Frances Russel, Lawrence Martin, Linda McQuaig & Conspiracy Theories as Journalism

"FOX North" conspiracy theory jumps the shark

With SUN Media's new television network applying for a category one broadcasting license from the CRTC -- which would require cable and satellite services to offer it -- the far left's compunction for conspiracy theorizing has officially jumped the shark.

Writing for Rabble.ca, Frances Russell is alluding to an article by Lawrence Martin, wherein he himself alludes to anonymous "insiders" who infer that Prime Minister set to, at his earliest opportunity, appoint a CRTC chair and vice-chair who would be in favour of the network.

Martin goes on to suggest that Kory Teneckye, Harper's former communications director, has been molding what individuals like Martin already argued was a conservative-biased newspaper chain into a conservative-biased newspaper chain.

His evidence is the firing of Greg Weston, whom Martin suggest was fired as retaliation for breaking the G20 "fake lake" non-story. (The "fake lake" which was, for the record, a hit with international media. The Canadian government showcasing Canadian media technology to the global media -- what an outrage!)

Martin deliberately overlooks the detail that various news outlets have been tightening their belts in the current economic climate. (Perhaps if Weston spent less time chasing non-stories and more time chasing real stories, he may have escaped the axe.)

The irony is so deep it could be grilled medium rare and then eaten with a knife and fork: Lawrence Martin, the long-time Liberal party shill, declaring Sun Media to be a Conservative party shill.

Perhaps the most suitable response is to admit that he may be right: after all, it's long been said that it takes one to know one.

Moving beyond Martin, it's clear that vitriol, rather than any rational objection to a conservative news network, drove Russell's pen as she wrote this column. If not, one would wonder what to make of this:

"The tone of political discourse, already shifted sharply right with the advent of Conrad Black's National Post in 1998, is about to take a quantum leap further down that road. The signs are numerous and ominous: The internet is already doused daily with the vitriol of thousands of anonymous far-right bloggers who slander and libel politicians, the media and all opponents with vile, often illiterate postings. Parliament and the country's entire political culture is being dug ever deeper into a mire of character assassination, personal insult and attack, smear campaigns, relentless and ruthless partisanship and denigration and demonization of any and all opponents."

Naturally, Russell the far-left demagogue has nothing to say about the legions of far-left bloggers who not only do precisely the same, but are often even more vicious and ruthless about it.

Russell's next exhibit is a column by none other than the Toronto Star's perpetually-reality-challenged Linda McQuaig:

"'There's been a tendency in the Canadian media to dismiss the threat of a Fox News transplant on the grounds Canadians wouldn't fall for that sort of nasty, right-wing extremism,' she writes. 'But that comforting notion may be naïve.' Most people don't have time to follow politics in detail, she continues. 'If they hear constant sound bites suggesting global warming is a hoax or public health care just doesn't work, after a while the message starts to seem believable.'

She points out the media already blasts Canadians with a steady chorus of right-wing ideas. 'A Fox-style network here -- if Harper gets his way -- would turn that into a deafening cacophony.'"

Of course, McQuaig doesn't elaborate on this particular claim. Would it be the CBC "blasting" Canadians with "right-wing ideas"? The same CBC whose executives overwhelmingly donate to the Liberal Party?

Of course not. This is simply another case of McQuaig refusing -- simply refusing -- to familiarize herself with reality.

It's hardly surprising that for all the objection to SUN Media starting a TV news network, there isn't one rational, factual or even coherent argument among them. The worst-kept secret regarding media bias is that everyone is in favour of media bias: they simply prefer that the media would share their bias.

Underlying this controversy is the fact that Canada's left seems to want the CRTC to, for no rational or logical reason, enforce the maintenance of the the dominant bias they prefer -- and they're peddling some rather bizarre conspiracy theories in order to justify it.

