Parliament’s on summer vacation and all of the MPs are away at politician summer camp, roasting marshmallows, having inter-party water-balloon fights and telling spooky ghost stories about the Reform Party coming back from the dead. That means no real national political news is happening these days (unless you’re Australian, what in the name of vegemite’s going on down there?) So today we’ll be focusing on dumb articles (and one non-dumb article with an embarrassing addendum!) that have appeared over the past couple of days in Canada’s most distinguished birdcage-lining newspapers.

• > EMBARRASSMENT #1: Did you know that racism existed a hundred years ago? A hundred Pulitzers to the Ottawa Citizen’s Don Butler, who spent the weekend holed up in the National Archives, smoking a pipe and flipping through dusty stacks of historical documents to bring you this earth-shattering revelation: many great Canadian historical figures would be deemed racially intolerant based on modern standards! The context of the story is whether or not Charlotte Whitton, Ottawa’s first female mayor, should be recognized as an important historical Canadian in light of her being a class-A Jew-hater. That controversy aside, I just love the way the Citizen eagerly “reports” that, indeed, historical Canadians from a hundred years ago would be deemed downright intolerant today. Of course the entire Earth back then would probably also be deemed racially intolerant by today’s standards, not to mention sexist, homophobic and xenophobic, because it was a hundred fucking years ago. These old-timey historical people also believed that drilling a hole in your skull was a valid medical procedure and that diseases were caused by an imbalance of yellow bile. Did you know that moral standards change over time, and historical people lived a LONG TIME AGO, when people believed a whole bunch of wacky wrong-headed shit about each other, and “people” includes “people who appeared in your Grade 8 Canadian History textbook”? Thanks a heap for the history lesson, Don!

• > EMBARRASSMENT #2: Durrrr, dem muslins gon’ build da mosque at da 9/11, HURF DURF RAGE: Can you remember the last time a story so minor, so petty, so downright weapons-grade retarded, managed to fill so many endless days of braindead cable-news coverage and self-righteous editorial columns? (Probably some other bullshit about a month ago, right?) A mosque is being built in New York City, alongside hundreds of other mosques in a massive, multicultural city, including one existing mosque a block away from the proposed one. Even though pretty much nobody in New York gives a shit, this has become a ridiculous cause celebre among the type of angry idiots in Cousinfuck, Arkansas who hear the numbers “9″ and “11″ and get a rage-boner. Somehow the memo has been passed from metropolitan Cousinfuck to the dusty typewriter of Sun Media moron Peter Worthington, so he could shit out a horrible, horrible column about this Tea Party-invented, bullshit, fake-controversy. Apparently there’s some Muslim in Canada who has the BRAVERY to stand up and say that this mosque is an affront to American liberty, and, ugh, Worthington has such a crush on this Muslim chick who’s clearly aiming to be the next Fox News Special Islam Correspondent. If you’re bulimic and looking to drop some of that poundage from your big lunch, save the toothbrush-gag and repeatedly read the part of this column where Worthington claims that all Muslims in Canada secretly stand behind terrorism. Ugggh God, I-, I’m gonn-BLLEERRGGGCCHHHH.

This is Woody's face upon hearing more Rob Ford crap on this blog.

• > EMBARRASSMENT#3: National D’oh!st: Chris Selley – who, despite looking like a Geico caveman, isn’t dumb, and is actually pretty good in his smart-ass headline-combing gig at the Post – got stung by the horrible bite of Rob Ford over the weekend, a bite all too familiar to anything edible in Rob Ford’s fridge. Selley was talking about how dirt-ass bankrupt the City of Toronto was (no arguments here) and then half-defending Rob Ford’s frontrunner status in the mayoralty race, arguing that as much of a greasy clown Rob Ford “F-150″ is, at least he’d be willing to cut the pork – if not from his diet, then from the budget. As an example, Selley points out the $600,000 the city is willing to spend to keep the humps of lightly-slush-coated compressed garbage it calls ski hills open. That’s right, BC readers, Toronto’s got ski hills – eat your heart out at those majestic slopes and weep in envy! You see, at least Rob Ford would never vote to fund some – I’m sorry, what? Fiscal boy-scout Rob Ford voted to fund the ski hills? Hah! Check the meek withdrawal at the bottom of the story, and then the complete turnaround, as Selley goes from cautiously optimistic about Ford in the story itself to downright vengeful in the addendum. I’m pretty sure this goes to show that Rob Ford is not only undefendable, he goes out of his way to make his optimists look foolish, like the ominous clap of thunder that sounds after a forelorn cartoon character says “Well, we’re trapped out here, but at least it’s not raining…”?

