No, I’m not being rhetorical; not entirely, anyway. Just who the hell does Stephane Dion think he’s kidding with his new little “look at me, I’m tough on crime” song and dance that he’s added to his traveling dog and pony show?

Forget — just for a minute or two, okay? — that this is the same bonehead who has fought every bit of real anti-crime legislation he has ever seen tooth and nail. Forget that this is the fool who flip-flopped on his own party’s anti-terror legislation, denying law enforcement vital tools needed to safeguard the people of this country from terrorist attacks that everyone with a brain in their heads says are coming, sooner or later. Forget that he has always decried any kind of tough-on-crime measures as draconian, but thought that the farmer Bob rifle registry was a great idea. Forget all that, just for a minute.

What Dion has done now is to fling open his piehole and hack up the tired, old and discredited hairball of “restorative justice.” 🙄

Dion yodeled on about more money for more cops, “tougher laws” (whatever the hell he thinks that means; I doubt it’s anywhere close to my definition) to protect kids and places of worship, and reverse onus for aresholes that use a gun and want out on bail. The problem is that he just doesn’t get that none of this means jack shit. Yes, you read that right.

Dion just can’t get his brain around the idea that scumbags that commit crimes with guns shouldn’t get out of jail at all, we already have more than enough laws, and we don’t need any more cops.

What the hell did I just say? We don’t need more cops?? Am I nuts all of a sudden??? No, I’m not. This is actually one of the things that I disagreed with Harper on during the last campaign, when he was also talking about putting more cops on the streets. The problem isn’t that we need more cops; we already have all the cops we need. The problem is that the cops we do have are having to chase down the same assholes again and again and again and again… because they keep getting sprung.

In other words, the problem isn’t with how we hunt down bad guys; it’s with what we do (or should I say, don’t do) with them once they’re caught. Our penal system is a God damned joke, and nobody’s laughing except criminals. How many times have you heard of someone getting raped or murdered by some sack of crap that was out on parole? Did you know that damn near every prisoner in the country has an automatic get-out-of-jail free card after serving a maximum of two-thirds of their sentence? But even then, what’s the difference? They get coddled on the inside anyway.

Liberals and the Left in general have spent decades obsessed with the notions of rehabilitation, hug-a-thug approaches and revolving-door justice. Everything they have tried has proven to be an abject failure.

Getting tough on crime doesn’t mean more social programs in crappy neighbourhoods; it doesn’t mean helping criminals “improve their self-image;” it doesn’t even mean more cops. What it means is punishing — and I mean really punishing — criminals in a way that would make Dion bleed from the ears if he heard about it:

No more TVs, no more radios, no more access to gyms that turn scrawny criminals into big criminals, no more conjugal visits (who the hell ever came up with that idea in the first place?), and NO AUTOMATIC EARLY RELEASE! You want parole? Prove that you deserve it, otherwise serve your whole damned stretch. And if you’re sentenced to life, forget that wussy little 25-years thing; you come out in a pine box. They don’t need to be given college degrees at public expense, they don’t need time in an exercise yard, and (contrary to what the thug-hugging handwringers will tell you) yes, you can live off bologna sandwiches for lunch. Every God damned day. For years.

Don’t tell any of this to Steffie, though. His poor sensibilities couldn’t handle it. Liberals, big or small “L,” just don’t have the stomach to deal with criminals. They never have and they never will.

So please, Stephane, quit trying to piss on my head and tell me it’s raining.

In the midst of all the sturm und drang over the Grits’ gutless caving in to bloc voting that we saw in the Commons yesterday, there is one thing that seems to have been overlooked that I would like to mention here, if even for a moment.

Yes, we all know that the HypoGrits killed their own anti-terror legislation because Steffy the stiff knows damn well what side his bread is buttered on. But — in the interest of giving credit where it’s due — even in a Dion-led caucus, there was at least one man willing to stand up and do the right thing. That man is the Liberal Member of Parliament for Scarborough Southwest, the Honourable Tom Wappel.

Mister Wappel showed all the most important characteristics of service to his country as he, alone among the entire Liberal caucus, showed the balls enough to stand up and basically tell Dion, “take your bullshit and shove it; I’m here for my country, not for you.”

Only one Liberal – Tom Wappel (Scarborough Southwest) – outright defied Dion, voting with the Conservative government to renew the powers.

Click here to read the Hansard record for Feb 26, 2007, including Tom’s Speech in support of the Statutory Order to maintain the sections of the ATA pertaining to Preventative Arrest and Investigative Hearings for a further three years.

To share your feelings on this matter with the only Liberal who did the right thing that day, you can write to Tom at:

Tom Wappel, M.P.
Room 115, East Block
House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6

Or, alternatively, you can email him at wappel.t@parl.gc.ca to be heard a little quicker.

