Mental defect 'joke' a real knee-slapper

Mental defect 'joke' a real knee-slapper

A few days ago Pat Martin, the MP from Winnipeg Centre, came unglued. He was writing on Twitter and he just went nuts.

He said the Conservative government was a "f------- disgrace" and was engaging in "jackboot s---." When someone criticized him, he told them to "f--- off."

The man's been an MP for 14 years, giving speeches every day. And that's the height of his eloquence.

So, how was his filthy-mouthed tirade treated by the media?

Why, he was the toast of the town!

The Globe and Mail actually ran a headline that said: "NDP profanity marks Parliament's hastened decline under Tories." Got that? NDP vulgarity is Stephen Harper's fault.

Martin's a New Democrat — the self-proclaimed party of civility.

It was their holy leader, Saint Jack Layton, who worked with his party's spin doctors to craft one last press release to be released after his death.

"Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear," he wrote.

I think I read that on a Hallmark greeting card once. Trouble with that is Saint Jack didn't live up to it in his lifetime.

Dr. Alex Sevigny of McMaster University went through question period in the last Parliament, one question at a time, and ranked MPs in terms of their rudeness.

Saint Jack was ranked the absolute lowest, the absolute rudest out of all 308 MPs.

Same thing with other leftist saints, like David Suzuki. He gave a one-word review of my book Ethical Oil to the Calgary Herald: "Bulls---," he told them. That's his "scientific" opinion. And he runs a "charity," you know.

It probably sounded clever in his own mind.

Not all left-wingers are rude, and not all conservatives are polite. But there's a double-standard in how the media treats rudeness.

On Sunday, I was on the receiving end of some invective from a leftist named Emmett Macfarlane. He called me a "mental defective" because he disagreed with my criticisms of the Occupy Toronto protesters.

Calling me a mental defective isn't even going to make the top 50 list of insults that I get in an average week. It was just some inarticulate boor reaching into a bucket of slop and throwing it at me. Boring.

But Macfarlane is a PhD, a teacher at the University of Victoria. He's one of those fancy types who always likes to prove he's more politically correct than you.

Here's an excerpt from a letter he wrote in the Globe and Mail in 2008: "I've taught at Queen's for five years. Several times, I've rebuked students for offensive language in the classroom. I hope that any private citizen would confront someone who spouts racist, homophobic or sexist language."

So he's a language cop.

Of course, since Macfarlane is a PhD, he didn't call me a "retard." He used the phrase "mental defective" because he's fancy that way.

I asked him if mental illness was a standard insult for a UVic teacher. He said it wasn't an insult, it was a joke.

But that's not any better, is it? If you have a child who is mentally retarded, is Macfarlane's joke funny? Is being retarded a moral flaw?

I'm not for censorship. I'm just pointing out that the leftist elites think of themselves as civil when they're as capable of as much rudeness and bigotry as anyone.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY