The decline and fall of the Canadian Empire

It's like the last days in Saigon at Daily Telegraph HQ these days. With reactionary proprietor Lord Black of Crossharbour on the way out, it's clearly time to squeeze in a last few columns for the reactionary Canadian hacks who owed their Telegraph sinecures to his ownership. Hence an entirely Canadian opinion page today, on what is supposed to be, like, a British newspaper. David Frum and Mark Steyn get the prime spots, and of course Black supplicant Martin Newland is overseeing the editorials. The Frum and Steyn spots are both intemperate and embarrassing. Both are filled with revisionist history of the last 6 months, and indeed the entire 20th century. For instance, Frum:

Together, the Anglo-Australian-American alliance can guarantee not only the peace of the world, but also liberty and human rights. This state visit is honouring no one individual, not even an American president. It is instead intended to reaffirm for the 21st century the grand alliance that saved democracy in the 20th.

DUDE! There's no doubting the effort of those countries -- and indeed your fellow Canadians -- in defeating fascism. And yes, you've got the weasel exclusion of the Russians by including a reference to "democracy." But who wants to speculate what the post 1945 world would have looked like without Russian intervention? [Paging Niall Ferguson]

But Steyn manages to make Frum seem restrained:

There's "no connection" between Saddam and al-Qa'eda, because radical Islamists would never make common cause with secular Ba'athists. Or so we're told by pro-gay, pro-feminist Eurolefties who thus make common cause with honour-killing, sodomite-beheading Islamists, apparently crediting Saddam with a greater degree of intellectual coherence than they credit themselves.

He completes his embarrassment by trying to throw in a local reference for what is clearly just a canned column prepared for dissemination throughout the dwindling Black empire:

The Min of Ag has already sacrificed all the sheep, but, that detail aside, much of Britain is now about as rational on America as the al-Munaif family. [family who had swung from pro-Bush to pro-Osama, the former signalled by the sacrifice of a sheep]

Well, the ministry to which he refers hasn't been called the Min of Ag in a long time. And he seems to be confusing the disease-related culls of sheep and cattle. The kind of mistakes one makes when the roof is caving in.