I don’t like the media very much. You can tell, I know. More often than not, the media displays a habitual, even vindictive, Leftist slant in virtually every issue. Sometimes, reading the paper or watching the news, it’s hard to imagine that they believe conservatives can do anything right or that liberals can do anything wrong. Every now and then, however — not often, mind you but just often enough — I come across something that just plain makes good sense and demonstrates that even the media is capable of heaving its head out of its arse from time to time.

Maybe I judge the media too harshly. Or maybe it’s just a case of even a stopped clock being right twice a day. Whatever it is, I do enjoy seeing it on those occasions it comes along. Today’s editorial in the Freeps was one of those occasions. Check it out for yourselves:

Reinforce our troops

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has rightly reminded the opposition parties that Canada has an obligation to its NATO partners in fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But NATO has an obligation to Canada as well.

Because, along with the British and Dutch, it is our troops who are on the sharp end of the stick when it comes to the fighting in the deadly Kandahar region.

To date, 44 Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan, 36 of them this year in and around Kandahar, including two killed in a suicide bombing this week. Almost nine per cent of the 511 coalition soldiers killed in Afghanistan since fighting began in 2001 have been Canadians.

This week, Harper came away from a NATO meeting in Latvia with only vague assurances that more countries in the 26-member alliance will start sharing the heavy lifting in Kandahar.

There was also confusion about which NATO countries will supply needed troops; and about the extent to which restrictions they have placed on their military that preclude their forces from serving on the front lines in Kandahar, will be lifted.

Harper who had gone to the meeting looking for reinforcements from other NATO countries, acknowledged that while Canada will be getting some help, it is not at the level he had hoped.

“Look, we’re not going to kid you, the security situation remains a challenge in the south,” he said. “We still believe we are under-manned, but we’re getting more forces all of the time, we’re getting more flexibility from our NATO partners.”

Gone are the days when Canada stood apart from these deadly conflicts and self-righteously lectured from the sidelines. Canadian soldiers are now in harm’s way, doing what must be done in Afghanistan if it is not to fall back into the hands of the religious fanatics and terrorists who first plotted 9/11 from within that country.

Canada has earned the right — through the sacrifices made by its soldiers in Afghanistan — to have its concerns taken seriously at the NATO table.

As if any of us actually needed one more reason why the federal HypoGrits (or any other branch of that malodourous menagerie of Machiavellian manipulators, for that matter), they decided to toss us another one anyway. At their Grand Poohbah Pageant in Montreal yesterday, the Fiberal old guard elected — in a vote of 318-299 — to stick with the “tried and true” system for electing party leaders and turfed the treacherous talk of switching to a “one member, one vote” system.

Under their current system, only delegates at the leadership convention get to vote on who leads the party and those that can’t afford to cough up several hundred bucks for travel, hotel, time off work, etc so that they can go to the little shindig are SOL. Every other federal party — and most provincial ones too, for that matter — long ago switched to an all-member voting process where every party member has a say in who leads. It’s called democracy; a peculiar notion quite foreign to the Librano$. The reaction was, of course, predictable:

Youthful Liberals whooped, clapped high-fives and hugged as delegates voted by a narrow majority to reject the constitutional amendment. The resolution needed a two-thirds majority to pass, meaning the count really wasn’t close.

Oddly enough, the most prominent (if feeble) criticism of this insider mentality came from what was for me, at least, the most unlikely-seeming of sources:

The vote marked a repudiation of sorts for MP Belinda Stronach.Stronach, a Conservative leadership candidate in 2004, declined to run in the Liberal race, saying she was committed instead to reforming her new party’s leadership process. She reportedly spent hundreds of dollars out of her own pocket this week paying for flyers to promote the one-member, one-vote initiative.

“You know what, we’re missing 98 per cent of the family here today,” Stronach implored delegates, speaking from one of the floor microphones at the Palais des congres.

So why the hell would the Grits not want all their membership to be able to vote? It’s simple, really. For the same reason that they refuse to put truly important things (same sex marriage being just one example) to referenda: being the typical, social-engineering, we-know-what’s-best-for-you Leftists that they are, they are utterly terrified that the Great Unwashed Masses might vote wrong!

This is what the Fiberals think of their own party members. Too damned dumb to be trusted with any important decisions where they might disagree with the plutocrats. This is what they think of their own.

Imagine what they think of you.