Kelly McParland: Linda McQuaig is running for the NDP. But which NDP?

...Linda McQuaig is considered a star candidate, and is as old-timey NDP as you can get.  Big Oil is bad. Rich people are bad. “Interfering” government keeps the world civilized and creates the environment for success. Taxes are good, especially high taxes. McQuaig advocates a marginal tax rate of 60% for incomes above $300,000, and 70% for incomes above $2.5-million — well above the “confiscatory” level identified by her would-be party leader. Nevermind, Mr. Mulcair said on the weekend, McQuaig is an “extraordinary” candidate, but should she win she’d would be part of the “team.”

He’s right, that is extraordinary: a candidate who has campaigned for years for higher taxes, whose reputation is based substantially on her dedication to that cause and her willingness to champion it in the face of much criticism, but who says she’d drop it and play along with a policy she rejects if she manages to get elected. And a leader who is happy to have her on the team even though she stands for everything he says is yesterday’s NDP.

Read the whole article at The NATIONAL POST 

More on Linda McQuaig HERE

NDP selects a moral imbecile to represent them in Toronto Centre by-election

Linda McQuaig received the NDP nomination today. 

Moral Imbecile Linda McQuaig running for NDP nomination in Toronto Centre

Linda McQuaig on TVO (via YouTube)

Linda McQuaig is something worse than just a moral relativist. She's a moral imbecile. Yesterday the sometime Toronto Star columnist declared her intent to bring her vacuity and hyperbolic peevishness to Canada's House of Commons on behalf of the New Democratic Party.

The riding's Parliamentary seat was recently left vacant by the retirement of former Liberal Party leader Bob Rae.

McQuaig is an ideologue who has campaigned against outlooks outside her narrow reasoning being taught at the University of Toronto. As the author of The Trouble with Billionaires, McQuaig presents a caricature of billionaires, suggesting that she knows very few, if any of them and even less about how they operate. One can envision vapid Occupy Wall Street-type rhetoric given a voice on Parliament Hill in the unlikely event McQuaig should be elected.

Her understanding of economics is predicated on her only looking for data that substantiates her polemical ideology. She bases her arguments on economics on the post-World War 2 growth period and attributing the economic success of those times to high tax rates while effectively discounting  the myriad of other factors that played a greater role.

But in that she only demonstrates a tremendous lack of insight. It is her lack of human decency that is far more troubling.

In 2010, nine Turkish activists attempting to break Israel's blockade of the Gaza strip were killed when they, along with a mob, attacked Israeli troops attempting to board the Mavi Marmara. 

That ship was the largest of seven boats in a small flotilla attempting to break a sea blockade of Gaza that was intercepted by Israel. The blockade is in place to prevent arms smuggling to Gaza, which is controlled by the terror group Hamas. Gaza is the world's largest per-capita recipient of aid and has one of the highest obesity rates on Earth.

There were no casualties on any of the other ships and the Mavi Marmara was the only one in which activists attacked the Israelis. The activists were part of a Turkish group called IHH that has known links to terror organizations. It's members who attacked the Israeli soldiers were self-declared jihadis who had expressed their desire for martyrdom.

At the time of that event, McQuaig equated those killings to that of Leon Klinghoffer by Palestinian terrorists. Klinghoffer was a helpless, innocent wheelchair-bound civilian travelling on a pleasure craft,  Achile Lauro, that was hijacked. He was murdered in cold blood by terrorists for no other reason than for being a Jew.

"There is a compelling need for a serious, UN-mandated investigation of these killings, which are as horrific as the killing on the Achille Lauro," wrote McQuaig.

Only a reprehensible moral imbecile could possibly equate his callous murder to the chaotic attempts at self-defense by a handful of Israeli commandos who were attacked and overwhelmed by dozens of knife and pipe wielding jihadist thugs.

Linda McQuaig is that reprehensible moral imbecile who wants to make her loathsome perspectives the voice of the Toronto Centre riding and the New Democratic Party of Canada.

