Bud Talkinghorn

The CBC--Rant #132

Just when you think maybe, just maybe, they will stay with a show, like "Wonderland" that has potential, that maybe they will simply get rid of the worst aspect (the urination scene), they cancel it. To make room for another incomprehensible Ken Finklestein opus. The "Newsroom" was definitely funny, a wild leap into the cynicism that probably underlines the news editors' decisions. CNN devotes something like 43% of its news to the "news" of Christopher Reeves' wife dying. Not enough that they sucked old Chris dry for coverage, but now the national wail must go up for his dead widow. This was the sort of schmaltz that "The Newsroom" satirized. The next two series from Finklestein were weaker, by far. Why do I think that he has been given yet another year to drivel? Now we have "Wonderland" cancelled so this dramatic version of Ralph Benmergui's pensees can have a final shot.

It is good in that CBC has dropped their cover of "neutrality" and are back to their obvious bias, having regained its old lefty news stance. The fear that a Conservative majority government would privatize them kept them posing as fairly neutral during the election. Now that a few Canadian soldiers have been killed or injured, the CBC picks up Jack Layton's anti-war position. "Are Canadians ready for the body bags?", one CBC woman intones darkly. The fact that it was the Liberals who sent them there in the first place is being buried. The spin will be: it's those war-mongering Conservatives who created this quagmire. To rub salt into the wound, we have Saint Peter Mansbridge reporting from the Kandahar "trenches"--well, actually surrounded by giant howitzers and tanks, well inside the camp.

© Bud Talkinghorn--Perhaps Finklestein will pull it off this time.

P.S. I watched the first episode. My conclusions are mixed. There was an eerie icy glow to the hotel's atmosphere. One almost expected Norman Bates to suddenly appear, sharpening his knife at the ending. Film noir has always intrigued me. However the outbursts of song from the characters was bizarre. Was Finklestein channeling "The Singing Detective" series? It actually worked in that British one, but not here. At least we were spared Finkleman's pseudo-intellectual ramblings. His second TV outing showed promise in the first episode, and then fizzled rapidly. I watched the spotty "This is Wonderland" to see if it had run out of gas and should be replaced. Like "At the Hotel" it garnered mixed reviews. Still, it has a better track record than Finklestein.



The death of multicult

It is hard for me to pinpoint exactly when I knew that multiculturalism was fading. Still two seminal events helped drive the nails in its coffin for me. The first was multicuralism's Cabinet Minister, Hedy Fry's statement that "That KKK crosses were being burnt on the lawns of Prince George, as we speak." Totally nutsy statement with not a thread of truth to back it up -- so nutsy in fact that she had to publicly apologize. Suddenly, Canadians got to see who oversaw this program and how rabid she had become. The second shoe that dropped was when the National Association of Women (NAC) started being the National Association of Women of Colour (NAWC). Now how a Canadian organization that claimed to represent all Canadian women ended up with its president being a New Yorker was always amazing. However Judy Rebbick--an arch-lefty--was to be the nadir of pretense. Next came Ms Thobani, an East-Indian transplant, also via America. She made Rebbick sound like a neocon by comparison. The emphasis switched from Canadian women to the supposed plight of ethnic women. Thobani was replaced by a Ms. Joan Grant-Cummins (Cummings?), a Barbadian. The victimology 101 screed continued unabated. NAC's government pork was cut and because no intelligent non-ethnic woman would support it, NAC withered into irrelevance. The last president was some aboriginal woman, whose name completely escapes me--as well as most Canadian women, I suspect.

Today, with our large urban immigrant populations, we are seeing the breakdown of assimilation. Of course, under past governments this rejection of Canadian values was actually encouraged. Another of Trudeau's utopian brain farts. Europe should be a road map to the disaster of the multicultural (mosaic) policy. Some of the great cities of the enlightenment are now encircled by festering Muslim slums of benighted ignorance. The massive outbreak of arson was a blackmail letter to the French. Basically, the rioters were saying, "We are here and you can't get rid of us, so treat us with deference, or else these crazy attacks will become an annual event." The world-wide Muslim protests about the cartoons was broadcasting an even more intimidating message, "If you impugn our prophet's reputation as being a messenger of peace, we will kill you." A rather mixed message that.

