Ultimate Wingnut Challenge: The Canadians
Today on Ultimate Wingnut Challenge, our Canadian team members will try to prove that they can be as just wingnutty as any American. (Sure, they have a snowball's chance in hell at succeeding since we INVENTED wingnuttery, but we admire their pluck.)
Anyway, their challenge is ... to bring us a shrubbery! (One that looks nice. And not too expensive.)
Okay, their challenge is to produce a column with attitude -- and not that polite, reasonable, decent Canadian attitude. No, along with whatever wingnutty claims they want to make in their column, they must also try to emulate an American pundit in tone, style, and know-it-all-ism.
1. We'll start with Mark Steyn, who, since he titled his book America Alone: Our Country's Future as a Loan Shark Lone Warrior, apparently believes that he is American. (Which is at odds with his "FAQs," which indicate that his nationality is still Canadian, and that he "divides his time between Quebec, New Hampshire and London."
Mark brings us "The Plame facts about distraction." The attitude he seems to be copping is Ann Coulteresque (at least, that's how it strike me, what with all the "clever" name calling and lying -- but you are free to make your own call on this). He also claims that he knows what REAL people care about (although I would imagine that he spends very little time hanging out in Home Depot with the guys). Anyway, he says that the REAL people aren't concerned about Valerie Plame, but instead spend their time fretting about the rogue liberal CIA cabal. (Yeah, that's the same conspiracy theory that Rush Limbaugh floated a couple of days ago, which gives Mark a twofer: copying Ann And Rush in the same piece.)
Mark concludes with a list of bad stuff done by real Arab terrorists -- as this has nothing to do with Wilson, Niger, Saddam, Rove, or anything in the first part of his column, I get a kind of Michelle Malkin-y "I don't care about you, but I think that terrorism is BAD, and so are brown-skinned people" vibe from it.
But anyway, here's Mark. Judge his attitude and wingnuttiness for yourself.
Karl Rove? Please. I couldn't care less. This week finds me thousands of miles from the Beltway in what I believe the ABC World News Tonight map designates as the Rest Of The Planet, an obscure beat the media can't seem to spare a correspondent for. But even if I was with the rest of the navel-gazers inside the Beltway, I wouldn't be interested in who "leaked" the name of CIA employee Valerie Plame to the press.
Yes, unlike the journalists who constitute he liberal media, Mark is covering the REAL news, and he couldn't care less about Rove, although he will spend the next nine paragraphs defaming Joseph Wilson and defending Rove.
As her weirdly self-obsessed husband Joseph C. Wilson IV conceded on CNN the other day, she wasn't a "clandestine officer" and, indeed, hadn't been one for six years. So one can only "leak" her name in the way one can "leak" the name of the check-out clerk at Home Depot or the busboy at Denny's.
Back when Woodrow Wilson ran for president, he had a campaign song called "Wilson, That's All." If only. With Joe Wilson, it's never all. He keeps coming back like a song.
But in the real world there's only one scandal in this whole wretched business -- that the CIA, as part of its institutional obstruction of the administration, set up a pathetic "fact-finding mission" that would be considered a joke by any serious intelligence agency and compounded it by sending, at the behest of his wife, a shrill politically motivated poseur who, for the sake of 15 minutes' celebrity on the cable gabfest circuit, misled the nation about what he found.
[...]
What we have here is, in effect, the old stand-by plot of lame Hollywood conspiracy thrillers: rogue elements within the CIA trying to destabilize the elected government. If the left's view of the world is now so insanely upside-down that's the side they want to be on, good for them.
But "leaking" the name of Mr. Wilson's wife and promoter within the CIA didn't "endanger her life" or "compromise her mission." Au contraire, exposing the nature of this fraudulent, compromised mission might conceivably prevent endangerment of the American people's lives.
I think it's impressive that the GOP managed to get those talking points even to a pundit "thousands of miles from the beltway." And I really admire the way Mark managed to use so many of them in a column which is ostenstibly about his total lack of interest in the Rove/Plame matter. Note the way he bravely asserts that leaking the name of a CIA officer currently working on non-proliferation issues -- one who had served overseas within the past few years gathering info from foreign assets, who was still under non-official cover -- is no different that leaking the name of a busboy at Denny's. Ken Melhman would be so proud.
Consider also the way that he expertly tries to distract us from what Rove did by claiming that Wilson, Plame, and the CIA are the bad guys here. Yes, it's "blame the victims" at its finest.
Throw in a little "Rove is a whistleblower and a hero" and I think Mark shows him to be every bit as good as Ann (although he does lose some points for failing to mention the Clenis and Ted Kennedy).
Oh, and here's another nicely-dressed up GOP talking point: Rove HAD to leak Plame's name because Wilson liked about the yellowcake.
In fact, the only lying sonofabitch turned out to be Yellowcake Joe. Just about everybody on the face of the Earth except Mr. Wilson, the White House press corps and the moveon.org crowd accepts that Saddam was indeed trying to acquire uranium from Africa.
And the White House. Don't forget them. They don't seem to have accepted that Saddam was trying to acquire large quantities of weapon-grade uranium form Africa. Remember those retracted 16 words? (At least Rush Limbaugh explained that they were retracted because George Bush is too nice, and backs down in order to please everyone. How do you account for the administration's action, Mark?)
Now, on to the "Unlike the members of the liberal beltway media, I have REAL things to write about" section of the piece (it comes directly after that bit about how Rove's leak "might conceivably prevent endangerment of the American people's lives," so I guess you're supposed to supply the connection yourself: that Rove's action prevented terrorists from bombing American trains.
Here's the thing: They're still pulling body parts from London's Tube tunnels. Too far away for you, no local angle? OK, how about this? Magdy el-Nashar. He's a 33-year old Egyptian arrested Friday in Cairo, and thought to be what they call a "little emir" -- i.e., the head honcho in the local terrorist cell, the one who fires up the suicide bombers. Until his timely and temporary disappearance, he was a biochemist studying at Leeds University and the London bombs were made in his apartment. Previously, he was studying at North Carolina State University.
[...]
The police found the suicide bomber's head in the rubble of the London bus, and Iran is enriching uranium. The only distraction here is the pitiful parochialism of our political culture
Yes, everyone, be more like Mark Steyn, and stop worrying about Karl Rove (except when you write columns defending him). Hey, look! Its a suicide bomber's head!
Personally, I find Steyn to be a better writer than Coulter, so, even though he's just as good at the lying and petty name calling and stuff, I can only give him a "9" on this piece. But it's really up to you.
2. Our next contestant is David "Axis of Idiocy" Frum. His talent number is called "What We Shold Expect of Muslims," and in it I think David demonstrates a Bill O'Reillyesque "I know better than anyone" attitude in that he tells us what we should expect, and tells the Muslims what they should do.
See what you think:
Let us be explicit about what we expect from Muslim communities:
[...]
Cooperate actively with police and security services. After the 9/11 attacks, one U.S. Islamic organization distributed a pamphlet called Know Your Rights, explaining to American Muslims that they had no obligation to answer questions from the police. From a legal point of view, that is of course correct. But one would have imagined that patriotic Muslims would want to tell the police anything that might help protect the country against future attack and bring the guilty to justice.
Many imams have in fact been cooperating with the police in the United States and the United Kingdom. But they often do so shame-facedly, grudgingly, incompletely, and only under pressure. And they are even more reluctant to urge their congregants to do the same. That must change. The pamphlets on "knowing your rights" should be matched by sermons on "knowing your responsibilities."
How about pamphlets on "Ratting Out Your Neighbors" and sermons on "Reporting Your Relatives for the Good of the Fatherland"? Hey, I hear the East German Stasi had great success with this -- maybe we could get them to teach it to the Muslims.
Bottom line: of COURSE anyone, Muslim or not, who knows anything about terrorism should report it to the authorities. But expecting any community that feels under fire already to cooperate with the police proudly, happily, and enthusiastically is a tad moronic.
Stop carving out special exemptions. One important reason that Western Muslims find it so difficult to speak forthrightly against Islamic terrorism is that too many of them want to preserve exceptions in favor of certain forms of terrorism: against India, against democratic Iraq, and above all against Israel.
Israel is a special challenge to Muslim communities in the West. It's hard to take a principled stand against al-Qaeda if you privately support Hamas and Hezbollah. It's almost impossible to hold the line against religious extremism if you yourself are steeped in anti-Semitism.
