Backlash to Maclean's "Disturbing New Poll"

Barbara Kay in the National Post takes to task Maclean's Magazine for chiding Canadians as intolerent based on some poll findings. I meant to post on this, but I think Kay sums it up well. I expect better from Maclean's

Of the many features offending against minimal standards of objectivity in this poll, two stand out as especially discrediting.

One is Maclean's' solicitation of editorial commentary on the poll numbers from Ihsaan Gardee, executive director of Islamism-supportive CAIRCan. CAIR-Can has never repudiated Islamic terrorism and fellow-travels with the Muslim brotherhood. The Brotherhood is openly committed to the promotion of stealth jihad, and is universally acknowledged as the intellectual fountainhead of Sunni Islamic radicalism. No media organ should invite such an extremist institution to pass moral judgment on Canadians.

The other is Maclean's' overt editorial criticism around the very low level of acceptance for shariah law. Hostility to officially sanctioned shariah law is falsely linked here with negativism toward Muslims. In fact Canadians' opposition to shariah represents a wholesome rejection of Europe-style cultural suicide.

It is offensive that Canadians should be implicitly labelled racists for upholding democratic ideals over willfully blind multiculturalism. To regard the phrase "clash of civilizations" without ironic quotation marks is not a sign of hostility toward individual Muslims. On the contrary, national self-interest demands that we view Islamism and the dangers posed by radicalized Muslim youths with dread.

Read the whole thing.

Iggy Over-Compensates

It's pretty rich for a man in his sixties, who has lived virtually his entire adult life living abroad, to write a book about Canada called True Patriot Love. He's so patriotic, he moved back to Canada as a senior citizen!

Seriously though, who would read this? Even die hard Liberals. Maclean's reviews it:

Ignatieff proposes patriotism as the sustaining motif in this grand lineage that reaches down to him. On one level this is merely a convenient way to package campaign fodder for a man who, after all, hopes the next federal election will make him prime minister.

Joke Police

Mark Styen had a great article about free speech in this week's Maclean's. It's about the shocking criminalization of certain jokes in the UK . Knock-knock. It's the gag police.

Robin Page, the chairman of Britain’s Countryside Restoration Trust and a columnist with the Daily Telegraph, spoke at a rally opposing the government’s anti-hunting laws at a Gloucestershire country fair in 2002. “If you are a black vegetarian Muslim asylum-seeking one-legged lesbian lorry driver,” he began, “I want the same rights as you.” A jocular reference to various approved identity groups by a member of an unfashionable one (country folk). Mr. Page was subsequently arrested and, upon declining to answer questions without the presence of counsel, thrown in a cell. Don’t worry. He eventually cleared his name—after five years.

Her Majesty’s Constabulary: the joke police—in every sense.

That’s the problem. Even if you think it’s a good idea for the state to regulate speech, the only troops available to do it are blundering coppers and hack bureaucrats. Last year, as readers may recall, I had the curious experience of having the “tone” of my jokes examined in a Vancouver courthouse by the geniuses of the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal. Hitherto, such forensic dissection has been limited to the more obscure literary critics. But not anymore. Following their week-long deconstruction of Steyn’s “tone,” the BCHRT announced that for its next show trial it would be turning to the “tone” of Guy Earle, a stand-up comic whose late-night put-downs of some lesbian hecklers were allegedly homophobic.

I knew offensive jokes were taboo in society and frowned upon by certain politically correct people in society, but actual arrests? As Steyn points out Obama is lucky he didn't say his little Special Olympics quip in Britain.

I remember in university there was a war against jokes, which if I can recall went something like: racist and homophobic jokes are an assertion of the power of the white male patriarchal society toward the powerless and oppressed.

No doubt this sort of thinking boosts the rating of tv shows like the Sopranos. Tony makes racist and homophobic jokes and it's not anything we're used to seeing in real life. That makes it so much more powerful. Remember the episode where Meadow's boyfriend reported to the gang that he spotted Vito engaged in a homosexual act? It was absolutely hilarious how these tough guys reacted to the news.

Coyne Embarrassed by Obama Worship

A hilarious post by Andrew Coyne on his Maclean's blog about Obamania.

But people, really: camping out at 4:30 in the morning on Parliament Hill for five seconds of waving from behind plexiglas two hundred yards away (and five seconds longer, at that, than scheduled)? Hours and hours of television coverage given over to a few brief clips of the President a) landing, b) walking with the Governor General, c) sitting with the Governor General, d) flashing by in his motorcade, and e) walking, sitting and standing with the Prime Minister?

Have we all taken leave of our senses? The CBC interviewed some lunatic woman who gravely informed us that, with the election of Barack Obama, she now knew that “everything was going to be okay.” A sign in the crowd read “First God, then Obama,” which was positively restrained compared to some of the comments one overheard. And I don’t just mean from the reporters.

There were some funny reader comments from my earlier post: Obama Visting Canada Today?