Perhaps a third realization of the detrimental effects of multiculuralism could be seen in the Concordia riot, when Muslims--some not even students--stormed the university to protest a speech that Benjamin Netanyahu was giving. To my knowledge, not one of these students (on student visas) was deported. The worst was when the administration didn't re-schedule Netanyahu's speech, but rather, shunted it to another off-campus place. That, along with Gabil Gharbi's (aka Jean Lepine) rampage against Ecole Polytechnic's female engineering students stands out in multicult's growing litany of failures. The acceptance of gays and women's rights spring from an European perspective, not a Middle Eastern one.

You notice that you rarely hear from "moderate Muslim" voices. If I were a Christian, the atrocities that were being waged in my religion's name would have me writing daily to the news editorial page to condemn these apostates. Instead, we get an Islamic replay of the "phobia" accusation. Well, to be honest, we have seen most of our media cave into that "phobia". Yes, they really do fear radical Muslims. Intrinsically, they know what the radical element is capable of. Just a while back, an Iranian student tried to run over students at the University of North Carolina. He is now charged with nine counts of attempted murder. Our liberal media choose not to report this, at least I didn't see it in Canada. I saw it on CNN. His rationale: "He was avenging the death of Muslims worldwide." Perhaps, as a Shi'ite,he might have done more avenging if he had run down the Sunni student organization on campus. However, he gave us a brilliant window into the radical Islamic mind.

We in the West must stop giving in to the demands of this retrograde religion that never underwent any transformation since the 7th Century. We cannot back down from our libertarian ideals. Having won this round of censorship, there will be more Islamic demands to the West. We beat down the anti-freedom fascist and Communist crowds. We can beat down Islamofascism. It simply takes some belief in our Western values.

© Bud Talkinghorn


Two beacons of media freedom

First, I have to sing the praises of The Western Standard. It alone dared incur the wrath of both the fanatical Islamists and our cowering liberal media. We had witnessed huge riots and mindless destruction across the Muslim world, mainly because a Danish imam took the original cartoons and three created obscene ones throughout the Middle East. He had been denied a visa for his Lebanese wife--any co-incidence there? Suddenly every rent-a-mob in the Islamic world was aflame with religious indignation. The fact that many of their chants included "the Great Satan" America and the Israelis showed who had organized them. The Danish cartoons were simply an excuse to threaten the West. It was a bullying statement from an insecure, paranoid religion. A small publication like the Western Standard was the sole news organization that stood up to these religious censors.

Perhaps the funniest of the liberal press coverage was from CNN, who showed the cartoon with Mohammed's face pixilated. As Mark Styen remarked, "It was as though he was in the witness protection program. But of course, it was really CNN which was in that program. Or at least hoped it was."

While The National Post chose not to publish the cartoons, it still is one of the most unfettered newspapers. Unlike such arch-leftist papers such as The Toronto Star, it trumpets the threats to Canada of our unchecked immigration and refugee policies. The National Post and the Western Standard are the "Cassandras" of news outlets. The National Post chronicles the nauseous decisions of a flunky-ridden IRB. It was not an aberration that the Conservatives couldn't penetrate the inner city electorate. The Liberals have allowed our immigration / refugee system to be abused for decades so as to curry favour with immigrant / refugee voters. And it worked. What does that say for the government's fundamental duty to protect the nation? For these exposes alone, the paper is worth reading. It can be critical of the new Conservative government without becoming hysterical about the up-coming changes. It can actually envision a Canada that does not have the paternalistic heel of government on the citizens' necks. We have mainly lost our university youth to this leftist pernicious socialistic thinking; therefore, we need an antidote. Before The National Post, we had none. Now even Macleans magasine has seen the light and begun to present a balanced viewpoint. There is hope yet.

© Bud Talkinghorn