Given some of the other voices in the NDP,  it would be shameful, but no great shock if she were successful.

One person can make a difference

Mainstream media gives some rather unintelligent and hopelessly biased people the credibility that accompanies a public platform.

Nowhere is this concern more evident than in the distorted coverage of matters relating to Israel. Just one example of a source of that phenomenon is The Toronto Star, whose anti-Israel editorial bias is so pronounced that it has earned that newspaper the nickname "al-Starzeera."

It publishes Haroon Siddiqui, who until recent complaints and public demonstrations caused a slight retreat, produced a column whose only seeming purpose was to find an excuse to vilify Israel. It' provides print space to Linda McQuaig, a hopelessly biased polemicist of who notoriously likened Israel's killing of 9 armed jihadis who expressed a desire for martyrdom on the Mavi Marmara to the murder of an innocent Jewish American by Palestinian terrorists on the Achile Lauro.

For years, it even allowed the  archaic, irrelevant Antonia Zerbisias to use the Star's Living section to defend Hamas and routinely condemn Israel and get the main points of her stories wrong in the process. And of course there are countless examples of daily mistruths and distortions from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Globe and Mail and other Canadian media outlets.

For the most part, when informed people hear of such things, they shake their heads in disappointment, maybe write a letter to the Editor, and worry about the dumbing-down of Canadian media. There are prominent organizations who do excellent work in holding the media to account, such as the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, but they have a number of areas of focus.

There is, however, an individual who has made anti-Israel bias in the Canadian media his sole mission, and he's doing an incredible job on his own, with just a few volunteers and a group of committed financial supporters. His name is Mike Fegelman and he's been vigilant in monitoring media and exposing the slander and hate that is directed towards the Jewish state by some of the members of Canada's media establishment.

Through Honest Reporting Canada, Mike has most recently drawn attention to the anti-Semitic TV host Stéphane Gendron, who in the past said that Jews  "invented terrorism." Now Gendron is accusing Israel of planing to bulldoze and kill Palestinians, and Honest Reporting Canada is holding him and the Quebec's V Network, that broadcasts such bigotry, to account.

Mike put on an interesting event with Mark Dubowitz last week. Dubowitz is the Executive Director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank. It was fascinating to hear his assessment that he hopes and expects President Obama's policies of containing Iran through sanctions and covert action to prevent them from acquiring a nuclear weapon will be successful. Most of the audience were less optimistic and felt that military strikes on Iran are both necessary and inevitable. Israel's threats of attack are seen in that context, not so much as a genuine threat as the stick to induce countries like China and Russia to accept the carrot of serious sanctions.

Honest Reporting Canada is doing fine work and you can learn more about it here.

Banal anti-Americanism and Zionist Conspiracy Theory Night at the Munk Centre

The Munk Centre is the University of Toronto's showpiece for Global Studies and frequently features brilliant speakers and fascinating presentations. But as Johnny Carson used to say when one of his jokes bombed, "they can't all be gems."

Case in point, a dual program on Tuesday evening called, "In Conversation with Brian Stewart."

In fairness to The Munk Centre, it did provide one thoughtful speaker that evening who provided pertinent facts and intelligent analysis in the person of Brigadier-General Jonathan Vance.

Stewart is a former Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reporter who is now affiliated with the Munk Centre. There were two parts to the program. The first was billed as "Canada and Afghanistan" and was an hour of Stewart posing questions to Vance, who is Chief of Staff, Land Strategy for the Canadian Armed Forces.

Vance offered insights into the Afghanistan situation and Canada's military role that are worth noting.  Aside from the obvious fact that the rights and lives of most Afghans have improved since the removal of the Taliban, it's critical to note that despite the implications by friends of the Mullah-ruled Iranian dictatorship, like the Canadian Peace Alliance's James Clark, most Afghans want NATO to be there. They don't want NATO to stay forever, but they do want them to remain until Afghanistan is secure enough to prevent a resumption of Taliban rule. The voices of Afghans who condemn NATO's presence in their country are almost always those who don't live in Afghanistan.

