Henry Louis Mencken once wrote: "No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."

I sometimes wonder if Prime Minister Stephen Harper has taken this quotation to heart.

You could see it during the 2008 federal election campaign when he derided the Liberal Green Shift as a gas tax. The media and the public  ate it up rather than subjecting  Harper's claims to serious scrutiny.  

The Conservatives' contempt for  voters' intelligence was also on display when the party distributed images of a  puffin crapping on the shoulder of then-Opposition leader Stephane Dion.

Here are  six examples over the past week in which Mencken's comment appears to be guiding Conservative actions:

* Harper and Environment Minister Jim Prentice refused to acknowledge the urgency of global warming on the eve of important climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen next month. They didn't seem too bothered by a new report from the Global Carbon Project. Based on  the latest study on carbon-dioxide emissions,  the report  suggested that global temperatures could rise by an average of 6 ° C by the end of the century.

* Harper's defence minister, Peter MacKay, smeared senior diplomat Richard Colvin for telling a special Commons committee on Afghanistan that he sent a blizzard of e-mails warning about the torture of Afghan detainees after they were turned over to Afghan captors in 2006 and 2007. On November 20, Foreign Affairs Canada and the Department of National Defence stated that future witnesses "will provide important context and information about this issue". NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar correctly interpreted these messages as an attempt to intimidate witnesses to toe the government's line as well as a way to subvert Commons hearings. Harper probably thinks the masses won't pay sufficient attention to this issue  to recognize the magnitude of his government's outrageous conduct.

* Harper met an Indian movie star, Akshay Kumar, on a trip to Mumbai in a cheap attempt to win South Asian votes at the same time as Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is cutting the number of refugees by more than half next year.

* The Conservatives had the gall to distribute a pamphlet in ridings with large numbers of Jewish voters claiming that Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff was no friend of Israel even though a former Liberal government listed Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations over the objections of many Canadians of Arab descent.

* Finance Minister Jim Flaherty released a draft code of conduct for the credit and debit card industry that did not include any controls over interest rates charged by the issuers of these cards. It's hard to see how these proposed rules would have any impact on the amount of  interest  that consumers fork over to the banks, but it gives the Conservatives a chance to claim that they're doing something about credit cards.

* Flaherty gave another speech about the $50-billion-plus budget deficit in which he failed to acknowledge that Conservative military policies will have a tremendously negative  long-term effect on government finances. Estimates of the cost of the Afghan war have exceeded $20 billion (including the cost of rehabilitation for veterans of the conflict).

In all of the examples listed above, Harper appears to be assuming that most voters are stupid or, at the very least, that  they're not paying attention.

Clearly, the prime minister is, in the words of Mencken, not under the impression that he will lose his public office by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if one day, the great masses of the plain people proved Harper wrong.