Barrel Strength

Driving back from hockey this morning, I heard Bob Rae chuckling abut the ‘plagiarism’ thing with some CBC radio host.  (Oh, those UCC boys. ‘Remember when we short-sheeted Biff?’) It reminded me of Mike Keenan measuring the visiting team’s bench when he had a playoff game in the other city - why, this bench is five inches shorter than regulation!  I’m not quite sure I can put my team on the ice under these conditions!  These illegal, lawless conditions! Standard mind abuse of your opponent.  Hardly a colossal gaffe of thermonuclear proportions. Oops.  Forgot to put quotation marks around that.  Hardly “… a colossal gaffe of thermonuclear proportions.”

Duggan’s Dew was talking to me yesterday about the significance of the recent changes at CBC’s website, which had featured the ravings of Heather Mallick about Sara Palin and Republican sexual inadequacies.

The CBC ombudsman  determined that the CBC’s political website had not exposed the range of political views available, and that it had erred seriously in publishing Mallick’s piece.

This morning, Jonathan Kay  remarked on how good a week it was for the blogosphere, as various nutjob 9/11 deniers have been forced out of the Canadian election campaign.

Kay writes: “The episode points the way to the future of the developing relationship between bloggers and the MSM. Yes, there will be competition, as the various media jostle for the available eyeballs out there. But there will also be synergy — with bloggers doing the sifting and stirring the outrage, while the broadcast and print journalists perform the equally important job of forcing the issue during scrums, interviews and press conferences.”

 All true, all good, but something more important is happening in Canada.

Read the rest…

Conservatives in Canada still recall the counting abilities of Rt. Hon. Joe Clark which led to fall of the government in 1979.  It seems that that section of the Hall of Fame has another candidate.  Please make way for Nancy Pelosi.  Today the vote on the bailout bill was rejected with Democrats voting 140 for and 95 against.  On the Republican side it was 65 for and 133 against.

Given the importance of the bill why would Pelosi put it to vote?

At first view, it appears merely that Michael Ignatieff can deliver a “hidden agenda” stemwinder that doesn’t induce comas in the audience, unlike his current leader. More to the point, we see that even a supposedly rational, educated man such as Ignatieff can descend to the timeworn tactic of placing all of his opponents’ views beyond the pale of the acceptable. This is not removed that far from the thinking behind Soviet denunciations of dissenters: those who disagree with the state are isolated lunatics.

Many of us have endured these diatribes numerous times to the point where they fade into background noise. But it is worth asking why in the twenty-first century it is still acceptable for some in this nation to presume that legitimate public policy debate cannot be permitted, that to oppose the Liberal Party is not the irrational act of a handful?

There was a hint of the answer revealed yesterday in CBC’s The Sunday Edition, wherein Michael Enright and his panel tried to discuss the question of elitism as a political issue in Canada. I say “tried” because they missed the point entirely. Taking as their cue Harper’s reasonable assertion that most Canadians are not impressed by the sight of gala-hopping arts world figures braying over supposed cuts to arts subsidies, the panel meandered into a chat about anti-intellectualism in North American society.

Could they not even consider the obvious evidence of discomfort over elites in Canada, such as the blatant disconnect between supposed national institutions like the CBC and the taxpayers who bankroll them, as evidenced by the ombudsman findings on Heather Mallick? Or the greater problem having a cadre of francophone and bilingual anglophone bureaucrats, recruited and honed in the heyday of Trudeaupia, presiding over the machinery of government and immune to public will?

When it is so starkly obvious to the rest of Canada, can even one person in the Liberal Party rise above these stale Soviet-era tactics and attempt some real political engagement? Judging by Ignatieff, not likely.

Update:

Here is Harry Flashman’s apt description of Iggy’s great-grandfather, Count Nicholas Pavlovich Ignatieff:

“He looked tough, and immensely self-assured; it was in his glance, in the abrupt way he moved…He was the kind who knew exactly what was what, where everything was, and precisely who was who - especially himself. He was probably a devil with women, admired by his superiors, hated by his rivals, and abjectly feared by his subordinates. One word summed him up: bastard.”

You leak our private conversations?  We leak yours. How do you like it so far?

By now you may have seen this. A poor Quebecois artist goes to the star chamber in Ottawa to beg for funding for his music festival, to be met by a group of anglophone judges who neither speak French nor understand the cause the poor artists represents. It is preposterous and effective. Why effective?

