This list post was originally published here in January.

I write a lot about conservative talk radio, so (alas) I have to keep track of the Left’s hair-raising, borderline insane attacks on Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and other hosts.

Here’s a round up of some of the biggest and craziest (unsuccessful) campaigns to destroy these powerful and popular pundits.

First up: the latest attempt to brand a talk radio host a “racist” fails miserably…

#5 “Monkey hear, monkey don’t”

Did you hear about the racist redneck talk radio host who referred to African-American students as “monkeys”?

The truth is: he didn’t.

Earlier this month, while criticizing his city’s dysfunctional public school system, WSPD’s Brian Wilson said:

“But certainly, teaching little monkeys to peel bananas and so on and them learning to do it correctly on cue does not mean that they’ve learned everything except a funny parlor trick.”

If you don’t see anything “racist” in those remarks, you’re not alone. The city’s public school system isn’t even overwhelmingly African-American; it’s 41% white and 8% Hispanic.

Nevertheless, the local newspaper, the Toledo Blade, easily convinced a gaggle of professional race-baiters to condemn Wilson’s imaginary bigotry. Then the trumped up “controversy” led to a public demonstration, with outraged protesters demanding an apology from the station.

Most predictably of all? When Wilson’s defenders pointed out that his 14-second clip had been purposely wrenched out of context, the Blade – which had run the “story” on four consecutive front pages — refused to admit they’d made a monkey out of a molehill.

Instead, the editors kept piling on, pointing out that, “Mr. Wilson doesn’t limit incendiary remarks to the airwaves. Atop his Web site is a picture of a microphone aflame.”

(Did I mention that the name of the crusading newspaper is… the Toledo Blade?)

Thanks to persistent pressure from the city’s alternative paper, the “story” is finally unraveling, but only after two weeks of daily character assassinations, and stubborn rumors of Wilson’s looming dismissal. (He still has his job.)

As the Toledo Free Press put it in their invaluable postmortem of the smear campaign:

“Toledo is not the hub of industry it once was, but if The Blade continues to manufacture stories like its recent Brian Wilson series, the Glass City’s production will rival Pittsburgh’s during the steel boom.”

Next: onto two big names — but only one big brain…

“But the biggest problem with conspiracy theories is that they keep us not only from the truth but also from confronting our faults and problems. …This way of thinking relates any given problem to external elements, and thus does not [lead] to a rational policy to confront the problem. He who speaks of ghosts [as the reason behind any given problem] can do nothing to solve it.”

“Anyone, who adopts the conspiracy theory becomes so helpless that he ends up surrendering or committing suicide. The thinking of conspiracy theorists shifts between surrender and suicide, between helplessness and passivity, between negligence and failure.”

– Dr. Abd Al-Mun’im Sa’id, 1999

During the Q&A at Mark Steyn’s recent “controversial” speech burlesque song-and-dance routine (no, really…) in London, Ontario, a young man rose to ask Steyn a question.

“I am Iranian,” he began — leading our gang ensconced in “bloggers row” to turn in unison to the Iranian ex-pat in our group for his verdict. After the questioner got out another sentence, our friend rolled his eyes and muttered, “Idiot…”

The Iranian up at the mic had asked a reasonable question about how much the U.S. had armed Iraq before they decided Iraq was their enemy and invaded them. (Steyn’s answer: according to a Stockholm “peace research institute”, only 1% of arms sales to Iraq since the 1970s had come from America. Most came from France and Germany. Ooops.)

What came next led everyone else in the hall to roll their eyes.

Just as, in the famous phrase of Abba Eban, “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” it seems that Muslims never miss an opportunity to toss out some pointless, idiotic conspiracy theory.

In this case, Steyn’s questioner was particularly agitated about the “fact” that Saddam Hussein had once been awarded the “key to the city of Kansas City.” To this young man, this naturally proved conclusively that… well, I’m not sure, but Steyn managed to get some comic mileage out of it.

As it turns out (and this too is typical), the Iranian questioner was half-right about the facts, and wrong about his conclusions. According to Wikipedia and other sources, Saddam Hussein was honored with the Freedom of the City of Detroit — write your own jokes in the comments — for donating a huge sum to a local church.

I think it was Canadian journalist Robert Fulford who called conspiracy theories “history for stupid people.” Given the level of illiteracy in the Muslim world, this is as good an explanation as any for why millions of Muslims, even “educated: ones, believe crazy stuff. I recently heard Canadian Muslim author Tarek Fatah relate stories of his latest visits to the Middle and Near East; he said he was most often regaled with 9/11 “troother” nonsense by relatively wealthy Pakistanis with university degrees.

Of course, the unpleasant fact is that the Muslim world has been in decline for centuries. Since this decline contradicts their self-image as a superior people, there must be some other explanation for their backwardness. Conspiracy theories provide that explanation, while short circuiting the very self-criticism that international Islam desperately needs to get itself out of its hole.