Rob Ford's mugshot, after he was stopped drinking and driving on his way to a Chris Farley lookalike pageant

Angry grease-hog Rob Ford is a shrill, pink man-baby, a horrible clown-monster coated in oil and booze and the purified and distilled human emotion of hatred, and could very well by the next mayor of Toronto, in the ultimate theological test or whether a truly loving God cannot exist.

The frontrunner in the race, whose entire life has been an awful, incoherent shouting match with the planet Earth, has had a pretty bad week. Pretty much every conceivable type of scandal a politician can commit has stuck to his gross, lard-slick carcass of a body, from a criminal record, to lying about drug charges, to unethical use of power, to racist comments, to threatening to kill his wife, to profanity-laced diatribes, to… oh, Jesus, I need to lie down. Just thinking about Rob Ford’s awful life from the time he was a screaming, red, pudgy infant to his days as a screaming, red, pudgy politician is giving me a headache.

Even the Toronto Sun, the official rag of mulleted pig-fuckers who’d vote for  a comedic failure-beast like Rob Ford, has come out with an editorial calling him an awful, unelectable monster.

With all of his scandals in place, we’re one step closer to completing ROB FORD SCANDAL BINGO! I’ve lined up a Bingo card (it’s ok, you can play along Ontarian readers, online gambling’s legal now!) with all of the conceivable scandals a politician can commit, with the theory being that, while one punch on the card isn’t a big deal, 5 in a row should be enough to derail any politician’s campaign. But Goddamn, Rob Ford just won’t die, he’s like the coke-fuelled Tony Montana at the end of Scarface being plugged by round after round of scandal-bullets but still screaming for more.

PLAY ALONG AT HOME! If Rob Ford gets 5 spaces in a row, YOU WIN! If you win, you have to drink a bottle of gin and then spend the rest of the night crying for humanity.

Our contestants: The Toronto Sun editorial team, Ezra Levant, and the smalldeadanimals comment section. Everyone loses.

For the past week, we’ve been hearing about a boat full of Tamil refugees slowly inching towards our shores, reported in the same dire tone you’d expect from Tokyo TV on news that Godzilla had once again risen from the Sea of Japan. As this rusty barge full of impoverished, hungry third-world refugees slowly made its way towards British Columbia, there was a general consensus: we’re doomed. The battle lines were drawn, and this boat full of sick, begging Sri Lankans would crush our military, destroy our society as we know it, and take control of our nation. Enjoy Canada as you know it, folks, if I’m to believe what I’m reading in the papers, the second we let these guys off the boat a Tamil Tigers flag will be flapping in the breeze over Parliament.

With all of this hullabaloo, we’re starting a contest: which media source can inject the most fear-mongering, over-the-top, end-of-the-world sensationalist vitriol into an article about 40-dozen-odd brown people landing a boat? Points will be awarded for doom-predicting, logical fallacies, breathless fury at Canadian society in general, irrelevant political talking points and overall retardedness of presentation.

Who’s ready to dish out a Sri Spankin’?

Contestant #1

Contestant Number One is from Toronto, he enjoys sports and bikini girls, and his pet peeves are kids these days and Liberals, say hello to The Sun!

First of all, let’s drop the “migrant” bunkum. It’s meaningless left-wing political claptrap.

Whoa, “bunkum”! “Claptrap”! Fantastic usage of words which are only used by 72-year-olds, and we’re only in the first sentence of this unsigned editorial! Plus, we’ve got kneejerk political reaction expertly woven in, with the claim that the very word “migrant”, meaning “one who migrates”, is left-wing in nature. Take that, left-wing claptrap bunkum!

Like queue-jumpers, scam artists, back-door home invaders, plus a terrorist or two.