All of us — yes, especially me — are always eager to sound off to anybody that will listen about everything that the Grits do wrong. Let’s see if we can be just as loud and honest when one of them does something right…

Here’s to you, Tom; you may not have won but ya fought the good fight.

HUH!?? This has to be some kind of early April Fool’s joke. Or something. I mean, come on now, even that dingbat Dion can’t possibly be that deluded… Can he?

I guess I should explain myself, eh? Okay, here goes. According to an article in todays NP, stunned Stephane actually thinks that… Aw, hell; just see for yourself:

Federal Liberal leader Stephane Dion brushed off bad press coverage and polls that put his party behind the Conservatives on Monday, saying he was confident of winning a majority in the next election.

Yeah you read that right. What the HELL has this guy been smoking?? Here’s a dude that was everybody’s third pick, from a B-list of candidates, and he thinks he can take down Her Majesty’s Prime Minister of Canada, the Right Honourable Stephen Hardass? Even though polls have the Grits trailing the Tories by anywhere from 6 to 11 points? Apparently so…

“That’s not so bad … and I’m very confident that at the right moment Canadians will support us very strongly and will give us a majority Liberal government.”

Hey, Steffy; let me clue you in a little bit. At the Librano$’ leadership convention, you turned out like that kid picked last before the ballgame. Your own party isn’t particularly impressed with you and Canadians… well, we just plain don’t trust you. You welcomed back Adscamers after PM-da-PM kicked them out for life (one of the few things he did right), you twist in the wind of public opinion on issues like the Afghan War and — whether it’s true or not deosn’t matter — the recent turd typhoon surrounding the ATA vote sure as hell has you looking like somebody else is pulling your strings.

You try taking on Harper right now (and I really, really think you should), and you ain’t gettin no cakewalk back to the other side of the House. What you’re in for is more like…

As most of you already know, the Librano$ have their collective panties in one hell of a bunch lately over the supposedly underhanded comments that the Prime Minister didn’t make in the House on Wednesday. And we’ve seen the Liberal/Left-loving media spin it every which way ever since. We’ve seen everything from “Liberals shout down PM over ‘base’ attack” to “Harper forgot the dignity of his office in quest for blood” and just about every damn thing in between.

Oddly enough, the least slanted-sounding headline that I could find, “Gloves off in terror law fight,” cropped up in the damned TO (Red) Star, of all places. No idea how the hell that happened… 😕

Everybody and their dog knows that the media spins things whatever way the staff leans (which usually means to the Left of the political spectrum) but very few publications ever actually come right out and say it. Well, the National Post did just that today. Not only that, but they also bluntly point out some of the BS we’ve been getting fed lately for what it is: a Left-loving, almost Machiavellian, MSM busting it’s ass to reinforce their beloved Grits. It skillfully paints a picture of deception, misdirection, hypocrisy and most of the other things that spring to mind when you think about the Fiberals and their lapdog media.

So, since I’m not above stealing somebody else’s stuff when they say it better than I would, here is the NP editorial in question, in full (with a little emphasis added here and there by me)…

‘Shame’? Hardly

National Post
Published: Friday, February 23, 2007

Journalists employ a special term when a politician accidentally speaks a forbidden truth out loud: They call it a “Kinsley gaffe,” after the legendary American editorialist Michael Kinsley, who pointed out in 1992 that the word “gaffe” is never really used by native writers of English except to describe such a situation.

The catcalls of “shame” that drowned out the Prime Minister in the House of Commons on Wednesday are the infallible sign of a Kinsley gaffe. Mr. Harper was about to describe an article from the Vancouver Sun pointing out that the father-in-law of an important young Liberal MP and organizer was once a spokesman for Babbar Khalsa, a group officially recognized by the Canadian government as a terrorist organization. This same individual is a potential witness in the Air India investigation, the very same inquiry that will be hobbled if Stephane Dion prevails in his new-found and oddly passionate quest to kill provisions of the 2001 Anti-Terrorism Act that permit such investigations.

None of the Liberals leaping to their feet to denounce Mr. Harper have bothered to deny the facts presented in the Sun by Kim Bolan: given Ms. Bolan’s reputation as an investigator and chronicler of Sikh separatist activity, it would be foolhardy to try. It is the context in which the fact was brought up that bothers them. Or so they say.

No one–including us –is accusing the MP in question, Navdeep Bains, of any illegal behaviour. And voters are entitled to make their own individual judgments on whether the PM was engaging in dirty pool by opening the pages of the Sun in the privileged environment of the House of Commons. But they would be advised to ignore the slanted, indignant language that some other media outlets are trying to disguise as impartial reporting.

The PM is being accused of suggesting that the Liberals changed their policy on ant terror legislation to protect Mr. Bains’ father-in-law, Darshan Singh Saini, or, more generally, to cripple an Air India investigation that many in the Sikh community oppose. In fact, it is only by clairvoyance that reporters can claim to know what Mr. Harper would have said in his complete reply. He was shouted down long before he had the chance to make the “suggestion” being freely attributed to him (readers may wonder why the Liberals did not sit quietly and let him continue covering himself with “shame”).

