The latest article about “weblogs, or ‘blogs’”, rather amazingly, sees no difference between off-colour comments made by bloggers who are Liberal party executives and those made by bloggers who are average citizens. All bloggers are advised to watch what they say, because — are you ready? — many are “wannabe politicians.” Someone called Denise Wakeman of “U.S.-based Blog Squad, a consulting firm that shows businesses how to use blogs,” offers the following heady mixture of the painfully obvious and the hyperbolic:

If there’s something you don’t want to get back to somebody else, you shouldn’t publish it because when one posts content on a blog, it’s archived forever.

Blogs are from earth — they are written by earthlings. You would almost never know it from reading Canadian newspapers.

National treasure Paul Jackson patents a new rhetorical device — praise by faint damnation:

I can’t say I see Harper as changing the world in an historic sense — as did Sir Winston Churchill when he refused to capitulate to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s hordes, or President Ronald Reagan in toppling Soviet Communism and freeing hundreds of millions in the Soviet empire from enslavement — but I do know Harper is a decent family man with honourable values.

Canadians are the worst sports fans in the world. To all of them out there who are absolutely apoplectic that Todd Bertuzzi was chosen to represent Canada in Turin (or saddened, or appalled, or considering cheering for those gentle, noble Finns, or whatever other forms this outrage takes), I have one simple question: How long would have been enough for you? The most popular answer, so far as I can see, is simply “more than what he got.” This is known in the business as a “cop-out”.

No less an authority than the Toronto Star’s editorial board is of the opinion that Bertuzzi should have been banned for life, but there is simply no precedent in the annals of the NHL history for such a penalty. And commenters in said newspaper, their pants sticky with self-righteousness, have conveniently omitted their preferred penalty in favour of the usual ranting and raving. To wit:

Jack Sim from Toronto says: “He does not represent me or my values. Any other Canadian that did what he did would be in jail, and not out making millions of dollars.”

Alex and Janet Duff from Oakville say: “What kind of message does this send to our youth? Do whatever you want in life because there are not really any consequences!”

Wayne Powers of Saskatoon agrees: “We tell our kids there are repercussions for their actions, and turn a blind eye to Bertuzzi and Heatley. Heatley should not go either.”

Kristan Jones of Bala too: “He ruined the NHL career of a fellow athlete, yet his punishment was a slap on the wrist and he still gets to make a wealthy living…”

These arguments — the first, and the next three in combination — are popular, and they are nonsense. As I’ve said before, the suspension the NHL handed Bertuzzi was easily the most severe in its history: 20 NHL hockey games (including seven playoff tilts, not including however many more Bertuzzi’s play might have netted the Canucks), the entire 2004-2005 hockey season, two World Championships and the World Cup. He lost half a million US dollars in NHL salary, plus an estimated $350,000 in endorsements, plus whatever he could have earned in Europe last year — if he’d caught AK Bars Kazan’s fancy, for instance, potentially well over a million samolians.

That’s 13 regular season games, seven playoff games, three international tournaments and likely upwards of two million American dollars. I’ve seen lenience, and it doesn’t look anything like that.

Many of this theory’s proponents will give you the “he should be in jail” line, too, as if we routinely hand out life sentences to those who rob people of their livelihoods. There are, what, like eight people in Canada serving true life sentences? A first-time offender who did actually manage to recreate Bertuzzi’s suckerpunch/piledriver act on a downtown Toronto sidewalk would probably get probation. The idea that he’d get 20 months in prison is richer than my grandmother’s trifle. Burp.

The suspension is to the on-ice act as the prison sentence is to the on-sidewalk act, after all: a lifetime ban is equivalent to a life sentence. Thus, banning Bertuzzi for life from NHL hockey would have been totally out of step with how we treat offenders in non-hockey contexts. I don’t anticipate any cessation of bleating to the contrary, mind you. I’m willing to debate whether Bertuzzi should have been left off this Olympic team as a gesture of disapproval towards his actions, but not until everyone calms the bloody hell down.

To me, the real story of the week was the anonymous (and ultimately groundless) cowardice coming out of the Canadian Olympic Committee. We can have a reasonable discussion about Bertuzzi, but questioning Dany Heatley’s and Shane Doan’s worthiness is beyond the pale. Doan especially — he’s been officially cleared of any wrongdoing by the league after some very fuzzy accusations of calling linesman Stephane Auger a “frog”, and that is (or should be) that. Cue Denis Coderre, former secretary of state for amateur sport, who said the following of the non-incident (please read aloud using Don Cherry’s girly-man voice):

It’s totally unacceptable and I sent a letter to Bob Nicholson, the president of Hockey Canada, and I’m sending all the messages that I can to all my sports colleagues [former colleagues –ed.] to send a clear message that as long as Mr. Doan doesn’t apologize and show that he truly regrets his gesture that he shouldn’t be there as a member of this team, period.