The Arab-Israel dispute is often cited as a fundamental cause of terrorism. But if this is true, it is true in this way: So long as Muslim communities refuse to accept the legitimacy of Israel, they will be crippled in their attempts to deny the legitimacy of terrorism.
So, as part of the War on Terror, we now expect Arabs to give up anti-Semitism and accept the legitimacy of Isreal?
I admit that this would be nice (just as it would be nice if the Israelis would give up their animosity towards the Arabs, and everyone would live in peace and harmony, and sing songs about giving the world a Coke and stuff), but again, I think that expecting Arabs to do this in order to prove to David Frum that they aren't terrorists is a little presumptious.
In case that didn't show you enough of David's work for you to form an opinion, here's David showing some more O'Reilly-like humility with "The Speech I Would Have Written," in which he tells George Bush where he went wrong in that speech he gave last month.
Those of us who support this president and this war do not need to be told how important it is to win. We get that. But that's precisely why we are worried — because every day brings terrible news that makes us fear that the war is being lost.
[...]
The president could have talked about the capture of weapons caches, the discovery of an insurgent torture chamber with four shackled Iraqi victims, and the rescue of Australian hostage Douglas Wood. He might have quoted Wood's words after the rescue — "God bless America" — and mentioned Wood's continuing faith that the Anglo-Australian-U.S. mission in Iraq remains worthwhile.
Bush might have discussed Saddam's rape rooms, and freedom, and young Ashley Faulkner, who lost her mother in 9/11 but who was healed by George Bush's touch. And he could have mentioned how being the President is hard work. THAT's the kind of stuff that makes people believe that the war is being won.
Henry Kissinger quipped that in the Clinton years, the explanations were always better than the policies. In the Bush administration, unfortunately, the reverse is becoming true
Well, the policies aren't that great either. But the Bush administration is still the reverse of the Clinton administration in that the policy now is, "The only ones getting blown will be the American public."
And in a democracy, a policy that is not effectively explained is a policy that cannot endure.
And that's why Bush should rehire David Frum, speechwriter and inventer of the "Axis of Evil." Call now. No reasonable offer refused.
So, I think that David shows a lot of attitude for a Canadian guy who only worked for the White House for a year, and who allegedly got fired for being a braggart. But since he didn't do much name-calling, I give him a "6."
3. Our next contestant is Adam Yoshida. He's more of a blogger than a columnist (although he has had his pieces reprinted in various low-rent wingnut sites). But hey, he's Canadian, and he has lots of attitude. So, let's give a warm welcome Adam, who will first tell us a little about himself and what he's learned from blogging, in "Reflections of Two Years":
After an unannounced hiatus of a considerable amount of time, I’ve decided to return to blogging. How often I’ll post and what I’m going to post will remain, for now, undetermined.
I’m going to begin my return by discussing myself and what I learned over the first two years of this blog and how, I hope, things are going to stay the same – and how they’re going to change.
See, he assumes that you even noticed that he was gone, and care about what he's going to do in the future. That reminds me of, say, a Rush Limbaugh.
Now, I’m going to tell you some things.
Cool! I like that in a blogger!
Adam goes on to say that he had toyed with the idea of writing a bio of Richard Nixon (because a bio of Nixon, by Yoshida, is just what the publishing world has been clamoring for), and that while studying the "great man," he read a quote from Dick about how the people who hate you only win if you hate them back. So, Adam has resolved not to hate us anymore.
If you originally came here because you read something so bizarre and so irrational that you said, “the guy can’t possibly mean it,” you’re probably half-right. The problem with the internet is that it is filled with materials guaranteed to enrage and to enflame the senses. Some days, particularly bad days, I’ll sit and read something written by some leftist somewhere and I’ll just literally shake with rage. And then I’ll write. And that is where my troubles begin.
So, if you read something so bizarre and irrational that you thought that Adam couldn't possibly have meant it, you were only half right, in that Adam did mean it, but it was the leftists who made him say it.
Oh, and here's a mental health tip for everyone: if anything you read on the internet makes you literally shake with rage, you should probably give up reading stuff on the net and take up knitting or gardening or something.
So, Adam resolves to be calmer. "I’ve no interest in dropping dead at my desk at the age of forty-five because I don’t like what gets posted on Democratic Underground or I don’t like the content of my hate email," he writes.. A good resolution. I advise everyone to try not to drop dead at your desk because you don't like what's posted at DU.
