Rick Salutin: Urbane, Sophisticated, Genteel, Vacuous, Wrong.

Slippery, too, so much so that one does not know quite where to start. But it's where it ends up, in Salutin's subtle, fashionably passive-aggressive way, that matters: The Conservatives are engaged in a dark plot to underfund and undermine Canada's "beloved social programs" by blowing the treasury on military spending, "a superb way to tilt an economy away from social goals."

If you can think of a better example of the addled, bourgeois, sanctimonious rot that has eaten away at the intellectual life of the Canadian "left," by all means, send in your suggestions.

The rot spreads, I am now convinced, owing to the substitution of what used to be called "class analysis" with a form of ideology that regards the illusion of relative power as the only criterion upon which to choose sides ("We now identify with the big guys, against the little scumbags," Salutin laments), and which rests entirely and completely on the unexamined presumption that facts simply don't matter.

Thus unhinged from the hard ground of objective reality, you should not expect that anyone among the legions of activists, aesthetes and pseudo-intellectuals that constitute Salutin's peers will be bothered in the slightest that he can get away with this libel against the Afghan people: "Sixty per cent want foreign troops out."

For a dozen Afghan public opinion polls, focus group surveys and analyses that demonstrate the disgraceful depths of that persistent lie, see the appendix to this document. The most recent Environics poll (pdf) shows that 43 per cent of Afghans want foreign troops to remain in their country "however long it takes" to defeat the Taliban and restore order, 15 per cent want foreign troops to remain for three to five years, 12 per cent say two years, and 11 per cent said another year should do the trick.

In sum, the Afghans who support the presence of foreign troops (which, in another deliberate distortion, Salutin calls "the Afghan occupation") outnumber those who don't by about five to one.

As for his obligatory utterance of that other comforting lie ("Social progress has been minimal") that Canada's misnamed "anti-war" crowd ritually repeats to itself, over and over and over, here's how untrue that is, just in Kandahar, where progress has been slower than anywhere else in the country.

Meanwhile, as Salutin enjoys every benefit that the comfortable sinecure the Conservative-supporting Globe and Mail affords him, the little scumbags that he so fervently wishes Canada would not be so beastly about are redoubling their efforts to deny the Afghan masses the right to elect their own leaders:

Afghanistan began registering voters Monday for next year's presidential polls, an election likely to be the most dangerous and challenging since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001.

Sorry, Rick, but you really should be more careful. Sooner or later, the people will win.

FURTHER to the point I've been making (here and here, for instance) about the delusions necessary to sustain both the "politics" and the "journalism" Salutin typifies, Rosie DiManno notices: "There's really no excuse, in these days of instant reporting verification, to misquote or misrepresent a quote. Unless, of course, the intention is to manipulate and deceive."