The Globe & Mail's Propaganda - Example #87,543

The Globe & Mail newspaper published an "interesting" poll on their website today. Read over the question carefully. How would you vote?

If you're like SDA regular "ET", you wouldn't vote at all. Here's what she had to say about it:

How about this poll question, in the Globe and Mail today? It's an example of 'begging the question', a fallacy, where you FIRST have to accept an internal-to-the-question opinion, before you can answer the question.

Here's the question:

"Will President Obama convince Americans to make the hard choices necessary to change the Bush administration's often-failed foreign policies?"

Heh. There are actually multiple fallacies in this esteemed, impartial, unbiased, truth-seeking newspaper's question.

First, there's the basic begging, where you have to accept as truth 'the Bush administration's often-failed foreign policies'. Notice that the question didn't FIRST ask you if you thought these policies were failures. No way. Truth is, according to the G&M, theirs and theirs alone.

Then, how about 'alleged certainty', where it is accepted as beyond question that Obama's actions will be 'necessary'? Oh? This assumes that any of his foreign policy actions will not be subject to criticism because they are already correct and are thus deemed 'necessary'.

Notice also yet another unquestioned assumption; the descriptive evaluation of Obama, i.e. that Obama KNOWS what is necessary and correct.

All of these fallacies, all in one G&M question.

By the way, not a mention of Obama's naive hug-a-terrorist actions, in his letter to Iran, suggesting that all is needed is to 'get along'.

How about his administration's change of definition of a terrorist action to a 'man-caused disaster', which removes all intentionality of that uh, terrorist, to uh, terrorize and reduces the action to pure accident.

How about his insults to the UK PM, to Sarkozy of France, to the Italian PM?

His Afghanistan agenda? Straight out of Bush's agenda in Iraq, which saw, after the surge had gained control of the country, the new agenda of empowering the local population to themselves fight back against Al Qaeda. The G&M seems to have forgotten this Bush strategy of creating a democracy and then empowering the people.

Posted by: ET at March 28, 2009 12:14 PM

Lawrence Martin: The Vast Right-Wing Media Conspiracy

Not often do I read something that leaves me baffled. But such is the case with the latest mutterings of the Globe & Mail's Lawrence Martin. In what is apparently not satire, he tries to put forward the case that journalism has moved to the RIGHT of the Canadian public. He goes on to make many references to American media outlets that one can only assume he believes the same has occurred in the U.S.

Think about that for a second. Mr. Martin is asserting that journalists in the mainstream media have become more right-wing, more conservative than the average person in the public. Considering that poll after poll after poll of journalists asserts that 98% label themselves as liberal or very liberal, how could he make such an assertion with any sense of credibility? One can only surmise that Martin is working under the old presumption that "if you tell a lie enough times, maybe people will start believing it."

Because of the parrot-like behaviour of so many in the MSM, look for others to recite this now as a fact. It's SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for how the Left operates.

How anyone could watch last year's U.S. Presidential election campaign or Canada's recent Constitutional Crisis and come away believing that there is a RIGHT-wing bias in the media is surely beyond the comprehension of even the most learned psychiatrists the world over!

It's one thing for people to have different political views but to think as Lawrence Martin does takes a special kind of stupid.

The New Bigotry of the Secular Left

1692: Salem Witch Hunt

2009: Ottawa Christian Hunt

The Toronto Globe & Mail on the Destroy Harper War Path

The latest actions of Canada's corrupt MSM comes from the [Toronto] Globe & Mail. They suggest by a reverse negative that Prime Minister Stephen Harper go on a "Contrition Tour". This is much the way a neurotic girlfriend would respond to, "Is everyone okay, honey?" : "Everything's FINE. Fine, Fine, Fine!" And then later to her girlfriends, "He was so stupid not to realize what he had done wrong!"

There's one very telling section:

Worse is that Mr. Harper continues to actively misrepresent the events of the past several weeks and the motives of his opponents. "We only found out [after the economic update] that they've been planning to overturn the results of the election ever since election night," he said. In fact, there is nothing to suggest that the opposition had any prior intention of toppling the government, and the disarray the Liberals quickly fell into suggests the prospect surprised them as much as anyone.

Nor would the opposition have been "overturning the results of the election," as Mr. Harper repeatedly alleged. Although a coalition government may be politically untenable, it would be entirely within the boundaries of parliamentary democracy - not a coup attempt, as the Conservatives continually claim.

What complete morons do they think we are? Does the Globe & Mail view Canadians as dementia patients who can't remember anything from just a few minutes ago?

1. It was just 2.5 weeks ago that Jack Layton revealed the opposition had EVERY INTENTION of toppling the government at the earliest opportunity. There is no absolute proof [yet] that Stephane Dion and the Liberals had prior knowledge of the NDP and Bloc's plan but the Coalition Accord came together extremely quickly to discount this as a real possibility.
   
   
2. No one disputes that the Coalition had the constitutional right to overthrow a newly elected government. But most Canadians adamantly believe that they had ZERO DEMOCRATIC RIGHT to do so. I wrote at length about this here. Ted McWhinney, a constitutional scholar, absolutely concurs. And Charles Adler explains the nefarious connection between many in academia and their pals in the MSM.

It has become very clear that Liberal and NDP elites, such as those who have infested newspapers like the Globe & Mail, don't give a damn about democracy. It's just too messy for them to let stupid Canadians actually make up their own minds. So they will do and say anything to insert their guy, Michael Ignatieff, into the PM job asap.

