Monday Evening Quarterback

Over the week-end the long suffering nation of Poland was dealt another blow when its president, his wife and ninety-five other people were killed in a plane crash.

Putin has put himself in charge of the investigation which makes me wish the NTSB was watching over his shoulder.

What is extremely troubling is that this accident occurred before a joint commemoration of the Katyn forest massacre in which 4,000 Polish intelligentsia were killed on Stalin's orders. The tragedy of the crash will overshadow another tragedy engineered by the Soviets.

Speaking of Russians, is this cartoon of Dmitri Medvedev too funny or shockingly accurate? Discuss. (hat tip: LR)

Oh please! Talk about self-deification and an incredibly inflated sense of self-importance! Reining atheists Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins would like to arrest the Pope when he visits the United Kingdom.

Two Canadian medical experts are calling for new guidelines that would bar doctors from telling parents the sex of their fetus until late in a pregnancy, calling it a subtle way to curb the practice of sex selection.

Emotional fatigue, backlash against multiculturalism or a rise against selfishness? Discuss.

Mark Steyn proves once more why he should be given a microphone:

Well, Ann Coulter is no longer in Canada, but 30 million Canadians are. So, for the sake of argument, let us take as read the frankly rather boring observation of the northern punditocracy that the whole brouhaha worked to her advantage, and consider instead whether the Canada on display during her 96-hour layover actually works to Canadians’ advantage. Which was the claim advanced by the eminent Canadian “feminist” Susan Cole appearing on U.S. TV to support the protesters’ shutdown of Miss Coulter’s Ottawa speech:

“We don’t have a First Amendment, we don’t have a religion of free speech,” she explained patiently. “Students sign off on all kinds of agreements as to how they’ll behave on campus, in order to respect diversity, equity, all of the values that Canadians really care about. Those are the things that drive our political culture. Not freedoms, not rugged individualism, not free speech. It’s different, and for us, it works.”

Does it? You rarely hear it put quite that bluntly—“Freedoms”? Ha! Who needs ’em?—but there was a lot of similarly self-regarding blather in Coulter Week euphemizing a stultifying, enforced conformism as “respect” and “diversity” and whatnot. “I therefore ask you, while you are a guest on our campus, to weigh your words with respect and civility in mind,” wrote François Houle, the provost of the University of Ottawa, addressing Miss Coulter in the smug, condescending, preening tone that comes so naturally to your taxpayer-funded, tenured mediocrity. “There is a strong tradition in Canada, including at this university, of restraint, respect and consideration in expressing even provocative and controversial opinions and urge you [sic] to respect that Canadian tradition.”

Amen.

Perhaps Miss Cole- who, I might add, must be speaking for herself as no one else asked her to speak for them- should level her spite against rugged individualists like Louis Riel and, indeed, anyone who has served in the armed forces for rugged individualism.

Again (emphasis mine):

Because the speakers hosted in recent seasons seem to be the usual parade of dreary publicly funded identity-group ward-heelers living high off the hog of diversity. Anyone else has a tougher time wiggling through. The howling gang of rent-a-leftists that greeted Miss Coulter at Ottawa is the natural product of this shrivelled, desiccated environment. I don’t suppose M. Houle gave his email much thought, other than that it would impress the many colleagues to whom he copied it: what a man! Speaking truth to power blond! But most of the diversity-peddling faculty are old enough to have some residual acquaintanceship with the inheritance they affect to revile. Whatever bollocks they spout in class, they have no wish to live anywhere other than an advanced Western society: for one thing, it’s the only place you can make a living selling fatuous pap about diversity; in that and many other ways, multiculturalism is a unicultural phenomenon. In some deep unacknowledged sense, they understand they’re engaged in a pantomime.

Damn! Aren't you glad not to be M. Francois A. Houle right now?

To close this post, Smurfs- are they charming blue people or kinder Andorians? Discuss.