Adam realizes that he won't always be successful, "But that, of course, is the nature of the struggle." So if he does die at his desk, that too is the nature of the struggle.
Oh, and he has comments again.
Anyway, Adam has only posted once since his return from his hiatus. It's an item called "The Case Against Llive-8," and it makes the same points that John Derbyshire did in his column, but without the Ethel Merman musical to liven things up. And while It does seem comparatively calm, it still demonstrates that special Yoshida touch towards the end:
Perhaps the left has good reason to think that Africa isn’t able to care for itself. After all, were it not for Europeans heroes, it seems doubtful that the Dark Continent would possess either electricity or the combustion engine today – let alone any technology developed after the year 1900. Without the West, it may be fairly confidently asserted, Africa would still be the same sort of tribal hell-hole that it was before the Europeans came.
And I think that shows a lot of attitude, coming as it does from somebody who, were it not for his parents, would probably not possess either electricity or a roof over his head, let alone food, clothes, and a computer. So, I give Adam's work an "8," since I found it more interesting than Frum's -- but if he doesn't increase his output, he may get pushed asided by David, who does do regular columns for the same paper that features Rachel Marsden as a pundit.
4. And speaking of Rachel, she's the last member of our Canadian team. In the latest column available at her site, "Press Attacks Celebrity it Created," Rachel tells off the Canadian press for paying attention to imfamous serial killer Karla Homolka. She concludes her piece with some wisdom which could apply to us, except that we actually like Rachel (well, we find it enjoyable to poke good-natured fun at her wingnutty columns, which is almost the same as liking her).
If the media loathe the woman as much as they claim to, then they ought to stop playing the role of her publicity agent.
So, instead of paying attention to Rachel's piece about Karla (which would just be giving her what she wants), let's look at the one before that, "Everyone Likes a Smackdown," which is about how great it is that Fox News (which has hired Rachel) is doing better than CNN . Watch for all the wingnutty names she drops.
As bestselling author and media bias whistleblower Bernard Goldberg told me recently: “[The public] see[s] it not simply as conservative, but also as making common sense…. But in all fairness we have to acknowledge that yes, style counts. Entertainment values count. And if [conservatives] have them and Joe Liberal Blow doesn’t — that does work in favour of the former and against the latter.”
The fact that “common sense” is often attacked by its detractors as being “conservative” should tell you something about which side occupies the deeper end of the ideological pool.
Um, Rachel, the fact that it's Bernie Goldberg who is saying that the public sees Fox as "making common sense" should tell you something about how seriously you should take this claim.
In a competitive 24-hour news cycle, branding and publicity matter. A recent poll by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that more people (40%) recognize Fox’s Bill O’Reilly as a journalist than recognize reporter Bob Woodward (30%) of Watergate fame as one, with top-rated conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh (27%) coming in right behind and right-wing political columnist George Will trailing with a mere 7% recognition.
Yeah, previous polls have shown that Fox News viewers are more ill-informed than, say, PBS viwers, so this makes sense.
Will is a conservative, but the esoteric pontificator is drier than a mouthful of volcanic ash and lacks the personality and charisma of figures like O’Reilly and Limbaugh who owe much of their publicity to attacks from other media outlets.
Rachel, if by chance you are traded to the Respected Conservative Thinker team and you and Will have to bunk together, things may be kind of awkward now.
Canada’s CBC was the latest to weigh in with a drive-by on high profile conservative commentators. (In the interest of full disclosure, I’m both a contributor to O’Reilly’s show and was featured by the CBC as the only Canadian apparently worth targeting in the “documentary.”)
Is Rachel claiming that the CBC thinks that she is high profile?
When I asked O’Reilly what he thought of the CBC putting the feature into heavy rotation like it was an episode of Seinfeld, he said that he hopes the CBC “plays that thing 24/7, because it just proves that the CBC is a left-wing propaganda outfit. Left-wing nuts aren’t going to make a fair assessment of anything anyway, but the majority of Canadians are fair-minded people and will know blatant dishonesty when they see it. And it will get them checking out Fox News, which they will see as being much different from the way the CBC represents it.”
