The Sixth Estate

After recently promising that Sixth Estate was back, I disappeared for a few days after all, which was terribly rude of me, I know. My feeble excuse is that getting back into the saddle, so to speak, hasn’t been as easy as I expected it to be, plus, I’m working on a couple of lengthy posts which will be up soon, including the latest installment in the Pork Barrel series.

In the meantime, I encourage you to check out the high-quality professional journalism in this country’s newspapers of record which, of course, makes the anonymous scribblings of bloggers like myself entirely redundant and unnecessary. Today John Ibbitson, the Canadian pundit class’s chief dunce, argues that Canadians should support Mitt Romney for President of the United States for the following reasons (I kid you not):

• Romney’s family owned a summer cottage in Ontario when he was growing up, and he also visited Windsor as a teenager.
• He spent two years as a Mormon missionary in France.
• His investment company has some shares in Canadian companies.
• Both Romney and Obama are “widely expected” to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, but Romney might do it sooner.
• Romney has a “stupid” plan for balancing the budget, but “any plan is better than no plan.”

After regaling us with all the most idiotic and pathetic reasons Ibbitson can muster for why Romney would be a good President, all of a sudden, in his last three paragraphs, he switches gears and says that Canadians should oppose the Romney Presidency because he supports tax cuts for the rich, increasing funding for the military, would blocks gay rights and healthcare reform, and wants to put “religion in everything.”

So, after spending most of his column explaining why we “should hope Mitt Romney becomes president,” in the end Ibbitson says that “maybe there isn’t” a reason Canadians should hope for it, “after all.”

Good column, John!