The angry, angry Left.

And if you can handle it, I think I have one more post in me regarding dishonest Canadian wankers and the insufferable assholitude of one Joel Johannesen of "Proud to Be Canadian." If you feel like keeping up, Barbara Kay's original article is still here, and the ever-so-animated comments section that goes with it is still here.

First, a couple of brief issues we can dispense with in short order. Not surprisingly, Joel is still lying, when he writes in comment 29:

Canadian Cynic: Attention! Upon further investigation, typing canadiancynic.blogspot.com works fine. Always did work fine.

Typing a www or http:// in front of it screwed it up, and caused the error message you reported to the world as my unquestionable attempt to censor you / blacklist you / or otherwise preemptively ban you personally even though I don’t know you or your blog from a squirrel.

In the first place, how idiotic is it to suggest that, if you start a URL with either "www" or "http://", it's going to be blacklisted? What kind of moronic system administrator would you have to be to put that kind of filtering in place?

More to the point, though, that claim is simply a lie as you can see for yourself in comment 7 where I used a "tiny" URL to get around the "blacklisting" and the "http://" at the front of that URL worked just fine. Joel is now simply lying at random but, at this point, it's pretty much what we've come to expect from him.

Joel also makes it clear for all of us what he thinks of his accountability for what appears at his web site when he writes (in comment 26):

(Also: I don’t answer for Barbara Kay —and she doesn’t spend her vacation time reading your comments at PTBC. So as I already suggested, write to her through the National Post in order to get the much needed answers to your inquiries. Members can email her from here, and as you know, folks can make respectful comments right here. I think that’s enough for now.)

So even though Kay (one of Joel's masthead columnists) has been accused of just flat-out making shit up, Joel doesn't seem terribly, terribly concerned. If we don't agree with Kay's "facts," we can take it up with Kay as Joel has better things to do. Apparently, that wussy fact-checking stuff is for liberals. But here's where we step back and look at the bigger picture.

If you read the first few comments, it's a bit puzzling how fast the discussion descended into vitriol and name-calling, isn't it? Based on nothing more than a couple comments from myself and "macadavy" about obvious blacklisting that is happening, Joel launches a blistering attack on his critics, accusing us of "gross misrepresentation" and other such rubbish. A Mr. Mattt Enss in comment 10 tries (very politely) to return things to civility, and he is also savaged. What the fuck is happening here?

What's happening, if you haven't figured it out by now, is that Joel is responding to the most mundane critisicm with totally out-of-proportion rage but, in fact, it's all part of a carefully choreographed script. Rather than actually respond to the issues, it's Joel's job to lash out at his critics and try to drag them into mindless name-calling, for a couple of reasons.

First, if he can make the discussion about personalities and not facts, he can distract everyone from Kay's blatant dishonesty. By the time we get to comment 17 or 18, Joel has insulted the rest of the commenters so much, they've all forgotten what started the discussion in the first place, which is exactly what he wants. And if he can keep the anger cranked up suitably a little while longer, he can start kicking people out. (Oh, look, there he is in comment 23: "And by the way, I’ve heard enough out of you now. You’ve abused your priviledges [sic] here. Don’t post here again.")

It's amazing, isn't it? Early on, things could have been resolved with a simple, "You're being blacklisted? Hmmm ... that's odd, you shouldn't be. Let me check into it and I'll get back to you." Instead, Joel made sure that didn't happen with a neck-snapping attack on early commenters, which guaranteed that the entire dialog was going to go to hell in a handbasket. Which is, of course, exactly what he wanted. But it doesn't end there.

Because now, Joel has proof positive of the existence of "the angry Left." If he ever needs evidence of just how angry we liberals can be, all he needs to do is drag out this comments section down the road, carefully hide the fact that he started this whole brouhaha, and happily point out how, no matter how polite you try to be, well, those liberals are just a bunch of offensive, insulting, unhinged, deranged moonbats, see? But that's par for the course these days, isn't it?

It's all part of a pattern in which right-wing dumbasses say the stupidest and most dishonest things, to which one might raise a quiet objection. When that objection goes unanswered, one might raise it again, a little more forcefully, to again be met with either silence or dismissive derision. And the pattern continues, being slowly ratcheted up until the leftie critic finally loses it a bit and says something intemperate, to the sudden accusations of, "Angry liberal! Angry liberal! Deranged, unhinged moonbat!" Which is, as I'm sure you can see, exactly what has happened here.

The funniest part of all of this is that, in the end, it's Joel who, commenting from right-wing Bizarro World, thinks that everyone else owes him an apology, as he writes in comment 29:

I suspect all the stupid and malicious allegations will be respectfully withdrawn now and apologies will flow to me like water.

I’ll be right here waiting.

Why, yes, and even after Joel's sputtering denigration of folks who tried to keep a civil tongue while they were pointing out his overwhelming dumbfuckitude, it's all of us who owe him an apology, which will make his wanker beerfests down the road even more entertaining, "Not only did they insult me and call me names, man, they never even had the grace to apologize after. Boy, those liberals sure are angry, aren't they? Hey, honey, another round of Zimas for me and my posse here."

And in all of this, should we ever expect to get some clarification on Kay's bogus quotes? Not if Joel has anything to say about it, I expect.

TOTALLY GRATUITOUS AFTERSNARK. I'm moderately amused by Joel's outrage at what he calls "gross misrepresentations," given that his site advertises Ann Coulter's new book, "Godless," a piece of dishonest swill that has been savagely panned for its appallingly dishonest distortion of biological evolution.

Apparently, mind-numbing dishonesty and absurd misrepresentation is OK if you're a wanker.