Absinthe & Cookies (a bit bitter, a bit sweet)

Must NOT See TV

I made the mistake of stopping on one of our new public access channels last night when I saw the CBC logo in the corner. Lord! Now my brother had told me that the PA channels were havens of left wing lunacy, but all I'd ever seen were bad seventies horror movies from Spain when I had channel surfed before. He was right! The "station" was calling itself "Free Speech TV" and they were airing a CBC show called "Counter-Spin". It was every loony left wing paranoid fantasy brought to life. The subject was what should Paul Martin tell George Bush about Iraq when they meet. As they worked thought the audience, I heard everything from the belief that since Bush was a Christian, the point of the Iraq war was to Christianize the Middle East, to it's about the Oooooooooooil, to an Iraqi Canadian woman saying that the women who were tortured and killed by Saddam didn't matter because it was an Iraqi matter. That got applause.

There were two official guests, one from something called Z net who was like a poster child for ANSWER, and a woman from the National Post, who while not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination, came off as the sane voice of reason in that group. After the break, they came back and started discussing missile defense. The Z net guy insisted it was an offensive weapon, the NP woman just stared at him in disbelief and then tried to reason with him and the audience. When she said that a terrorist could get their hands on a missile some day and use it, they laughed at her! She said that she hoped that the idea ended up being as funny as they all seemed to think that it was, but that it was a real possibility to her, and as a Canadian, living very close to the U.S.A., it was something Canadians should be concerned about. You can imagine the reaction she got to that.

That was the point I turned it off. Not relaxing TV before bed!

Posted by Ithildin at May 7, 2004 9:18 AM | PROCURE FINE OLD WORLD ABSINTHE