It’s easy to laugh at these conspiracy theories, and maybe watch Jesse Ventura’s new show about them, “just for laughs.” However, as memorably laid out in one of my favorite books — The Cost of Deception: The Seduction of Modern Myths and Urban Legends, by John A. Williams — conspiracy theories, far from being harmless fun, actually pollute the public square. Misinformation undermines civil society by making trust in one’s fellow man a mug’s game. Paranoid cynicism becomes the default “sophisticated” worldview.

Indulging in conspiracy theories isn’t healthy, whether or not those indulging are on the right or the left.  And when those theories are being spread by millions of people who have the potential and the will, to kill, they can be fatal.

And now, on to the 6 stupidest conspiracy theories that millions of Muslims believe:

This popular post was first published here on April 19.

Here’s all you need to know about Canada:

When Canadian author Mordecai Richler died a few years ago, the crusty, controversial author of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Barney’s Version was duly eulogized on the front page of the nation’s newest paper, the National Post. (It didn’t hurt that the Post employed three — count ‘em! — of Richler’s talented children — but his death was a no-brainer A1 headline at every other Canadian newspaper, too.)

The next day, a different, equally glowing obit also praised Mordecai Richler — on the front page of the New York Times.

The day after that? News of that almost unheard of hono(u)r — a Canadian writer, memorialized on page one of The Paper of Record! — was breathlessly reported…

On the front page of the National Post.

And that is the only story you ever need to know, to completely understand Canada, your neighbor to the north (with a “u”.)

Oh, and one other thing:

Last night, the country’s first “conservative” 24-hour news channel, the Sun News Network, went on the air at 5PM sharp.

I’m obliged to note that I’m friendly with a few of the folks who host programs on the new network.

That said: I’m guessing I wasn’t the only one who got a little thrill watching Sun News’ “countdown clock” tick-tick-tick yesterday. (Yes, some folks videotaped the countdown clock for posterity. What can I say? That’s how desperate Canadians were for change, and how thrilled they were that it was on its way.)

When  5:00PM finally arrived and Ezra Levant greeted his viewers, I was delighted. Americans who remember the days before Fox News and the internet can probably identify with that feeling.

Our state-sponsored TV channel, the CBC, is supported by my tax dollars, rabidly anti-American and anti-Israel — and, a blessing of sorts, extremely low rated.

Other stations range from left-middle to left-left. Often this is more a case of self-selection than ideology; Canada’s media centers are our big cities, and people in big cities are typically “progressive. Their passion for “Earth Hour” and Cuban vacations and “mulitculturalism” is simply “normal.” Chances are, they’ve never met a gun owner, a climate “skeptic,” a practicing Christian, an opponent of “gay marriage” — or a Conservative Party voter.

Having said that, watching Sun News the first day still felt a bit like dutifully showing up to a pal’s new “little theatre” production of The Music Man, or your child’s Christmas pageant. You’re kind of pre-cringing, waiting for part of the set to fall over.

Yet I’m betting many of us were pleasantly surprised. Much of the on-air talent comes from the world of print; sometimes it shows (guys, they’re called “haircuts”…) but, delightfully, sometimes it doesn’t. Everyone deserves a medal just for going on TV live, to a national audience, in a recently constructed studio on its very first day.

Wow!

As the show biz bible Variety reminded us this morning, not everybody is happy with the very existence of Sun News.

As I reported here months back, Canada’s self-appointed guardians of the nation’s “values” — Establishment elites like Margaret Atwood and major newspaper columnists — tried to keep Sun News off the air before it even launched.

They didn’t succeed, obviously. And I predict that after about a week of cursing on Twitter, most of them will forget all about it and go back to fretting about the upcoming national election and the latest made-up quote attributed to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Those of us who remain tuned in, meanwhile, are happy to hear phrases like “free market economics” and “low taxes” uttered on Canadian TV without eye-rolling and sarcasm.

Of everything I saw last night, nothing moved me more than Charles Adler’s opening monologue. Adler is one of our biggest talk radio hosts. He’s a TV veteran from way back, though (with the local Emmy to prove it). I’ve been sending everyone over to the Sun News website to see his stirring welcome to his new audience, in which he shares the story of his father smuggling him, as a baby, out of Communist Hungary in a knapsack:

We took a risk for freedom, for democracy… for Canada.

It’s a moving meditation on common sense values, success, risk taking and being part of a challenging (ad)venture in a new era. Hope you’ll give it a few minutes of your time.

Naturally, the channel’s first real “controversy” came at the instigation of host Ezra Levant.

At the behest of a foreign-born imam, Levant was famously prosecuted by the Alberta government in 2006 for publishing the so-called “Mohammed cartoons.” Yesterday, by way of introduction, he showed them on his program.

And — you’ll never guess — an imam complained!

The imam, a convert named Stephen Rockwell, issued a bizarre statement invoking the Holocaust, making soap out of Jews, and the n-word.

Plus — you’ll never guess — he declined Ezra’s invitation to appear on the show today. Levant informed viewers tonight that he was going to put up a photograph of Rockwell for their benefit, but “didn’t want to frighten” them.

