The Relentlessly-Whiny Canadian Left

4,100 Gillis-organized crybabies wirte the CBSC

If one were to judge from the volume of complaints received by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, one would think Krista Erickson's interview on the Sun News Network with Margie Gillis is a geat and terrible thing.

News outlets like the Globe and Mail and distinctly not-news outlets like The Mark and the Toronto Star have repoted that the CBSC has received more than twice the number of complaints about that one specific interview than it normally receives in an entire year.

However, they're declining to report a single salient detail:

The complaints are the result of a campaign organized by Gillis herself.

In a previous Facebook note, Gillis expressed sadness at the malicious hate messages being posted on Erickson's own Facebook page. That much is to her credit. But in the very same post, she recommended that her followers write to the government to complain not about Erickson's conduct, but rather about her views.

"Filing a letter with the CRTC , with copy to the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages and to the Prime Minister, stating that the unilateral view depicted in that interview is not what we want for ourselves or how we wish to be known in the world would be a far more fruitful action and it wouldn’t replicate the hatred we want to denounce," Gillis writes.

That's almost as comical as concluding her campaign call with a direction to "be brave, be clear, be compassionate."

Uh... what? What does compassion have to do with Margie Gillis' outrage at being asked some challenging questions on the Sun News Network? Or being confronted with her bizarrely-sanctimonious attitude toward Canadian society (the same Canadian society that supported her interpretive dance endeavours to the tune of $1.2 million over 13 years).

Speaking of sanctimony.

In a comical turn of events, the Star's resident hate addict, Heather Mallick wrote a column about the complaints, wherein she depicted Erickson as "venomous".

Mallick even seemed to echo Gillis' bizarre insistance that 1998-2011 is a 35-year period.

"Viewers are up in arms about the bullying the much-loved Gillis took from the angry, wired Erickson for having received a total of $1.2 million in government cultural grants over the decades," Mallick writes. Huh? 13 years "over the decades"? It seems that Mallick shares Gillis' extremely bizarre sense of time.

She acknowledged the Facebook campaign, but failed to attribute it to Gillis.

Quelle suprise!

One would almost think Mallick forgot that it was herself, not Erickson, who once penned a column in which she declared that then-Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin dresses like a porn star. That column blissfully ended her career at the CBC, even if the Star has breathed undeserved life into it. But the most salient detail seems to be that Mallick is so unashamed of her own venmous performance that she maintains it on her personal website.

No rational person needed the reminder, but that's how contemptible a person Heather Mallick is.

This author would love to see her go on the Sun News Network to defend her condemnation of Erickson in light of her own conduct. Unfortuately, Mallick is far too much of a coward to do anything like that.

For the CBSC, there should really be only one response to the complaints, spurred by Gillis' own wounded pride: severe disintrest in the complaints, and immediate dismissal.

After all, one could likely safely guarantee that if one were to examine the complaints submitted to the CBSC and compare it to the petition that Avaaz so feverishly organized in order to prevent the Sun News Network from ever coming to air, one would likely find each one of those 4,100 complainees had signed the petition.

Because that's what this is about: it's about the relentlessly-whiny, impacably-censorious left trying to run the Sun News Network off the air.

If the CBSC doesn't treat this comical complaints with the seriousness they deserve -- which is none -- the Sun News Network should summarily respond to them with a middle finger. Perhaps even an exploding one.

Shake it off, ignore the crybabies, and just let them wail. No one's listening to them anyway.

Heather Mallick Doesn't Really "Get" This Whole "Canada" Thing

Mallick publishes bombastic post-election fear tantrum... in Britain

Canadians familiar with Heather Mallick have long been aware of one central fact: namely, that Mallick isn't any good with them.

Writing an op/ed in Britain's Guardian newspaper, Mallick peddles her fair share of whoppers -- such as suggesting that the Conservative Party can afford to cut the per-vote subsidy because it collects so many donations from corporations. Not only do the Conservatives not accept donations from corporations (this would be illegal under campaign finance law), it's the Liberal Party that has historically collected the most such donations.

So, once again: facts. She's not good with them.

But facts aren't the only thing that Mallick doesn't get. She really doesn't "get" this whole "Canada" thing, either.

In her tirade, Mallick claims that Prime Minister Stephen Harper -- whom she desbribes as "a Canadian version of George W Bush, minus the warmth and intellect" -- wants to Americanize Canada. Or, at the very least, de-Canadianize it.

Her evidence? She's not good with evidence, either.

The closest she comes to actually offering any is noting that Harper "once sneeringly referred to Canada as a typical northern European 'welfare state'."

Which is at least partially true. Harper did say that. The difference is that he wasn't sneering; he wasn't speaking these words out of contempt, but rather out of concern.

In the full speech -- trotted out every time there's an election by panicked leftists hoping to alarm Canadians -- Harper expresses his concern over Canada being a country that over-spends on social spending while suffering from slow economic growth.

"Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it," Harper remarked. "Canadians make no connection between the fact that they are a Northern European welfare state and the fact that we have very low economic growth, a standard of living substantially lower than yours, a massive brain drain of young professionals to your country, and double the unemployment rate of the United States."

This isn't some dark secret in Stephen Harper's past. It's not some skeleton in his closet. These remarks are public knowledge, and have been for a long time.

Yet these comments just haven't had the effect on Canadians that Mallick and her far-left friends would like them to. Publicizing them has been intended to drive Canadian voters -- in the mind of Mallick truly good socialists at heart -- into the arms of the Liberal Party and NDP in droves.

It hasn't worked out that way.

The comments were first given prominent treatment in 2004, after Harper had ascended to the leadership of the Conservative Party. The Liberal Party, reeling from corruption charges, was reduced to a minority government.

They tried again in 2006. This time, Stephen Harper became the Prime Minister of Canada, winning a minority government.

They tried again in 2008. Harper remained the Prime Minister, this time with a stronger minority.

They tried again in 2011. This time, Harper won a majority government.

Every time the left has trotted out these comments, Harper has garnered a little more support from the Canadian electorate. If anything, they seem to be driving more Canadians to Harper than away from him.

If Canadians are really such good socialists at heart, as Mallick seems to believe, how could this be the case? Simople. Canadians aren't really the socialists Heather Mallick has grown accustomed to.

As it turns out, Harper's "de-Canadianized" Canada is more like Canada than the one Mallick claims Harper is destroying. History holds this idea up to be true.

No one has made the case for this more spendidly than Brian Lee Crowley. In The Canadian Century, Crowley makes the case that the enduring vision for Canada has been the vision of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, one in which taxes are kept low, Canada benefits from free trade with its neighbours, and Canadians accept responsibility for their own destinies.

No one should expect Heather Mallick to understand these kinds of complex factual arguments. She still has yet to realize that Prime Minister Stephen Harper wasn't born in Calgary.

Dobbin, Mallick & Theilheimer: a Fear Mongering Trifecta

With the far-left decrying Prime Minister Stephen Harper's alleged fear mongering over the prospect of a coalition of losers, they have also taken this as an opportunity to... fear monger.

It's no great surprise. They've been doing it non-stop for nearly 20 years.

Some of the far-left's premier fear mongerers have dusted off their most dystopic nightmare to send one overhwelming message to Canadians: give Harper a majority, and Canada is over. Done for. History.

Everyone -- especially the authors of these diatribes -- know it isn't true. But these people being who they are, they're saying it anyway. Here's a brief round up.

First up, at Straight Goods Ish Theilheimer declares that, if given a majority, the first thing Harper would do is destroy public health care.

"Politicians and activists need to remind Canadians of how drastic the threat is. The record clearly shows that Stephen Harper loathes medicare," Theilheimer declares.

"Harper deserted Preston Manning and left politics in 1997 to work for the National Citizens Coalition, which was formed expressly to fight medicare, as chronicled by Murray Dobbin. In 1997, as NCC Vice-President, Harper said that Canada should scrap the Canada Health Act."

"Until 2005 Harper publicly professed to believe in two-tier care," Theilheimer continues. "When asked by the CBC about a parallel health care system, he said: 'Well I think it would be a good idea. We're alone among OECD countries in deciding that we'll have a two-tier system but our second tier will be outside the country where only the very rich and powerful can access it and [it] will be of absolutely no benefit to the Canadian health care system.'"

"In October 2002, Dobbin reminds us, Harper said, 'We also support the exploration of alternative ways to deliver health care. Moving toward alternatives, including those provided by the private sector, is a natural development of our health care system.'"

Of course to people like Theilheimer, who denounce "US-style health care" to anyone who will listen, the idea of parallel health care systems seems like a scary idea... until you consider that the best health care systems in the world feature mixtures of public and private health care delivery.