A Crash Course in Reality for Linda McQuaig

McQuaig contemptibly refuses to acknowledge reality

The government's recent decision to purchase F-35 fighter jets to replace Canada's aging fleet of CF-18 Hornets has driven at least one point home to the Canadian public:

The Toronto Star seems to have attracted a stable of peacenik writers who simply refuse to acquaint themselves with reality.

Previously, it was Michael Byers, the foreign policy "expert" who implicitly suggested that Canada simply doesn't need fighter jets. Now it's Linda McQuaig.

Writing in an op/ed, McQuaig starts out by suggesting that Canadians simply don't want a new fleet of fighter jets.

"Of all the things Canadians want from their government, my guess is that new military fighter jets would probably rank close to last," McQuaig writes.

"But new fighter jets are what we’re getting," she complains. "Despite the enduring popularity of peacekeeping among Canadians, the Harper government continues to ramp up war-oriented military spending, most recently with its announcement of plans to buy 65 F-35 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin."

McQuaig is clearly clinging to the Pearsonian model of peacekeeping despite the fact that the nature of modern conflicts -- which, as opposed to being inter-state conflicts tend to be ethnic or religious conflicts -- has rendered it obselete.

Few know this better than the person whom McQuaig likely hopes her criticism of this purchase would benefit -- Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.

Ignatieff has made it clear on numerous occasions that the peacekeeping model people like McQuaig favour is simply no longer applicable to modern conflicts -- including Darfur, where McQuaig has previously made it clear she would like to see Canadians deployed.

During a 2008 speech at the University of Alberta -- carried in full exclusively at the Nexus -- Ignatieff cast doubt on a Darfur deployment as a peaceful alternative to deployments such as Afghanistan.

"The problems in Darfur are extremely serious. Sometimes people can say that 'if I can just go there. Why Afghanistan? Why not Darfur?'. The only thing to bear in mind when you say that is just think about what a deployment of Canadians in Darfur would look like.

It's 55 degrees centigrade. There's no cover anywhere. Do you think the Janjaweed are going to get off their camels and walk up when they see a Canadian flag and our hand? No. It's a combat mission."

In a combat mission such as that in the Sudan, the paramount goal of Canadian forces wouldn't be to advance McQuaig's far-left hippie ideology. It would be to accomplish the goals of the mission with a minimum of casualties.

That demands air cover -- the kind of air cover provided by helicopters, and by a fighter jet like the Lightning II, that can hover and deliver its munitions in close combat situations.

McQuaig, however, clearly refuses -- simply refuses -- to acquaint herself with this reality.

Even McQuaig's insistence that the looming end of Canada's combat engagement in Afghanistan should lead to a reduction in military expenditures is highly suspect.

After all, the reduction in Canada's hard power capabilities led to situations like in Rwanda, where an under-sized, under-equipped and under-supplied contingent of UN peacekeepers -- under Canadian command -- were forced to stand impotently by while more than 800,000 were ruthlessly slaughtered.

In Canada, the lack of political will to make the appropriate contribution to that mission was compounded by the lack of political will to even have that capability in the first place.

Simply put, when people like Linda McQuaig criticize Stephen Harper's government for investing in Canada's military capabilities, they are simply talking out of their ass.

L:nda McQuaig doesn't know the first thing about these kinds of issues, and she never has. By the force of her own will, she never will.

McQuaig's commitment to a discredited peacenik ideology not only fails to save lives overseas, but would actually put the lives of Canadian servicemen at an unacceptable level of risk.

One could offer Linda McQuaig a crash course in reality, but any attempt to educate her in such matters will plummet to Earth faster than Canada's fleet of CF-18s will if not replaced in the near future.

The New-Age Political Dilemma: Leadership or Management?

Canada needs to correct historical leadership deficit

If one were to ask Canadians, there would be little question: Canadians want to lead the world.

Paradoxically, if one were to ask Canadians, they may receive a contradictory answer: Canadians feel as if their country has failed to ascend to a position of leadership in the world, and has instead been relegated into the ranks of the followers.

