TRANSCANADA GAS PIPELINE, or

CANADIAN WOMEN JOURNALISTS STRIKE!

Many a Canadian is delighted that before becoming internationally famous, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin pushed to seal the deal on the gas pipeline that will bring north Alaska gas to the lower 48 via western Canadian territory. (details here, maps here)

That project will take some years to come online, but in the meantime there's been a blast of Canadian unnatural gas that is blowing all across the United States, and nations abroad. ** Journalista Heather Mallick, a viciously anti-American asp who has worn out readerships in newsprint and codex form, and is now on her last legs on the CBC website. Marshalling all the poisons in her alchemical closet, Mallick churned out a piece called A Mighty Wind Blows Through Republican Convention a few days ago. It starts like this:

I assume John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential partner in a fit of pique because the Republican money men refused to let him have the stuffed male shirt he really wanted. She added nothing to the ticket that the Republicans didn't already have sewn up, the white trash vote, the demographic that sullies America's name inside and outside its borders yet has such a curious appeal for the right.

Then builds to stuff like this:

Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look favoured by this decade's woman, the overtreated hair, puffy lips and permanently alarmed expression. Bristol has what is known in Britain as the look of the teen mum, the "pramface." Husband Todd looks like a roughneck; Track, heading off to Iraq, appears terrified. They claim to be family obsessed while being studiously terrible at parenting. What normal father would want Levi "I'm a fuckin' redneck" Johnson prodding his daughter?

You get the picture.
[**Mallick also re-worked her malice for Britain's Guardian]

Fortunately, one of the people who made this column famous was James Lileks, who conducted a world-class fisking on it here. Even more fortunately, Canadian journalist Jonathan Kay dismantled Mallick, and her employers, in today's National Post, with Another week, another disgrace at the CBC.

In the same issue of the Post, Jonathan is one-upped by his mom, Barbara Kay, who writes this!:

I imagine his pre-speech expression as alert, but relaxed paternalism, like a chief surgeon set to supervise a lowly resident's clumsy initial attempt at an appendectomy. Then puzzlement as the surgeon realizes that he's to be the patient, and finally horror as, strapped to the table and, before a nation of fascinated onlookers, he is subjected to ... a palinoscopy!

Oh, she got through to him all right. For eight months critics haven't really laid more than glancing blows on Obama, because they were jabbing away at his exterior. Sarah got him right in the gut.

Palin's mockery tickled Obama's worrisome polyps of swollen self-regard (the "styrofoam pillars"), his history of words over action ("two memoirs, but no major bills"), his curious pattern of risk avoidance (unlike community organizers, mayors have "actual responsibilities") and his tendency to solipsism(presidential journeys are not "voyages of personal discovery").

Bottom line:

...Palin wasn't ever committed to any collectivity but America itself. She was never "I am Woman, hear me roar." She was always, "I am Sarah, watch me act."

Mama Mia!

Just passin' this on, so's people don't assume from the 'Mallick aforethought' that everybody in this banana-like republic is certifiably bananas.






NOT A PICTURE OF HEATHER MALLICK --

NOT, NOT, NOT