Giving that dead horse one more whack: the Joel Johannesen edition.

In spite of Thomas Huxley's thoughtful advice that "one should never occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once," we're going to give Proud to be Canada's Biggest Dumbass Joel Johannesen's crumpled, bleeding form a couple more swift kicks to the happy sack, at which point we will consign him to the dustbin of history where he belongs. (Well, we might hold something back for one more kick, but that will be your Christmas ... whoops, I mean holiday present from me, at no extra charge.)

Recall, if you will, what inspired Joel's infantile, little tantrum here:

Surprising to not one single soul who is even remotely in search of the great book “GODLESS”, Ann Coulter’s latest (of five) huge best-sellers; or the great thinker Mark Steyn’s best-selling book “America Alone”; or, say, Bill O’Reilly’s huge best-seller “Culture Warrior”, the Chapters - Indigo “Christmas” catalogue, which they call their “Holiday Gift Guide 2006” is out, and it features none of them, nor virtually any of the other huge best-selling conservative-tolerant books of late. Left-wing books? Oh yes of course.

... In a perhaps unwitting nod to the “big ideas” of the right, if indeed they have any at all according to “Heather”: a book by Niall Ferguson is offered, called “The War of the World”. It is the only one of 13 books in the spread.

Note carefully the fundamental flaw in Joel's petulant outburst: his entire column is based solely on Chapters' Holiday flyer, and nothing more. There's nothing that says you can't purchase the latest ignorant piece of swill from Steyn, or Coulter, or O'Reilly, from Chapters. Not at all. Joel is basing all of his hyper-ventilating whinging on the necessarily limited selection that Chapters has chosen for its flyer, and if that chain chooses to slant leftward for its Christmas promotion, well, that's their choice, isn't it? But wait -- there's so much more.

While Joel seemed happy to shriek about liberal bias and related idiocy like that, your humble correspondent (uh, that would be me) decided to actually run a little experiment, so I hied myself hence to the local Chapters store in Waterloo to see for myself the hideous discrimination against what passes for deep thought in Joel's social circles.

I walked in the front door. I didn't even make it to the stacks.

Right there, directly off the main aisle, under the prominent banner reading "Books with Buzz," I found Steyn's recent magnum dopus, "America Alone." And not just one copy, oh no -- five copies, all stacked neatly on the top shelf, right in the middle -- absolutely prime bookstore real estate if there ever was such a thing. Oh, yeah -- there's some serious left-wing bias going on here, Joel. But wait.

It gets better since, leaving the "Books with Buzz" section, you run smack into the main display -- centre aisle -- under the banner "Big Ideas, Current Events." And you'll never guess what you find there. No, really, go ahead ... guess. All right, fine -- I'll tell you.

More Steyn. That's right -- it's not enough to give Steyn prime shelf space at "Books with Buzz," but he's given a position of prominence in that second location as well. Damn that Heather Reisman! Damn her and her grotesque bias! But it doesn't end there, as you look around at the other selections in that same display, where you find (and I am not making any of this up) those five additional copies of Steyn, a half-dozen of the new John Ashcroft crud "Never Again," a sizable stack of conservative Hugh Segal's "The Long Road Back" and (I'm sure you saw this coming) a small pile of Ferguson's "The War of the World" (with a "Chapters Recommends" sticker on it, no less).

Hard to believe, isn't it? Joel has wasted God knows how much time and strained all eight of his brain cells venting about that nasty left-wing bias at Chapters, when a five-minute trip to the local store was sufficient to demonstrate how utterly full of shit he is. And all of the above represents just what you can buy off the shelf. (And, as I said, this was all at the front of the store, in the promotional displays. I never even bothered to head back to the stacks. I figured I'd made my point.)

You can, as I'm sure you realize, also order anything you want from Chapters online, which means Joel doesn't even have to drag his sorry ass off of the Cheeto-stained couch in his parents' basement to get whatever he wants delivered right to his door. But that wouldn't be any fun, because then it wouldn't give Joel the excuse to bitch and whine and moan about how everyone's out to trample the intellectual freedom of him and his mentally-defective collection of groupies over at his hermetically-sealed web site.

In any event, I think we're done with Joel Johannesen. I see no point in wasting any more snark in his direction. Frankly, I don't know if he's actually the stupidest conservative in the entire country but the thought of anyone even dumber just gives me the creeps.