CBC: Canadian Butt-kissing Corporation

It's been over 3 weeks since Heather Mallick's withering opinion piece about despicable moron Sarah Palin ran on the CBC's website and the crybaby wingnuts have been bawling about it ever since, with the National Post's Kay family leading the charge. Oh boo hoo hoo! Sob! SHRIEEEEEK!

Now the CBC has caved -- caved! -- to right-wingnut pressure, removed the column from its website and published a whimpering "mea culpa":

"More than 300 people have taken the trouble this month to complain to the CBC ombudsman about a column we ran on CBCNews.ca about Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Sept. 5. The column, by award-winning freelance writer Heather Mallick, was also pilloried by the National Post in Canada and by Fox News in the U.S. … Vince Carlin, the CBC Ombudsman, has now issued his assessment of the Mallick column. He doesn't fault her for riling readers by either the caustic nature of her tone or the polarizing nature of her opinion. But he objects that many of her most savage assertions lack a basis in fact. And he is certainly correct. Mallick's column is a classic piece of political invective. It is viciously personal, grossly hyperbolic and intensely partisan. And because it is all those things, this column should not have appeared on the CBCNews.ca site … We failed you in this case. And as a result we have put new editing procedures in place to insure that in the future, work that is not appropriate for our platforms, will not appear."

"Viciously personal, grossly hyperbolic and intensely partisan". Uh... I can has "Viewpoint"? What part of the word "viewpoint" is so hard to understand!??

Frankly, 300 complaints doesn't sound like a lot to me, given that the column was discussed on Fox News, the O'Reilly show and other right-wing outlets whose audiences are notorious for having nothing better to do but freep polls and complain about "left-wing bias". Oh well... at the center of the storm is the fact that the CBC is taxpayer-funded, and therefore has no business publishing opinion pieces that don't have a consensus of agreement with 100% of taxpayers. (Ignoring for a moment the fact that the vast majority of Canadians likely agree with the gist of Mallick's comments about Caribou Barbie.)

Public consensus for opinion pieces because of taxpayer funding? Get real. I look at it this way: I have no kids in school, yet I pay taxes for schools. I have no use for churches, yet I subsidize them through tax breaks, even as some of their more rabid members try to bully their way into public policy-making. If the CBC is to have a "Viewpoint" column at all, sooner or later there will be viewpoints that don't have consensus. TOUGH! SHIT!

The taxpayer funding issue is kind of a red herring anyway, since almost everyone gets some (yes, that's the Western Standard that sucked up $132,063 of MY MONEY in its death throes last year -- why wasn't I consulted?). As usual, it boils down to the right's psychotic intolerance for opinions they don't agree with: free speech for me, but not for Heather Mallick. It really is that simple.

And anyway, what about the taxpayers who agree with Mallick? What are we, chopped liver? Thanks a pantload, CBC!

UPDATE: Mallick's column was so evil, odious and disgusting that these guys are doing somersaults trying to find it again: "It's here", "Try here", "Find it here". Huh!? Guys, mission accomplished -- you got Mallick censored. Now you want to read the column again? Jesus fucking DUH! (h/t CC)

UPDATE II: Even better.

UPDATE III: psa speaks, you listen.

Hurricane Heather

Never mind Ike and its devastation of the US landscape -- the hurricane devastating the mindscape of right-wing America at the moment is our own Heather Mallick:

"Canadian journalist Heather Mallick is facing an ugly onslaught from the U.S. right-wing media and its fans for an online column she wrote maligning Sarah Palin as "white trash."

The Sept. 5 column on CBC.ca, entitled "A Mighty Wind Blows Through the Republican Convention," had already been on the receiving end of vitriol from some Canadian news organizations.

But Fox News picked up on it this week, and unleashed its full fury on Mallick for stating that Palin, the Republicans' vice-presidential nominee, appeals to "the white trash vote" with her "toned-down version of the porn actress look.""

Last week I posted about the double head explosion that Mallick set off with her snarky Viewpoint piece about Sarah Palin -- the janitor is still scrubbing bits of brain and skull from the walls of the National Post. (Okay, more skull than brain. A lot more.) Eleven days is an eternity by the lightning-fast information-moving standards of the internets, yet the article continues to cause a chain-reaction of head explosions on both sides of the border, particularly since Fox News covered it. And are they fucking squealing! Now the article's combox at the CBC website is foaming over with spittle-flecked outrage, and there are still comments being posted even as I type (6 more just now). GET A LIFE, WINGNUTS! Never before has there been so much faux outrage from so many over so little.

It's not just Americans perpetuating the fauxtrage. I happened to turn on the O'Reilly show yesterday, just in time to hear Bill-O take a call from "Lance on Vancouver Island, Canada"... "What say you, Lance?". What said Lance is that he wanted to apologize to "All Americans" on behalf of Canada for Mallick's column, and then add fawningly that "Canada just does what You Guys (the US) do". Pant, pant. A patronizing and scornful O'Reilly scolded Lance, self-appointed Ambassador of Grovelling, and advised Canadians to rise up en masse against the CBC. (Lance whimpered and begged for a cookie.) Wow -- so that's what Canada's conservatives have come to? Simpering lapdogs of the American right?