Beware: The Coalition is NOT Dead

The Liberal Party's PR surrogates - aka "the mainstream media" have made it very clear that the Coalition isn't dead. It's just lying in wait to bring down the "evil tyrant" Stephen Harper at the earliest opportunity.

Here's a fascinating discussion with the Globe and Mail's Gloria Galloway (starting at 7:00). Ms. Galloway has a long history of contempt for Stephen Harper in particular and conservative-minded Canadians in general. While she's carefully holding back her venom at this time, this glowing article by her about Michael Ignatieff is a clear sign of what heavy bias we'll be seeing in the media in 2009.

Incidentally, by my count it has now been 2 days since Ignatieff has been the head of the dreaded Coalition, which came very close to taking away the democracy of Canadians. Some Liberal pundits are saying that he was the least supportive of it. If that's true then why has he not spoken out against it as of yet?!

Blogging is Cheaper than Therapy

Kate McMillan, the founder of Small Dead Animals, one of the most successful political blogs in Canada, once said that the reason she started blogging was to stop throwing objects at the radio and TV when she heard something extremely stupid or biased (I'm paraphrasing).

Her blog is now so successful that she has guest bloggers as well. One of them just wrote this piece. His opening sentence reads as follows:

Sometimes I get asked why I blog. If anyone else can think of a more productive way to get this stuff off my chest, please let me know. As Sean says, it's cheaper than therapy.

In this particular case, he's commenting on a Paris Hilton like princess named Jessica Leader who is currently wearing a beret that says, "Globe and Mail War Correspondent". You've got to read her latest missive to understand just how absolutely pathetic she is. This is what passes for Canadian journalism these days?

Another blogger has a similar take.

---

If you'd like to read & see some REAL reporting from Afghanistan then visit the website of Michael Yon.

The Globe & Mail [Finally] Weighs In

Finally, our major national newspaper lends its voice to what transpired here this past week. The most brilliant portion of the editorial was this:

"Vigorous and legitimate expressions of opinion may sometimes get some listeners or readers worked up in harmful ways. But that is not the fault of the speaker or writer of the opinion - not at least in any nation where there is free speech."

Is Progressive the New Regressive?

In the old Soviet Union there was a process of thinking known as the Marxist Dialectic. With it, everything got turned upside down: black was white, blue was green, left was right, up was down, etc.

The term "liberal" has grown out of disfavour because of all the negative connotations associated with it. Such people now like to be referred to as "progressive". If you'd like to see the minds of such "progressives" on display, then take a look at many of the comments posted for editorials written by Ezra Levant and the 4 Osgoode Hall law students on the Globe & Mail website. They provide perfect examples of the Marxist Dialectic at work; as does the latter editorial.

Here's a letter I sent to the newspaper:

I very much appreciate the ongoing debate of ideas you've been featuring on your website regarding Free Speech in Canada. Particularly interesting are the hundreds of comments posted in response to the editorials from Ezra Levant and the 4 Osgoode Hall law students.

One disturbing trend that became clear was a similarity amongst those who philosophically were at odds with the views of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn. They disagreed with these gentlemen, frequently belittled them, and then went on to support the government muzzling their right to free speech, citing any or all of the following reasons: it was hate (which it's not), it offended them (which it surely did), and that they were personally being victimized because of such words being published.

It's amazing to me that in 2008, there are still many people in Canada who think this way. It brings a whole new level of meaning to "pampered by the nanny state". Indeed, they have every reason to think anyway they want, but I adamantly don't believe that the government has any right to enforce their views. One can only wonder how such folks would feel if charges of a similar nature were brought against them? For make no mistake, these people offend me ... deeply! If only I could remember the address of the Canadian Human Rights Commission . . . .

A Few Words from Gary Mason on the Strike

The Globe & Mail's Gary Mason wrote a brilliant piece about the strike. While I'm unable to provide a link to it, here are a few key comments of his:

There was a time that citizens of Vancouver actually felt some sympathy for striking civic workers. Not any more.

People have lost their patience - finally. You can hear it on the radio. You can see it on television. You can certainly read it in letters to the editor. The original reserves of goodwill the striking workers had with the public are now completely empty.

The 84-day strike, which will become the longest in city history if it drags on into next week, has now officially entered the lunacy phase. And the real idiots are those leading - and I use that term loosely - the striking CUPE locals. Those leading a couple of them anyway.

The advice that the still-striking workers have been getting from their union leaders has been at best misguided, at worst appallingly irresponsible and politically motivated.

It's funny, from the very beginning of this dispute the unions tried to foist the blame for it on Mayor Sam Sullivan. They called it Sam's Strike. From the outset, CUPE made this dispute political, doing the bidding of the centre-left civic parties that oppose Mr. Sullivan and his Non-Partisan Association party.

At first it worked. When Mr. Sullivan said he was not going to interfere to try to bring an end to the strike, the unions made him out to look weak and ineffectual. Mr. Sullivan, it seems, had a master plan: let the unions hang themselves.

What has really pushed the public over the edge is the attitude, in particular, of the outside workers, many of whom have bragged in interviews about easily finding other jobs that pay them more than the ones they have at city hall. Proof, they say, of just how grossly underpaid they are.

Of course, the reason most of them wouldn't even consider the idea [of leaving their civic jobs] is because the jobs they've found don't come with the same lucrative benefit packages as the ones they have. Or the same job security. Or the same number of days off.