Truly this is the former secretary of state for amateur sport that Canadians deserve. Shane Doan arguably shouldn’t be on Team Canada because he’s not a good enough hockey player, but Wayne is presumed to be wise in this regard. Coderre certainly shouldn’t be an MP, because he’s an idiot. I shan’t wait up for his apology.

Any lingering antipathy towards Dany Heatley, meanwhile, seems to me to stem entirely from the public’s unslakeable thirst to see rich young athletes come a cropper (and from an incredibly stubborn rumor that he was drunk, which he was not). If he’d been driving a Honda he might never have even been charged, and we’d think of Dan Snyder’s death as a tragic accident — which would be great, I think, since that’s what it obviously was. I don’t care what the law in Georgia says — calling what Heatley did homicide is ridiculous, and even hinting that it’s grounds for his exclusion from the Olympics, especially anonymously, is more or less akin to pissing on Snyder’s grave.

Notice how it’s “about the victim” in the case of Steve Moore, who seems to hold a very justifiable grudge, but somehow not about the victim in the case of Dan Snyder, whose family famously supported Heatley from the get-go? Funny how that works. One way or the other, it always ends up being about us, the participants in Canada’s third and fourth national sports — pietistic sermonizing, and self-loathing.

These people who wouldn’t dream of watching Bertuzzi play hockey in red and white are the same people who cheer on Adam van Whoosits — you know, the canoe guy, yay Canada! — but recoil in bombastic disgust when Perdita Felicien biffs on a hurdle. Then, for want of a mirror, they fire off letters to the Toronto Star wondering what the problem is. My Canada includes both Todd Bertuzzi and Steve Moore, but it does not include these people. They’ve already guaranteed themselves a lousy New Year, and I hope they had a really crummy Christmas too.

There’s a line in the seventh episode of the increasingly terrific third season of Arrested Development that would, but for its sheer mean-spiritedness, perfectly encapsulate the show. In a flashback, we see the Bluth family planning a fundraising event for which they have not yet picked a cause. (They are ultimately unable to, and the event ends up raising $25,000 for T.B.D.) Each member of the family writes down his or her choice and puts it in a bowl. George is reading them out one by one.

“Ovarian cancer,” he says in mock surprise, and looks at Michael. “Gee, I wonder who that was.”

I imagine this confused the hell out of first-time viewers of the show — all 150-or-so of them. They would have felt like they needed a back story, and they did, but only that Tracy Bluth is dead — as far as I know this is the first Arrested Development viewers had ever heard of ovarian cancer. The show was asking us to process simultaneously this new information about how Michael’s wife died and the fact that George was making fun of it, and then to laugh.

And I did laugh. But add up the people who wouldn’t get it and the people who wouldn’t find it remotely funny and you’ll have a pretty solid majority of the North American population, I’d say. Staring down the barrel of extinction’s rifle, Mitchell Hurwitz and company have chosen this moment to join the rare company of those willing to attempt cancer humor.

That’s okay. My marrow’s just low.

This does not bode well. (Unless somehow Fox picks up a fourth season, of course, in which case it bodes extremely well.)

Look out — the blogger known only as Nugget is getting political. He highlights the truly absurd tale of Guy Massé, 47, single father of three, who was fired from his job at a St-Hyacinthe Zellers for taking expired chocolate bars out of the company garbage to give to his kids.

Nugget is, I think, too kind to the Zellers folk:

Call him into the office, yell at him a bit and tell him the importance of being a part of the team. Reprimand him if you must, dock his pay for a day, switch him to the worst shift there is, but don’t fire him.

That would indeed have been better. Hell, that’s probably a pretty good day for most Zellers employees. But unless Massé’s manager was actually maintaining a queue of employees who were after the past-due sweets — unless Canada’s oldest company runs some sort of lottery system whereby spoiled or potentially spoiled foodstuffs are distributed to its gratefully misty-eyed employees — there is simply no reason on earth for the company to care.

Either there’s more to this story, or Zellers in St-Hyacinthe can kiss my business goodbye.

Sometimes, when your newspaper “refuses” to pick up on a story that you think is the biggest thing since Strippergate, it’s not The Grand Liberal Media Conspiracy at work. It’s simply that your newspaper has a policy against publishing great big steaming piles of unsubstantiated bullshit that they’ll end up having to clean up with their bare hands.

[UPDATE December 22: To her credit, Ms Shaidle has appointed herself the blogging clearinghouse for this rapidly evaporating story.]