Because it exploits every French-Canadian cliché’d perception of les Anglais.

a) poor misunderstood French Canadians in an alien environment

What can you say about a person whose image of Ottawa dates from 1916? When was the last time you met a unilingual English Canadian in an arts funding job in Ottawa? 1963?

b) no French Canadian bureaucrats in Ottawa

When was the last time a French Canadian artist dealt with a unilingual arts bureaucrat? Answer: possibly the last time he dealt with a fellow French Canadian from the Canada Council.

c) Anti-sexual English puritans

This is the racial stereotype that is believed by the French with all their heart and soul: the English are anti-sexual, we French have  a better  sex life, they are too hung up. Perhaps some people confuse the fact that English Canadians shut the bathroom door when they use it with embarrassment about what to do in the sack. Having been to bed with several dozens of English Canadian women I have never noticed any reluctance to get at it. Maybe my sample size is too small. I had better work on that.

Imagine the equivalent.

The English Canadian cultuiral festival seeks funding from a Quebec government agency. Mrs. Watson and Mrs Dobell got to Quebec City to speak to officials of the Agence Culturelle Québécoise.

a) The officials speak no English, of course, and are aggressively rude to the ladies for having the tenmerity to ask for funding for their Lennoxville arts festival which is in English.

b) they smoke and make offensive sexual references throughout.

c) they rail against the applicants for humiliating them in 1763 on the Plains of Abraham, and because a unilingual  relative of theirs was spoken English to in Eaton’s department store in 1957.

Come to think of it, except for the indoor smoking, what have I exaggerated?

The BBC reaches for the Eric von Däniken playbook to tout the theory that the origins of English common law lie in Islamic law.

First, the setup:

For some scholars, a historical connection to Islam is a “missing link” that explains why English common law is so different from classical Roman legal systems that hold sway across much of the rest of Europe.

Next, the attempt at a syllogism:

From the end of the 9th to the middle of the 11th Century, Sicily had Muslim rulers. Many Sicilians were Muslims and followed the Maliki school of legal thought in Sunni Islam.

Maliki law has certain provisions which resemble English legal principles, such as jury trial and land possession. Sicily represented a gateway into western Europe for Islamic ideas but it’s unclear how these ideas are meant to have travelled to England.

Norman barons first invaded Sicily in 1061 - five years before William the Conqueror invaded England. The Norman leaders in Sicily went on to develop close cultural affinities with the Arabs, and these Normans were blood relations of Henry II, the English king credited with founding the common law.

And then the “can you prove it’s not true?” rejoinder worthy of Criswell:

There is proof he brought Islamic knowledge back to England, especially in mathematics. But no particular proof he brought legal concepts.

There are clear parallels between Islamic legal history and English law, but unless new historical evidence comes to light, the link remains unproven.

And it only took twenty-two paragraphs for them to build up to that.

The Beeb: putting the dim back into dhimmitude.

Joe “Honest as the Angstrom is Long” Biden says he didn’t approve of the false sarcastic ad about John McCain’s computing skills, then suggests the Obamessiah may not have approved it either.

That’s not an alibi, Joe, that’s just more of the same we expect from your campaign.

…. and Lord Black is doing time for nothing?  Something very wrong here.

So “Liberal leadership” is geting voters to remember a nearly defunct treaty that is now barely observed — if acknowledged — by the world’s major nations, rather than focus on a current Rube Goldberg-like carbon tax plan that even its creator is trying to forget.

If the Grits are lucky, Mike Dukakis may have his leather Snoopy helmet up for loan when they decide to put Steffi in the turret of a tank.

Direktlink zum Video auf Youtube

When the going gets tough, the tough get going.  This headline speaks for itself.

Democratic Congress May Adjourn, Leave Crisis to Fed, Treasury

Even Katie Couric isn’t taken in by this jaw-dropping display of ego run amok (click below to play video):

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Though one would expect this of the Nutty Professor’s campaign circus, this embarrassing scene was part of the  Obamessiah’s tour:

But the Illinois senator used a teleprompter at both his Colorado events Monday — making for a particularly peculiar scene in Pueblo, where the prompter was set up in the middle of what is normally a rodeo ring.

That, folks, is the essence of “Big hat, no cattle”.

Victor Davis Hanson sums up elegantly the increasing revulsion of American voters to the Democrat camp followers who are presumably trying to win their votes:

There is a growing public anger at the petty amateurish biases of those who claim they are sophisticated and subtle; and it is not just that they sympathize with a smeared Palin, but are angry that the media thinks they are so stupid not to catch on. The odder thing still is that the media obsession has turned into some sort of compulsive disorder—they know that they are way out of bounds; know that they are hurting their own candidate Obama— and they know that they simply can’t and won’t quit now.