Mark Hemingway has an idiot’s guide to the idiocy going on in Canada at the Human Wrongs Tribunal. He also has an interview with Andrew Coyne, the MacLeans reporter who has been live blogging the proceedings.

I hope that this will finally get the attention of the media in Canada, who so far seem clueless. As Mark points out, a lot of people have been abused under this system for years, but because they were politically incorrect as victims, the press paid it no mind. With apologies to Pastor Niemoller, this may be the motto of the CBC:

First they went after the racists
And we did not speak out, because we are not racist
Then they went after the pastors preaching against homosexuality
And we did not speak out, because we are not against homosexuality
Then they went after a Christian publisher who refused to print pedophilia
And we did not speak out because we are not Christian
Then they went after the Knights of Columbus
And we not speak out because we are not Knights of Columbus
Then they went after the Western Standard
And we did not speak out, because we are not a right-wing rag
Then they went after MacLeans
And we did not speak out because we hate Mark Steyn
We don’t expect them to come after us, because we’re afraid to say anything that might offend any Muslim, and we fear the consequences of doing that even more than we fear the HRC.

In a piece on whether Obama will be Al Smith, or JFK (ummmmm…neither), John Judis (who should know better) writes:

Blacks began entering the Democratic party during the New Deal, but even as late as 1960, Richard Nixon won a third of the black vote. After Democratic support for and Republican opposition to the civil rights acts of the 1960s, the overwhelming majority of African Americans became Democrats.

Emphasis mine. I’ve discussed this before.

The ugly fact, of which ABC is either unaware, or worse, deliberately misleading their readers about, is that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would not have passed without Republican support, due to the continued opposition by southern Democrats. Contra ABC’s implication, it was not the minority Republicans who filibustered it, but the majority Democrats, and the cloture vote to end debate was achieved only with the votes of many Republicans. Former Klansman Robert “Sheets” Byrd (shamefully still representing the state of West Virginia, even in his dotage and senility) was the last debater on the floor before that cloture vote (it then required 67 votes, rather than the current 60) was passed. Other stars of the filibuster were Richard Russell (D-GA), Albert Gore, Sr. (the last Vice President’s father) (D-TN), and William Fullbright (D-AR) (Bill Clinton’s mentor).

But I guess when you’re a modern liberal Democrat reporter, all that can just go down the memory hole, as long as it’s in service to a greater cause–to preserving the myth of Republican racism and opposition to civil rights, and demonstrating the continuing horror of George Bush’s and the Republican’s “theocracy.”

This is simply false history, but it’s become a matter of faith to Democrats. The Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate, but they couldn’t muster the votes to pass the bill on their own. Everyone who filibustered the Civil Rights Act was a Democrat. In order to get cloture, and passage, they had to get significant Republican support. The notion that it was Republicans who were opposed to true civil rights (as opposed to the modern reverse discrimination) remains pernicious. But the story has to be told that way, otherwise the narrative of Republicans as “racists” falls apart.

[Update a few minutes later]

Historical inaccuracies aside, what is particularly annoying about Judis’ thesis is that it takes as a given that if Obama loses, it will be because of his race, and have nothing to do with his extreme lack of experience, and the fact that he’ll be the most left-wing candidate nominated since George McGovern.