I’m going to buck a trend here and say that if some two-bit cow-tipping Senator from Montana wants to believe that some or all of the 9/11 terrorists got into the US via Canada, we should go ahead and let him do so. Jumping up and down and demanding retractions and apologies is probably just going to reassure the few remaining rubes out there who believe it that they’re on to something. What’s worse, it’s undignified. And what’s even worse than that, it forces us to live with half-assed retractions like this:

Montana Senator Conrad Burns said Tuesday he “misspoke” when he claimed terrorists involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks entered the United States from Canada.

But he insisted his mistake at a news conference this week shouldn’t obscure security problems “that clearly exist on the border.”

In a letter to Ambassador Frank McKenna, Burns noted a man who planned to bomb a New York City subway in 1997, Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, was arrested on this third illegal entry into the United States from Canada.

He also noted Ahmed Ressam, the so-called Millennium Bomber who plotted an attack on the Los Angeles Airport, entered illegally from Canada.
…
“These incidents are disturbing and should not be ignored,” Burns wrote.

There now, do we all feel better? Or did that “retraction” have precisely the opposite effect that Ambassador McKenna hoped?

(Cross-posted to the Shotgun.)

Not at all on the subject of reasonable people, Paul Jackson hit a round-tripper in today’s Calgary Sun:

Has no one wondered why it took so long to solve the ban on our packaged beef and then live cattle destined for the U.S?

Brian Mulroney — or Preston Manning, Stockwell Day or Stephen Harper — would have solved it with a phone call.

Has no one wondered why the softwood lumber dispute drags on year-after-year?

Mulroney — or Manning, Day or Harper — again would have solved it with a snap of the fingers.

Through the power of the internet and your tax dollars, here’s Barbara Frum, in 1986, interviewing Allan Gotlieb on just why he and Brian Mulroney were unable to solve the softwood lumber dispute. (If you shut your eyes, that news item could easily be from yesterday.)

Sorry, I digress. Back to Paul:

Has no one wondered why Martin can’t get his foot in the door of the Oval Office at the White House to push Canada’s case on any number of issues?

Mulroney — or Manning, Day or Harper — would get the nod from the Bush administration on just about every concern the mind could conjure up on Canadian-American relations.

That’s one to put up on the fridge.

Quick reader poll: other than the “global conscience” piffle in Montreal and the ensuing back-and-forth with Washington, can anyone point out some recent examples of Paul Martin’s anti-American rhetoric? Douglas MacKinnon sure couldn’t in his semi-infamous editorial in the Washington Times — heck, he had to drag Ahmed Ressam into it — but that can’t just be it, can it? A single speech at a single silly event totally unrelated to the campaign shouldn’t be enough to turn reasonable people into certifiable conspiracy theorists.

[UPDATE December 21: So that's a "no", then. The only overtly anti-American thing Paul Martin has done since the campaign began was to deliver his little climate change sermon in Montreal. That's what prompted the American Ambassador's objection. That's what set the Washington Times, Frontpage Magazine and Fox News types off on their anti-Canada jag, hauling out a six-year-old terrorist plot that was successfully thwarted and, in the case of the Times, trying to turn Carolyn Parrish into two people (shudder –ed.):

After the prime minister (sic) said the United States lacked a "global conscience" for not ratifying the seriously flawed Kyoto accord, Mr. Wilkins decided it was time to speak up. If that had been the first insult, he more than likely would have let it go. Sadly, it was far from the first or the worst.

A top aide to Mr. Martin's predecessor, Jean Chretien, once called President Bush a "moron." Another high-ranking Canadian official publicly called Mr. Bush a profane name. And yet another liberal member of parliament stomped on a George W. Bush doll on national television. This would be the same Canadian liberal who called all Americans a profane name.

So, to recap: not very much anti-Americanism; a complete, Bruce Banner-esque meltdown from the conservative press and blogosphere on both sides of the border. Whether or not this is exactly what the Liberals wanted, and I'm prepared to believe it was, it was a wild overreaction.]

New York Post or no New York Post, this is one of the more extraordinary pieces of fearmongering journalism I’ve ever come across:

Cham Dallas, director of the federally funded Center for Mass Destruction Defense [uninspiring website here –ed.], discussed his conclusions at a Nov. 10 closed hearing of a congressional panel. He showed lawmakers data predicting 1.6 million New Yorkers could be killed, maimed, burned or sickened if a 20-kiloton nuke exploded at Broadway and Warren Street downtown.

“We are not prepared for the 100,000 burn victims,” Dallas said. “It will be a picture out of Dante’s ‘Inferno,’ with all these people screaming in agony for days, and you won’t have enough people there to help them.”

A bomb that size, similar to the weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is considered “relatively small” by today’s standards for thermonuclear weapons, and could be detonated from the back of “a small rental truck or even a van,” Dallas said.