But even if Mr. Harper intended to suggest what he is being accused of suggesting, his only “shame” lies in saying what millions of Canadians are thinking. The Sikh voting bloc that Mr. Bains drew to the Dion camp (via Gerard Kennedy) at the Liberal convention in December is a critical reason why it is Mr. Dion, as opposed to Bob Rae or Michael Ignatieff, who now sits as Leader of the Opposition. Why would it be out of bounds to suggest that Mr. Dion’s sudden and stalwart opposition to key anti-terrorism provisions — even over the objections of many influential members of his own divided caucus — might somehow be traced to those same provisions being potentially used to compel testimony from the supporters of a king making MP?

We recall that, in 2000, the Liberals used the same specious calls of “shame” to attack Reform politicians who questioned the Liberals about their party’s stance on a Tamil terrorist group. Yet it was the Liberals themselves who were disgraced when it turned out Paul Martin and Maria Minna had attended a fundraising event for a group identified by the U.S. State Department as a front for the Tamil Tigers, which — like the Babbar Khalsa outfit for which Mr. Bains’ father-in-law once acted as spokesman — is classified as a terrorist group under Canadian law (over Liberal objections, of course).

Even given the premise of Mr. Bains’ personal unimpeachability — a premise to which the Prime Minister’s press secretary was glad to assent on Wednesday — this may be a trickier question than it appears. The premise that a Member of Parliament’s family and ethno-political connections are irrelevant can easily be carried to the point of absurdity. Apparently in recognition of his delivering the votes of his fellow Sikhs at the Montreal convention, Mr. Dion appointed Mr. Bains to the party’s national election readiness committee last month. If an equally important Conservative had a father-in-law who stood to benefit from a newfound Conservative policy, are we to believe that no reporter or opposition member would dare ask uncomfortable questions? No one can show that Mr. Bains’ family connections to a possible Air India witness have played any part in the sudden Liberal rediscovery of civil liberties, but when did it become inappropriate for a politician to point out a potential conflict of interest among his opponents?

It seems to have happened right around the time the conservative parties reunited and formed a national government. We recall that some of the publications now lashing out at Mr. Harper were happy to wallow in “family legacies” when it came to Stockwell Day’s Western-separatist father or Preston Manning’s ancestral Social Credit connections. Could the apologies owed to these men have gotten misplaced in the mail?

There’s an old saying that I had drilled into my head over and over, once upon a time: “Once is an accident, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” Let me tell you, ladies and gents, this stinks to the rafters.

It’s one thing to say that the Librano$ are soft on terrorism (which I think they are; but then I think they’re soft on all kinds of crime in general), but it’s another thing entirely to see something this damned suspicious and then hear nothing from the Grits except not-so-righteous indignation.

Don’t take my word for it. See for yourself what popped up in the Vancouver Sun today:

A young Liberal MP who delivered Stephane Dion 250 leadership votes is the son-in-law of a man police have interviewed in connection with the Air India bombing case.

Navdeep Singh Bains, MP for Mississauga-Brampton South, shot on to the national stage after the December 2006 convention in which he delivered huge support to Gerard Kennedy and later to Dion, who won the Liberal leadership by 437 votes.

The Vancouver Sun has learned that Bains’s father-in-law, Darshan Singh Saini, is on the RCMP’s potential list of witnesses at investigative hearings designed to advance the Air India criminal probe.

But the ability to hold those hearings will be lost March 1 if parts of the Anti-Terrorism Act expire as expected, after the Liberals recently withdrew support for extending the provision being used to hold them.

And before some little shit out there even thinks about trying any ad hominem bullshit: don’t even fucking bother. Yes, I’m partisan; yes, I’m a card-carrying member of the VRWC; and yes, whenever I hear something bad about the Natural Governing Party of Canadaâ„¢, I tend to believe it right off the bat. But for all that, I still know that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it ain’t no God damned platypus.

I’m not the only one thinking what I’m thinking either. Groups from the Air India Victims’ Families Association to B’nai Brith to even other Liberals are calling bullshit…

Some privately grouse that Dion has been influenced by militant Sikh and Muslim groups, members of which helped secure his leadership victory last December.

Those complaints were echoed Tuesday by the chairman of the Air India Victims’ Families Association.

“It looks like the sympathizers of terrorism have more influence on (Liberals),” Gupta said.

He said Dion may have become “victim of vote bank politics,” referring to ethnic bloc voting.

[…]Frank Dimant, the Jewish organization’s executive vice president, said he too has heard speculation that the Liberals are “pandering to certain specific groups within the Canadian society.”