And when I asked O'Reilly what he thought of Canada, he said, "Canada can't help us anyway. They have no military to speak of. And the socialistic system they have there has nearly bankrupted them." But guess what? It turns out that Canada really isn't close to bankruptcy.
And he also said, "The truth is that the USA has freed more human beings in 230 years than the rest of the world combined. France has freed almost no one. Ditto Canada. ...Canada should be ashamed that so many of its young people are flat out ignorant. And Americans should wise up and realize we are living in a changing world. Old friends are not necessarily true friends." So, if any fair-minded Canadians do ever check out Fox News, I doubt many will find it to their liking.
The recently cancelled CNN program Crossfire never had more buzz than when comedian Jon Stewart played the class clown to conservative co-host Tucker Carlson’s smart-mouthed, bowtied know-it-all debating club brat — verbally sucker-punching the annoying twerp on his own show. No doubt there were a lot of viewers living vicariously through that experience. Whether or not they’ll admit it, a well-deserved smackdown is refreshing.
So, per Rachel, what would really draw in viewers is sombody throwing pies at the smart-mouthed, annoying, know-it-all Sean Hannity on his own show (or actually smacking the big-mouthed, annoying, know-it-all Bill O'Reilly on his program). Good programming advice, I think.
Rather than attacking entertaining media personalities whose common-sense approach resonates with the public, maybe the stodgy traditional news media can figure out what it is they’re doing to turn people off.
ABC News president David Westin’s post-9/11 remarks to the Columbia University journalism school, as broadcast on C-SPAN, illustrate the problem. When asked whether the Pentagon was a legitimate military target, he replied, “I actually don’t have an opinion on that…. Our job is to determine what is, not what ought to be, and when we get into the job of what ought to be, I think we’re not doing a service to the American people. I can say the Pentagon got hit. I can say this is what their position is, this is what our position is, but for me to take a position this was right or wrong, I mean that’s perhaps for me in my private life…. But as a journalist I feel strongly that’s something that I should not be taking a position on.”
If you’re hoping to resonate with little people, connecting with them on an issue like the mass slaughtering of your fellow citizens might be a good start.
Yeah, because the general public pays close attention to those Columbia journalism things on C-SPAN, and people really hates it when the president of a network's news division says that it's not really the place of journalists to determine what constitutes legitimate military targets.
But they do like it when Jon Stewart makes Tucker Carlson look like a ninny, so maybe we should have more of that -- and perhaps ABC should give up on doing actual "news," and devote that time slot to a reality show in which various people sucker-punch Tucker. I know I would watch it.
While this isn't one of Rachel's more wingnutty columns (which, like Steyn's, usually seem to follow the Ann Coulter model), it does show a lot of attitude for a former Conservative Babe of the Week who's still on probation. So, I give it a "7."
5. Now, for our outside challenger: her name is Judi McLeod, and she is the founding editor of the Canada Free Press (which I think it kinda like The Rant, except that they spell "honor" and "color" funny). She also claims to be "an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the media" A former Toronto Sun and Kingston Whig Standard columnist, she has also appeared on Newsmax.com, the Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, and World Net Daily."
With a resume like that, I think she already has more credibility than David Frum.
Anyway, her audition piece is called "The Killing-off-Rachel Marsden Rally." While it isn't about the real killing-off of Rachel, it's still pretty fun:
As the official Canadian correspondent for Fox News’ Numero Uno The O’Reilly Factor, the outspoken and humourous Rachel Marsden qualifies as Canada’s latest media celebrity.
Wow, the poor Canadians! I never realized they were so hard up for media celebrities! I think it's only fair that we return Celine Dion.
Marsden, who has never in her life been convicted of a crime, is now being portrayed as a "criminal".
I was curious about why somebody who wasn't convicted of a crime would be given a year's probation by a judge, so I checked out the webpage of the Western Standard's Ezra Levant. Here's part of what he said:
I received an e-mail from Canada Free Press pointing out that a conditional discharge and a sentence of one year's probation (which Marsden is still serving) is not technically a conviction.