Meanwhile, Canada's health care system -- operating within the framework defined in the Canada Health Act -- continues to perform dismally compared to other health care systems. Perhaps Harper was right in 1997; perhaps Canada needs a new health care framework in order to correct the ever-growing list of flaws in the current system.

Speaking of Murray Dobbin, he too took the interwebs for some good-old fashioned Dobbin-flavoured fear mongering:

"It's been a long five years for Stephen Harper, his gaggle of ex-Reformers and the gang of three from Harris-era Ontario -- Jim Flaherty, John Baird and Tony Clement. Long and infuriating, I am sure, because for all that time they had to pretend that they were a government. They had to masquerade as people who believed that government could be a force for good. They even "stimulated" the economy. They were a minority government and the big ticket items they really wanted to get their teeth into were out of reach.

They couldn't slash Medicare or gut the Canada Health Act. They couldn't cut transfers to the provinces, or further weaken EI. They left the public services unions with their rights intact. They had to leave education alone (more or less). And they didn't risk slashing the civil service they hate so much. Even the CBC has been spared (though they raised millions from their loyalists attacking it in fundraising letters).

The frustration level, especially for Harper, must have been almost unbearable. Remember, this is a man who got so frustrated being in Opposition as right-hand man to Preston Manning that he bolted from politics altogether. The place he chose to cleanse himself after all those years having to play the democrat was the National Citizens Coalition, by a big margin the most right-wing organization on the national scene. He said he was glad to be out of politics so he could say what he really thought.

Harper was hoping for revenge in the last election and blew it by attacking culture. He's eager for another try, making Jack Layton an offer he had to refuse. And if you want to see what real revenge looks like, give this crowd a majority and they will unleash the most destructive, nation-changing blitzkrieg in living memory. I can still remember the night that Brian Mulroney won the historic free trade election 1988. It was devastating. But Mulroney was a kindergarten teacher compared to Stephen Harper. Free trade started us down the road to Americanization. Harper will take us to the end of that road and beyond."

There's very little of substance in Dobbin's tirade. The sole issue of great concern Dobbin raises is the "committee handbook" the Conservatives were caught passing about earlier in their tenure. As disappointing as that affair was, it's but a mere patrol boat in Harper's political game of Battleship.

Dobbin spends the rest of his column chasing conspiratorial phantoms in the dark. Apparently, Dobbin believes in ghosts.

The rank anti-Americanism of Dobbin's column sets the table splendidly for Heather Mallick's contribution to the politics of fear, who is so brazen about her empty anti-Americanism that it's heralded in the title of her piece.

"We’re being conquered. If Stephen Harper wins a majority, the United States of Canada is what we’ll be. Maybe you’re fine with that. I am not," Mallick writes. "The Harperites’ attitude is Republican with a layer of Tea Party, a 'current of bitterness, an anger born of a sense of exclusion,' as Lawrence Martin wrote in his fine book Harperland, Conservatives 'viscerally hating their political opposition' in a way that was new and startling in Canada but old poisoned hat for the Americans. We will become more American in word and deed, in thought and feeling."

The only anti-American bogeymen Mallick seems to have missed are the Koch brothers and Sarah Palin (Mallick's self-humiliating vicious attack on Sarah Palin in 2008 managed to earn her a permanent place at the journalistic kids' table). Speaking of visceral hatred of political opposition, it was Mallick herself who openly admitted to experiencing a blubbering episode during the 2010 Olympics when Harper was simply shown on TV.

"The Harper Government does indeed love 'jets and jails,' as Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has been saying on the campaign trail," Mallick fumes. "Its plan for more jailing and less parole is at the core of the disastrous US prison explosion that even the Americans are horrified of by now (plus they can’t afford it)."

The Harper government may indeed love jets -- they are rather awesome -- but the salient fact is that no one loves jails. The difference between Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff is that Harper knows that Canada needs both.

Speaking of Ignatieff, he did once declare that the United States was his country, yet Mallick has nothing at all to say about that. Anti-Americanism, it seems, applies only to Conservatives.

Mallick even blames Harper for what she considers to be increasing public acceptance of racism. Comically, she refers to the "too Asian?" issue of Macleans magazine, but leaves out a central fact: that the issue was widely denounced by critics.

Facts like that clearly didn't matter to Mallick. They've been sacrificed at the altar of fear, Mallick's last resort to try to prevent a Stephen Harper majority government.

Fear served the Canadian far-left well for 13 years. Yet Heather Mallick Murray Dobbin and Ish Theilheimer have yet to realize that Canadians woke up from that coma in 2006 when they elected enough Conservative MPs to make Harper Prime Minister.

The bid to resurrect that fear in the minds of Canadians is sad and pathetic. Thankfully, it won't get them anywhere.

Wherein Heather Mallick Makes a Stark Choice (For Britain)

Austerity or oblivion? Mallick chooses oblivion

As many of the world's advanced states trudge forward, economic reality is presenting them with a choice:

Austerity or oblivion.

Britain, who owes 64.6% of its Gross Domestic Product to foreign creditors is one of those countries that is facing some tough choices in terms of its budget.

Prime Minister David Cameron and his coalition government partner, Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg, have responded to Britain's looming fiscal crisis in kind. They plan to cut as much as 40% of Britain's national budget in order to get things back under control there.

For her own part, Mallick objects entirely. She wishes to join her voices to those of thousands of Greek and French protesters who have made their decision between austerity or oblivion, and chosen oblivion.

Rather than pare back their demands on the public purse -- at least in the short term -- Mallick and her compatriots have decided to demand that the states in question stay the course toward economic disaster.

After this, there will be no more: an economic collapse that could raze the British economy to the ground. They don't care.

Not that they have no solutions of their own. It just so happens that their medicine would be far more harmful than the disease.

They imagine undercutting core functions of government that they don't care for in favour of maintaining spending to extraneous functions of government that they do. They imagine taxing the living hell out of banks and corporations, not seeming to care where the kind of economic growth necessary to ensure Britain's long-term prosperity will come from.

Canadians already know well the kind of pressure David Cameron and his government are under. When Canada was on the brink of fiscal insolvency in the 1990s, the Canadian government was forced to make some hard decisions as well.

The Jean Chretien government chose to cut things such as education, health care, and provincial transfers. It may have never happened if not for the pressures applied by the Reform Party and individuals such as Andrew Coyne, but the important detail is that it did happen.

15 years later Canada has the fiscal strength to weather what some have described as a perfect economic storm.

In time, Britain may be able to boast the same strength. But not if Heather Mallick has her way. In her own mind, she's chosen for Britain. Fortunately for her, she doesn't have to live there.

Somewhere, in the Darkest Corner of the Toronto Star...

...Heather Mallick could be heard screaming "pramface!!!"

Two Years Later, Heather Mallick Still Playing the Victim

Mallick seeks to re-write the history of her career

Apparently, Heather Mallick's relocation in employment from the CBC to the Toronto Star has had the precise effect so many Canadians expected it would.

It emboldened Mallick, to the extent that she actually thinks she can re-write the history of her career.

For the most part, Mallick regurgitates half-considered complaints about Fox News. Her basic argument is that Sun TV will be bad because Fox News is bad. (No, really -- that's the extent of the argument to date.)

Some of her complaints are so hashed-over that they're actually rather comical:

"Fox celebrates ignorance and fosters hate, it’s your weasel heart, that chunk of you that spurts endorphins when a hated rival crashes his car on Ambien or is caught with a gerbil where a gerbil shouldn’t be. It’s a poison tree. Weirdly transfixing as Glenn Beck is, when you eat the Fox apple, it eats away at you.

And it’s a news cartoon. When real journalists make a mistake, we feel a sickness in our soul. It’s humiliating, it should, and will be, publicly corrected and so-workers avert their eyes. Fox isn’t like that. They seemingly make up numbers, flying unburdened through their fenced-in no-fact zone."

Mallick also complains about a previous run-in with Bill O'Reilly during his famed attempt at a boycott of Canada.

Other than that, the substance of Mallick's argument is that Fox is bad because she says it is. More or less.

Of course, that isn't all Mallick has to say about Fox News. She apparently thinks that this is an opportunity to re-write the history of her career, when she broke a Mighty Wind, and wound up sharting all over her journalistic reputation:

"When Sarah Palin appeared at the Republican convention in 2008, I wrote about her honestly, an online CBC.ca column that would have disappeared into the ether as usual, except Fox News found out about it. I said Palin was a dangerous idiot. It made me the target of the worst Americans and Canadians, men with a violent hatred of (see list above). The attack was organized, as all Internet attacks are. And online anonymous hate is like a poison gas.

It was the same as my previous experience with Fox, but hotter and filthier. I’m happy to be called a pig by Greta Van Susteren, whatever. But this time people, really were hunting not just me, but friends, which made me frantic with guilt and fear. They were trying to find out where I lived. I’m only writing this now because I’m in a building with security guards."

