Behold, the Mindset of the Palin Haters

Stephen Hanks Shows Who He Is

Did Dan Sawyer Verbally Harrass Tory Convention Attendees?

You be the judge:

Lunatics Behaving... Like Lunatics

With amusing regularity, one of the far-left's favourite political tactics is to set out to capture footage of conservatives behaving badly.

Courtesy of Jeff Jedras we get a vision of how the 200 far-lefties who turned out in Ottawa to fawn over Brigette DePape behaved. It was not, by any means, a positive picture.

Clearly visible in the video, which Jedras (himself not a Conservative) filmed while walking to the convention to cover it as an accredited blogger, are basically the standard far-left sore losers.

"Fuck you, shame on you, go to hell," one man shouts at Tories as they peacefully walk to their convention.

"I hope you choke on your money!" an unseen woman can be heard shouting.

At one point what sounds like a faint "you are Godless" can even be heard.

Each individual Conservative who peacefully passes by their fuming throng is serenaded with shouts of "shame!". (Apparently, Conservatives should be ashamed to win elections, fair and square.)

It's a comical reminder of the extreme double-standard deliberately promoted by the far-left. If conservative protesters were to appear at the upcoming NDP convention, they would instantly declare it to be an act of bullying and intimidation. When far-left protesters present at the Conservative Party convention are subjected to actual bullying and actual acts of verbal intimidation, it's simply brushed off as inconsequential.

Jedras, to his own exemplary credit, doesn't shy away from the aggressive protesters, nor did he hide the evidence of the far-left's typical behaviour, as Rabble does.

In viewing Rabble's own video of the protest, it becomes clear that mr "fuck you, shame on you, go to hell" was not by any means a random protester. Rather, it was Dan Sawyer of Take Back the Capital, who was given a stage to speak on.

Jeff Jedras may be solidly on the left, but he hasn't descended into the depths of hatred those further left than he have resorted to. Nor does he hide it, as many would.

(After all, Rabble did.)

Torture Derangement Syndrome

Please, please, pleeeeeeeease pay no attention to Liberal Party complicity in torture

When dealing with The Chickenwankers, that collection of "Progressive" bloggers who lacks the courage to decide for themselves who may or may not comment on their blogs, one can expect one thing above all others:

The intellectual dishonesty and cowardice of The Chickenwankers truly knows no bounds.

A typical case in point is Sister Sage's Musings proprietor CK. In a recent post there, she decides that the CBC is afflicted with "Liberal derangement syndrome" for reporting on the most recent development in the allegations regarding the torture of Afghan detainees:

"It never seems to stop. This time, it appears that the CBC is now afflicted with LDS. It is now helping the Harpercons do that whole 'blame the Libruls' thang back in order to deflect and distract. Yikes!"

Apparently, in the mind of CK, the role of the CBC isn't to report the news -- not by a long shot. Rather, CK seems to think that the role of the CBC is to suppress any story that doesn't directly benefit her ideological agenda.

And it would now seem that the CBC is off the reservation.

For those not in the know, it turns out that Liberal party received even more warnings about the potential torture of Afghan detainees than a recently re-revealed story in La Presse indicated.

Recently, Eileen Olexiuk, who was the second-in-command of the Canadian embassy in Kabul, recently reported that she warned the Paul Martin government on many occasions that torture was common in Afghan prisons.

Her warnings went unheeded.

"I don't think anybody really cared, quite frankly," she said.

The Martin government had apparently considered establishing a Canadian detention centre in Afghanistan, or handing detainees over to US Forces to be held in their facilities. Both options were rejected out of fear of a Guantanamo Bay-esque scandal.

Instead, the Liberals ignored the warnings regarding torture, and negotiated a prisoner transfer agreement with the government of Afghanistan that did not allow Canadian forces sufficient monitoring powers over detainees transferred -- an oversight that the Stephen Harper government has since corrected.

An apologist for anything left-wing no less esteemed than fellow Chickenwanker John Baglow insists that if the Liberal Party is guilty of anything, it's of signing a flawed PTA.