“In a way, it’s a little bit of a continuation of what happened at the Liberal leadership convention. This seems to be becoming more of a pattern,” he said.

The Air India bombing was (so far) the worst act of terrorism in Canadian history, claiming 329 lives. Prior to 9/11, it was the deadliest terrorist attack ever, anywhere. Now, just as some Grit’s daddy-in-law is about to get grilled over the whole affair, the Librano$ are trying to pull the plug on the very law, WHICH THEY ENACTED IN THE FIRST PLACE, that makes the investigation possible.

Don’t piss on my head and tell me it’s raining.

Some CTV footage is here.

As most of you that have been here a few times before already know, My blogging habits tend to be rather cyclical. And when I find myself in one of those slow patches, I have a bit of a habit of falling back on the ol’ suggested reading post. Slapping up links to things that have caught my eye one way or the other in the past few days.

As you’ve likely guessed by now, this is one of those slow patches. So, without further ado, here’s a listing of things I’ve tripped over on the net lately that I think are worth a look (for one reason or another)…

Sliding into an abyss
Michael Coren, TO Sun

Sometimes we in the media merely play a game, making little ripples at the side of the water rather than diving right in to make an almighty splash.

In other words, we run around the edge of various problems and debates but are afraid to shine light on the authentic dilemmas of our age.

Whether it’s politics, economics, culture or morality, the culture, society and various pundits always assume that things are getting better — that we’re making progress and that what we have and what is to come is superior to what was.

Problem is, it’s mostly nonsense.

Cheating has become a way of life
Ted Byfield, Cowtown Sun

When a columnist in one of our leading financial newspapers last year casually asserted telling lies is indispensable to the efficient functioning of business, I was doubly shocked.

First, because the paper published it. Second, because no reader so far as I know questioned this remarkable contention.

Disturbing reality buried
Licia Corbella, Calgary Sun

In the news business, it’s called burying the lead.

It means you missed the most important or interesting part of a story and led with something less significant.

Dion’s politics shift with wind
Ezra “the Lip” Levant, Calgary Sun

Stephane Dion, the new Liberal leader, says he’s against renewing the provisions of Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act.

Because the Conservatives don’t have a majority, and the Bloc and NDP are notoriously soft on the war on terror, Dion holds the balance.

And he’s voting not to renew our security laws.

He’s pretending it’s still Sept. 10.

Pardon me for being astonished
Ian Robinson, Cowtown Sun

OK, I’ll bite.

What in the name of all that’s holy does somebody have to do to be well and truly punished by the judicial system?

[…]

I guess to be truly punished, you’ve got to videotape yourself raping high school girls that you kill later and then get caught and have your wife testify against you.

That would make you Paul Bernardo.

Of course, if you’re Paul’s partner-in-crime, Karla Homolka, you get a taxpayer-funded university degree in a prison so lax that you get to enter into loving, lesbian relationships — and model lingerie.

Deadline on Kyoto not doable
Rory Leishman, Da Freeps

In forcing a bill through Parliament that gives the Harper government 60 days to come up with a detailed plan for fulfilling Canada’s commitments under the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the three opposition parties are simply playing Canadians for fools. The leaders of these parties know full well that no government — not even one led by them — could possibly meet this absurd deadline.

Under terms of the Kyoto Protocol, Canada is supposed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to six per cent below the levels set in 1990 by 2012. The previous Liberal government signed this Kyoto Protocol on behalf of Canada, but failed to devise a plan for fulfilling the commitment.

Go west, young man, to find Canada
Jordan Michael Smith, Ottawa Sun

I moved to Calgary recently, to work at the Western Standard for a couple of months. I’ve only been out here a few days, but I feel well-versed enough in the city’s ways to say this: Calgary is unlike any large city I have ever seen.

Calgary has about a million people, so you’d think it would feel like a big city. You’d be wrong.

The Kyoto horror show
Lorrie Goldstein, TO Sun

  Here’s my list of the “top 10” problems with the Kyoto accord on global warming. Feel free to add your own.

My own Inconvenient Truth
Rachel Marsden, TO Sun

A U.S. Congressional hearing on climate change was cancelled this week because of a massive snowstorm in DC. I’m just wondering, how many academic degrees are required for a person to find that funny?

An article in the Los Angeles Times perfectly sums up global warming quackery: “As glaciers from Greenland to Kilimanjaro recede at record rates, the central icecap of Antarctica has been steadily growing for 11 years, partially offsetting the rise in seas from the melt waters of global warming, researchers said.”

The “experts” claim to be able to measure the temperature of the Earth. (I don’t want to know where they stick the thermometer.) They travel to remote regions and declare that because ice is melting somewhere and growing somewhere else, that means the Earth is (drumroll) warmer! Duh. Of course it does.

Knock yourselves out, kids.  More of my own rantings as soon as I can grab some spare time again… 🙄