Of course, Mallick didn't merely say that Palin is a "dangerous idiot". She also wrote:

"...Republican men, sexual inadequates that they are..."

"...She isn't even female really."

"John Doyle, the cleverest critic in Canada, comes right out and calls Palin an Alaska hillbilly. Damn his eyes, I wish I'd had the wit to come up with it first. It's safer than 'white trash' but I'll pluck safety out of the nettle danger. Or something."

"Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look ..."

"Bristol has what is known in Britain as the look of the teen mum, the 'pramface.' Husband Todd looks like a roughneck; Track, heading off to Iraq, appears terrified. They claim to be family obsessed while being studiously terrible at parenting."

"The conventioneers are nothing like the rich men who run the party, and that's the mystery of the hick vote."

"Republicans dream of a personal future that involves only household staff, not equals who need to be persuaded to vote."

The sad thing is that this is quite literally the most substantive comment in Mallick's hate-filled rant. The rest of it is basically filler. Terse, brutal, hateful, unreadable filler.

Perhaps Mallick actually feels vindicated to have been swept out of the CBC's dunce corner -- where the CBC promptly parked her after doing the responsible thing and removing her column from the website (although Mallick still maintains the source of her shame on her own site) -- and into the loving arms of the Toronto Star.

But like so many columnists at the Toronto Star, she isn't there because she produces quality work. Quite the contrary. Mallick is at the Star because she produces rhetoric that is ideologically soothing to the far left. Those like Mallick who are filled with an irrational, seething, and soul-consuming hatred of anyone who doesn't share their views, find her vitriolic invective especially soothing.

And no matter how many cues life sends her, Mallick never seems to figure out what her problem is:

"Being the target of Internet swarming is paranoia-producing and lonely-making. I got no sympathy from girlfriends—they eat for comfort like normal people—for my subsequent weight loss. I spent the winter not eating and thinking gloomy thoughts."

Apparently it's never occured to Mallick that she never received any sympathy from her friends because they examined what she wrote and found it to be genuinely repulsive. God knows that every single sane individual who wrote it -- including Dr Jeffrey Kargel of the Obama campaign -- recognized precisely this.

As for Mallick's gloomy thoughts, one can only imagine precisely hateful those thoughts must have been.

The rest of Mallick's column basically consists of the vapid, razor-thin rhetoric she specializes in. For the most part, the entire column consists of her substance-free ravings.

The only thing worth noting in her column is her complete inability to ever admit having done anything wrong. Heather Mallick is the classical lunatic far-leftist who would never dream of taking responsibility for her actions.

That she would seek to portray herself as a victim two years after her hateful Mighty Wind hit piece is purely indicative of that.

What's the Matter With Heather Mallick?

Panic clearly building at Toronto Star

When Heather Mallick agreed to write for the Toronto Star, the editorial board of that newspaper must have had one thing to say to her:

"Welcome home, Heather. Welcome home."

It would only be a matter of time before the Star would gleefully provide a willing forum for Mallick's famed political invective -- the one that eventually earned her a very short leash at the CBC.

Then, it was a disgusting hit-piece on US Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

In that tirade, she compared Palin to a pornstar, denigrated her family, and in the depths of feverish lunacy, suggested that Palin isn't even actually a woman.

It's in the spirit of such invective that Mallick has approached the ongoing election campaign to decide who will be the next mayor of Toronto. With polls suggesting that conservative candidate Rob Ford has pulled ahead of his competition, the Toronto Star has gone into full-blown panic mode.

It isn't a pretty sight.

In a column entitled "Rob Ford as Mayor? Are We Nuts?" Mallick doesn't provide any real logical reason why anyone in Toronto shouldn't want Ford as their mayor. Instead, she tries to needle long-simmering feelings of resentment against, of all things, gym teachers into a full anti-conservative boil:

"I have a degree of sympathy for Ford. We all knew him in high school. He was our gym teacher, the kind who laughed when the slender shy boys got their hair entangled in the trampoline netting."

Mallick being Mallick, that naturally isn't the full extent of the mud directed in Ford's direction. Mallick also pens the following:

"-He is what he is and, unlike most people, makes no attempt to conceal it. What I doubt is that he is like you. Have the police been called to your home to resolve a dispute with your loved one? Do you have a mug shot?

-Voters allegedly like candidates with whom they could happily sit down and have a beer, as was said about Bush. But you couldn’t drink with Bush. He was an alcoholic who no longer drank. And you wouldn’t drink with Ford because he gets angry rather than amiable as, in just one instance, some people in a neighbouring box at the Air Canada Centre discovered in 2006."

Mallick doesn't elaborate very far on either one of these two issues. There may well be good reason for this. Judging from this article by Linda Diebel -- who seems to have been pulled off her national affairs beat to help bolster the paper's anti-Ford efforts -- the official editorial line at the Toronto Star currently seems to be that they'll happily spread innuendo about Ford, but not make any concrete accusations:

"And that thing with his wife?

'Nothing happened. My wife got mad at me. She made an allegation that wasn’t true and the charges never even got to court ... I’ve never laid a hand on a woman in my life. Rule No. 1 in the Ford family: You never touch a woman.'

Other incidents seem muddier.

Did he tell a couple at the Air Canada Centre that the wife should 'go to Iran and get raped and shot?' He says he didn’t, but doesn’t clarify. In a letter to city hall, they claimed he did. He apologized.

'That was just stupidity. I feel terrible about it. My wife and I had a little bit too much to drink ... I made a mistake that will never happen again.'"

In fact, it eems to be one individual -- city councillor Kyle Rae -- who is publicly pusihing the "buffoon" angle.

Which is actually rather ironic. After all, it's Mallick herself who has earned herself a reputation as a very public buffoon. And it's in vein of realizations like this that the following pair of passages become actually rather comical:

"I am wary of the political truism that voters prefer candidates who resemble them. If a candidate resembles me, he’s a bookworm racked with emotion. I wouldn’t vote for me. Run away!

...Why should a politician’s notional resemblance to you recommend his candidacy? If you suspect that people find you buffoonish and a bit of a bully, would voting for your clone make it better to be you?"

Ironically, it's Mallick's reputation that establishes her as a buffoon and a bully. Even according to the reputation she'd like to think she has, the emotions Mallick is "racked" with have so often proven to be extremely ugly ones.

All of this is, of course, the public face of the Toronto Star's anti-Ford efforts.

Behind the scenes the Star has been editing Wiklpedia entries about the candidate and then attempting to disavow any responsibility.

So the question remains: what's the matter with Heather Mallick? A lot of things.

But those things also tend to be wrong with the Toronto Star. There's a reason why she seems so at home there.

Use Your Words, Heather

...Or maybe it's better that you don't

Writing in the Guardian -- the only place where she's able to peddle her political invective these days -- Heather Mallick has a message for Britain:

She despises Canada. So Britain should avoid being like Canada.

Mallick tells Britain that they should "use their words". She describes it as polite shorthand for: "Stop hitting your little friend, you tiny nasty animal. Negotiate. Share your toys. Find a way."

This is immediately preceded by her wailing about how Canada's centre-left opposition parties won't gang up against Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party, and refuse to share their toys with them.

"Use your words". The phrase takes on a particularly facetious tone when it comes from someone whose personal viciousnesa and vindictiveness is as well known as Mallick's.

One just has to look at what Mallick uses her words for:

"Excellent campaigning. If only our hateful pseudo-human Prime Minister would meet a nice granny in Kamloops and hurt her feelings. Actually, Harper would knee her in the groin and block her hip replacement, he's that personal in his hates.

Canada has a Conservative minority government right now that does have a core belief. It's that Canadians deserve a good stomping, all of them. Conservatives can't stand people, particularly if they're female, or second-generation Canadian, or educated, or principled, or not from Alberta, which is the home of the hard-right belly-bulging middle-aged Tory male. Watch them at the G8, ostensibly fighting for women's health internationally while blocking abortions for raped Congolese."

Stephen Harper is "hateful", "pseduo-human", and assaults the elderly.

Is that what Heather Mallick is trying to say here?

Conservatives are so hateful that they "can't stand people" (it helps that in Mallick's mind Conservatives are "pseudo-human", so themselves are not people), and are sexist fat old men.

(Unless they're Rona Ambrose, in which case it's acceptable to make sexist jokes about her hair.)

It kind of reminds one of what Mallick had to say in the column that effectively ended any semblence of revelance she may have enjoyed at the CBC:

"It's possible that Republican men, sexual inadequates that they are, really believe that women will vote for a woman just because she's a woman.

...

...No, she isn't even female really. She's a type, and she comes in male form too.

...

Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look favoured by this decade's woman, the overtreated hair, puffy lips and permanently alarmed expression. Bristol has what is known in Britain as the look of the teen mum, the "pramface." Husband Todd looks like a roughneck; Track, heading off to Iraq, appears terrified."

Republican men are "sexually inadequate". Sarah Palin isn't really female. She looks like a primped-up porn star. Her daughter is a hussy impregnated out of wedlock. Her husband is a redneck, and her son is a sissy.

Yep. Heather Mallick is a poster-girl for the civilized nature of the use of words. When she insists that the use of words is the act of the civil, everyone should take her seriously.

Not.

One imagines that perhaps Canadians should be thankful for one thing. If Mallick is going to insist on using her words, as they were, at least she's doing it far, far away from Canada -- in what seems to be the only news outlet that will actually print this kind of drivel.

In the meantime, she should feel free to count herself among Murray Dobbin and those desperate denizens of the far left who either have failed to understand that Canadians relected the Liberal/NDP/Bloc coalition, or simply don't care.

It isn't as if she possesses so much of a shred of relevance. Any semblence of it she ever possessed was drowned in her own bile a long time ago.

A Gold Medal in Hysteria

Heather Mallick comes spectacularly unhinged

Over time, Heather Mallick has become something of the Jerry Springer of Canadian political commentary: one simply never knows what she's about to do next.

A recent op/ed published on the UTV website is Mallick at her lunatic best. It's so incoherent that one's almost shocked it never made it onto the CBC website.

This time, it seems the provoking factor for Mallick's insanity is none other than the Olympic games. It's driven her into hysterics over Stephen Harper:

"Whenever Stephen Harper's big boxy grey-lidded head appeared on screen, with its wet smile (note on his hand: Try to grin like normal human), I would rant at anyone within hearing, ie, no one. 'He's Bush with a mean streak, he's a Slytherin , we only gave him a minority government in a prolonged fit of pique.' (Then I'd say it in French, out of bilingual idealism.)"

Over trees:

"The event gave the impression that Canadians spent their time posing on pointy mountains, paddling navy blue lakes and staring at evergreens (anti-deciduous to an extent that verged on the racist, I say), surrounded by snow snow snow, more snow than air. And we honour the wisdom of our aboriginal peoples, whose land we, well, stole but they have forgiven us and dance at our Olympic ceremonies."

And nature in general, and aboriginal affairs:

"The event gave the impression that Canadians spent their time posing on pointy mountains, paddling navy blue lakes and staring at evergreens (anti-deciduous to an extent that verged on the racist, I say), surrounded by snow snow snow, more snow than air. And we honour the wisdom of our aboriginal peoples, whose land we, well, stole but they have forgiven us and dance at our Olympic ceremonies."

Apparently, it's unthinkable to Mallick that the Olympic opening ceremonies should feature an appearance by the Prime Minister, the wrong type of trees, and aboriginals who don't hold historical grudges.

Apparently, the presence of these things made for a terrible opening ceremonies.

"I spent it sobbing," Mallick writes. "Thanks, Olympic organisers!"

Mallick then goes on to implore the organizers of the London 2012 Olympics to do better.

One can't help but wonder what Mallick would have preferred that the ceremony be wrought with comparisons of Sarah Palin to porn stars. Perhaps she'd have liked to see the Prime Minister covered in green slime as a follow-up.

Considering that Heather Mallick so prefers Britain that she now publishes her embarrassing attempts at political commentary there, one can only hope that she'll enjoy the London 2012 opening ceremonies enough that she'll decide to stay and frighten small children there as opposed to doing it here in Canada.

An Instant Emergency

Heather Mallick decries proroguement of Parliament

For many Canadians, if any one particular word could be used to describe Heather Mallick, it's almost certainly "tiresome".

Mallick demolished her own credibility with a vindictive hit-piece on Sarah Palin during the 2008 Presidential election. Under most circumstances, appealing to such ignominity would have to be treated as an ad hominem attack.

Unless, of course, it serves to appropriately characterize an individual as an ideological attack dog.

Similarly, the phrase "instant emergency" should strike most people as a tautology, unless it serves to describe a situation in which a particular course of action is only deemed to be threatening or troubling now.

This is, frankly, the only realistic manner in which to treat the complaints of Mallick and her compatriots over Stephen Harper's recent proroguement of Parliament: only suddenly is an emergency, or even an outrage.

"If there was a gold medal for shafting democracy at the Winter Olympics, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper would win it," Mallick fumes in a recent op/ed column. "Just before the games open in Vancouver, he has halted Parliament in its tracks, suspending it for the second time in little more than a year."

"Canada will not have a House of Commons until March 3," Mallick continues. "Instantly, we are a part-time democracy, a shabby diminished place packed with angry voiceless citizens whose votes have been rendered meaningless."

Mallick doth protest far too much. After all, she's made it clear on many previous occasions that Mallick doesn't consider this "diminishment" of Canada to be sudden at all. In fact, Mallick seems to think that Canada was diminished the moment it elected a conservative government.

In fact, she insists that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been planning that "diminishment" for a good, long time.

"Harper, that strange vengeful man you will see in February clapping awkwardly as Olympians leap off mountains and shoot past in the luge, has been on a mission since his youth to turn Canada into a pale, watery version of the United States of America," she complains. "Even then, the US was well into its identity-switch into the undereducated, paranoid, self-destructively aggressive overspent mess we watch now with grim fascination."

Of course, as some other commentators have already noted, Mallick and her ilk were suspiciously quiet on some of the occasions in which the Liberal Party prorogued Parliament.

Mallick and her compatriots insist that Harper is proroguing Parliament to escape from the "scandal" surrounding the treatment of Afghan detainees. There is a fundamental facetiousness at the centre of these claims -- one that insists on treating this matter as if it were the province of the Tories and the Tories alone.

In reality, there's a great deal of blame to go around. Some of it does indeed lie with the Conservative Party. Some of it rests with failures in the chain of command within the Canadian Forces, and more still lies with the Liberal Party who negotiated the prisoner transfer agreement in the first place.

In truth, proroguement of Parliament is a routine event. While Harper's previous proroguement was decidedly not routine -- it was done to head off an undemocratic attempt by the Liberal Party, NDP and Bloc Quebecois to impose an irresponsible coalition government on the country.

Whereas the current proroguement is intended to give Harper time to prepare phase two of his economic plan, take advantage of the diplomatic opportunity that is the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, and -- if you believe Don Newman -- position for a spring election.

Which still beats the hell out of what the Liberal Party used proroguement for, hands-down. For his own part, former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien prorogued Parliament on four separate occasions.

On September 16, 2002, Chretien prorogued Parliament so he could prepare a Throne Speech that would test the resolve of the pro-Paul Martin faction within his party, which were trying to force him out of office faster.

On November 13, 2003, Chretien progogued Parliament again. This time, Parliament was prorogued in order to prolong Martin's transition into the Prime Minister's Office.

Whatever individuals like Mallick may want to complain about, Harper has yet to prorogue Parliament just to give himself an advantage in internal party wrangling. Jean Chretien and the Liberal Party literally kept Parliament waiting for them to settle their internal squabbles.

So, one may ask: which was the greater outrage?

Heather Mallick, by omission, has come up with an ideologically partisan answer. It isn't any kind of a surprise. Rather, it's precisely what those unfortunate enough to encounter her ramblings have come to expect of her.


Other bloggers writing about this topic:

A CAW Workers' Voice of Reason - "Heather Malick Reinforces The Fact She Is An Idiot"

No, It Doesn't -- And It Isn't About Gender

Heather Mallick has a bizarre & inflated sense of gun registry's effectiveness

As the 20th anniversary of the 1989 L'Ecole Polytechnique, the ideological stalwarts of Canada's left wing are milking it for as much as the memory of the 14 killed are worth.

In the case of Heather Mallick, her cause is the long gun registry. In her most recent column published at the CBC website -- which seems to break the moritorium on allowing her to publish there on serious matters following her Mighty Wind debacle -- Mallick reminds readers that Marc Lepine, the perpetrator of the shooting, used a hunting rifle to kill his victims.

"Lépine used a Ruger Mini-14, the kind of gun normally used by hunters to kill gophers, groundhogs and rabbits," Mallick recounts. "It's a comfortable gun, lightweight with little recoil, and it's semi-automatic, which means it fires without complications every time you pull the trigger (especially effective with a larger magazine of 20 bullets). It's very accurate to begin with, but in a classroom, experts say, you couldn't miss if you tried. And Lépine, a hater of all women, especially police officers and prominent successful women, did not."

Mallick's sense of gender self-importance cuts not only to the core of her feelings about L'Ecole Polytechnique (this would be only natural). But her feelings of gender self-importance also seem to cut to the core of the gun registry itself, as she seems to imagine that support for the long gun registry is rooted in machismo.