For one, Lieutenant General (ret) Romeo Dallaire would wistfully agree. And as disappointing as this state of affairs may be for many Canadians, those many Canadians may also have to agree with Dallaire when he points out that we may ultimately only have ourselves to blame: Canada's failure to lead on the global stage may have come about as a result of a deficit of leadership at home.

"We have been a very well-managed country, but we have not been well led," Dallaire recently told an audience in Peterborough, Ontario. "We are within the power structure of the world, what are we going to do with it?"

"We've got to move to change the future," he added.

Anyone who has ever been privileged enough to hear Dallaire, who continues to serve his country as a Liberal Senator, speak understands the depth of his faith in Canadians. This is a man who not only fervently believes that Canadians can lead on the global stage, but rather knows we can.

He's done it himself. In 1994, he sacrificed too much of himself trying to avert the genocide that took place in Rwanda, where Hutu militia slaughtered nearly 1,000,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Dallaire and his UNAMIR peacekeeping force struggled against the superior numbers of the Hutu militia, insufficient supplies and ammunition, and scarcity of even the most basic necessities while waiting for the world to wake up to what was taking place in Rwanda.

By the time the civil conflict in Rwanda began to wound down and a reinforced UNAMIR 2 mission began to deploy, Dallaire was utterly spent. Suffering from the Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome that would frame the next few years of his life.

Both Dallaire's message and his example are crystal clear: leadership on the world stage isn't a right -- it's a privilege that must be earned. Furthermore, it comes with a price.

Sadly, it seems that all too often either Canadian leaders, or Canadians in general, aren't willing to pay the price for leadership on the world stage. Global leadership comes with various costs: financial, political, personal, and human.

Throughout much of the postwar period, Canada's political leaders proved unwilling to pay the financial cost of global leadership. Under Pearson, Trudeau, Mulroney and Chretien, funding of Canada's armed forces continually declined until after 9/11, when security-related pressures forced the Chretien government to start to take the issue seriously.

But by the time the 1994 conflict in Rwanda rolled around, Canada's military was approaching dire straights. While many other countries came to admire Canada's armed forces, it was largely because they were accomplishing tremendously impressive feats with tremendously sub-par equipment.

The argument could be raised that even if Chretien's government cared enough about what was happening in Rwanda, it was still unable to respond due to the neglected state of Canada's military.

Yet remarkably many of those who would have been most eager to send a significant contingent of Canadian troops into Rwanda have actually decried recent military spending that, once upon a time, would have made such a rescue operation possible.

It's hard to fault blinkered ideologues such as Linda McQuaig for such an inconsistency. They literally have no understanding of what most modern peacekeeping missions actually entail.

Even those who may otherwise profit politically from denouncing the Harper government's military spending understand why it's so crucial. As Michael Ignatieff notes:

"One of the things I have learned in 15 years out there in the killing fields of Africa and the Balkans, is that you can't protect human beings with blue berets and a sidearm. I'm fiercely proud of our peacekeeping tradition. Where peacekeeping of the traditional Pearsonian sort can be practiced we must practice it. But in a lot of cases now, in situations where you want to protect human beings, you want to prevent them from being ethnically cleansed or massacred because of their race, religion or ethnicity, you've got to have bulked up capabilities. You gotta go in there with flak jackets, you've got to have armour, you've gotta protect them."

What individuals such as Linda McQuaig -- in fact, the entire core of writers publishing via Global Research have willfully overlooked is the nature of modern conflict. The days of the idealized Pearsonian blue beret have long passed.

Even when one considers the current situation in Afghanistan and the often-idealized alternative mission in the Sudan, one encounters serious shortages of realistic thinking on the part of such ideologues. Once again, from Ignatieff:

"The problems in Darfur, however, are extremely serious. Sometimes people can say that "if I can just go there. Why Afghanistan? Why not Darfur?". The only thing to bear in mind when you say that is just think about what a deployment of Canadians in Darfur would look like.

It's 55 degrees centigrade. There's no cover anywhere. Do you think the Janjaweed are going to get off their camels and walk up when they see a Canadian flag and shake our hand? No. It's a combat mission."

But there's a reason why McQuaig and her contemporaries prefer peacekeeping missions such as the one they imagine in Darfur to the less pleasant business of conducting warfare -- peacekeeping comes with virtually no political price for them. Unless peacekeepers are killed in a Mogadishu-style ambush, peacekeeping is considered to be a politically nonthreatening activity -- generally considered to be a noble cause.

Warfare, on the other hand, is seen quite differently, even when the cause being fought for is in line with Canadian interests and values. Even when a withdrawal from the theatre of conflict would result in the ascension of a regime -- such as the Taliban -- so antithetical to Canadian values.

Even when the potential triumph or defeat of Canadian values -- so often claimed by individuals such as McQuaig as their values -- is at stake, these are people who are unwilling to pay a political price for them.

Sadly, sometimes even those Canadians who claim to support missions such as that in Afghanistan are unwilling to pay a political price for it. Little else remains to be said about Stephen Harper's recent decision to end the mission altogether in 2011, whether the mission is accomplished or not.

Sometimes leadership on the global stage carries a tremendous personal cost. As previously mentioned, Dallaire himself has paid that personal cost in spades -- and paid not only his own share, but that of an entire country.

It's only natural, however, that many people would be reluctant to pay the human cost of global leadership. No one enjoys the prospect of sending troops overseas to die. When they are sent, every prayer is uttered that they'll return home safely.

But even as those who would end up paying that human cost with their lives or health continue to support their mission despite the loss of their comrades, it serves a reminder: our service men and women volunteer knowing that the price of global leadership may be their lives.

This does nothing to undermine the responsibility of political leaders to ensure that the lives of our service men and women are risked only when necessary. But it should also remind them that such risks are truly inevitable, regardless of the anxiety that accompanies making decisions that may very well turn out to be matters of life and death.

Dallaire understands this. The current road of global leadership is not an easy one to traverse. "We are in a new era and it's not necessarily the easiest era," Dallaire said. "If you are a leader, part of your job is to anticipate the future. We are in a time of revolutions and not in an era of change."

The challenge for Canadians will be to decide whether they want their leaders to lead, or to settle for "leaders" who promote themselves more as public managers.

If Canadians want to lead on the global stage, we'll need to understand that such leadership has to start at home. And it has to begin with both leaders and citizens who are willing to pay that price.

Dear Wanks: Stephane Dion Has Your "Separation of Church and State" Right Here

Are anti-religious protesters equal-opportunity protesters?

It seems like a silly thing, but there were people in Canada who shit kittens the second Prime Minister Stephen Harper started saying "god bless Canada".

"Is it just me or does anyone else find it ominous that Harper says 'God bless Canada'?" asked Linda McQuaig in a column at Rabble.ca.

"Stephen Harper is a radical neocon theocrat [and] the media is too even-handed," insisted Jeff Monaghan, who would eventually be arrested for leaking confidential documents during his employment at Environment Canada.

"God Bless Canada is an obvious aping of American politicians finishing their speeches with 'Thank you. God bless America'," wrote one frantic (and unidentifiable) demagogue. "'God Bless Canada' does not mean 'I love Canada'. I am honestly please. At best, it means 'I love Alberta'. Harper hates Canada."

When Ontario Progressive Conservative leader John Tory suggested the Ontario government should fund all religious schools, as opposed only to Catholic schools, Toronto Star readers sounded off repeatedly about the "separation of church and state".

Now, Liberal leader Stephane Dion has announced he'd like to provide a $75 million fund to help places of worship targeted for vandalism by varying bigots protect their property.

Which, although laudable, naturally makes a lot less sense than providing religious organizations with tax dollars in order to fund education.

The fact is that Dion's proposal is actually quite benign. As was John Tory's plan to fund faith-based schools, and as is Stephen Harper saying "god bless Canada".

Will those who protested Harper and Tory in the name of separation of church and state now protest Stephane Dion?

One severely doubts it, but only time will tell.