Scared Witless (Anyone left shaking after CBC's lowbrow attack on Sarah Palin?)

Heather Mallick must be loving it. The largely anonymous journalist, a legend in her own lunchtime, is now the subject of controversy because she called American Republicans "white trash," said Sarah Palin looked like a porn actress and made repugnant personal comments about the governor of Alaska's family. She did all this on the CBC website, paid for by public dollars. The content of the diatribe is less Oscar Wilde and more Oscar the Grouch, but it's become major news in the United States.

This is not a woman whose career has exactly blossomed and the consequent anger and bitterness is obvious, as is her evident jealousy of Palin's physical attractiveness. None of this matters very much; what does matter is that once again the Canadian public is obliged to fund this nonsense. Beyond the abuse of public money, however, is hypocrisy.

Mallick's defence is one of freedom of speech. Yet last year I was approached by the editor of a newspaper called The Women's Post and asked if I would write a column for her, providing what publisher Sarah Thomson called "a conservative voice." She explained that she already had plenty of liberal writers but wanted some balance.

One of those left-wing writers employed by The Women's Post was Mallick. When she heard about me being offered a column she became extraordinarily angry and threatened to resign. The good people at The Women's Post called the enraged journalist's bluff and it was goodbye to our control freak comrade. So when Mallick's defenders cry about unfettered expression and the right to offend they ought to know of whom they speak.

Which brings us nicely to radio presenter Michael Enright, who on CBC last Sunday said that he had been fortunate in his life to avoid such unpleasant things as "Michael Coren and the Ebola virus" -- proving that genuine wit and humour require more than pomposity and a silly bow tie. Much as I'm delighted by the attack, twice in two weeks now CBC types have used childlike insults to pursue their own leftist agendas.

Enright was the man who some years ago said that the Roman Catholic Church was the largest criminal organization in the world outside of the Mafia. Enright, or anyone else, has a perfect right to express an opinion, even one as suburban and daft as this. Such ignorance and extremism does, however, bring the man's ability and objectivity into severe doubt. Has he been informed and balanced in his interviews over the years or is he merely a conduit for the cliched Toronto leftism?

I assume that before long Bollinger Bolshevik journalists will simply be throwing bricks through people's windows if they disagree with them. So much easier than writing anything down or picking up a microphone.

There is something exciting and vibrant about the meaty exchange of ideas and ideals, and from such a clash of ideologies Canada becomes a more interesting place. Instead we have dreary and predictable abuse from Enright, Mallick and their dowdy friends.

Time and change are against the corporation. Simply put, the CBC as it stands now has no future. For the time being people who somehow think they're clever apparently will argue with you by the equivalent of calling you smelly or putting a "kick me" sign on your back. How sad. And these dunderheads say Americans are dumb!

Mark Steyn should file a hate speech complaint agianst Malik
, with the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

She would be censored and fined.

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Heather Mallick
A Mighty Wind blows through Republican convention
Last Updated: Friday, September 5, 2008 | 8:48 PM ET
By Heather Mallick, special to CBC News

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.

But do they not know that women have been trained to resent other women and that they only learn to suppress this by constantly berating themselves and reading columns like this one? I’m a feminist who understands that women can nurse terrible and delicate woman hatred.

Palin was not a sure choice, not even for the stolidly Republican ladies branch of Citizens for a Tackier America. No, she isn’t even female really. She’s a type, and she comes in male form too.

John Doyle, the cleverest critic in Canada, comes right out and calls Palin an Alaska hillbilly. Damn his eyes, I wish I’d had the wit to come up with it first. It’s safer than “white trash” but I’ll pluck safety out of the nettle danger. Or something.

Doyle’s job includes watching a lot of reality television and he’s well-versed in the backstory. White trash — not trailer trash, that’s something different — is rural, loud, proudly unlettered (like Bush himself), suspicious of the urban, frankly disbelieving of the foreign, and a fan of the American cliché of authenticity. The semiotics are pure Palin: a sturdy body, clothes that are clinging yet boxy and a voice that could peel the plastic seal off your new microwave.
‘Turn your guns on Levi, ma’am’

Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look favoured by this decade’s woman, the overtreated hair, puffy lips and permanently alarmed expression. Bristol has what is known in Britain as the look of the teen mum, the “pramface.” Husband Todd looks like a roughneck; Track, heading off to Iraq, appears terrified. They claim to be family obsessed while being studiously terrible at parenting. What normal father would want Levi “I’m a fuckin’ redneck” Johnson prodding his daughter?