"The registry requires only this: If you buy or own a gun — and this includes rifles used by farmers and hunters, firing range enthusiasts, etc — it must be registered," Mallick writes. "It won't be confiscated, but law enforcement officials will know you have it. Is this so damaging to one's own personal notion of one's manhood?"

Right. Support for the abolition of the gun registry isn't based on not wanting to see the government continue to waste money on programs, masquerading as gun control, that do absolutely nothing to accomplish their goal, but on male preoccupation with their own masculinity.

Or, there's the matter of shame.

"There's no reason to be ashamed of owning a rifle if you live rurally and make rural excursions, and no reason to object to registering your gun the same way you register your car, house, boat, dog and cat," Mallick continues. "You often register major purchases in case they turn out to be faulty. The city inspects your house to make sure it's reliably built, your life insurer knows your health status, your home insurer prowls around, and doctors regularly probe your cavities and press your tender areas for signs of cancer."

Of course, we don't do any of these things under the false impression that doing so will protect us from crime, or protect others from us. As a matter of fact, the people who Canadians need protection from simply don't register their weapons.

Mallick evidently knows the gun issue as poorly as she knows gun owners.

When appeals to emotion aren't sufficient for Mallick, however, she falls back on twisting or distorting the facts.

"In 2009, police made an average 10,800 calls a day to find out registry information," Mallick writes.

Except, Mallick doesn't mention that police are logged onto the gun registry every time they log onto their onboard computer systems. So while some of the calls to the gun registry may well be to get information about particular guns, calls in which the express purpose of the call number far, far fewer than the nearly 11,000 Mallick claims.

When Mallick fails to impress with her razor-thin emotion-based appeals, she simply shows her contempt for the teeming rural masses.

"As Stephen Hume wrote this month in the Vancouver Sun, the loud, endlessly complaining rural minority doesn't understand the facts about gun deaths," Mallick writes.

But Mallick would be mistaken in suggesting that the gun registry is opposed only by a "rural minority". In fact, only in Quebec do a majority of Canadians favour maintaining the registry.

In fact, as it turns out, it's the pro-registry minority that are loud. And far more often than necessary, they're pretending that the long gun registry is a matter of gender politics.

It's not about gender politics. And individuals like Heather Mallick need to learn that it isn't all about them.

Yeah, Antonia. About That Whole "Sexism" Thing...

Zerbisias decries state of feminism in United States

Writing from her bully pulpit at the Toronto Star, Antonia Zerbisias continues her ongoing quest against... yep, you guessed it: sexism.

Yet among those she identifies as the targets of sexism in the United States is, oddly, enough Sarah Palin.

"Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin? Both still get 'bitch-slapped' around in the most virulent sexist terms," Zerbisias complains. "Women's looks, their clothing, even their voices – all are not-so-fair game, no matter how accomplished they may be."

It's an interesting complaint. One might wonder what Zerbisias would have thought if a sexist attack on Sarah Palin were made by someone who is allegedly accomplished, and female.

How about by Zerbisias' "chesty sister" Heather Mallick?

Mallick's "Mighty Wind" has been played and replayed so much it's almost become a cliche. But at a time like this, it might be a useful exercise to examine a few of Mallick's more "enlightened" comments in the course of that article:

-Palin appealed to the "white trash" vote (by the way, Republicans apparently own that).
-Republican men are sexually inadequate.
-Palin dresses like a porn actress.
-Bristol Palin's pregnancy means Sarah and Todd Palin are bad parents.

Readers may recall that "A Mighty Wind" was the column that pretty much convinced CBC to take her punditry skills elsewhere and stick to writing fluff. (Mallick has, by the way, plied her punditry skills elsewhere, with disastrous results.)

One may want to direct their attention toward the latter two bullet points. It sounds an awful lot like the "women's looks, their clothing, even their voices" complaint that Zerbisias is making here.

As a matter of fact, it sounds exactly like it.

So, one may wonder what it was that Antonia Zerbisias had to say about Heather Mallick's "Mighty Wind". The answer seems to be "why, nothing. Nothing at all."

To find that such a dedicated denizen of the far left could be so disingenuous isn't all that hard to believe. In fact, observers of what passes for feminist commentary these days have long realized that sexism (like racism) can be perfectly acceptable, so long as it comes from the "right" source.

Breaking Bones For Politics

Produced by the CBC's Bob McKeown, Sticks and Stones is a brief exploration of right-wing bias in US news media.

The film explores notions that the news media has a left-wing bias, and points to Dan Rather and Walter Kronkite as the figures originally associated with left-wing media bias.

Bernard Goldberg became conservative America's star witness against left-wing media bias.

McKeown then moves on to address individuals like Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter and Rachel Marsden, while using individuals like Al Franken and Heather Mallick as witnesses to the virulent nature of the right-wing media -- Mallick even conjures tears at one point.

McKeown clearly takes a certain amount of glee in cornering Coulter and Marsden -- and really, who wouldn't? Marsden shifts uncomfortably when being questioned about her stalking of her ex-boyfriend, and Coulter stridently insists that Canada sent troops to Vietnam, even as McKeown inists we didn't.

(As an interesting side note, Coulter is actually right and wrong about Canadian troops in Vietnam. Canada contributed 240 soldiers to the United Nations' Operation Gallant, which was a peacekeeping mission, not part of the US war there -- although the North Vietnamese felt differently at the time, and accused Canadian troops of passing intelligence along to Canadian forces.)

Yet McKeown's own CBC is not immune to criticisms regarding bias. Fresh in the minds of many Canadians is Christina Lawand's dishonest editing of a Stephen Harper press conference, Krista Ericksen colluding with a Liberal MP, and Heather Mallick discrediting herself in spectacular fashion.

Meanwhile, south of the 49th parallel, Keith Olbermann and Janeane Garofalo indulged themselves in the kind of bombastic nonsense that so often finds a place on Fox News.

Sticks and Stones was produced in 2004, and as a result couldn't possibly be expected to address examples such as these. But it tends to ignore left-wing media bias in favour right-wing bias.

The simple fact of the matter is that both left-wing and right-wing biases can be detected in the media, depending upon which outlet one examines. Almost everyone claims to be opposed to bias in the media, but the truth is quite different.

Almost everyone is in favour of media bias. More importantly, almost everyone is in favour of their particular media bias.

Further Evidence that Heather Mallick is Utterly Crazy

Ideology can make for some strange bedfellows

Many Canadians still remember the embarrassing debacle surrounding Heather Mallick and her her comments about the Palin family during the recent US Presidential Elections.

The extremely anti-feminist undertones of Mallick's comments -- joining the chorus of Sarah Palin's left-wing detractors who proved utterly delighted to denounce her daughter as a tramp -- only served to further reinforce the image of Mallick as someone not altogether comfortable with the principles she espouses, or with reality.

Her most recent piece of commentary to appear on CBC only further demonstrates precisely how out of touch Mallick really is.

In a column entitled "Let Gorgeous George Speak", Mallick gushes enthusiastically over George Galloway, who was recently denied entry into Canada over his financial links to Hamas.

"I could listen to Galloway all night," Mallick writes. "He's practically Shakespearean in his fierceness and perfect phrasing. He's like Tony Benn (another troublesome British politician of the left) whose oratory was so valued that it was actually released on CD with an ambient soundtrack."

"Another clever Brit, the polymath Stephen Fry, calls them the QIs. It stands for Quite Interesting," Mallick continues. "It is a category that includes The Literate, The Talkers, the people with a sense of humour who add gaiety to our increasingly grunted national discussion."

Apparently, in Malick's mind, Galloway's barring from the country has nothing to do with his actions, and it has everything to do with jealousy at "Gorgeous" George Galloway.

"Banning this argumentative, energizing Scot will make Canada look even more like what we are rapidly becoming: a hamster of a country, petting and fattening its dullness, silencing dissent, mocking artists, musicians and anyone who's creative, or odd, or not entirely mainstream," Mallick insists.

Only a resevoir of visine and the lack of sense of most of Mallick's supporters could deaden the sound of 60 million rolling eyes.

Mallick even tries to counter the fact that Galloway donated money to Hamas, listed as a terrorist organization in Canada, by citing Hamas' status as the elected government of Gaza, and by echoing Galloway's claim that he had donated that money for aid purposes.

But by the same token, Galloway could have donated that money to the Red Cross or the Red Crescent and enjoyed further assurances that the money would have actually been used for aid purposes, as opposed to being used to purchase weapons that would be stored in hospitals and schools.

Not to mention Galloway's extremely questionable financial links to Saddam Hussein.