As a self-described troublemaker and media veteran going back to his college days, Ezra Levant is in his element. Other on-air folks aren’t as seasoned, but they’re — for lack of a gentler word — ideologically sound. Sun News scooped up almost all the nation’s openly conservative commentators in print and radio. I predict veteran Parliament Hill reporter Brian Lilley and hyperarticulate high finance expert (and children’s author!) Theo Caldwell will be the channel’s breakout stars.

So, American readers: please congratulate us, and keep your fingers crossed. If you catch clips from Sun News on the internet, do cut us some slack; we don’t have the economies of scale, and sheer capital, to launch something as visually fancy as Fox. But Sun’s heart and mind is in the right place. Millions of us are thrilled and relieved.

As my fellow Canadian blogger, Kate McMillan posted triumphantly this morning:

April 18th, 2011: The day a whole new stratum of Canadian society learned what it’s like to yell at the TV

Here’s all you need to know about Canada:

When Canadian author Mordecai Richler died a few years ago, the crusty, controversial author of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Barney’s Version was duly eulogized on the front page of the nation’s newest paper, the National Post. (It didn’t hurt that the Post employed three — count ‘em! — of Richler’s talented children — but his death was a no-brainer A1 headline at every other Canadian newspaper, too.)

The next day, a different, equally glowing obit also praised Mordecai Richler — on the front page of the New York Times.

The day after that? News of that almost unheard of hono(u)r — a Canadian writer, memorialized on page one of The Paper of Record! — was breathlessly reported…

On the front page of the National Post.

And that is the only story you ever need to know, to completely understand Canada, your neighbor to the north (with a “u”.)

Oh, and one other thing:

Last night, the country’s first “conservative” 24-hour news channel, the Sun News Network, went on the air at 5PM sharp.

I’m obliged to note that I’m friendly with a few of the folks who host programs on the new network.

That said: I’m guessing I wasn’t the only one who got a little thrill watching Sun News’ “countdown clock” tick-tick-tick yesterday. (Yes, some folks videotaped the countdown clock for posterity. What can I say? That’s how desperate Canadians were for change, and how thrilled they were that it was on its way.)

When  5:00PM finally arrived and Ezra Levant greeted his viewers, I was delighted. Americans who remember the days before Fox News and the internet can probably identify with that feeling.

Our state-sponsored TV channel, the CBC, is supported by my tax dollars, rabidly anti-American and anti-Israel — and, a blessing of sorts, extremely low rated.

Other stations range from left-middle to left-left. Often this is more a case of self-selection than ideology; Canada’s media centers are our big cities, and people in big cities are typically “progressive. Their passion for “Earth Hour” and Cuban vacations and “mulitculturalism” is simply “normal.” Chances are, they’ve never met a gun owner, a climate “skeptic,” a practicing Christian, an opponent of “gay marriage” — or a Conservative Party voter.

Having said that, watching Sun News the first day still felt a bit like dutifully showing up to a pal’s new “little theatre” production of The Music Man, or your child’s Christmas pageant. You’re kind of pre-cringing, waiting for part of the set to fall over.

Yet I’m betting many of us were pleasantly surprised. Much of the on-air talent comes from the world of print; sometimes it shows (guys, they’re called “haircuts”…) but, delightfully, sometimes it doesn’t. Everyone deserves a medal just for going on TV live, to a national audience, in a recently constructed studio on its very first day.

Wow!

As the show biz bible Variety reminded us this morning, not everybody is happy with the very existence of Sun News.

As I reported here months back, Canada’s self-appointed guardians of the nation’s “values” — Establishment elites like Margaret Atwood and major newspaper columnists — tried to keep Sun News off the air before it even launched.

They didn’t succeed, obviously. And I predict that after about a week of cursing on Twitter, most of them will forget all about it and go back to fretting about the upcoming national election and the latest made-up quote attributed to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Those of us who remain tuned in, meanwhile, are happy to hear phrases like “free market economics” and “low taxes” uttered on Canadian TV without eye-rolling and sarcasm.

Of everything I saw last night, nothing moved me more than Charles Adler’s opening monologue. Adler is one of our biggest talk radio hosts. He’s a TV veteran from way back, though (with the local Emmy to prove it). I’ve been sending everyone over to the Sun News website to see his stirring welcome to his new audience, in which he shares the story of his father smuggling him, as a baby, out of Communist Hungary in a knapsack:

We took a risk for freedom, for democracy… for Canada.

It’s a moving meditation on common sense values, success, risk taking and being part of a challenging (ad)venture in a new era. Hope you’ll give it a few minutes of your time.

Naturally, the channel’s first real “controversy” came at the instigation of host Ezra Levant.

At the behest of a foreign-born imam, Levant was famously prosecuted by the Alberta government in 2006 for publishing the so-called “Mohammed cartoons.” Yesterday, by way of introduction, he showed them on his program.

And — you’ll never guess — an imam complained!

The imam, a convert named Stephen Rockwell, issued a bizarre statement invoking the Holocaust, making soap out of Jews, and the n-word.

Plus — you’ll never guess — he declined Ezra’s invitation to appear on the show today. Levant informed viewers tonight that he was going to put up a photograph of Rockwell for their benefit, but “didn’t want to frighten” them.

As a self-described troublemaker and media veteran going back to his college days, Ezra Levant is in his element. Other on-air folks aren’t as seasoned, but they’re — for lack of a gentler word — ideologically sound. Sun News scooped up almost all the nation’s openly conservative commentators in print and radio. I predict veteran Parliament Hill reporter Brian Lilley and hyperarticulate high finance expert (and children’s author!) Theo Caldwell will be the channel’s breakout stars.

So, American readers: please congratulate us, and keep your fingers crossed. If you catch clips from Sun News on the internet, do cut us some slack; we don’t have the economies of scale, and sheer capital, to launch something as visually fancy as Fox. But Sun’s heart and mind is in the right place. Millions of us are thrilled and relieved.

As my fellow Canadian blogger, Kate McMillan posted triumphantly this morning:

April 18th, 2011: The day a whole new stratum of Canadian society learned what it’s like to yell at the TV

Editor’s Note: This popular post was first published on February 13 here.

Noam Chomsky is a linguist and political philosopher of dubious repute, who remains, in spite of his errors and failed predictions, the Left’s “rabbi, our preacher, our rinpoche, our sensei.”

This week at CounterContempt, David Stein announced the release of letters he says shed harsh light on one of Chomsky’s most troubling associations: his literary relationship with a Holocaust denier.

As Stein explains:

In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, leftist author, professor, and anti-Israel activist Noam Chomsky became embroiled in what would become known as “The Faurisson Affair.” In 1979, a professor of literature at the University of Lyon, Robert Faurisson, was fined by a French court for claiming in Le Monde that the Holocaust was a hoax.

Chomsky, a rabid critic of Israel, was asked by a friend of Faurisson’s to sign a petition supporting Faurisson’s right to free speech. The petition did not mention Faurisson’s views; it merely defended his right to express them.

I should relate here that I share Chomsky’s disinterested, “absolute free speech” philosophy, which I would summarize artlessly as “let a thousand morons bloom.” (I don’t even believe in libel laws.)

As we learned to our dismay here in Canada, singling out Holocaust denial for special punishment not only turned obscure dingbats into household names; that same quasi-legal mechanism was eventually used by Muslims to persecute Jews and those with, shall we say, suspiciously Jewish-sounding names — such as Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn. (Had Steyn’s surname been “Smith,” I’m convinced his writings would never have attracted the attention of the Canadian Islamic Congress.)

In fact, Chomsky’s widely distributed condemnation of our “Human Rights Commissions” marked a turning point in our battle against state-sponsored, politically correct censorship.

However, Chomsky did more than just sign a petition defending a professor’s right to express questionable, controversial opinions back in 1979. (And who can blame him? That same freedom has made Chomsky himself relatively wealthy…)

Chomsky then wrote an essay explaining to his critics why he defended Faurisson’s right to free expression  — again, understandable and defensible as an expression of abstract principles that reasonable men have disagreed upon for centuries.

It was after that, as CounterContempt’s backgrounder explains, that things got messy:

Chomsky’s essay was used by a [Holocaust] denial publishing house as a preface for a book about Faurisson. Chomsky admitted that he had issued the essay with no restrictions regarding how it could be used, but he claimed to have asked the deniers to refrain from using it in their book. According to Chomsky, his request arrived too late, and the book (with the Chomsky preface) was published.

And that was that. Chomsky has continued, for the past thirty years, to defend his role in L’Affaire Faurisson. His defense always consists of the same points: His lack of knowledge of Faurisson’s work, and (more importantly) his absolute, total lack of interest in Holocaust denial. Chomsky has stressed, time and again, that the subject doesn’t interest him, and that he doesn’t care about, nor does he have knowledge of, anything the deniers say or write.

In short, Chomsky’s defense can be paraphrased as, ‘Look, I helped a guy out because I don’t believe in government censorship. I don’t care who he was; I’d have helped anyone in the same way. And now it’s done and I have no interest in knowing anything about who this guy is or what he believes in.’

Then CounterContempt drops the hammer:

…according to recently uncovered documents, that’s simply not true.

CounterContempt has released two letters which they say are a sampling of correspondence showing that Chomsky’s relationship with Holocaust deniers was more serious than he has let on.

These letters are between Chomsky and L.A. “Lou” Rollins, “a writer and contributing editor at the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), the North American headquarters of Holocaust denial and Nazi literature.”

CounterContempt opines that this is a “very friendly correspondence, complete with praise for the denier’s work, and an offer of assistance on Chomsky’s part.”

In one of the letters dated March 10, 1984, from Chomsky to Rollins, we read the following:

I’m very glad to hear that you are writing about Elie Wiesel, who is one of the major frauds of our time. His attitude towards Israel is essentially the same as that of the Communist party members towards the USSR, or of ‘good Germans’ towards the Nazis. (…)

Wiesel’s “shameful subservience to the State of Israel,” Chomsky continues, is a “stance” that is “all the more grotesque in his case because of the pretense of saintliness. It may be, however, that many people are aware of his exploitation of the Holocaust.”

Noam Chomsky is a linguist and political philosopher of dubious repute, who remains, in spite of his errors and failed predictions, the Left’s “rabbi, our preacher, our rinpoche, our sensei.”

This week at CounterContempt, David Stein announced the release of letters he says shed harsh light on one of Chomsky’s most troubling associations: his literary relationship with a Holocaust denier.

As Stein explains:

In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, leftist author, professor, and anti-Israel activist Noam Chomsky became embroiled in what would become known as “The Faurisson Affair.” In 1979, a professor of literature at the University of Lyon, Robert Faurisson, was fined by a French court for claiming in Le Monde that the Holocaust was a hoax.

Chomsky, a rabid critic of Israel, was asked by a friend of Faurisson’s to sign a petition supporting Faurisson’s right to free speech. The petition did not mention Faurisson’s views; it merely defended his right to express them.

I should relate here that I share Chomsky’s disinterested, “absolute free speech” philosophy, which I would summarize artlessly as “let a thousand morons bloom.” (I don’t even believe in libel laws.)

As we learned to our dismay here in Canada, singling out Holocaust denial for special punishment not only turned obscure dingbats into household names; that same quasi-legal mechanism was eventually used by Muslims to persecute Jews and those with, shall we say, suspiciously Jewish-sounding names — such as Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn. (Had Steyn’s surname been “Smith,” I’m convinced his writings would never have attracted the attention of the Canadian Islamic Congress.)

In fact, Chomsky’s widely distributed condemnation of our “Human Rights Commissions” marked a turning point in our battle against state-sponsored, politically correct censorship.

However, Chomsky did more than just sign a petition defending a professor’s right to express questionable, controversial opinions back in 1979. (And who can blame him? That same freedom has made Chomsky himself relatively wealthy…)

Chomsky then wrote an essay explaining to his critics why he defended Faurisson’s right to free expression  — again, understandable and defensible as an expression of abstract principles that reasonable men have disagreed upon for centuries.

It was after that, as CounterContempt’s backgrounder explains, that things got messy:

Chomsky’s essay was used by a [Holocaust] denial publishing house as a preface for a book about Faurisson. Chomsky admitted that he had issued the essay with no restrictions regarding how it could be used, but he claimed to have asked the deniers to refrain from using it in their book. According to Chomsky, his request arrived too late, and the book (with the Chomsky preface) was published.

And that was that. Chomsky has continued, for the past thirty years, to defend his role in L’Affaire Faurisson. His defense always consists of the same points: His lack of knowledge of Faurisson’s work, and (more importantly) his absolute, total lack of interest in Holocaust denial. Chomsky has stressed, time and again, that the subject doesn’t interest him, and that he doesn’t care about, nor does he have knowledge of, anything the deniers say or write.

In short, Chomsky’s defense can be paraphrased as, ‘Look, I helped a guy out because I don’t believe in government censorship. I don’t care who he was; I’d have helped anyone in the same way. And now it’s done and I have no interest in knowing anything about who this guy is or what he believes in.’

Then CounterContempt drops the hammer:

…according to recently uncovered documents, that’s simply not true.

CounterContempt has released two letters which they say are a sampling of correspondence showing that Chomsky’s relationship with Holocaust deniers was more serious than he has let on.

These letters are between Chomsky and L.A. “Lou” Rollins, “a writer and contributing editor at the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), the North American headquarters of Holocaust denial and Nazi literature.”

CounterContempt opines that this is a “very friendly correspondence, complete with praise for the denier’s work, and an offer of assistance on Chomsky’s part.”

In one of the letters dated March 10, 1984, from Chomsky to Rollins, we read the following:

I’m very glad to hear that you are writing about Elie Wiesel, who is one of the major frauds of our time. His attitude towards Israel is essentially the same as that of the Communist party members towards the USSR, or of ‘good Germans’ towards the Nazis. (…)

Wiesel’s “shameful subservience to the State of Israel,” Chomsky continues, is a “stance” that is “all the more grotesque in his case because of the pretense of saintliness. It may be, however, that many people are aware of his exploitation of the Holocaust.”

Mark Steyn sat in for Rush Limbaugh on Monday, and among other things, he mused about the Eminem/Chrysler Super Bowl ad (Steyn’s audio is below).

The TV spot purports to celebrate everything that once made Detroit great — and will make it great again, presumably if American taxpayers continue to throw money at (or is that down?) that urban hellhole.

