Nitwit of the Day

Now this is just embarrassing -- can we please get some kind of ruling that hockey columnists do not get to also write about politics? Maybe from the board of health under workplace sanitation rules, like the way raw poultry has to be handled separately. Having spent the weeks in question covering Sidney Crosbie, Roy MacGregor here shows olde-Canadian grit and resourcefulness in just making stuff up as regards the nameless parliamentary crisis. For the record: we have no reason to think that the G-G was 'uncertain' about anything, whatever exactly he means by that, and it is not true that "one of the polls found that nearly three-quarters of Canadians were "scared" silly by all this." Well, maybe one of the polls did, I don't know what might be out there (and notice how msm columnists never give you links, even in the online version), and I know that for instance the outfit that specializes in climate-change denialist push-polling also did a poll with some predictably absurd results. But the only serious poll I saw about the coalition, and the only one the Globe itself bothered printing, had the following on the relevant point:

Only 37 per cent of respondents supported the proposed Liberal-NDP coalition, while 58 per cent opposed it.

Good luck getting that to equal 'three-quarters scared silly'.

Meanwhile some of the grownup columnists are also peddling this tripe about the coalition having been an unmitigated disaster with the voters, what a terrible blunder it was, good thing Ignatieff is backing away etc. etc. I can't tell whether they've been sincerely gulled by all the hysterical screeching from the right (not that it wasn't sincere screeching, just that the Con base is very good at puffing its chest out to look bigger than it is). Actually my suspicion is that the media insider types were just so horrified by Dion's amateur video that it's the only thing they can remember about the whole business (which happened all of ten days ago). Anyway, the fact that public opinion was divided and equivocal in all the ways you'd expect has been pushed right down the memory hole already.