Idiot’s guide to Parliament

We are favoured with another eructation from Carolyn Parrish, MP, who has identified a “Coalition of the Idiots,” in which Americans figure prominently.

Parrish, readers may remember, got in tepid water in February of last year for saying, “Damn Americans . . . I hate those bastards,” after giving a statement to reporters about the then-impending invasion of Iraq. (We use the word “tepid” deliberately: she was instructed to apologize, and did so. Nothing more.)

This time, Parrish tried to weasel out of her comments, but hearing that they were on tape, resorted to pleading with the assembled hacks not to report them. Only with that retreat blocked did she try good old-fashioned brazenness — true to her heritage as a Peel Region high-school English teacher and educrat, she looked up “idiot” in a dictionary (“lacking in common sense, lacking in knowledge”) and said she found her diction “appropriate.” What she said was “colourful” and “bold.” And “idiots” was different from last year’s “inappropriate language,” she said, saying that her words then “weren’t in the dictionary.”

Compelled by rigid scholarly training, we looked up Parrish’s 2003 insult in our office Random House. Contrary to what she says, it’s there too, heading a long line of compound nouns from “bastard amber” through “bastard eigne” (an early Common Law term) and “bastard mahogany” to “bastard wing.”

Insults are insults, Ms. Parrish. Yours of last year and this year are vicious, and despicable, and we thoroughly dislike them.

Our stalwart Prime Minister, never one to mince words when grinding them up in a mortar will do, spoke out bravely and substantively: “But let me tell you, [views on missile defence] need to be expressed in language that’s acceptable.”

Insults are insults, Mr. Martin. We think you’re either spineless or unprincipled, or perhaps just vapid, and we’re reserving judgment on just which one. But we have a jellyfish, not a man, for Prime Minister.

Parrish — who two years ago this week delivered a sermon about “the Jewish lobby” to the semi- official Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram — is one of those ornaments of the Liberal back bench that prove just how detached the political class has become from adult life. In adult life, you can disagree with people without taking them, prima facie, for idiots. In adult life, you make a point of knowing people before labelling them as “bastards.” In adult life, you remember who your country’s friends are — particularly when you are charged by the electors to make the laws and hold the public purse.

The voters of Mississauga-Erindale have played a joke, in bad taste, on the rest of the country, sending to Ottawa a fool, a dullard, a superficial, self-satisfied blockhead, stuffed so full of the empty pieties and shallow falsehoods of modern-day cringe culture that she doesn’t see facts that stare her in the face. And she is — not in spite of that, but because of it — perfectly suited to life in the Liberal caucus: the coalition of perpetual adolescents.