(You paid $9 million for that commercial, by the way — Chrysler was one of the bailout beneficiaries, remember? Oh, and I helped: they got some Canadian assistance as well. Being Canadian born and a U.S. resident, that makes Mark Steyn doubly entitled — if you’ll permit me to use a word Detroit residents are all too familiar with — to his rant.)

Steyn joked grimly that Eminem and his director managed to find the only theater still standing in the Motor City — the city’s more majestic ones have been reduced to abandoned rubble, like so many of its homes and businesses, as famously captured on various websites with names like “The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit.”

Detroit crumbled to dust, says Steyn, not because it was bombed by foreign enemies — but because it was “run” by Democrats and unions for generations.

Steyn called Detroit: “The perfect emblem of America at the dawn of the 21st century” — a ruined city that looks like “a banana republic after a coup” is now being held up as a model for the rest of the country to emulate.

It’s the sort of thing conservatives have been saying to each other for years. (While those “ruins of Detroit” photos have recently gone mainstream/viral, a couple of websites had been serving them up for a decade. They weren’t news to me, at least.)

However, apparently nobody in Detroit has ever heard anyone blame the obvious culprits for its own demise. And Steyn, with his “elitist” accent and habit of employing expressions like “pantywaist” and “nancy boys” in between singing snatches of mid-century show tunes, managed to get under Motown’s skin like a jailhouse tattoo.

He’s spent the last 24 hours doing interviews with local Detroit and national media. Dragged on the air to “explain himself” and presumably apologize, Steyn has merely doubled down, as only he can.

For instance, he’s received hundreds of illiterate (and irony deficient) emails (language warning) chastising him for mentioning the city’s embarrassing illiteracy rate, and has thus been compelled to respond:

Actually, I said that the illiteracy rate within the city limits is about 50 per cent. That being the case, I’m impressed to see that so many of the correspondents below are able to spell correctly the two-syllable word “a*****e”. Great start! You can be anything you want to be! Dream your dream!

Hilariously, one of Steyn’s most prominent critics — local radio host Frank Beckman — admitted that “he agreed with Steyn on some issues: the roots of the city’s decline lay with unions, liberal political leaders and a sense of entitlement.” (Audio.)

But his main complaint, and those of Steyn’s less articulate critics, seemed to be:

That commercial made us feel good about our lousy city for 30 seconds. Then you came along and ruined it, you fruity foreigner!

I hear crack makes you feel good for 30 seconds too.

With childish reasoning like that in evidence, (not to mention all the embarrassing displays of misplaced homophobia) the real puzzle is how the Detroit ever rose high enough to fall so low.

Mark Steyn sat in for Rush Limbaugh on Monday, and among other things, he mused about the Eminem/Chrysler Super Bowl ad (Steyn’s audio is below).

The TV spot purports to celebrate everything that once made Detroit great — and will make it great again, presumably if American taxpayers continue to throw money at (or is that down?) that urban hellhole.

(You paid $9 million for that commercial, by the way — Chrysler was one of the bailout beneficiaries, remember? Oh, and I helped: they got some Canadian assistance as well. Being Canadian born and a U.S. resident, that makes Mark Steyn doubly entitled — if you’ll permit me to use a word Detroit residents are all too familiar with — to his rant.)

Steyn joked grimly that Eminem and his director managed to find the only theater still standing in the Motor City — the city’s more majestic ones have been reduced to abandoned rubble, like so many of its homes and businesses, as famously captured on various websites with names like “The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit.”

Detroit crumbled to dust, says Steyn, not because it was bombed by foreign enemies — but because it was “run” by Democrats and unions for generations.

Steyn called Detroit: “The perfect emblem of America at the dawn of the 21st century” — a ruined city that looks like “a banana republic after a coup” is now being held up as a model for the rest of the country to emulate.

It’s the sort of thing conservatives have been saying to each other for years. (While those “ruins of Detroit” photos have recently gone mainstream/viral, a couple of websites had been serving them up for a decade. They weren’t news to me, at least.)

However, apparently nobody in Detroit has ever heard anyone blame the obvious culprits for its own demise. And Steyn, with his “elitist” accent and habit of employing expressions like “pantywaist” and “nancy boys” in between singing snatches of mid-century show tunes, managed to get under Motown’s skin like a jailhouse tattoo.

He’s spent the last 24 hours doing interviews with local Detroit and national media. Dragged on the air to “explain himself” and presumably apologize, Steyn has merely doubled down, as only he can.

For instance, he’s received hundreds of illiterate (and irony deficient) emails (language warning) chastising him for mentioning the city’s embarrassing illiteracy rate, and has thus been compelled to respond:

Actually, I said that the illiteracy rate within the city limits is about 50 per cent. That being the case, I’m impressed to see that so many of the correspondents below are able to spell correctly the two-syllable word “a*****e”. Great start! You can be anything you want to be! Dream your dream!

Hilariously, one of Steyn’s most prominent critics — local radio host Frank Beckman — admitted that “he agreed with Steyn on some issues: the roots of the city’s decline lay with unions, liberal political leaders and a sense of entitlement.” (Audio.)