Baglow previously insisted that the obvious Liberal complicity in torture be discounted out of "Canadian fairness". "Canadian fairness" apparently doesn't apply to the governments that actually fix the problems left behind by their predecessors.

CK goes on to insist that the Liberal Party isn't very troubled by the notion that their complicitly would -- or, rather, already has -- come to light. Admittedly, Ujjal Dosanjh certainly doesn't seem worried.

"We want to be transparent, and learn what mistakes were made, and who knew what and what was hidden from the public, either by the Liberal government or the current Conservative government," Dosanjh insisted.

Of course, Dosanjh has every reason to be confident. His party has been doing everything it can to make an issue out of the highly-questionable Richard Colvin allegations for months, all while the media declined to report on the pre-2006 timeline.

All but overheard in Liberal Party circles was "seriously, do you believe this? Do you fucking believe this? It's a matter of public record that our government negotiated and signed the PTA under which the torture took place, and the media isn't saying 'boo'. We get to tar the Conservatives for our supreme fuck up! Do you believe this? It's too good to be true!"

If CK and John Baglow are guilty of anything, it's of two things.

The first is trying to sell something that was too good to be true. They both knew, just like any Canadians who have paid even passing attention to this story, that the Liberal Party made the torture of detainees transferred by Canadian forces possible in the first place.

The second, clearly, is an act of historical revisionism. They are just as guilty as anyone else for the phenomenon of the orphan timeline, a bizarre rhetorical approach to the matter that has attempted to omit the entire pre-2006 timeline and the entire post-2007 timeline from the public discourse.

Having invested so much time and energy in peddling a derangement syndrome to anyone foolish enough to listen to them, they simply cannot bring themselves to admit that if the Conservative government is guilty of anything it's of not taking torture allegations seriously enough. The Liberal Party is clearly guilty of the same.

Considering the well-known Al Qaida/Taliban tendency to falsely claim torture, it would be hard to blame either.

The difference between the two, of course, is that the Conservative Party didn't sign a fatally flawed Prisoner Transfer Agreement despite having been warned.

The Liberals did.

CK and John Baglow may consider themselves free to desperately try and spin that.

The Assassination Card

The left is still playing it

With the scope of dissent against US President Barack Obama continuing to intensify, the political elements that worked so hard to win his election have slowly, over time, awakened to the full extent of the nightmare that is confronting them.

On the domestic front, at least, Obama seems well on his way to becoming every bit as unpopular as George W Bush.

There's an irony in this. Many of those who campaigned on Obama's behalf went to some rather bizarre lengths to pretend that, in defeating Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, that they were actually beating Bush. Now Obama is facing the same domestic political troubles that a political environment as polarized as that of the United States inevitably produces for any leader.

The results haven't been pretty.

To date, the definitive response of Obama's supporters has been to play a series of cards. The most prominent of these has been the race card, in which those opposing Obama have been accused of being racists, regardless of whether or not their words or actions actually justify the charge.

Another has been the "assassination card".

An interesting case in point has been that of Chris Broughton.

Broughton first began to flirt with international fame when he committed the inherently foolish act of showing up to an Arizona Town Hall meeting at which Obama would be speaking with an AR-15 assault rifle. It wasn't this act alone, however, which garnered him infamy.

It was, rather, the efforts of MSNBC's Contessa Brewer to use footage of him to suggest that an assassination attempt on the President may be imminent.

"There are questions about whether this has racial overtones," Brewer insisted. "I mean, here you have a man of color in the presidency and white people showing up with guns."

The ironic point was that Broughton is actually African American, and that the footage of him was very selectively edited to obscure this fact. This may have gone entirely undetected if not for the presence of CNN reporters at the same event, who interviewed Broughton.

But the left was unwilling to surrender the assassination card, even under the condition of discredit. So the left-wing machine went back to work, and they discovered that Broughton is a member of Reverend Steven Anderson's congregation.

Anderson will be remembered as the individual who delivered the contemptible "spiritual warfare" sermon in which he prayed for Obama's death.

Some left-wing commentators have claimed that the incident is evidence of how "conservative Christian hate speech" (evidently without considering that "Christian hate speech" is an oxymoron) could incite assassination attempts against the President.