But I'm getting away from myself here. Back to Saint Sarah, who's disliked (to put it mildly) for a number of excellent reasons apart from her lack of qualifications for the VP's job: she's a proven liar and a Jesus Camp simpleton who has the unmitigated hubris to think she could actually handle the job of VP (never mind that "one heartbeat" thing!). Georgie in a dress. Here in Canada, where polls indicate that 66% of us would vote for Obama if we could, it should come as no surprise that extremist nitwits like Palin are widely loathed. So one of our columnists wrote a negative opinion piece about her -- so what? What part of the word "Viewpoint" don't these people understand?? This isn't news reporting, it's an opinion piece. Ya know -- that free speech thingie?

The perpetually fauxtraged jabber about the CBC's taxpayer funding, and Why-is-the-Canadian-Government-paying-for-this-far-left-moonbattery??? SHRIEEEEK!!!

But moonbattery is in the eye of the beholder. Although some of Mallick's remarks may have been intemperate and even petty (the part about the "overtreated hair", hmm -- Palin's caramel and platinum highlights are identical to my own), a lot of what she said is in fact what many of us think... and if we're to believe the non-foaming comments at the CBC website, an opinion also shared by more than a few Americans. More than anything, the Palin pick has drawn so much fire because it shows that even after 8 hideous, disastrous years of Bush, American conservatives haven't learned a goddamn thing. Keeping the GOP in power is more important than proper governance, more important than national security, more important than ending their endless wars and fixing their broken economy. Which would be okay if the USA was some banana republic whose play elections and faux-candidates didn't affect anyone else in the world, but it isn't.

Meanwhile, wingnuts continue to register with the CBC website just to post a vitriolic comment -- honestly, don't these people have anything better to think about? Like their 401ks that were looted by the last gang of petro pimps and warmongers?

Mallick-induced explosions at NatPo

Heather speaks:

"I assume John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential partner in a fit of pique because the Republican money men refused to let him have the stuffed male shirt he really wanted. She added nothing to the ticket that the Republicans didn't already have sewn up, the white trash vote, the demographic that sullies America's name inside and outside its borders yet has such a curious appeal for the right.

So why do it?

It's possible that Republican men, sexual inadequates that they are, really believe that women will vote for a woman just because she's a woman. They're unfamiliar with our true natures. Do they think vaginas call out to each other in the jungle night? I mean, I know men have their secret meetings at which they pledge to do manly things, like being irresponsible with their semen and postponing household repairs with glue and used matches. Guys will be guys, obviously."

Barbara Kay: BANG!:

"But a new low in Palin-targeting journalistic sewage – and that is saying something – fetched up on the CBC’s online shores on September 5, written by Heather Mallick. Her VIEWPOINT blog post, “A Mighty Wind blows through Republican convention” Is so beyond the ethical pale that it comes close to hate speech.

Not that I want Mallick reported to a Human rights Commission. I just want the CBC to fire her and I want to see her blackballed from Canadian media altogether."

Jonathon Kay: BOOM!:

"Mallick’s column — “A mighty wind blows through Republican convention” — advances two theses: (1) That John McCain’s selection of 44-year-old Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his VP nominee was a crass gesture meant to appease the party’s “rural,” “unlettered” “white trash” base; and (2) that Palin herself is a tacky, badly dressed redneck who looks like a “porn actress.”"

Did we really need two columns on the same day about the same topic... another columnist? Christ, what a couple of freaking crybabies. Oh, boo hoo hoo, yes, it's the terrible truth: during election campaigns, people sometimes say mean things. Waaaahhh! SHRIEEEK!

Mama Kay was especially outraged, though she did stop short of demanding Mallick be burned at the stake. She contends that those who write for the taxpayer-funded CBC should be fired when some taxpayers don't agree with what they write. What about those of us who also pay taxes and do agree? Apparently in Wingnuttia we don't count. (Good -- then I want all that money back.) But Ms. Kay goes a lot further than taxpayer issues with her disturbing demand that Mallick be "blackballed from Canadian media altogether". Sorry, but that sounds an awful lot like censorship to me.

Most of Barbara Kay's screeds are barely worth reading, with their addlepated nitwitticisms and indignant, self-righteous scolding. But I can't imagine wanting her "blackballed from Canadian media", and if it ever came to that, I'd fight for her right to speak her mind (however feeble I might think it). Amazing how little it takes to make the "free speech" mask drop, and how little these douchebags really care for the principle.

CBC, shine a light

on me..."Heh".

Poser Poker

I'll see your opportunistic whore, and raise you a hypocritical scumbag.

Shorter K & K: "De-fund the CBC -- except our cut."

Kids strike back at fetus fetishists

Ya gotta love young people.