But his main complaint, and those of Steyn’s less articulate critics, seemed to be:

That commercial made us feel good about our lousy city for 30 seconds. Then you came along and ruined it, you fruity foreigner!

I hear crack makes you feel good for 30 seconds too.

With childish reasoning like that in evidence, (not to mention all the embarrassing displays of misplaced homophobia) the real puzzle is how the Detroit ever rose high enough to fall so low.

I always liked The Kids in the Hall. It was one of the few TV programs on the CBC that I’ve ever watched, so I didn’t resent supporting it with my extorted tax dollars. My friends and I admired The Kids’ uncanny ability to capture the mundane horrors of cubicle life at all levels, from CEO to temp, and duly adopted lots of their catchphrases.

But like their comedic counterparts at “the Corpse” (The Royal Canadian Air Farce, This Hour Has 22 Minutes), they occasionally lapsed into brainless anti-Americanism, just not as frequently.

Up here, it’s a running, well, joke that comedians are one of Canada’s major exports, starting with Wayne & Shuster (who hold the record for appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show) to Jim Carrey, Harold Ramis, Eugene Levy, Mike Myers and any number of SNL/National Lampoon writers.

However, The Kids never made the leap across the border, except as hipster cult favorites. Too weird, too dark, too “high concept”? Hard to say.

Now one of The Kids is finally moving to America for good, but not because he’s signed a development deal or landed a juicy role.

Having built his early career at our expense, Dave (News Radio) Foley is now decamping to the US — to escape our notoriously feminist, anti-male, “progressive” child support system.

I have mixed feelings about alimony and child support. My deadbeat dad died owing me countless thousands of dollars in support; while my mother and I lived below the poverty line, he hung out drinking at the golf course and the race track.

However, I’m also on a Canadian “father’s rights” mailing list, which has hipped me to our twisted “women are always right” justice system.

At the extreme end, women who kill get much shorter sentences than male murderers (who get ridiculously short sentences to begin with.) But every day, (non-violent) men like Dave Foley face situations like this one:

Foley explained during an interview on comedian Marc Maron’s podcast that he was recently ordered by an Ontario Family Court judge to pay his first wife and two teenage sons more than he has been able to earn.

“I’m happy to give away half my money, that would be great,” said Foley. “But I’m literally obligated to give away 400 per cent of my income, or otherwise go to jail.

“The judge even said, if I was paralyzed from the neck down, I would still be responsible for having to earn a million dollars a year.” (…)

While he was re-married to American actress Chrissy Guerrero a few years later, and the couple had a daughter in 2003, Foley said the strain of having to pay spousal and child support for his first marriage contributed to the recent dissolution of the second one.

Foley explained the latest ruling stated he remains on the hook to Southey whether or not he is able to earn the money, and whether or not he is alive.

So, for the time being, Foley has planned to hunker down in Los Angeles.

“I don’t think I would take to jail well,” he said.

(Indeed, that’s more “Buddy Cole’s” forte…)

The friend who emailed me this information about Foley thoughtfully added a video (see below) that will give you an idea of who you’re about to “welcome” into your country!

Remember: Dave Foley gets to live in the United States. And I don’t.

Just sayin’…

At least she didn’t blame Sarah Palin.

On her low-rated MSNBC show Monday night, Rachel Maddow condemned “Stephenson Billings at ChristWire.org” for writing this:

The escalating crisis in Egypt could become a defining moment for Sarah Palin. Governor Palin needs to speak out publicly and forcibly for an American-led invasion to protect our interests in North Africa.

Too bad Stephenson Billings is an imaginary person and ChristWire.org is a satirical site.

Maybe it’s because I’m Canadian, but I can’t imagine voluntarily tuning in to watch a smug, snide woman who looks like a cross between k.d. lang, and Linda Griffiths in her Pierre Trudeau drag.

But somebody’s watching Rachel “Maybe If I Talk Really Fast, People Will Think I’m Clever” Maddow, apparently, because The Atlantic Wire (note: neither a satirical site nor a “right wing” one) caught her slamming an imaginary person for daring to criticize Obama.

As The Atlantic Wire points out, two NBC affiliates, along with The Huffington Post, have also mistaken ChristWire.org for a legitimate news source, and the latter were mocked for doing so by no less than the New York Times. Speaking for everyone reading this post right now, they add:

C’mon people. Google searches! They’re not that hard.

Obliged to acknowledge her mistake, Maddow tweeted after her show Monday night, “The bad news about a free and open internet? Sometimes you get had by brilliant satirists.”

Yes, satirists are always “brilliant” when they’re mocking conservative Christians. I don’t find ChristWire.org particularly insightful or original, but then again, I’m not a “progressive.”

This morning, Business Wire reported on Maddow’s on-air mea (minima) culpa last night, and were unimpressed, to put it mildly:

After a series of clips of George W. Bush and John Boehner and then Glenn Beck raging about the new Caliphate, Christwire finally came in:

“Props to them for a brilliant piece of satire, shame on us for believing them.  But in a world where China taking over New Zealand [cue visual of Glenn Beck] is what passes for real analysis on the situation in Egypt how do we know that’s not satire too?”

