Canadian Cynic

The Globe and Mail watch -- setting the table

While the focus of this blog will be primarily on American politics, since we're actually based in the Great White North (the home of socialized medicine and real beer), we will of course have to deal with the Canadian media, mostly in terms of just how atrocious they are. And what better place to start than with Canada's very own "national newspaper," the Globe and Mail? Or, as some like to call it, the Grope and Flail. Or Mope and Wail. Or Mop and Pail.

For those of you Yanks not familiar with the Globe, it's fair to say that Canada has two major "national" newspapers, the Globe and the National Post. By way of comparison, think of the Post as our equivalent of the Wall Street Journal -- hideously right wing. As a reference point, this is a paper that still runs columns by right-wing howler monkey Ann Coulter. More than that, do you really need to know?

The Globe, on the other hand, is more like the New York Times -- once upon a time a respectable paper but, like the Times, steadily lurching rightward over the last few years, with its own gaggle of grating neocon columnists indistinguishable from Times' writers like Bill Safire, William Krauthammer and so on.

That much sets the table for our first installment of the Globe Watch, coming shortly, in which one of the paper's regular columnists defends the efforts of the United States to install democracy in Iraq. No, I'm not joking. More shortly.