Yet those individuals have clearly chosen to overlook the fact that, regardless of how contemptible Anderson's definitively un-Christian sermon is (and it most certainly is), Anderson also called for Obama to die of natural causes.

"I don't want him to be a martyr, we don't need another holiday," Anderson later explained. "I'd like to see him die, like Ted Kennedy, of brain cancer."

Broughton would later state that he "concurs" with Anderson's words.

Certainly, this confirms that race doesn't form the basis of the hatred Anderson worships.

One may recall that, to Contessa Brewer, race was initially supposed to be at the heart of the alleged assassination plots against Obama. Until it turned out that it wasn't race. Then, it was religion.

All of this without an assassination plot in the first place.

But this, it seems, may all be immaterial. What matters most to many of these activists isn't whether or not such claims are truthful, but whether or not they can use them to help demonize any conservative opposition whatsoever, regardless of whether that comes from extreme conservative elements -- like Reverend Steven Anderson -- or from more moderate conservative elements that are simply alarmed about the direction in which Barack Obama is trying to take their country.

The assassination card, as any rational individual knows, isn't about fear of an assassination. It's about fear of dissent, and about doing anything possible to marginalize it.

Michael Byers: Nutty Professer or Nuttiest Professor?

Byers would be a disaster for Canada

Nearly two weeks ago, Michael Byers fired an ideological shot across the bow of reality.

In an op/ed article published in the Toronto Star, Byers proposed that the Liberal party and NDP combine their efforts to block a Conservative majority government -- by delivering a majority Liberal government.

(This despite the fact that the last thing the NDP wants is a Liberal majority government.)

Byers' piece was widely mocked by those who recognized how unfeasible, politically selfish, and (frankly) stupid it is. It was widely applauded by ideologues willing to overlook these shortcomings.

The Ottawa Citizen's Leonard Stern has since offered one of the better responses to Byers' article:

"Byers is an eminent political scientist in Vancouver (and an occasional contributor to the Citizen's opinion pages). He's well known as an academic-activist, who situates himself firmly on the Canadian left. No pretense of scholarly objectivity from Byers, at least not in his role as public intellectual. In the last federal election he ran — and lost — for the NDP in the riding of Vancouver Centre."

Stern chalks the vehemence of Byers' opposition to Harper up to a Derangement Syndrome:

"Many leftist intellectuals despise Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in no small part because they see him as a traitor to the educated class. Harper — who has a graduate degree in economics — has never identified with the liberal elites who traditionally dominate political life in the major urban centres of Canada. It's one thing to be a conservative if you just got off the turnip truck — liberals can tolerate and even expect that. But a clever, policy-wonkish conservative like Stephen Harper represents a serious threat to the received order. Harper's electoral success drives leftist intellectuals such as Byers dangerously close to madness.

Byers is so disoriented by the prospect of further Conservative victories that he is proposing a radical subversion of democracy. Byers wants the NDP and Liberal parties to collude, whereby they'd agree not to run candidates against each other in the next federal election. He outlined his idea in this op-ed in the Toronto Star. In every single riding across the country, either the Liberals or NDP would agree to not run a candidate, based on which party fared worse in the last election. This is necessary, he says, in order 'to prevent a Harper majority.'"

When Byers' article quickly faded from the public imagination, one would expect that Byers would reconsider his ideas. But, as Stern points out, Byers is as stubborn as any ideologue:

"In a CBC interview Sunday, Byers went on about how a Conservative majority would be a tragedy for Canada. Basically apocalyptic. The end of our country as we know it, he seems to think."

The "disaster for Canada" argument was trotted out repeatedly by ideologues of Byers' ilk long before Stephen Harper ever became Prime Minister. But it's obvious that fewer and fewer Canadians share the opinion of Byers and his fellow fearmongers.

But it's even more interesting to look back at some of Byers' ideas and appraise who would really be a "disaster for Canada".

In a New Year's Day 2008 op/ed column, Byers denounced Harper for -- amongst other things -- recalling Canada's ambassador to Iran and interrupting diplomatic relations with that country.

