A country called Canada, and more.

Something Resembling News from Canada!

Somebody named Carolyn Parrish, a member of parliament from someplace called Mississauga-Erindale, was expelled from Canada's governing Liberal party on November 18 by that country's prime minister, who is somebody named Paul Martin. Ms. Parrish's fate appears to have been sealed when the news division of an outfit called the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a five-second video clip that showed her gleefully grinding her leather boot onto a "George Bush action figure." But Prime Minister Martin's aides insist that Parrish's own taste of the boot was actually the result of long-accumulating Liberal party frustration over her outlandish behavior. Word is, for example, that Parrish last year created another such stir up north with remarks about "damn Americans"--and how "I hate those bastards."

Not everyone in Canada is happy with the way Bush-stomp-gate has played out, of course. Somebody named Michael Donovan, for instance--the CBC producer of a satirical news program for which the Parrish video was originally filmed--complains to the New York Times that public criticism of his "tame" little comedy "sketch" suggests that "Canadians have lost their famous sense of humor."

Famous?

The banished Ms. Parrish, however, claims to feel "50 pounds lighter and 10 years younger" in consequence of her new status as an involuntarily independent MP. She promises to continue serving her constituents, just as before. And she also promises to restrain herself should the real-life President Bush happen by the House of Commons during his two- day visit this week to Canada's capital, a city called Ottawa. According to a newspaper called the Toronto Star, there'd earlier been some nervousness about the possibility that Parrish might go ahead and boo the president--much the way "MP Svend Robinson famously heckled then-U.S. president Ronald Reagan in 1987."

Famously?

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Political cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall has had a bad November. On November 4, his syndicate sent out a four-panel comic strip depicting Republican-dominated American politics as a "classroom in which mentally handicapped children are mainstreamed"--complete with mocking pictures of drooling special-needs students. Many parents of real-life special-needs students took notice. And the Washington Post, deciding that Rall's work "just did not fit the tone we wanted," dropped him from its website (much as the New York Times had done back in March).

Then there was Rall's November 9 column about the presidential election returns, "Confessions of a Cultural Elitist: Win or Lose, Kerry Voters are Smarter than Bush Voters," in which our hero further cultivated what appears to be his peculiar obsession with IQ demographics. "The biggest red-blue divide is intellectual," Rall announced. "By any objective standard, you had to be spectacularly stupid to support Bush." So Kerry supporters "on the coasts," while disappointed, should remember to "feel superior," he advised. After all, "we eat better, travel more, dress better, watch cooler movies, earn better salaries, meet more interesting people, listen to better music, and know more about what's going on in the world."

To which THE SCRAPBOOK might add: One particular Kerry supporter also seems to have much bigger and more complicated status anxieties than the rest of us do. And he seems embarrassingly powerless to shut up about them--even while other people, cognitively advanced blue-state types included, are all but laughing in his face.

How else to explain Ted Rall's astonishing, auto-da-fé performance on Minnesota Public Radio's Weekend America program on November 20? Co-host Barbara Bogaev had invited him on to defend "what some might say" was the "smug elitism" of his published "rant" about the cerebral inferiority of Bush voters. Bogaev's other guest, Democratic media consultant Hank Sheinkopf, had raised an obvious objection: "You can't tell people they're stupid and their faith doesn't matter and then expect them to vote for Democrats." So what did Rall have to say for himself?

Rall, unrepentant, said this:

I do think that it's important for the intellectual elite to be proud of what we do. Those of us who are in the punditry class, those of us who live in the big coastal cities, we do have access to better information than people in the Midwest. If you read the Toledo Blade, you don't get as much high-quality information as you do if you read the New York Times. But I do think Hank is absolutely right when you talk about the need to, obviously, to communicate with people. The way that that's going to happen is to stop overintellectualizing issues, and to tap into the sort of hot-button emotional responses that were so successful for liberals through the '60s and '70s. And then somehow we started becoming all intellectual and arguing facts and, you know, facts don't really work with the electorate because unfortunately, let's face it, the electorate is mostly stupid.

Besides, Rall explained to a plainly incredulous Barbara Bogaev:

Isn't it kind of intellectually dishonest on the part of Democrats, especially people who are well informed and who are journalists, to try to pretend that they know less than they do? People who are busy working 52 hours a week don't really have the time to watch CNN and MSNBC and Fox News every day all day long like I do. They're not reading Libération or Le Monde like I do.

The blinkered ignorance of common folk poses a "terrible conundrum," Monsieur Rall admits. "I'm not comfortable with the fact that someone who doesn't know who the vice president is has the same vote that I do." But he isn't quite prepared to "take it away from them, either."

So what to do? Rall recommends that Mensacrats ignore the hicks and yabbos and set out, instead, on yet another expeditionary search for the Lost Tribe of Howard Dean. And he just knows they're out there: "We still have a lot of people who didn't show up to vote on Election Day who are registered Democrats," Rall insists.

Hank Sheinkopf, by contrast, thinks his party would be better off simply praying for rain. "In order for Democrats to thrive again," he sighs, "unfortunately we're gonna need some economic problems that are more severe, and we're gonna need a belief that people have to be protected, that market forces are not sufficient. And a couple of good downturns in the economy in the Midwest would be a lot helpful."