To illustrate that, while millions of Afghans left the country as refugees during Taliban rule, millions are now returning since the NATO intervention. That fact alone should be ample testimony to the benefit of NATO's role in Afghanistan.

The best answers are often elicited from a questioner who challenges the person being questioned. Because an idea or proposition is offered doesn't mean it should be accepted. However there was something about Stewart's questioning, having alternated between cynical and uninformed, which brought to mind the worst practices of the old CBC. Stewart made weird allegations parroted from a group of communists about "the militarization" of Hockey Night in Canada and concluded with a condescending congratulation of Vance for his "honesty," as if anything less could have been expected.

Stewart's position couldn't have been made more apparent than by his shift to the role of obsequious acolyte in the second part of the program called,  "Obama Watch: Historians Review the Obama Foreign Policy Record"

One of the secrets of academia is that a PhD is no guarantee of great intelligence. Sometimes all it means is that an individual who possess one is better trained to articulate banal ideas than the average person. Historians John Milton Cooper and Robert Bothwell provided ample reminder of that. They shared the stage with the Munk Centre's Ronald Pruessen and what was supposed to be a critique of US President Obama's foreign policy instantaneously descended into Cooper bloviating about a Zionist takeover of American politics, only to be echoed by Bothwell's conspiratorial assertion that Israeli Prime Minister Netenyahu is more powerful in American politics than Obama.

Pruessen seemed embarrassed by his colleagues and while he sensibly (sanely) stayed away from that delusional line of distraction, he did not challenge it. That is understandable since it might have inspired ostracism given the the anti-Zionist zealotry often prevalent at U of T, which includes entire departments devoted to it.

While it was shocking to hear an outburst from Cooper and Bothwell that could just as easily have been a recital from a neo-Nazi website or a squawk from a Maoist nut like Norman Finkelstein, what was most surprising about the hour-long panel was that among all the many assertions, not once was a single historical fact introduced by any of the historians to substantiate them. Finkelstein routinely presents facts and data out of context, but at least he actually uses facts on occasion.

Such was not the case with the historian's panel. A panel that was ostensibly about Obama, overwhelmingly became just a group denunciation of George W Bush. Cooper and Bothwell seemed personally affronted by the popular conception that Bush's push for democracy in the middle east could in any way be responsible for the wave of pro-democracy rebellions spreading across the region. Cooper appeared to revile Bush to the extent that he could barely bring himself to say his name, almost always referring to him as "the last president," bringing to mind the way that Islamist fanatics cannot bear to say "Israel" and refer to it as "the Zionist entity."

Cooper's oft-repeated use of the term "right-wing", spitting it out as if it were a diabolical curse, implied an ideologically-inspired intellectual vacuity, as if by virtue of an idea's being from a particular part of the political spectrum, it was automatically disqualified from any validity. The best US president of the last two decades was Bill Clinton, whose success was in no small measure derived from his ability to recognize good ideas and adopt them, regardless of their source. The reason the Republicans were so frustrated by him, and their attacks against him so personal, was because it is almost impossible to attack the politics of someone who appropriates your best ideas and implements them as his own policies.

Of course, Bill Clinton possesses one of the most politically astute minds in the world, and Messieurs Cooper and Bothwell, to put it politely, do not.

It was staggering to hear the panel unanimously postulate something that should be discouraging for any supporter of Barack Obama as it is for anyone who welcomes global stability: their positive assessment of an Obama presidency leading to a weaker America. At that point, I realized I was listening to a panel of 20th century historians who have learned absolutely nothing from the history of the 20th century.

They all agreed that America, in the absence of another superpower, was too strong, and it's weakening would be a good thing for the world and the USA . What they didn't say was who they assumed would fill the power vacuum left by a debilitated United States. Unless they meant a nuclear Iran or authoritarian China, the natural assumption would be Europe.