What Byers failed to mention that Harper recalled the ambassador as a protest over Iran's handling of the Zahra Kazemi case.

Byers is often promoted as a foreign policy expert, and if the NDP were ever able to win government -- either as a majority or minority -- one would have to consider Michael Byers to be a candidate for Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The notion of a Foreign Affairs Minister who believes that foreign countries should be able to beat and rape Canadian citizens to death without so much as a diplomatic hiccup between the two countries is largely self-explanatory. It would lead to oppressive countries -- like Iran -- believing they can do absolutely anything they feel like to Canadian citizens with impunity.

Michael Byers can white and cry about the "disaster" that is Stephen Harper to his heart's content. Canadians who have familiarized themselves with Byers' ideas know who the real disaster for Canada would be.

It's the professor nutty enough to believe that the government should interact unblinkingly with countries who abuse Canadian citizens.

The Nobel No Prize

Nobel Peace Prize as much a burden as an honour for US President

As various leftist sychophants continue to preen over US President Barack Obama recently being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the lion's share of the commentary over the matter seems to revolve around whether or not Obama actually deserves the prize.

Almost certainly, he doesn't -- not yet, not even by the specious line of reasoning used by Rachel Maddow.

But even under the questionable reasons given for awarding the prize to Obama -- encouraging him to embrace diplomacy over American force -- the award committee hasn't truly done Obama any favours. In fact, as Andrew Cohen posits, the "promisary note" award may actually prove to be a millstone around Obama's neck.

In many ways, it turned out to be precisely that for Lester Pearson, who received his Nobel Peace Prize before ever becoming leader of the Liberal party, let alone Prime Minister:

"...The prize may have been the worst thing that ever happened to Mike Pearson. To many it turned him into a peacemaker and a pacifist. It conjured up an enduring image of a toga-clad high priest atop a stony mountain, uttering mystical mantras into the winds.

Pearson was just embarking on a feverish decade as Leader of the Opposition and Prime Minister. Twice, in both roles, the prize would come to haunt him.

In 1963, Pearson reversed his party's stand and agreed to accept the deployment of US nuclear weapons in Canada. It was a political master-stroke that helped split John Diefenbaker's Conservatives and propel the Liberals to power that spring.

But Pearson angered his party's left wing. His critics couldn't believe that a Nobel laureate could countenance nuclear weapons. An angry Pierre Trudeau famously called him 'the defrocked prince of peace' and refused to run as a Liberal that year.

In 1965, as prime minister, Pearson came under pressure to urge Lyndon Johnson to end the bombing of Vietnam. The question arose: how could our poster boy of peace remain silent during the greatest aerial bombardment in history?

Once again, Pearson acted as a conscientious, practical politician, not as a pacifist. He had long tried to contain 'thermo-nuclear weapons,' as he called them, but believed that Canada had to honour its commitment to accept them as a member of NATO, which he had helped conceive and shape in 1949.

He opposed the war in Vietnam and gave a contentious speech in Philadelphia proposing a halt in the bombing. For his trouble he was picked up and dressed down by LBJ the next day. Ever the pragmatist, Pearson then went silent in public, worried about damaging relations between the two countries."

Pearson's experience demonstrates that the kind of expectations produced by a Nobel Peace Prize win can create expectations that would, if satisfied, permanently divorce that individual from realism. Moreover, observing diplomacy just for the sake of diplomacy can often paint a leader into a corner in which they can't criticize the actions of another country for fear of offending them.

For Barack Obama, the problems of living up to the expectations set for him by a Nobel Peace Prize are obvious. They are the same as the problems of living up to the expectations set for him by the progressive movement that so deftly delivered him to power in the first place.

If Obama continues -- as he must -- to prosecute either of the two wars his country is currently engaged in (and abandoning Afghanistan is simply not an option for him) he will certainly disappoint many members of the global "peace" movement who believe his Nobel Peace Prize should provide the impetus for retirement from the field of battle.

Obama is almost certain to disappoint and anger a great number of people no matter what he does from here on out.

At the very least, however, the Rachel Maddows of the world, suffering from the sycophantic strain of Derangement Syndrome, will still applaud no matter what.