and all without ever understanding any of the issues or opinions being fought over. Worse, people didn't catch on either: a major government department hired this guy repeatedly over many years to mediate the same dispute - with both sides happy to bring him back each time because they trusted him and, of course, neither side ever changed because both sides believed the other guy had agreed to.
Scum_bucket's talent expressed itself in other ways too: if, for example, there was an emerging consensus in a room, he'd put himself at the front of it, first adopt and then push aside, whoever had the most influence in getting it accepted, and emerge as the brilliant strategist who had put it all together. Amazingly he could do this entirely without reference to the subject: afterward he would know what the buzz words were, what Jane wanted, what Dick's role was, and where Spot fit in, but not what any of it meant in terms of actions or consequences.
I watched a few minutes of Mark Carney on stage at a recent Canada investors conference with former prime minister Steven Harper - but I didn't see Carney, I saw scum_bucket with better family connections and a more expensive tailor.
To see if I'm right here's a testable prediction: not a single one of his memoranda of agreement with the provinces will ever be realized at the federal level. The provinces, particularly Alberta and Saskatchewan, will put money and political support on the table, but the federal government will seem to use every political or legal process possible to ensure it all comes to nothing - and this won't be because Mark Carney is stupid, lying, or unable to control the budeaucracy; it will be because he has no idea what he's committing to, no actual commitment beyond the current press release, and absolutely no moral response to the trust people like Smith, Moe, and Harper are investing in him.
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