If nothing else can be learned from the history of Europe over the last 100 years, it is that Europe is incapable of functioning for any length of time without a strong America. Cooper, who wrote a well received biography of Woodrow Wilson, the US President at the close of World War 1, seemed to have forgotten the cause of that war was European instability. It took a strong America to end that conflict, since Europe was unable to solve its own problems. History repeated itself with the American intervention needed to end World War 2. It was America's support for western Europe that prevented the Soviets from dominating that continent during the cold war. And if any further reminder was needed, though it shouldn't be, it is the resolution of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, which threatened to turn into a regional war while Europe criticized and ineffectually dithered until an American bombing campaign ordered by President Clinton concluded that crisis.

Given their other proclivities, maybe it should not have been surprising that those obvious facts didn't factor into the assessment of the historical trio.

The Munk Centre provides a tremendous service in presenting different voices and divergent views so that students, academics, and the public can be exposed to a variety of ideas. A moderator who challenges the preposterous rather than allows his own prejudices to be reinforced would provide a good enhancement for these events.

One consolation from the historian's panel is that it conclusively proves that Linda McQuaig is full of..hot air.

Rick Salutin returns to a major daily newspaper.. and no one notices

The Looney Left went crazy a few months ago when the Globe and Mail replaced Rick Salutin's column with one from Irshad Manji.

"A blow to "progressive" (read: regressive) voices in the media" was the gist of their shrill cries. As of last Friday, Salutin has been writing for The Toronto Star. His first column for the Liberal-leaning paper was ostensibly a review of a TV series called NCIS, but Salutin being Salutin, it was filled with undertones about the evils of the United States.

One would think all those people who decried Salutin's firing from the Globe would be cheering his return with great fanfare.

But such was not the case. In the 3 days since his article was published online, it managed to draw only 3 user comments and virtually no attention.

Maybe it's because in the Globe, his column stood out. Whereas in the Star, among raving fanatics like Linda McQuaig, Haroon Siddiqui, Antonia Zerbisias, and James Travers, Salutin gets lost in the crowd. In fact, he seems relatively sane compared to his new colleagues, particularly when considering that Heather Mallick is one of them.

University of Toronto academics (and Linda McQuaig) angered by $35 million dollar donation

One would think that when an entrepreneur and philanthropist donates $35 million dollars to a public university for the purpose of establishing a top caliber school of Global Affairs, there would be cheering from people ostensibly interested in improving education and enhancing the debate about international issues.

But at the University of Toronto, it appears there are some staff members and their acolytes who are deeply troubled at the prospect of students being given a well-rounded education that strays from their "approved doctrines."

Peter Munk is the founder of Barrick Gold is one of Toronto's foremost philanthropists. His $35 million dollar donation to the University of Toronto to establish the Munk School of Global Affairs was intended to give U of T a program that could rival those at Stanford and Oxford universities. The purpose is to facilitate the experience and knowledge of students who can think critically and enable to them to engage with a variety of ideas and perspectives in order to contribute to addressing compelling world issues.

Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, as recent experience at U of T demonstrates, there are some academics at that institution who do not appear to be able to differentiate between critical thought and indoctrination. Their own views suggest that they are afraid that any thought that disputes their own should be suppressed and they object to Munk's donation to the university, ostensibly on the grounds that this is part of the "corporatization" of academia and that Munk may have "influence" on the curriculum.

It must be appalling for professors like Paul Hamel and John Valleau, and someone with the absence of a moral compass such as Linda McQuaig to think that anything other than Marxist perspective could inform political theory at U of T. The Munk School of Global Affairs is headed by Janice Gross Stein, who is as fair-minded and non-ideological as one could hope for in a teacher.

To give an indication of Munk's commitment to the open exchange of ideas, you only need look as far as the Munk Debates series he sponsors.

The Munk Debates have brought together people of diametrically opposing views to provide public exchange of ideas in which people can balance proposals and engage in something OISE students aren't exposed to: critical thought. The debates have been on subjects such as The Canadian vs US health care systems, whether religion is a force for good, climate change, humanitarian aid and more. Participants have included people with such varied outlooks as Stephen Lewis, Christopher Hitchens, Charles Krauthammer, Mia Farrow, Tony Blair, John Bolton, Gareth Evans and so on.