Translation: Glenn Beck is so crazy, and so successful, how can I, Rachel Maddow, be expected to differentiate between him and false news stories?

Boy was that disappointing.

“Disappointing”? More like predictable and pathetic. Pushed to the wall, one of the leftist’s favorite responses is to whine impotently, “He does it too!!” Maddow’s non-apology is just another example.

PS: MSNBC removed Maddow’s embarrassing gaff from its website, but you can view it below:

Writing recently for USAToday, Harvard Law professor David B. Wilkins looked back at a disturbing, depressing event in recent American history:

During his confirmation hearings for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991, Clarence Thomas famously described the news media’s treatment of the allegations that he had sexually harassed a young female co-worker during his tenure as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as a “high-tech lynching.”

In Thomas’ case, the claim was little more than clever hyperbole.

Wilkins’ snide characterization of Thomas’ metaphor is fairly commonplace on the Left. You see, progressives turn antsy when conservatives “steal” two of their favorite weapons: civil disobedience and metaphors. Pro-abortion activists still resent Operation Rescue for adopting passive resistance and street theater, and leftists hamfistedly mock anyone to their right who speaks and writes using figures of speech.

And of course, they really hate it when African-Americans escape from the progressive plantation. How uppity!

Fast forward twenty years:

At a ‘progressive’ rally in Palm Springs [on January 30, 2011], [white] demonstrators called for Clarence Thomas to be hanged, stringed up, tortured, sent back to the fields, and so on.

The “Uncloaking the Kochs” rally was sponsored by Common Cause, AFFCE, The Ruckus Society, 350, Greenpeace, Code Pink, the Progressive Democrats of America, and others. The event was staged outside venue of Koch Brothers conference.

But hey, give that one lady on the video credit: at least she apologized for swearing!

I can find no evidence that “hate crime,” “hate speech” or civil rights charges were laid related to this incident.

Oddly enough!

Someone should send this tape to the Palm Springs District Attorney or equivalent and ask what s/he makes of it.

Or maybe this is a job for the FBI…

PS: According to their website at least, the Palm Springs Police Department takes “hate crimes” very seriously. They define a hate crime as:

…any unlawful action designed to frighten or harm an individual or group which is motivated because of race, religion, ethnic/national origin, sexual orientation, gender or disability of the victim.

The Palm Springs Police Department urges citizens to “report the incident immediately to the police.”

So there you have it…

At least she didn’t blame Sarah Palin.

On her low-rated MSNBC show Monday night, Rachel Maddow condemned “Stephenson Billings at ChristWire.org” for writing this:

The escalating crisis in Egypt could become a defining moment for Sarah Palin. Governor Palin needs to speak out publicly and forcibly for an American-led invasion to protect our interests in North Africa.

Too bad Stephenson Billings is an imaginary person and ChristWire.org is a satirical site.

Maybe it’s because I’m Canadian, but I can’t imagine voluntarily tuning in to watch a smug, snide woman who looks like a cross between k.d. lang, and Linda Griffiths in her Pierre Trudeau drag.

But somebody’s watching Rachel “Maybe If I Talk Really Fast, People Will Think I’m Clever” Maddow, apparently, because The Atlantic Wire (note: neither a satirical site nor a “right wing” one) caught her slamming an imaginary person for daring to criticize Obama.

As The Atlantic Wire points out, two NBC affiliates, along with The Huffington Post, have also mistaken ChristWire.org for a legitimate news source, and the latter were mocked for doing so by no less than the New York Times. Speaking for everyone reading this post right now, they add:

C’mon people. Google searches! They’re not that hard.

Obliged to acknowledge her mistake, Maddow tweeted after her show Monday night, “The bad news about a free and open internet? Sometimes you get had by brilliant satirists.”

Yes, satirists are always “brilliant” when they’re mocking conservative Christians. I don’t find ChristWire.org particularly insightful or original, but then again, I’m not a “progressive.”

This morning, Business Wire reported on Maddow’s on-air mea (minima) culpa last night, and were unimpressed, to put it mildly:

After a series of clips of George W. Bush and John Boehner and then Glenn Beck raging about the new Caliphate, Christwire finally came in:

“Props to them for a brilliant piece of satire, shame on us for believing them.  But in a world where China taking over New Zealand [cue visual of Glenn Beck] is what passes for real analysis on the situation in Egypt how do we know that’s not satire too?”

Translation: Glenn Beck is so crazy, and so successful, how can I, Rachel Maddow, be expected to differentiate between him and false news stories?

Boy was that disappointing.

“Disappointing”? More like predictable and pathetic. Pushed to the wall, one of the leftist’s favorite responses is to whine impotently, “He does it too!!” Maddow’s non-apology is just another example.

PS: MSNBC removed Maddow’s embarrassing gaff from its website, but you can view it below: