My Lord But He's Stupid, Isn't He?

Canadian Cynic forgets the date, gloats prematurely

An amusing trend has emerged on the blogosphere today with various bloggers announcing retirement and other bloggers forgetting the date and engaging in some premature gloating.

Few of them, however, were more hilarious than Canadian Cynic, who managed to make a hypocrite of himself once again:

"So long, Matthew. Don't forget to take the stupid with you when you go."

"I'm becoming perpetually amused by the fact that the very people who accuse me of profane intemperance are the same ones who can't seem to avoid legal grief for not knowing when to shut the fuck up."

Cynic is referring to an episode in which Matthew, in the course of dealing with Garth Turner's outrage over Conservative MPs allegedly using their mailing budgets for partisan purposes when the Liberals were apparently doing the same thing.

During the course of that post, Matthew apparently made the error of stating, "thanks to a reader tip, we now know through Steve Janke’s work that Garth Turner is not only a hypocrite but a massive crook."

A statement which, when expressed as an alleged statement of fact (and not merely an opinion) does in fact border on libelous.

Now, on to the hypocrisy:

Consider this particular post, wherein he dismissed claims on behalf of Canadian officials that they had made either contact, or attempted to make contact, with Martin on approximately 100 occasions as "lies".

Unfortunately for Cynic these claims actually turned out to be true.

As such, his dismissal of those particular claims as "lies" would turn out to be libelous.

But we won't hold our breath waiting for a retraction on his part: that would seem an awful lot like honesty, and we all know he wouldn't want to develop that particular habit.

On more humourous fronts, however, it's now well passed noon and Matthew blogs on. Looks like not only are the reports of Matthew's demise exaggerated, but this particular joke's on Cynic.

Not unlike all the others.