Thursday, March 09, 2006
"NOTORIOUS CONSERVATIVE" OUT OF BRITAIN
Mark Steyn is no longer published in the UK. Leftoid Guardian columnist Lionel Shriver will miss him, as will thousands:
His column has now been dropped by both the Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator. I don’t know the inside story, so I can’t be certain that the jettisoning of this notoriously conservative Canadian constitutes political self-censorship.
Thus my indignation is solely on account of my own entertainment. Fair enough, few Guardian readers would share his hard-right views. I don’t always agree with him either, but I love Mark Steyn. Even though I write them, I cannot bear most columns, which when light-hearted usually err on the trivial, and when serious usually err on the po-faced. But however you may deplore his opinions, Steyn is funny. How often do you read comment pages and laugh aloud? He writes about big issues with tremendous energy, and he has a sensibility now more pertinent to British politics than ever: a refined sense of the absurd.
Steyn remains available to print readers in Canada, New York, Jerusalem, Chicago, and Australia, among other zones. The Telegraph and Spectator have lost their best columnist.
UPDATE. Local comic columnist Kenneth Davidson—no Mark Steyn, but who is?—takes advantage of a Kim Beazley speech on climate change to deliver a series of sly gags about the Labor leader’s weight problem:
This speech shows that, unlike the Government, he is prepared to spell out the enormity of the problem of climate change, accept the fact that it is largely man-made ...
Oh, mercy!