I know that I have an attachment to children that verges on the irrational, but why don’t the Palins? I’m not the one preaching homespun values but I’d destroy that ratboy before I’d let him get within scenting range of my daughter again, and so would you. Palin’s e-mails about the brother-in-law she tried to get fired as a state trooper are fizzing with rage and revenge. Turn your guns on Levi, ma’am.

Palin has it all, along with being vicious and profoundly dishonest. Just hours after her first convention speech, the Associated Press did a good fast listing of her untruths and I won’t dwell on them.

I did promise to watch the entire convention so you wouldn’t have to, but I discovered a neat trick. I switched between the convention and the 2003 folk music mockumentary A Mighty Wind on Bravo.

They were indistinguishable. Click on a nervous wreck with deeply strange hair doing a monologue on society today and where it all went wrong. Are you watching Christian belter Aaron Tippin singing Where the Stars and Stripes and Eagle Fly in the Xcel Centre in St. Paul or the actors from Spinal Tap remixing the 1966 version of Potato’s in the Paddy Wagon?

Who delivered this line: “To do then now would be retro. To do then then was very now-tro, if you will.” Was it Rev. James Dobson of Focus on the Family talking about Bristol Palin’s shotgun wedding or was it a flashback to the Kingston Trio?

The conventioneers are nothing like the rich men who run the party, and that’s the mystery of the hick vote. They’d be much better served by the Democrats. I know Thomas Frank answered this in What’s the Matter with Kansas?; I know that red states vote Republican on social issues to give themselves the only self-esteem available to their broken, economically abused existence.
Lie works for Palin

But surely they know Barack Obama is not planning to finish off the ordinary hillbilly when he adjusts tax rates. He’s going to raise taxes on the top 2% of Americans and that doesn’t include anyone at the convention beyond the Bushes and McCains and random party management. So why cheer Palin when she claims otherwise?

Is it racism? I’m told that it is, although I find racism so appalling that I have difficulty identifying it. It is more likely the dearly held Republican notion that any American can become violently rich, as rich as those hedge funders in Greenwich, Conn., who buy $40-million mansions unseen and have their topiary shaped in the form of musical notes.

When Palin and Rudy Giuliani sneered at Obama’s years of “community organizing” — they said it like “rectal fissure” — the audience ewww-ed with them. Republicans dream of a personal future that involves only household staff, not equals who need to be persuaded to vote.

So I’m trying to imagine the pain of realizing, as they all must at some point, that it is not going to happen for them. It’s the green light at the end of the dock. It’s the ship that never comes in, gals, as Palin would put it. But she won’t because the lie works for her. It helps her scramble, without compassion, above all those other tense no-hoper ladies in the audience.

American politics isn’t short of smart women. Susan Eisenhower, Ike’s granddaughter, who just endorsed Obama, made an extraordinary speech at the Democratic convention (and a terrific casual appearance on The Colbert Report as Palin was speaking). The Republican party has already consumed nearly all of its moderate “seed corn,” she said aptly. Time to start again.

Eisenhower, a scholar and journalist, has a point. Or am I only saying that because she’s part of the thoughtful demographic that I’m trying to reach here? Think, Heather, think like a Republican! The Skeptics, shall I call them, are my base, and I’ll pander to them as ardently as the Republican patriarchs tease their white female marginals.

This Week

Mad Men is scaring me (AMC on Sunday nights). What has Matthew Weiner, a writer from The Sopranos, created, a period soap opera about reality and façade or a horror series on a localized war between men and women? Was Episode 6 of Season 2 a costume drama about the Madonna/whore complex or the operatic rendition of one simple thing, human cruelty?

Or maybe I’m seeing too much into it and it’s just a sexed-up version of the Republican convention.
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[Heather Mallick is obviously a bona fide psychopathic nutter, posing as a journalist.]

This CBC apology is far too little, far too late.Not only do they lack class, but the CBC is idiotic. Mallick should be looking for a new job.They just lost millions of readers and watchers.Oh I forgot, they are government subsidized and do not have to worry about competition. ( See what socialism does to the media?)

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