Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Friday, February 13, 2009

TVO, WTF?

Kathy Shaidle was a panelist on The Agenda to discuss the atheist bus ads last night, setting off a minor blog shitstorm. Some think she shouldn't have appeared, some think it worked out for the best:

La Shaidle, for all her bluster, was totally out of her league, and it showed. If I were an opponent of the Atheist Bus Campaign, I'd be writing angry letter's to TVO to complain about showing their side to be so bad by having a pitiful boob like her representing it. It wasn't close to fair.

Kinsella has some good roundups including a link to TVO's response. Here's a synopsis of the segment or you can just watch some of it. Shaidle's response to her critics on her blog was:

No! Seriously, that's pretty much it:
My enemies are belligerent Muslims -- from now on I'm calling them "brown supremicists" -- and the radical left. Both are unfortunately being enabled by our liberal elite Establishment.

We watch The Agenda frequently and think Steve Paikin is a national treasure ... but I think they tripped up by not keeping current with her blog. Today's Shaidle is not the same writer she was several years ago when she wrote Relapsed Catholic.

Back "in the day", Shaidle had the qualities of the classic comic book villain; she was the blogger you loved to hate. She was funny, feisty, mean and unapologetic -- back when those qualities were in short supply on Canadian blogs -- so of course you'd want to book her on your show. Her blog was interesting and covered a broad range of subjects and she blunted her more radical, fringe views with code and weasel words.

But over time she tread closer and closer towards crazy. Her blog became an endless spew of racist insults. She seemed to cross the line around the time of this post about the Errol Morris doc, Mr. Death, a film about a man who becomes a white supremacist and holocaust denier. I thought it was odd that she didn't see herself in the film ... I dunno, maybe her whole 'racist' thing is some sort of bizarre art project.

Anyhow, there's probably no god ... but there's certainly nobody reading Shaidle's blog at TVO.

update: a better version of what I was trying to say:

Kathy Shaidle ceased to be Relapsed Catholic a long time ago, and if I have a beef, it is with TVO representing her as the former writer of Relapsed Catholic and not the current writer of Five Feet of Fury. Five Feet of Fury is a sewer of bigotry, so much so that most of Kathy’s former TV or radio friends (Michael Coren for example) have left her by the wayside. TVO needs to update their information.

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