At the Blair/Hitchens debate, I met some Munk School students and they were thoughtful, balanced, intelligent people who were open to a variety of ideas.

Which is exactly what seems to bother McQuaig and the opponents of the donation and the Munk School of Global Affairs. Under the guise of wanting "critical thought," they seemingly want students to be able to have one type of thought and to be critical of anything that digresses from it. That could be called many things, but "critical thought" it ain't.

There are a lot of things I could write to make fun of the ideologues opposed Munk's donation and to ideas that contradict theirs. But nothing does the job better than this piece of news: The Toronto Star's blogger, Antonia Zerbisias, who without explanation backed out of being a featured speaker at the mini-hate fest earlier this week, is going to enthusiastically attend a full day of anti-Munk protest this Saturday.

Persichilli: One of the few voices of sanity at al-Starzeera

There's one columnist at al-Starzeera whom I haven't mentioned previously in this blog and I regret that.

Partially, it's because his column only appears once a week on Sundays and the other reason is that his main gig is as political editor of the Italian-Canadian newspaper Corriere Canadese, so I don't think of him so much as being a Star columnist.

But he is and he deserves mention, because he is one of the few editorial anomalies in the organization that gives a forum to the habitually uninformed hysteria of James Travers, Heather Mallick, Haroon Siddiqui, Christopher Hume, Antonia Zerbisias, Linda McQuaig, et cetera.

There are a couple of others, like Martin Regg Cohn, to be sure, but they are the rare exceptions in that organization.

Angelo Persichilli's column are routinely informative, insightful and he actually has the connections in Ottawa and the Liberal Party to be able to report based on credible information rather than wild, paranoid speculation.

Today he wrote a column about what Rob Ford's candidacy represents that has shown a level of insight and maturity that reminded me how out of place he is at The Toronto Star.  I don't agree with Persichilli about his notion of bike lanes being such a representation of the urban/suburban and elitist/public divide. If that were the case than Rocco Rossi wouldn't be the last-place candidate with single digit polling numbers. But basically, Persichilli nails it:

Rob Ford is neither a candidate to fear nor a political phenomenon. He is only an individual who is in the right place at the right time. The Oct. 25 vote is not about Ford, it’s a referendum on outgoing Mayor David Miller and his cronies.

This campaign is about four things: the repudiation of Miller’s vision of Toronto; the revolt of the suburban “colonies”; the frustration of people in the downtown core; and the inability of the other candidates to understand the first three of these factors.

Miller thinks that his Toronto is the real Canada. He’s wrong. Miller’s Toronto it’s only a distillation of this complex country seen through magnifying, distorting glasses. His Toronto is a concentration of Canadian virtues and imperfections, blown up and stuffed together into a few square kilometres around city hall.

There we have the best museums, art galleries and universities, but also a lot of ignorance just a few hundred metres away from those institutions. There are religious icons like St. Michael’s Cathedral, but also in the same street many organizations that are challenging Catholic doctrine. You find the opulent banks at Bay and King, but also food banks around the corner. There are the beautiful houses of the Rosedale enclave, but also a lot of homeless people. There are expensive and fancy cars, but also people who cannot even afford the TTC.

Miller didn’t deal with any of these contradictions. He made them worse by promoting petty projects like bike lanes that were sold as a social revolution, an environmental game-changer. His approach to government has been much like the behaviour of rich socialites who pollute the environment with their SUVs and private planes or sully the lakes in Muskoka with their powerboats and then engage in petty projects such as sending their children to volunteer at the food bank or to some camp in a Third World country for a photo-op to fabricate a social conscience.

Miller’s administration is identified with traffic jams that are fouling the environment; a “special relationship” with the unions and friendly, costly contractors; the garbage strike, which exposed his lack of leadership; waste; tax increases and, most of all, the typical in-your-face attitude of a messiah who thinks he can disregard the opinions of his ignorant subjects.