Having spent the last few weeks being swamped by FFs on CBC's Facebook Wish List, the kids are sick and tired of the endless pedantic rhetoric, hyperbole and gross fetus pictures being posted by the anti-choice nutters. So they're striking back at the tiresome twits with a little twisted humour. Their latest discussion topic:"This group is not pro-choice, we are pro-abortions. There is no choice. Only abortions." HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Fetus fetishists frantic over Facebook

CBC's Great Canadian Wish List: it's just an imminently freepable online poll, the results of which (as any thinking person knows) mean zilch-zip-zero. Nobody other than the students it was originally intended for paid much attention to it at first: until the mobilization of the right-wing freep machine skewed the voting so much that the results suggest Canada is a social conservative intellectual wasteland where our main concerns are abolishing abortion and "spiritual revival". Um yeah, right!

The "abolish abortion" wish quickly gained traction as the conservative freep/sockpuppet machine went into overdrive. Pro-choicers stayed away from it in droves; there's no point engaging anti-choice cretins who repeat "the fetus is a person" over and over ad nauseum like automatons. Also I'm sure many pro-choicers feel, as I do, that my right to an abortion isn't up for "debate" any more than my right to a hysterectomy or a heart transplant. FUCK no, I'm not "discussing" it with anyone, except my doctor.

I was all for just letting them "win" the goofy little contest, go on TV and be assholes, then disappear back into the wormy woodwork from whence they came. But some pro-choicers are sufficiently disgusted by the patently false picture painted by the facebook results that they decided it might be time to mobilize our vote and get that imbecilic, idiotic wish off the top spot. Suddenly the FFs,feeling threatened, have taken it to their main news organ, "lifesite":

OTTAWA, June 14, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) –The CBC has inadvertently allowed pro-life Canadians a voice on abortion, a rare opportunity in Canada’s largely pro-abortion media landscape. Online abortion advocates are complaining that the “Great Canadian Wish List,” a contest described by the CBC as a way for Canadians to express what they hope for the country, has been “highjacked” by “right-wingers,” “anti-choicers” and “fetus fetishizers”...in other words, Canadians wanting an end to abortion. (...)

"Fetus Fetishizers"! Ha! You'd think they'd at least give Canadian Cynic a hat tip for the use of that expression. Bastards!

"Worried that the pro-abortion hegemony in Canadian media is under threat, abortion advocates are urging their supporters in online chat groups and mailing lists to vote for the alternate wish, “that Canada would remain pro-choice.” Joyce Arthur, among Canada’s leading abortion crusaders, complains, “‘Abolish Abortion’ is the #1 wish by a wide margin, which may indicate growing confidence within the anti-choice movement, and their increased hopes for a chance to re-open the debate and recriminalize abortion.”

In other words, when they do it it's "winning", when we do it it's cheating. My question is, if the fetus fetishists are so sure that their opinion is truly representative of the majority of Canadians, what are they so afraid of? Why does the thought of pro-choice voters mobilizing on the facebook poll throw them into such a raging panic?

(h/t birth pangs)

Yo, fetus fetishists:

the jig's up, CBC is wise to you chumps -- this afternoon they spent some time perusing this blog for evidence of your freepitude on the Wish List. Your wish will no doubt get the most votes, the result of sending sending How-To guides to all those kids from schools like Our Lady Of Perpetual Copraphagy, and posting alerts on right-wing websites and listservs. (We won't even get into the sockpuppetry.) In the event that you're given a chance to speak on air, I guarantee you'll be called upon to explain "Freepology 101". Just something to think about! Hope this helps!!!

Fetus fetishists get their 15 minutes

Or 2 minutes, or 30 seconds, whatever the case may be. Tonight! is their big night -- one of the FF's from the CBC facebook freep-fest was interviewed, said interview supposedly to run on the CBC evening news tonight. From the "AAIC" discussion board on CBC's Great Canadian Wish List website:

"Topic: Our Wish on CBC News at 6pm Tuesday!!! Watch it!

Hey everyone, I was just interviewed by CBC news about our wish. It will be aired tomorrow (Tuesday June 12) at 6pm ET on CBC. The program is called "CBC news at 6" It will be interesting how they use the interview on the news. Fingers crossed."

Wow, that's so friggin exciting I think I just peed myself. But I'm looking forward to it -- if this dude sounds anything on TV like he sounds in the facebook "debate" (if by "debate" you mean "unwelcome invasion into the private personal business in my pants"), it should be good. As much as it pisses me off that they think they should be able to dictate what goes on in my body, it delights me to see them testify before the public because they always, always discredit themselves. The religiosity, the desperate, petty picking apart of semantics ("You called it a baby! So you're okay with killing babies!"), and the gory, scientifically-challenged hyperbole aren't exactly calculated to win anyone over -- it's all a kind of mutual mental masturbation in which they furiously stroke themselves into an orgasmic frenzy with fetus-shaped vibrators.

I just hope the guy gets more than a few seconds -- as far as I'm concerned, the longer he talks, the tighter the noose.