Fiddlesticks & Poppycock!

Goodness gracious, what is the world coming to? Quickly! Bring the smelling salts!

Ah, the dreaded, ever-wearisome matter of “civility” rears its baleful head yet again. Perhaps Ms. Crux would be better served if she focused on her own daft obduracy and profound mendacity a little more and fretted a tad less about the offensive brickbats of critics frustrated by her patently deceitful antics.

Update: Not to get too far into this, because it is, after all, a deeply boring and utterly trivial online spat, but it’s somewhat interesting to note the commentary speculating on whether “Canadian Cynic” is male or female. One particularly obtuse nitwit writes: “Let’s start calling CC “she” then. Since she prefers to remain anonymous, it shouldn’t bother her.” Presumably, the idea here is that there could be nothing more insulting or demeaning than being referred to as a woman. Coming from a woman (or, at least, so we can only presume, because “she” blogs anonymously), that’s a rather “interesting angle” wouldn’t you say?

It should also be noted that the same purported “woman” referenced above just recently saw fit to trivialize rape on her own blog in order to craft a provocative title for a post attempting to score some cheap political points at the expense of Stéphane Dion. I suppose that would be another example of the refined “civility” of the Right that’s elevating our political discourse…

“Don’t Come In My Ear”

“No, no no, but, okay, no no, this is wrong.”

A “found object” (revealing footage of media personalities in unguarded moments) from Harry Shearer’s My Damn Channel. Here’s conservative radio host Laura Ingraham in full meltdown during the first few days of her short-lived Fox News TV show “Just in”; a program that she caustically (but accurately) describes as “a train wreck.” Enjoy.

By way of a little background on this sweetheart of the right, while the editor of the Dartmouth Review, she sent an undercover reporter with a tape recorder to a campus gay students association meeting, then outed the students in print and sent tapes of the meetings to the students’ parents. In the university magazine she called association members “cheerleaders for latent campus sodomites.” She’s apparently changed her views on the issue however since learning that her brother came out as gay. Typical.

Oh, and this isn’t the first time that Laura’s gotten the axe. In the late 1990s, she hosted a show on MSNBC called “Watch It!” A year an a half and three time slots later, she joked that it should have been called “Watch It Get Canceled!”

Links With Your Java

• What’s this, National Post letter writers are complaining that the Conservatives are “governing like socialists”? Well duh. As John Ivison notes: “The Conservatives have never been averse to tweaking the nose of orthodox conservatives since the backlash makes them look more moderate.” Cynical and unprincipled? Um, yeah… and this would be a surprise, how?

• “Ontarians are coming together to more effectively assert themselves in the face of an unfairness caused by the financial arrangements between us and Ottawa,” says Dalton McGuinty about a $20 billion “gap” in the federal equalization scheme. Well that might certainly throw a bit of a spanner in the works for the Harper government’s next budget, wouldn’t it?

• Harper’s hapless apology for the Komagata Maru incident almost a century ago seems to be backfiring horribly with the Indo-Canadian community. Surely Ruby Dhalla never had this outcome in mind, did she?

• A sixth disembodied foot has washed up on the shores of the West Coast and a dead body was found in Lake Ontario near a beachfront park in the city’s east end. Time for yet another Clorox® scrub-down of Neo’s keyboard…