Read the rest of his column here.

Anti-Semitism among the regressive imbeciles at rabble.ca

rabble ca is not noteworthy for its ideas. That online clearing house for the ranting of humourless, paranoid Marxist stooges hasn't proposed a single idea worth serious consideration.

But rabble is noteworthy for providing insight into the mind-set of prominent individuals on Canada's far left. Naomi Klein, Rick Salutin, Maude Barlow, and Linda McQuaig are all regular contributors to the histrionic mouthpiece founded by Judy Rebick and currently published by Kim Elliott, the spouse of  NDP Deputy Leader Libby Davies.

One of the regular themes of rabble is a pathological institutionalized obsession with, and hatred of  Israel that verges on anti-Semitism. Now they are venturing further into that territory. Today rabble is promoting Michael Keefer's book Anti-Semitism, Real and imagined.

The show notes from their audio presentation describe it as:

In his book Antisemitism: Real and imagined, Michael Keefer details Canada’s history of real anti-semitism, and challenges attempts to equate political criticism of Israel with a “new” anti-semitism.  At stake is the right of Canadians to exercise free speech on the issue of Palestine and Israel.

It's natural that the fanatics at rabble want to sell the lie that single-minded focus on Israel that eliminates the context of the Israeli/Palestinian dispute and places all the blame on the Israeli side has nothing to do with its being a country of Jews.

They say it's racist for a country to have a Jewish character, but have absolutely no complaint about the Islamic character of countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, but that has nothing to do with them hating and singling out Jews.

They are concerned about colonization where it doesn't exist because the Jews are behind it, but have little to say where it does, as in the Chinese colonization of Tibet.

They talk about a "genocide" of the Palestinians, which is factually ludicrous, since the population of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories has tripled since Israel took over, while they ignore the actual genocide in Darfur. But this couldn't be motivated by their Jew-hatred.

And if anyone complains about the hypocrisy of the far-left, that's just more proof of the international Zionist conspiracy.

These bigots want to persuade anyone stupid enough to take their word that the Marxofascist left's single-minded focus on Israel not only isn't anti-Semitic, but that criticism of their bigotry is somehow an inhibition of free speech. This is part of a current regular theme of the nutcase left. They are pushing the absurd, McCarthyist claim that they are allowed to say anything the want without any basis in fact, but if you so much as criticize them, you are repressing free speech.  In other words, it's more of the totalitarian left's  "free speech for me, but not for thee."

And let's look at the credibility of Michael Keefer, whose book is also being heavily promoted by Mohammed "Elmo" Elmasry's The Canadian Charger.

Keefer is a 9-11 conspiracy theorist who has claimed that George W. Bush not only won the 2000 election by fraud, but that such was the case in 2004 election as well.  He is on the Editorial Board of Elmasry's The Canadian Charger, so it is not unreasonable to assume that he is in agreement with their recent printing of a column on "Jewish sensitivity" by nutcase journalist Alan Hart, who contends that Israel and Jews were behind 9-11.

These people are laughing stocks, but they are also bigots trying to cloak their prejudice in what they call a social justice movement. If mullah-controlled Iran is your idea of a just society, you will enjoy what the brain trust at rabble.ca would have in store for us if anyone descends to the point of taking them seriously.

More domestic terrorism from the Canadian Looney Left? The New Socialist has no problem with the morality of violence as long as it's an effective tactic

"if we remain too fixated on the optics of staying ‘peaceful’ – even in the face of unparalleled state violence, such as was witnessed during the G20 Summit – how can we realistically hope to advance social change?" Ali Mustafa


In an article in the New Socialist titled "Where Do We Go from Here? The G20 Summit, Black Bloc, and the Canadian Left" one Ali Mustafa is concerned about the direction the Canadian Left is taking and its continued inability to "radicalize" the masses.