Like scallywags, trollops, ne’er-do-wells and common rapscallions, says I! Got a boat full o’ people you know literally nothing about, who haven’t even been identified or spoken to the media? Are they brown? The Sun can tell you exactly how many terrorists are on the boat: either one, or two.

Alright Contestant Number One, here’s your final chance to impress our judges, put all of your retardedness on the line!

If the MV Sun Sea were carrying 500 “migrants” from Afghanistan, home base for the Taliban and al-Qaeda, would we be allowing it to enter Canadian waters, or would we put firing [sic] a shot over the bow with a message that the next would be midships? [sic]

Outstanding answer, Toronto Sun! You’ve combined a false premise, an appeal to emotion, an outright falsehood (Pakistan’s the home base of al-Qaeda), ridiculous chest-thumping bravado, and – best of all! – the writer has become so heart-poundingly outraged at the end of this sentence that he can’t even put words together, drifting off into a stream of furious, spittle-flecked nonsense. Or would be put firing, indeed! Thank you, Contestant Number One!

Contestant #2

Contestant Number Two is the failed abortion of a sewer rat fucking a Reform Party yard sign. His interests include suing blogs for libel, which he can’t do in this case, because the preceding sentence was factual. Meet perpetual clown Ezra Levant!

Ezra pooped out a column about this Tamil stuff, and it was run by a variety of newspapers which couldn’t fill the page space with something more meaningful, like ads for escort services. I’ll direct you to the version at the Belleville Intelligencer.

Great news for health care! The Victoria General Hospital is reopening a whole ward that had been shut down. They’re even contemplating dusting off an extra emergency department. No more waiting lists in that B.C. city! Just joking.

Oh, ha ha, hah haha, ho-ho, ha-ha, funny joke Ezra Levant!

Reports from the ship say there was an outbreak of tuberculosis. It’s a safe bet the B.C. department of health didn’t set aside millions of dollars in their budget for that Third World disease. No problem — just take it away from MRIs or cataract surgeries. No one will notice, and if they do, let’s just call them racist.

Alright, look, this is an open contest and all, but we didn’t expect any professional retards to enter. This isn’t even fair. This is a swimsuit competition, and you just showed up topless. Your level of retardedness is making a mockery of this retardedness pageant’s standards of fair competition. In that four-sentence bucket of brain-vomit alone, it’s worth noting the passengers didn’t have TB, no money is being diverted from regular provincial healthcare funding, and, oh WHAT THE FUCK with your racism-baiting bullshit Ezra.

We’re an awfully long journey from Sri Lanka, an island country just off the tip of India.

Good Lord.

Let’s do what Australia does. They have a small island 2,600 km off the coast of Perth.

What? No. Jesus, Ezra. No.

Let’s build a Christmas Island. We can do it on one of our remote islands off the West Coast, maybe in the Queen Charlottes.

Oh come on Ezra, this was supposed to be a fair, clean pageant, and then you had to come in here seriously proposing that we turn the national-park-protected, Native-administered Haidi Gwaii (formerly known as Queen Charlotte Islands) into some sort of Gitmo. Ezra, you’ve tarnished this wholesome beauty pageant with your swollen boobjobs of illegal idiocy, and you’re hereby DISQUALIFIED.

Contestant #3

Small Dead Animals founder Kate McMillan. Hint: the dead animal in question is a Cougar.

Our third contestant in our Parade of Irrational Tamil Fearmongering Sweepstakes says that she enjoys fast motorcycles, tight leather pants, and blog posts involving no more than 15 keystrokes. Say hello to Kate McMillan’s Small Dead Animals comments section!

They and the Taliban now know what cowards our authorities are when it comes to enforcing laws against non-European “citizens”.

And the judges are giving a 8.0 for grammar abuse and barely-veiled racism, fantastic start Small Dead Animals!

Immigration is like a credit card with a high limit; Instant gratification, then pain and misery for decades. If you are a leftist, you have no idea what I mean.

After reading this comment, our judges gave ace commenter “Friend of USA” a slow, deliberate golf clap. You see, the judges were trying to make sense of his metaphor – wait, who gets the gratification and who gets the misery? Why does this commenter have decades worth of painful credit card debt? When white people immigrate, is it more like a tax-free savings account? Then the judges realized – of course we can’t understand what he means. We’re leftists.

