flickering pictures

Yesterday, I didn’t think much of the National Post. But today, my opinion of the paper reached new depths, so dark and so deep that it’s amazing intelligent life can survive down there. I’m not actually sure it does.

Yesterday’s Post included a ranting diatribe against David Suzuki by Lorne Gunter, an Edmonton Journal columnist and big cheese at the Canadian Centre for Libertarian Studies. Employing half-baked ad hominem arguments and gross misrepresentations of Suzuki’s views, Gunter actually titles his column “David de Torquemada,” likening one of our national treasures to the mass murderer and Spanish Inquisition mastermind.

On Suzuki’s insistence that climate change-deniers are wrong, Gunter writes:

Never mind that Dr. Suzuki is defending a secular faith rather than a theological one, he is merely picking up the time-honoured tradition of Tomas de Torquemada, inquisitor-general of the Spanish Inquisition. Over its active run of approximately 140 years, the Inquisition tortured, tried and imprisoned some 14,000 people for heresy, 4,000 for superstitions and another 4,000 for crimes against the Inquisition itself.

No climate change argument here - just name-calling and mudslinging that not even politicians could get away with. If Peter Mackay said this to Stéphane Dion today, tomorrow’s headlines would read “Mackay apologizes for Inquisition jab.” The only time-honoured tradition here is that of attacking your opponent’s character when you can’t attack his arguments.

Give a skeptical review to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and end up in some Suzukiite re-education camp in the wilderness of northern B.C. Or a gulag. Or a state psychiatric hospital, for surely anyone who disagrees with the Green worldview must be criminally insane.

Funny, my Google search for “Suzukiite gulags for the criminally insane” comes up empty. Gunter must have confused these re-education camps with the Canadian internment camp that Suzuki was sent to as child, a victim of anti-Japanese sentiment following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Gunter accuses Suzuki of hearkening back to:

those halcyon days when both the economy and the climate were in constant, unfaltering harmony, when no community grew, no new houses were built, no new jobs were created because none were needed, no business ever expanded, none ever went bankrupt and each year the seasons brought just the right amount of rain and snow, sunshine and wind. Everyone ate only food grown within 100 miles of their homes and there were never droughts or floods. You know, before Big Oil paid off its friends in the Bush administration to use the CIA’s secret weather machines to mess everything up so Big Industry could make obscene profits (aren’t all profits obscene?) selling us outsourced goods we don’t need from Wal-Mart through mind-controlling advertising.

Also, rainbows magically cured cancer, gumdrops rained from the marshmallow clouds, and CanWest hadn’t yet bought and sold the integrity of Canadian daily newspapers from sea to shining sea. Now, I don’t pretend to be any kind of authority on David Suzuki’s ideal world. But I’ve seen the man speak, I’ve heard his pitch, and I’m pretty sure there’s nothing in there about CIA weather machines or pointy-eared rainbow pixies. It seems like common sense - from both an economic and an environmental perspective - to get rid of inefficient packaging, inefficient energy sources and dirty manufacturing processes that pump pollutants into our air, food and water, causing massive health care costs over the long term. If Gunter’s libertarian centre has a website, neither I nor Google could find it, but I can only imagine what it has to say about providing health care to people who get sick because of industrial pollutants and other man-made toxins.

Despite his being so silly, my quarrel isn’t really with Gunter. If I’m going to advocate free speech, I also have to advocate his right to spout nearly any drivel he likes. My issue is with the National Post, which surely has some kind of standards when it comes to accepting editorial content. I’m not saying the paper needs to be perfect, or that I have to agree with all or any of the arguments in its editorial pages. But you wouldn’t think that a blatant character assassination, with no real arguments or intelligent contribution of any kind, would make it past any copy editor worth his salt. Surely some low-quality writing will make it past the gatekeepers, but if you can’t drain the pool, you can at least scoop out the leaves and dead bugs before diving in. I’d expect this kind of infantile attack in the schoolyard, at the sandbox, or on Fox News, but certainly not at a half-respectable national news outlet. Seems I gave them too much credit.

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