I'm a lawyer myself, but I don't practise criminal law -- so I called up Shawn Beaver, the gold medallist at law school a few years ahead of me. He explained the technicalities. Marsden:
1. Pled guilty to the charge against her;
2. Accepted the statement of facts put forward by the prosecutor;
3. Sought an absolute discharge from the judge, which was not granted;
4. Was sentenced instead to one year's probation;
5. Has that entered on her CPIC police record, where it will remain for four years;
6. After the four years, it will be expunged from her record.
While I'm not any kind of a lawyer, I think this means that Rachel is every bit as much of a "criminal" as she would be if she were convicted by a jury.
But back to Judi:
Like many young women making their way through the dating scene, she’s had her share of trouble with bogus boyfriends. Unlike other young women, however her personal life has become tabloid fodder.
Um, yeah, that's what Rachel's problem was: bogus boyfriends! And that's why, like many young women making their way through the dating scene, Rachel falsely accused one beau of rape and sexual harassment, stalked two others, and finally got arrested for criminal harassment.
Readers can always Google rather than ogle Marsden to make up their own minds.
Well, if you do Google, you can also ogle those Conservative Babe photos, plus the image Rachel used to have at her site of Rachel's face pasted on Julia Roberts' body.
The worst thing written about Marsden by Steele, in the opinion of this writer, not libelous only by virtue of positing it in question form was: "How does a serial stalker, convict and fraud artist end up hottest young conservative pundit?"
[...]
When I asked Marsden how it felt to be attacked on a personal basis as a "convict" a "serial stalker" and a "fraud artist", she told me that she believed she could sue the Western Standard. "But a litigation victory would be a shallow one given that they likely can’t afford to pay,
Well, Rachel has been found guilty by the judge who took her plea, has stalked at least three people (four, if you count the harassment counselor), and is a "fraud" in that she made false or inflated claims in the bio that was formerly posted with her online columns. But I imagine that the litigation victory for the Standard would be a shallow one, given that Rachel probably can't afford to pay them anything, and would just stalk them for their trouble.
so why give them any publicity?"
Hey, just what Rachel said about the press and Karla Homolka! I can see why Rachel might feel like she has a lot in common with Karla: both have been hounded by the press, both are convicted criminals, and, like Rachel said about herself (but which would also apply to Karla), "Fifty percent of people want to sleep with me, and the other 50% want to kill me."
BTW, if you want to read more about Rachel, here's a link to the Western Standard article that libeled her by saying that she's a "criminal." And here's a link to the The Ambler item which presciently asks if Judi is talking about Rachel or Karla Homolka. It also raises an issue that was on my mind all while I was reading Judi's piece: "McLeod's article resembles something a clever but emotionally incontinent 9th Grader might write after being dumped by her boyfriend. In other words, it reads like a Rachel Marsden column."
Yes, I thought that Judi might in reality be Rachel. (Hey, if she can be "Elle Henderson," why not another personality?) But it seems that Judi may actually exist. If she does, I give her a "6" for her efforts -- her piece, while audacious enough, would only be of interest to those people who know who Rachel Marsden is, and that's a fairly small group. But if Judi had covered a subject with universal appeal, like Dr. Mike's mediocre performance evaluation, I would have given her a higher score.
But hey, check out 9/11 and the Mob by Judi and one David Hawkins. Here's the key passage:
If this is mob, did the mob know of the impending attack on 9/11? The terrorist-piloted plane hit Cantor Fitzgerald directly–one floor below where they were located. This would be the worst possible spot because the flames would go up and engulf everything. Could this really be only sheer coincidence? No suicide jockey flying a plane for the first time coincidentally hit right where the mob knew they would hit.
What are the odds of a six-member executive team surviving the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center while almost 800 of their employees burned or jumped 103 stories to their death?
The plane had to be aimed very carefully which implies GPS and targeting not a nut flying for the first time.
Do you buy the story that they found Mohammed Atta’s suicide note and luggage, including a will but not two black boxes?
Canada Free Press did.
Not anymore
I now give Judi an "8". (Hat tip to None for both of the Judi columns)
But hey, I'm just one person, and I'm not in charge here -- YOU are.
So, vote now to send TWO of our contestants back to the Great White North (well, in the case of Steyn and Frum, I'm not sure if we can actually deport them if they're voted off the island, but I guess we could try). Whom do you want to leave: Mark Steyn, David Frum, Adam Yoshida, Rachel Marsen, or Judi McLeod? Vote early and often for this important referendum.
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