Kindof surprised Barry Soetoro didn’t offer them asylum just to p-off the Arizonians.

HOLY SHIT A REAL LIFE BIRTHER! Invoking Barack Obama’s top-secret Kenyan-Muslim name! And, “Arizonians”! The judges here are RISING TO THEIR FEET in applause for the sheer awfulness of this comment!

Since there are women on board and the ship has been on sea for three months, my guess is that quite a few are pregnant by now (either willingly or unwillingly through rape).

Just, wow. Alright Small Dead Animals, finish us off with one classic, awful comment!

Foreign ships up to no good should not be allowed into Canadian waters. Foreign ships engaged in human smuggling operations should not gain admittance to Canadian waters on principle: human smuggling is illegal. Other grounds include what is in the best interest of Canadians – what is in the best interest of human cargo destined to be utilized as sweated labour, or more chillingly, as operatives – and what is in the best interest of an ethnic community that has long endured Tiger fundraising shakedowns without recourse to Canada’s legal remedies

Hey, wait a minute, this comment’s actually free of spelling mistakes and uses legal logic instead of baseless vitriol, and even seems to defend the rights of Tamils, while – oh wait, nevermind, this wasn’t a Small Dead Animals comment, it was posted on a Neo-Nazi forum by white supremacist Paul Fromm. Sorry folks, I get all mixed up when I’ve got multiple tabs going in my browser.

Final Results

Although the SDA comment section was impressively retarded, I’ve got to give the edge to the Toronto Sun for being even more embarrassing and incoherent, while actually being published in a newspaper people pay money to read.

Congrashrilankans!

Hey, we’re only a week late on this story, that’s not bad for us!

-M

Just doin' my job ma'am, protecting all the fine constituents of my riding

Tony Clement is our favourite Cabinet Minister. He’s unashamedly geek-chic like a Judd Apatow character, he’s thoroughly unwilling to take any of your shit, he’s not a loony-bin Reform righty, he shows up on radio talk shows to make poop and weiner jokes, and he rocks Twitter so hard it made Ashton Kutcher jealous. But until today, we didn’t know that Tony Clement was a LITERAL SUPERHERO.

It makes sense when you think about it – Clark Kent hid his ultra-macho Superman persona by working as a pencil-pushing journalist by day, while Bruce Wayne disguised his dark, brooding Batman identity by living the life of a billionaire playboy. It only makes sense that Aquaman, a hero who speaks the language of the sea and has no fear of diving into the churning, dark waves of the Muskoka River to save a citizen in peril, would hide his seafaring heroics with a role by day as mild-mannered, four-eyed nerd Tory Minister Tony Clement.

Then again, the girl he saved was from Toronto – it wouldn’t surprise me if after coming out of her coma and opening her eyes to see her saviour, she’d let out a disappointed sigh and hop back into the river, waiting to see if Justin Trudeau would save her instead.

In all seriousness, though, water safety is a serious issue. I looked up the stats on drowning in Canada, and it turns out that… well, hold on, these statistics are all out of whack, this can’t be right… fucking Stats Canada, does anyone even run this organization?

Pass GO, collect 200 HST-exempt dollars

Regular readers (HI MOM) will notice we haven’t posted in about seventeen years (all figures approx.) There’s a good reason for this, Your Editor has been busy like a beaver moving into a new place, a fleabag Toronto bachelor apartment that hadn’t gotten an internet connection. I suppose that’s not really busy like a beaver, which would necessitate building my home from twigs and mud I hauled with my teeth, and also eating my own testicles when I was sufficiently frightened. (What a noble national creature we have!) In any case, if I ever disappear again you can honestly just read all of the old articles on this site if you need your fix – some of them are coherent!

In any case, the theme of The Canadian Politics this week has been PARDONS! Let’s see who’s been freed, and who hasn’t!