If routine demonstrations consistently fall short of the radicalism that many among us would like to see, it is not necessarily due to any lack of political will on the part of organizers but more likely because the objective conditions at present are simply not conducive to do much else. Yet if we remain too fixated on the optics of staying ‘peaceful’ – even in the face of unparalleled state violence, such as was witnessed during the G20 Summit – how can we realistically hope to advance social change? The overall failure of the Canadian Left to meaningfully engage the broader public (and oftentimes each other) inevitably limits the range of ‘tactics’ that will be available to us. As a result, the basic goal of the Canadian Left so far has been not so much social change but simply looking to avoid the loss of any more ground politically (the labour movement being a particularly clear example of this troubling trend).



By contrast, whether targeted property attacks amount to a morally legitimate ‘tactic’ is not the question per se but rather, under the given balance of forces, are they at all strategically effective?

I came across this article through a link at rabble.ca. Of course radicalization might become even more difficult if the assessment by Linda "Paranoid" McQuaig is correct that "the media already blasts Canadians with a steady chorus of right-wing ideas" and it's going to get even worse when Quebecor launches its conservative news channel.

You can read the full article at The New Socialist

Linda McQuaig and the nitwits at rabble.ca's new great fear

The hapless nitwits at rabble.ca are quaking with fear about something. The advancement of peace talks in the middle east brokered by the hated Americans? The public's ongoing rejection of "Proportional Representation" which is the best hope for loser parties like the NDP to achieve some national influence?

Yes, but that isn't their most immediate fear.

The Marxist stooges' greatest fear of the moment is: Quebecor's conservative media network!

"The prime minister's office. In a first-world democracy. Controlling a major media network. We did not make this up."

Unlike the ephemeral "soldiers with guns in our streets," we have the very real and menacing prospect of a major national media chain being bulldozed into a blatant propaganda tool by and for the party in power.

"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[Linda McQuaig] 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."

And further along...

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."

It all makes soldiers with guns on Canada's streets more plausible with every passing day.

"the media already blasts Canadians with a steady chorus of right-wing ideas" Linda McQuaig

I don't know what Linda McQuaig is mainlining, but it's doing strange things to her brain. The Toronto Star is the largest-circulation daily in Canada. The Globe and Mail, which simultaneously, along with rabble, publishes Rick Salutin is the next largest. And then there's The CB frikin' C. This is "a steady chorus of right-wing ideas"!?

Being continually marginalized at the fringes of society must be terrifying enough for the rabbleoids. Toronto is on the verge of throwing out a socialist city council and voting in fiscally-conservative Rob Ford. Stephen Harper has been Prime Minister for 4 years, being the most popular national party in the last 2 elections and the NDP has made zero headway, despite the Looney Left's all-out efforts.

And here comes another network that takes a different ideological position to rabble's and isn't going to be financed by Syd Ryan! How dare we have a marketplace of ideas and a free press that doesn't enforce only the ideologically approved dogma of the 3 witches (Judy Rebick/Naomi Klein/Libby Davies)!?

If you want a laugh, you can read the entire column here at rabble.ca

Linda McQuaig equates self-defense to terrorists murdering a wheelchair-bound civillian

Linda McQuaig has just compared the Israeli action in enforcing the blockade to prevent weapons being smuggled into Gaza to the Palestinian terrorists' 1985 seizing of the Achille Lauro and their murder of a wheelchair-bound American in this article published in The Toronto Star


http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/823487--mcquaig-partner-in-flotilla-farce

I think it would, under the best of circumstances, require a moral imbecile to make that comparison.

Achille lauro hijacking

McQuaig backs herself up with an eyewitness acount from none other than Kevin Neish who, in McQuaig's words: "also on-board, report[ed] that the attack began with Israeli commandos firing live ammunition onto the darkened ship from helicopters above"

As you can see from yesterday's post, she might want to find a more credible eyewitness.

http://eyecrazy.blogspot.com/2010/06/is-canadian-floatilla-activist-kevin.html

Why does anything involving Israel cause the far-left crazies to go off the deep end?