"Free speech does not exist in this hamster country," Mallick complains. "I, for instance, cannot speak about the value of English literature at a university campus in Alberta because anti-abortionists dislike my pro-choice views and promise to riot over my presence, harming donations."

Of course, where Mallick chooses to use the word "riot", anti-abortion advocates had actually promised to protest.

If one could miss the irony of Mallick whining about her freedom of speech being impugned by other people exercising their freedom of speech, it would be difficult to see how.

"Free speech is no longer a cause," Mallick muses. "It is a weapon used against those who wish to speak by those who don't wish to let others hear it."

"I wish to hear Galloway speak and not only because he speaks so well," she continues. "I am ashamed of what this country is turning into, a humourless place that celebrates unreason and the subtraction of ancient freedoms."

It's unsurprising that Mallick would be so desparate to make this issue about freedom of speech. Many Canadians continue -- wrongly -- to insist that Mallick's freedom of speech was curtailed when the CBC removed her atrocious "Mighty Wind" from its website.

Freedom of speech doesn't equate the right to be published by any media outlet -- just as freedom of speech doesn't guarantee freedom of entry.

It isn't surprising Mallick would try to transform Galloway's barring from Canada as a free speech canard. It's just strange that she would do this in a column on the very same day Galloway gave his speech through a video link.

Galloway was clearly no threat to Canadian security. But the law is the law.

No self-respecting Canadian would actually want Galloway in the country. Only someone as out-of-touch with reality as Heather Mallick could actually want him here.

On "Change"...

Heather Mallick is down with change... at least when it's other people changing

In an opinion article published on the CBC website, Heather Mallick is being herself again.

Not as outrageously as before. Her infamous "Sarah Palin has a secret penis/why Republican men need viagra" column should be fresh in the minds of many Canadians, as should the controversy surrounding it.

On Saturday, ahead of Barack Obama's inauguration, Mallick has taken an interesting attitude toward change.

Change? Who, me?

In the column, Mallick takes issue with Obama's official inauguration poster:

"Barack Obama is making me nervous. "Be the change," his official inauguration poster urges. Until recently I would have done anything the man suggested. But could he be more specific?

This presidential inauguration is a good time for my chronic paranoia to flower. (How did George W. Bush put it, "Fool me once, shame on-shame on you. Fool me-you can't get fooled again.")

What change? Does it make me uncool to wonder if I shouldn't make the change rather than be it?"

Which really seems to imply a particular character issue of Mallick's when it pertains to change.

The slogan on the poster is a shortened version of "be the change you want to see". This adage basically suggests to people that if they want to change the world, they should first change themselves, making themselves reflective of that change. The strong Buddhist undertones of this maxim tend to be spiritually and intellectually soothing.

The message of the poster could be interpreted any number of ways.

A particularly compelling interpretation could harken back to Obama's own campaign slogan "yes we can". Heavily populist in nature, the slogan was refreshing because it symbolized faith not in Obama to change the United States, but in the ability of the citizens of the United States to change their country under Obama's leadership.

It was a drastic departure from the "yes he can" message that would normally typify American politics.

Now, on the eve of his inauguration, Obama is expanding the message. In order for the people of the United States to change their country, they must first change themselves, both individually and collectively. Once again, Obama seeks to empower the people rather than glorify himself.

Hopefully, he even believes it.

But for Mallick, change isn't something she wants to be -- it's something she wants to make.

Namely, she wants to make other people change:

"I don't want to be illusioned about Obama. I want to get it right, from the start, and not be let down.

Obama invited to his inauguration a man (Pastor Rick Warren) who has openly preached that gays are lesser beings, unfit to marry and raise children.

When I initially decided to overlook this politically pragmatic invite, I felt like a bully, which is the worst thing a person can be. It's easy for me to let Obama off the hook on Warren, but then I'm not gay.

That is why I don't like this skilled rendition of Obama gazing into a distance, which is clearly implied to be packed with future glory, and being told to Be the Change.

What change, I ask again? It sounds like the same old thing."

To a great many people (including this writer), the inclusion of Pastor Rick Warren at Obama's inauguration seems extremely unfortunate.

But then again, a great many people (sadly) hold beliefs such as this. To banish them from the public eye or from public functions doesn't do anyone much of a service. Instead, they'll merely foment their views in isolation and alienation.

There is, of course, the possibility that they may change their views. That would be welcome to a great many people (including this writer). But to demand they change their views lest they be unwelcome to come to the party is not what a monist like Obama would do. After all, monism is the belief that there are certain universal moral principles that everyone can agree upon provided that they can be convinced, and it's hard to convince someone who you won't let in the front door.

For Obama to achieve the kind of collaborative, inclusive change that we wants to implement, he needds to open a dialogue with a great many people that he and his supporters would otherwise disagree with.

But it seems that Mallick herself isn't feeling very collaborative or inclusive:

"We liberal-minded people, hundreds of millions of us, have triumphed. We were proved right about George W. Bush.

We said that he embraced stupidity; it is wonderful to see intellect valued again in public office.

We said he panicked after Sept 11, 2001, and gave terrorists the most valuable gift imaginable — America's self-inflicted blows to its own military and system of justice.

We said that private affluence couldn't be sustained when it accompanied public squalor and now the economic collapse is destroying both spheres. (Obama can't fix this but he'll have to try.)

We said the invasion of Iraq was not justified. (Obama will have to find a way out of the morass.)

We said torture was wrong and the rest of the world would come to hate America and its allies for it. (Now Obama's torture-deploring cabinet nominees will need to find a way to restore a great nation's good name.)

So I should be high on happiness right now, no? The second Gilded Age is dead. People are thinking hard about the health of the planet.

In my own little universe, I finally have the birch tree in my garden I've longed for since childhood. I have eyesight, a pile of new books to read and am hearing rumours about a new 9-inch computer screen for reading big fat newspapers on my lap. That screen might save the industry I work in.

I'm finally teaching the university class I want to teach to the students I want to teach it to. I can spend the year watching Malia and Sasha Obama and their rivers of laughter and curiosity as they explore the White House and the world it opens up.

Hark at me, trying to pump up enthusiasm in my own personal head. Yes, we were right. The thing is, though, I'd almost rather have been proved wrong.

I feel no triumph whatsoever and the triumphalism of the inauguration poster leaves me wary. It's redolent of wartime. I don't feel giddy. I just feel tired."

Mallick's message is very clear:

We (the left wing) won. Now all the stupid people (everyone else) can fuck off.

But if Mallick ever believed that such an exclusionary and parochial result was going to come out of Obama's election, then she wasn't paying attention. If she believed this, she hasn't paid attention to a single word spoken or written by Barack Obama.

Those familiar with Mallick have every reason to suspect she'll never change. That's why she'll never truly be part of the change that Barack Obama wants to implement.

Ouch. That's Gotta Hurt

BarackObama.com blogger weighs in on Heather Mallick

When Heather Mallick wrote her "Mighty Wind" op/ed column -- the very one that so deliberately baited so many of the Republican right's more unbalanced denizens, one has to think that Mallick imagined that the pro-Obama crowd would crystalize around her cause, coming to her stalwart defense.

Not so. As it turns out (unsurprisingly) far too many Barack Obama supporters are too wise to do that. Consider the following comments from BarackObama.com blogger Dr Jeffrey Kargel:

"Heather Mallick, your outrageous commentary about Sarah Palin goes far beyond what decency and political common sense and common purpose would allow. (Readers, if you must, see http://www.heathermallick.ca/cbc.ca-columns/a-mighty-wind-blows-through-republican-convention.html.) Of course you are free to vent your anger, as I and so many others have regarding McCain's inane or downright stupid choice of VP. Sarah Palin, according to probably just about any male or female qualitative assessment, is cute, pretty, or gorgeous: take your pick. By some accounts, and in my judgment (the little I know of her), she is a great hockey Mom and raised her kids well; mistakes happen, and teenagers make more than the per capita annual average number of mistakes.

All this has some bearing on society, like maybe the cover and inside pages of People magazine, but it amounts to noise and fluff with respect to the real debates and decisions being made based on real political positions (and lack thereof) of the candidates. Heather Mallick, your commentary is mere fluff and noise, and is fairly hateful stuff at that. Your commentary detracts from the real issues. You may have intended it as a humorous, satirical piece, but it missed that mark by a long shot. There was nothing funny about it, at least not in my opinion. You treated one vindictive woman's lack of political and personal Presidential-quality character with your own vindictive diatribe; and you exposed your lack of integrity and balance. Sarah Palin needs to be dealt with, but not the way you tried to deal with it. I'd rather have balanced commentary that nobody reads than to seek attention through writing sheer trash and nonsense. You ought to feel quite ashamed."

Unfortunately, Dr Kargel, she doesn't.

As a matter of fact, Mallick has used the outrage and some of the more... unenlightened... responses to her tirade to mentally reinforce her schema of herself as more cultured than the great unwashed of the pro-Palin crowd.

Meanwhile, one may wonder who Dr Jeffrey Kargel is. He's an astronomist at the University of Arizona. If an astronomist -- so very far removed from the beer-swilling redneck Mallick imagines emailing her threats from the monster truck rally -- can see Mallick's invective for what it is, it isn't too hard to think of something to tell Mallick she can do with her sense of self-superiority.

She won't be cozying too closely to the Obama campaign, that's for certain.

A Lament For Lessons Unlearned

Here's what you should have learned, Heather

As most people grow into adulthood, they find themselves in a rather precarious position.

No longer children but not yet fully adults, the safety net that had accompanied childhood is mostly gone -- except under the direst of circumstances -- and the pressure to become a better, stronger and more independent person truly mounts.

A premium quickly emerges to learn from one's mistakes.

So then what does it say about CBC op/ed columnist and fervent blinkered left-wing feminist ideologue Heather Mallick that she can't seem to learn from hers?

In a column published by CBC yesterday, Mallick at long last offers her thoughts on the controversy that emerged following her notorious "Mighty Wind" column:

"A month ago, I wrote about Sarah Palin's unfitness to be the Republican vice-presidential nominee and attracted the wholly unwelcome attention of Fox News and its viewers."

So Mallick considers Sarah Palin unfit to be the Republican Vice Presidential nominee. Fair enough. There's a case to made for that, if one can actually make it.

But many observers feel that Mallick herself is unfit to be a journalist -- the case she made for herself when she resorted to a personal attack in lieu of actual legitimate political criticism.

For those, like Mallick, so driven to the depths of loonishness by Palin's nomination, may benefit from a few quick notes about how to not make oneself look like a political vulture:

First off, attacks on a politician's family are extremely bad form.

Second, the personal relationships of family members of a politician (such as Bristol Palin's relationship with Levi Johnson) should be considered off-limits. Once again, not only is this bad form, but actually suggests that you're unable of debating the issues.

Third, try not to show your actual contempt for the people you claim to give a shit about.

Fourth, making unsubstantiated claims about a broad group of people tends to make one look, frankly, stupid.

Last but not least, don't bait the crazies. For example, if one knows that there are unstable individuals among America's Republican right -- and there most certainly are -- then dismissing the lot of them as sexually inadequate "white trash" may not be the best idea.

Which is really what Mallick's characterization of the attention of Fox News and its viewers as "unwelcome".

Was she operating under some delusion that cbc.ca is unavailable in the United States? Or that maybe, just maybe, they'd never find out about it?

Or maybe the entire point was to attract said attention, and to stir up the ensuing controversy. Except that this one turned out to bite Mallick in the ass a little bit, fatally damaging the very slim journalistic credibility she once possessed.

There's something about writing a column with the vicious character of Mallick's "Mighty Wind" article and then complaining about receiving hate mail afterward.

Sarah Palin's favourite joke could probably be paraphrased as such: "What's the difference between a pit bull and Heather Mallick? A pit bull doesn't poke a hornet's nest and then whine about it afterward."

Or was it "lipstick"?

No matter.

Unsurprisingly, Mallick seems ill-prepared to take any responsibility for her own comments. In fact, in Kevin Potvin-esque fashion, she predictably blames Fox News for provoking the outrage:

"After Fox got the firestorm restarted, we redirected the next few hundred threats to the e-mail belonging to my husband, who is British and unflappable. He initially read them, rather than mass-delete, so that kind people offering encouragement would not be ignored. Readers are hurt when you don't reply. Canadians are nice. Angry sometimes, but not violent.

But Fox viewers are a piece of work. I last appeared on Fox News in 2004 when I went on Bill O'Reilly's show to defend American war resisters sheltering in Canada. O'Reilly lost his mind, if he ever had one, and he was so mad about Vancouver's safe-injection site that he threatened to tell his fans to boycott Canada and destroy our economy, as they had that of France, he alleged, ludicrously. The conversation was so deranged that anti-Foxers sent me personalized "baguette" coffee mugs as souvenirs. "Beellions of dollairs," they read.

This time, I explained to Fox producers that I couldn't appear because Fox viewers are, like their hosts, too violently brutish to alienate. Fox shows aren't interviews so much as bear-baiting. I didn't watch the Fox shows on the subject of me or read the subsequent Canadian commentary in print or online."

So in the end, Mallick seems to take no responsibility for the response to her own comments. In fact, in Mallick's mind, her comments have nothing to do with the entire affair. Instead, Fox News (and all the other news outlets, both off- and online) are to blame.

Yet perhaps the greatest irony in Mallick's response to the entire affair is that she doesn't yet seem to have comprehended just how much like her hated right-wing counterparts on Fox news she really has shown herself to be.

Take, for example, the comments offered on the matter by Fox News commentator Greta Van Susteren, who responded to Mallick's comparison of Sarah Palin to a porn star by calling Mallick a "pig".

To put this in suitable context, when Heather Mallick was confronted with a Vice Presidential candidate she didn't like, she wrote an insult-laden tirade about her and her supporters. When Greta Van Susteren read the article, she settled for insulting Mallick back.

Sadly, this is all preschool calibre politics with no sense whatsoever of the larger issues at stake in this particular matter.

As mentioned here previously, Heather Mallick, of all people should be able to regard a pregnant teenager as a societal dilemma -- one created as much by Mallick's left-wing feminism as by the religious right -- rather than merely a political football to be punted.

Political field goals may be treated as points on the board, but recognizing and solving the real problems are the touchdowns of the game.

But if one needed any further proof that Mallick simply doesn't get it, one only needs consider the following passage:

"Online has brought instant media democratization as well as the erasure of national borders. And websites have not devised a way to keep online forums civilized. "There's no point debating anything online," writes the columnist Charlie Brooker. "You might as well hurl shoes in the air to knock clouds from the sky."

I used to write for print newspapers - an endangered species of their own - but this squabble made me think of Lévi-Strauss's theory of human culture, the raw versus the cooked: Cooking marks the transition from nature to culture. Online commentary is still mostly raw.

I have now discovered the joy of no e-mail; I cannot tell you how peaceful and happy life has become in the world of the cooked."

Apparently, in Mallick's mind, to attack the family of a political opponent and label their supporters as "white trash" qualifies as cultured.

The absurdity of that very notion need not be commented on or explained here.

Only a blinkered ideologue -- as Lindsay Stewart, an apparent huge fan of Mallick's wound describe her if he could muster the sense to do so -- Heather Mallick could come out of something like this with their arrogant sense of superiority intact.

But then again, this may be the greatest tragedy of an individual who, even at Mallick's age (she turns 50 next year), has yet to achieve full adult hood.

It's a lament for lessons unlearned.

Leave This One to the Pros, Kids...

Cruickshank, Carlin not alone in their assessment of Mallick's "Mighty Wind"

In the wake of the CBC's mea culpa regarding Heather Mallick's "Mighty Wind" op/ed column, a distinct odour is spreading through some of the darkest corners of Canada's left-wing blogosphere.

It's the familiar stink of outrage.

The CBC is merely being gutless, and caving into right-wing interests, the consensus seems to be.

Yet the consensus among media professionals -- people who actually confront issues such as those surrounding the infamous Mallick article -- is that the CBC was precisely right in its judgment. As the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente points out, one need not even be a Palin supporter to figure this out:

"It's fun to bash Sarah Palin. I should know. I've been doing it for weeks. But nobody has bashed her quite as viciously as a semi-obscure columnist named Heather Mallick.

"Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look ... the overtreated hair, puffy lips and permanently alarmed expression," she wrote in a column that was posted Sept. 5 on the CBC's online news site. And she didn't stop there. She went on to refer to Republican men as "sexual inadequates," small-town Americans as "hicks" and "hillbillies," Bristol's boyfriend, Levi, as a "ratboy," and the Palins as terrible parents. "What normal father would want Levi 'I'm a fuckin' redneck' Johnson prodding his daughter?" she wondered.

Vitriolic drivel is all the rage these days. The blogosphere is full of it. But this drivel was bought and paid for by the CBC. And soon the organic waste material hit the fan. The National Post went ballistic. So did Fox News, which loves nothing better than denouncing the left-wing loonies who live up here in Canada.

"Is this what actually passes for commentary at a publicly funded broadcasting company in Canada?" seethed a Fox News babe. Even Fox's Greta Van Susteren got into the act. She called Ms. Mallick a "pig." Ms. Mallick was deluged with hate mail, and the CBC with hundreds of complaints. Ms. Van Susteren said it was all in fun and invited Ms. Mallick on the air, but she declined.

Ms. Mallick has professed shock at the hate mail she's received (tell me about it), while revelling in her new-found notoriety. But Sunday, the CBC finally ate crow and yanked the column from its website. "We erred in our judgment," said news publisher John Cruickshank, who called the column a "viciously personal, grossly hyperbolic and intensely partisan" piece of political invective that should never have been published. The ombudsman had looked into the matter, and found many of her "most savage assertions lack a basis in fact." I'll say. For one thing, she obviously knows nothing about the sex lives of Republicans.

The Mallick affair is bad news for the CBC, because it reinforces the widespread belief the place is a hotbed of left-wing bias. That's not good news when a Tory government controls the purse strings. Nor is it entirely fair. The CBC's online commentary arm is not exactly the flagship of the network. It is a backwater that has served as a sort of semi-retirement home for aging lefties (think Judy Rebick) who could no longer find an outlet in the mainstream media and, one suspects, supplied copy cheap. They had little oversight and less influence - until now.

The truth about the CBC is more complicated. Its problem isn't an overt left-wing bias. Its problem is an earnest, mushy-liberal mindset that can scarcely entertain a contrarian idea. Its editors, producers and directors strive to be fair-minded. It's just hardly any of them would ever vote Tory. Oh, they try. Once they even had right-wing commentator David Frum guest-host The Current. But people were so shocked they never did it again.

Ironically, no one is more bothered by this groupthink than the top CBC managers themselves. More than one have told me that it drives them crazy. And it's no accident that left-wing faces such as Avi Lewis have recently decamped for the greener fields of English-language Al Jazeera. Although I haven't talked to Mr. Cruickshank (a former colleague), my guess is that part of his mandate is to vigorously encourage a wider range of world views. Too bad Ms. Mallick popped up to prove the critics right.

Meantime, I'm not feeling too sorry for Ms. Mallick. She is a sour, narrow-minded writer - the kind of who makes Michael Moore look like a world-class wit. Her reflexive anti-Americanism is heavy-handed and stale, to say nothing of casually racist. There are many, many ways of dissing Sarah Palin. But Ms. Mallick's naughty, coarse puerility is not among them."

This may be hard for lunatics like Lindsay Stewart to come to grips with, but plenty of people -- not merely right-wingers or denizens of the Free Republic website -- find Mallick's column objectionable, and unworthy of publishing.

But, hey, don't ask them -- they're merely professionals. What do they know?

Birds of a Feather Hate Together

My, how shocking...

Of all the people to defend Heather Mallick, it's certainly unsurprising that Canadian Cynic's partner in hatecrime, Lindsay Stewart, one be among them.

Mallick's seething epithets are nothing more than fact, Stewart insists, and suggests that Carlin would have realized this had he simply practiced "due diligence".

As evidence of this, Stewart offers up alleged "close ties" between Sarah Palin and Thomas Muthee.

And yet, as one closely examines the coverage of the so-called "Mutheegate" controversy, one uncovers the sheer triviality of Palin's so-called "association" with Muthee.

She was blassed once by Muthee, on a single occasion.

Wow. Clearly Palin and Murthee are bestest buds.

Apparently, meeting someone once is sufficient to have a "very close relationship", as Scott Swenson describes them.

And while Palin could -- and perhaps even should have, hindsight being 20/20 and all -- have stopped Muthee in his tracks the minute he started wailing about "witchcraft", she would have had to interrupt his blessing in order to do so. Which would have certainly been impolite. But what's impolite when dealing with an individual who incited his largely-uneducated followers to mass murder?

Certainly, Palin could -- and perhaps even should -- have refused to meet Muthee at all.

Then there's the reason why hindsight is 20/20 -- because it's often so clear due to knowing that one didn't know at the time. And there is no indication that Palin had ever met Muthee before he delivered a guest sermon at a church she formally left in 2002, nor has she met him since.

There is no indication that Palin knew about Muthee's horiffic activities before meeting him, and no indication that she knew about these things until the news of them broke.

But then again, what's the truth when one is trying to run up political points by distorting reality?

Keep in mind that this is follows Stewart trying to prove "factually" that Republican men are "sexually inadequate" by citing a long list of sex scandals, including some featuring prostitutes underage children.

Interestingly, Stewart declines to mention numerous Democrat sex scandals, some of which also include prostitutes and underage children.

Curious, that.

In the end, much of Stewart's thesis lies on the revelation that there are, indeed, wingnuts amongst Palin's supporters.

Yet Lindsay Stewart takes the wingnutty comments of these wingnuttish characters, and declares that they represent all of Palin's supporters. A few of Palin's supporters could be described as "white trash" if one attaches a contemptuous value statement to their comments. A few of Palin's supporters could be described as "white trash". Ergo, all of Palin's supporters are white trash.

Stewart unsurprisingly tries to turn Palin's son Trig -- whom CBC reporter Neil MacDonald suggested may actually be Bristol Palin's child -- against her, echoing the full range of political snakes and vultures who are so eager to pick apart Palin's personal life.

Stewart also shamefully tries to envoke the Bristol Palin issue again, trying to stick his nose into a very private matter and exploit it for partisan gain. (Which is quite ironic, considering the things that could be said about one of his blogmates -- but won't be. Someone, after all, has to choose to be bigger than Lindsay Stewart and his pack of online hatemongers.)

The distinct pro-abortion anti-feminism inherent in the exploitation of this issue has already been addressed elsewhere.

Comically (and with dishonesty typical of himself), Stewart insists that "the Palin/McCain campaign are the ones responsible for making a spectacle out of the girl."

Apparently, Stewart himself never wrote anything like this.

Who's making the spectacle, indeed? Let's not forget that "journalists" like Neil MacDonald were out to drag Bristol Palin into some kind of controversy similar to this before the pregnancy story even broke. But, nope, it isn't the various left-wing activists out to destroy Sarah Palin who are making the spectacle, apparently it's Palin herself.

What a joke.

Which, in the end, is precisely what Stewart insists the Mallick article was:

"Oh how silly of me, you do think we're stupid. Reading Mallick's piece we are obviously not bright enough to recognize satire without a flashing light reminding us that this is not a dissertation, litany or insurance manual."

It wouldn't be hard to mistake Lindsay Stewart for stupid -- just like his blogmate mistakes Canadians for stupid. After all, apparently, Stewart doesn't know what satire really is.

Satire, first off, is best done when its humourous, but it's generally meant to make a hyperbolic parody of something. So what, precisely, does Stewart suggest Mallick is making a parody of here? Herself? Are we really supposed to believe that what Mallick wrote doesn't dislike Sarah Palin? The same Heather Mallick who has been relentless in her criticism of Palin?

Not that there's anything wrong with criticizing Sarah Palin. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made -- starting with, but not limited to, her advocacy of abstinence-only sex education.

But describing her as a porn actress isn't one of them. Nor is using her down syndrome-stricken child to question her political judgement.

It doesn't take a rocket science to recognize Mallick's column as precisely what it factually was. Not satire, as Stewart insists it was, but invective as John Cruickshank recognized it.

But even the obvious simplicity of the issue doesn't abate Stewart's outrage:

"You Mr Carlin and your complicit and cowardly superiors have buckled to pressure from a handful of pearl clutching ninnies and let us not forget what put the real fear in your quisling heart. You betrayed one of your own freelancers because you were scared of the noisy reaction. You have become enemies of freedom and liberty, engaging in censorship at the behest of the liars who pretend to support freedom of speech."

Vince Carlin: enemy of freedom and liberty?

Apparently, "freedom" and "liberty" depend upon the CBC to allow Heather Mallick to publish whatever hateful diatribe she wishes on their website.

And, apparently, CBC executives should not have freedom of expression enough to decide that they don't want to be involved in the publishing of garbage like Mallick's column. Apparently, anyone writing for the CBC should consider their "freedom of expression" more important than the protection of the institution's reputation.

What an absolute joke.

"CBC is being run by cowards, it seems. Change your britches little man, the scary people will go away now that you've bent a knee and given in to their ignorant demands."

But at the end of the day, people with a moral compass far more effective and resolute than Lindsay Stewart's will decide whether or not Carlin and Cruickshank's course of action is the wise one to take.

At the end of the day, however, the question is thus: who is the bigger man? The man who decides that allowing a freelance journalist to use the CBC as a soapbox to attack a politician through their family is a mistake, or the one who denounces him for it?

At the end of the day, who is the coward? The individual who recognizes that attacking a politician through their family is wrong, or the invididual who indulges himself in doing so while accusing the politician themselves of making the spectacle?

Of course, this is all par for the course from Lindsay Stewart. What else does one really expect from an individual who insisted that a 69-year-old man pushed off the roof of a car simply slipped and "sucked pavement"?

The answer: you don't expect much. Which is precisely what Stewart delivered today.

What a joke.