>> HELENA GUERGIS IS FREE! Unlike the girls her husband slept with, who weren’t free at all, but were rather costly. That’s right, the Lindsay Lohan of Canadian politics has been cleared of criminal wrongdoing by the Mounties for her once-alleged-but-now-apparently-non-existent tampering, influence-peddling and shit-disturbing on behalf of her slimey husband while she was an MP. She’s still kicked out of the Conservative caucus, though, in one of those classic “We know you weren’t officially criminally charged but you’re still tainted by sleaziness” defenses, called the “Michael Jackson” in legal circles. Although Guergis was set free, justice was not served for the fine people of PEI, who are still reeling after Guergis called their province a “fucking hellhole”.

>> CONRAD BLACK IS FREE! After being convicted in 2007 of the minor, petty crime of Fucking Massive Fraud, cartoonish fake-Canadian and Mr. Burns-esque media-baron-monster Conrad Black has been serving his days in the draconian hell-hole of a minimum-security prison where they don’t even give you an olive in your afternoon martini, or give you the option of lavender-chai soap to drop in the shower. After having been persecuted for his beliefs (namely, the belief that stealing money is fucking awesome) by a corrupt American judicial system, Conrad Black is free, and wants to return to Canada! The only problem is that as a convicted felon it’s hard to cross borders, and his job opportunities are limited to burger flipper and/or gangsta rapper. We would link you to the reaction of the National Post to this news story, but it was just a long series of excited gurgling noises, mixed with trance-like chanting of “Our glorious Dear Leader… he returns!… just as was prophesized… the Chosen One returns to lead us to the promised land!”

>> THE HEAD OF STATSCAN IS FREE… TO PURSUE OTHER INTERESTS! Munir Sheikh, head of Statistics Canada, has quit over the brouhaha surrounding the Tories’ plan to eliminate the mandatory census. Once the census is voluntary, we expect StatsCan to make some really valuable reports: “alright, so, we got back 17 of the new voluntary census forms… that’s quite the dip from our last reported population of 33 million, huh Bob?” To report how you feel about the resignation of the head of StatsCan over the census, please fill out table 3.a.ii, but only if you have not completely unfilled out sub-form 4.77(a) on the attached orange form 9-B.AA, excluding residents of Alberta, who are to circle their preference on the attached subsection 5B on the Disclosure Of 7-A-Compliant Persons graph, excluding residents of Moose Jaw and people with red hair (9.33-D), but not ex-including persons who own a pet bird or work at a paper factory, per 73-B.ii[2].

>> LINDSAY LOHAN IS GOING TO JAIL! Mean Girls is an underrated movie.

• > Oh wow, hey, there’s a new Governor General? I’d just planned on mailing in a News In Briefs today, but the changing of our head of state’s official representative deserves its own full post, no? I’ll get on that sometime.

• > RAISE THE ELECTION THREAT LEVEL! Or at least I would, if I wasn’t at work, and had Photoshop on-hand to edit that graphic you’ve been quizzically eyeing to your right all these months. This comes after the Tories are talking tough about an election after Liberal senators stripped the budget bill of all the juicy red-meat Conservative bits, like selling the AECL, and selling Canada Post. Also, as I link to that Winnipeg Free Press article I’m seeing a fantastic poll question on the right side that you just don’t get from big-city Toronto newspapers: “Should the City of Winnipeg kill gophers?” Your options are Yes, Yes but not with poison, and No. I VOTED YES, fucking gophers.

• > To celebrate Pride Week, Minister to voluntarily get probed: The Canadian equivalent of the American political catchphrase “I did not accept money from Jack Abramoff” is “I did not have contact with Rahim Jaffer in a lobbying capacity.” Rahim Jaffer, known sleazeball who used the tenuous political power of his batshit crazy wife, dirtbag mob connections in stripclub backrooms, and the greased palms of one-time Tory connections in order to scam governments out of mysterious, money-burning “green initiatives”, has – according to pretty well everyone on Parliament Hill – “never talked to me! Sorry, who? Rahi-wha? Never HEARD of the guy!” Well, obviously someone had more than a passing nod at the guy in the hallway, as a number of federal Ministers, most recently RISING SUPERSTAR Natural Resources Minister Christian Paradis, are now under an ethics probe for wheelings and dealing with the Jaffster. OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: MapleRag has never taken money from Rahim Jaffer.

• > Liberals down in polls, all hope lost, Liberal Party to disband. In other breaking news, the sun rose this morning, the sky is blue, and Justin Bieber can’t sing.