Hat tip: Strack Attack

Macabre Drug War Deaths in Mexico

As I posted here last week, the War on Drugs is destroying Mexico. Last week an arrest was made of a man who had dissolved 300 bodies into vats of acid, at the behest of a drug lord. (here)

They call him El Pozolero (“the Stewmaker”), a macabre tribute to his grisly trade. Arrested last week in Tijuana, Mexico, Santiago Meza López has admitted to dissolving some 300 bodies in acid over the past 10 years. His victims, he said, were the enemies of a drug lord who paid him $700 per week for his work. In a bizarre statement, Meza López claims he only dissolved men, refusing to dispose of female bodies this way.

It’s the latest gruesome story to emerge from Mexico, which is in the grip of a brutal drug war. On Jan. 18, the severed head of a police chief was found in an ice cooler outside a police station near Ciudad Juárez (across the border from El Paso), reportedly left there as a warning between rival cartels. It was one of 15 execution-style killings in the area within 24 hours, the Mexican newspaper El Universal reported. On top of that, in December, eight soldiers and a police chief were found beheaded in Guerrero state.

Elected in 2006, Mexican President Felipe Calderón has made cracking down on the drug trade a priority. As his campaign has escalated, though, so has the backlash: more than 5,400 people died in drug-related violence last year, double the number from 2007. If it isn’t contained, experts caution, Mexico could become a failed state. Outgoing CIA director Michael V. Hayden has named the problems in Mexico and Iran as among the most urgent for the new U.S. government. And the U.S. Joint Forces Command has singled out Mexico and Pakistan as two states at risk of “rapid and sudden collapse.”

All these problems eminate from the US and it's ridiculous War on Drugs. All this to keep pot out of Peoria. (And they can't keep pot out of Peoria.)

I guess no more trips to Puerto Vallarta for a while.

The Death of Canadian Conservatism

Andrew Coyne blasts Harper as a sell out, and tallies the long term damage this budget is going to do at his Maclean's blog:

And whatever its likely consequences for the debt, its effect has already been to ratchet up expectations, to tilt the political landscape toward greater and greater interventionism, to change the very language in which we discuss these things. Again, this is unlikely to be easily reversed. Among the consequences of the end of conservatism will be to make it difficult, if not impossible, to muster a constituency even for restraining the growth of government, let alone rolling it back. When the “right” is defined as $34-billion deficits, record spending, and bailouts for everything in sight—when every other party is to the left of that—people lose the ability to think in any other way. They forget there was ever a contrary view.

Conservatives, then, should think hard about whether they can afford to support this government any longer. Its sole contribution at this point is to limit debate, to rule out of bounds any serious discussion of alternatives, since “even” a Conservative government now believes in an all-pervasive, ever-expanding state. The Conservative experiment—the whole enterprise of “uniting the right” in which conservatives have invested much of the past decade—has reached a dead end. They have not succeeded in replacing the Liberals. They have only succeeded in becoming them. Perhaps, some conservatives will conclude, it would be better if this government were defeated—if the party were to lose power, that it might find itself.

(...)

When there is no longer any budget constraint, when deficits are not evidence of incontinence, but “stimulus,” why should any project, any sector, any region be denied? More to the point, when there is no political constraint—when no party is pulling to the right, while four pull left—spending can only go in one direction. And for the foreseeable future, that’s where the action is going to be: sucking money from the gushing spigot of the state. Starting a business? Only a chump would spend his time worrying about pleasing the consumer. It’s the politicians you want to keep happy, mate.

It's such a massive about face. Has anybody turned so hard, and so fast away from their base before in Canadian history? I guess you could say Mulroney but when he got all those Quebec seats, I don't think anybody was surprised he was just a run of the mill pork barreler.

UPDATE: Small 'c' conservatives express their dismay in this CP article:

"But it looks like things are grinding to a halt. Are we just going to enter a period of political pragmatism, when all you do is fight to survive? That's very discouraging.

"We thought that Mr. Harper had the strategic acumen to survive and make some progress toward conservative goals."

Hat tip: Pat

Bleak Budget Outlook From Andrew Coyne

From his blog at Maclean's today:

Say what you like about the Tories: they don’t do things by halves. When they spend, they spend. When they go into debt, they do it $100-billion at a time. And when they decide to put an end to conservatism in Canada — as a philosophy, as a movement—they go out with a bang.

We can safely say that the strategy of incrementalism, at least, has been put to bed. With this historic budget, the Conservatives’ already headlong retreat from principle has become a rout: a great final leap into the void. For there will be no going back from this, for the party or for the country. Whatever the budget’s soothing talk of “temporary” this and “extraordinary” that, and for all its well-mannered charts showing spending obediently returning to its pen, deficits meekly subsiding, “investments” repaid in full, we are in fact headed somewhere we have never been before. We are on course towards a massive and permanent increase in the size and scope of government: record spending, sky-high borrowing, and — ultimately, inevitably — higher taxes. And all this before the first of the Baby Boomers have had a chance to retire, and cough up a lung.