Old White Men

I love when old white men feel aggrieved about one thing or another. Last week while reading the crypto-fascist website Canada Free Press, I laughed as pundit Arthur Weinreb bashed The Globe and Mail for their anti-Harper rhetoric. His accusation were based on an innocuous article written by my homegirl Eva Salinas. Weinreb calls the article a "textbook case of media bias" and an attack on Stephen Harper. The problem. Eva uses sources that are skeptical of Harper's plan and even one that "no one has ever heard of before."

It's funny because when I read the article I see sources as diverse as the mayor of Burnaby (one of BC's largest cities for all you unfamiliar with geography west of Mississauga), the wife of recently deceased MP Chuck Cadman (a tireless advocate of stricter anti-street racing laws whose name Harper has hijacked), a Vancouver defense lawyer and an activist whose sister was killed by street racers.

Most of Weinreb's hysteria is about Eva's use of this last woman. He writes, "The Globe and Mail quoted Nina Rivet who lost her sister to a [sic] street racing which doesn’t seem to be as much as a problem for her as the fact that Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party are now in power." Waaaaa. Poor guy is mad because people don't think like him.

It's an interesting case-study. A British Columbia woman writes an article quoting other women directly affected by the story. Some mysogenist in Ontario gets all huffy calling the sources worthless and goes on to defend Our Dear Leader the Prime Minister (an Ontario born Anglo male) from these rabid accusations and then accuses the entire mainstream media as having a liberal bias.

In other angry-white-man news, I have tickets to go see Robert Fisk tonight at Concordia University in Montreal. Now this is a Caker I can get behind. His reporting from the Middle East is consistently solid, contrarian and, despite the constant attacks against him, never ending. He's also one hell of an entertainer. Seeing him all blustery and red faced in a packed auditorium cracking jokes about Osama Bin Laden's mom is about as good as it gets. I'd go see him over The Blue Man Group any day.

Tomorrow I'll post some Montreal pictures. You can look forward to dreadlocked, mud smeared neo-hippies dancing wildly to the beat of a hundred drums and some more conventional pics of smoked meat sandwiches.