She writes about the first one — leaving:
They asked what I’d like to do and I said I’d like to go on stage and give it a whirl, and that though I’d prefer the trio be removed first, I’d go on regardless. Nicola Makoway, the Doubleday/Random House publicist with me, asked if the police approved of that. The campus cop, who had called in a couple of cruisers from Waterloo Regional Police before I even got there, said no, because if things got rowdy, they wouldn’t be able to protect me.
However, even though she mentions it, she doesn’t realize the second mistake she made, one made much earlier:
I think we were all mystified. I’m hardly a Coulter-esque stirrer of pots, but a reporter, and my book, which is about the ruination of the rule of law in Caledonia, Ont., during the native occupation there, is most sharply critical of the Ontario government and the senior ranks of the Ontario Provincial Police – that is, the state, which cheerfully threw the town under the bus.
I took pains in the book to explain what it is not about, and while I expected (and the university might have reasonably expected) there might be those who disagreed with that approach, it never occurred to me that anyone would try to stop me from speaking.
(…)
Mr. Kellar went on to tell Mr. Brean that “older members” of Kitchener-Waterloo Anti-Racist Action recalled me “glorifying” the neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel and went on to compare me to a Nazi propagandist.
Now, I knew damn well that I have never done anything of the sort, but before I said so, had Globe and Mail researcher Stephanie Chambers check the record.She found that in more than 35 years of daily journalism, working for four different Toronto newspapers, I had mentioned Mr. Zundel’s name a total of five times, mostly peripherally...
***
“Take pains to explain…”
Get yelled at anyway.
Ann Coulter pulls very few punches and doesn’t care what you think of her. She gets shut down.
Christie Blatchford (and her army of defenders — thank God for them all) feel obliged to say the same thing in every damn article:
“Christie Blatchford is not a racist. Christie Blatchford has always been pro-cop — except in this instance.”
And so what? What difference has it made?
None. Blatchford was shut down too.
Both women are treated almost exactly the same way.
Also dumb:
She not only did a bit of fact checking on herself after the asshole’s allegations, but published the results in this column.
She took the idiot’s bait, then felt obliged to rebutt crazy allegations nobody would ever believe and would never have heard about anyhow, if she hadn’t repeated them in this column.
Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb.
The time has passed when we should even be accepting our enemies’ premises, anticipating their objections and twisting ourselves into knots pre-rebutting them, and generally playing by their rules.
I guess you might say Christie Blatchford’s third mistake was being born female, but your mileage may vary.
PS: as for the cops, what we pay them for these days, I’ve no idea.
We should just tell them to stay home from now on and arrange door-to-door donut delivery.
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