I have a few points to make when it comes to the story of Afghan torture as blown open by Richard Colvin these past few days.  Here goes.

     Point one:  I hear many people say that Afghan people being tortured by Afghan people is none of our concern.  This is true.  So we turn over prisoners to the Afghan army, and they torture those prisoners, innocent guilty or otherwise.  This is not our problem.  After all, when I was a security guard at the Mint, and I left the door ajar and went about my rounds in other parts of the building so my friends could pour four hundred tons of toonies into their dumptrucks, I was not to blame because I didn’t do the actual stealing.

     Point two:  People are right.  In this case, you have one of two choices – support the Taliban OR support our soldiers.  If you feel that Taliban fighters should not be tortured, then you are against Canadian troops.  If you support Canadian troops, you MUST be pleased about the torture.  This is perfect logic.  Any complaints or concerns about the torture of detained suspects take away from the support and love our soldiers receive from our country.  In the same vein of thinking, I hate it when newspapers report stories about Ottawa City Council, because that takes valuable column inches away – inches that could be filled with stories about Steven Seagal.

     Point three:  People are right.  No one cares that Afghan people are tortured to begin with.  Whether they be innocent or guilty, this is just what Afghanistan does, and besides, at least some of those people are trying to kill our soldiers.  So, whip and electrocute and beat away, we as a nation don’t care.  We’re totally comfortable with torture, so long as it satisfies our desire for revenge when our heroes lives are threatened.  Which is why there was a massive grass-roots campaign to have Alan Eagleson’s eyelids stapled shut and fingernails pulled out while he was in prison for defrauding our hockey icons.

     Point four:  As Peter McKay and the rest of the government have pointed out, Richard Colvin is clearly stupid.  The Taliban have waged a very obvious campaign here to feed him misinformation every single day, a sophisticated one where they claim to be farmers and claim to be tortured every single time someone speaks to them.  When in fact, they are ruthless Taliban fighters who are treated humanely and pleasantly by friendly captors.  Obviously Colvin is a gullible and foolish man who doesn’t know the first rule of capturing prisoners – if they tell you they aren’t Taliban, that means that they are!  What a dummy.

      Point five:  The issue here is whether Canadians are handing over captured people to be tortured.  It is most certainly not the fact that there was a cover-up.  After all, since Colvin was so obviously misled by the crafty Taliban, why would anyone have ever listened to him?  I guess that the four hundred and thirty people to whom Colvin voiced his concerns thought (reasonably, I assume) of him more as a silly Taliban Stooge than as Canada’s second-ranking diplomat in Afghanistan.  And so they didn’t cover it up, so much as they ignored it, knowing that with his third-grade education, Colvin couldn’t possibly be relied upon to present them with facts.

     Point six:  The real issue here, obviously, is who let someone as gullible and susceptible as Richard Colvin rise through the ranks to become the #2 man in Afghanistan?  How did we have such a breakdown?  You would think that a man in his position would have his reports taken seriously, but we were clearly unable to do so because of his lack of qualifications!  Who is to blame?  Peter McKay?

I need to figure out how a few things work on this new blog.  I assume that eventually, the links on the CHEZ page that say “Eric’s Blog” will go here instead of the old one.  All in good time, though.  In the meantime, I am going to put up a bunch of unrelated pictures and video on a single blog post, in order to test the system out.  Here goes:

OK, so that’s one.

That’s two.

Hmmm.  OK.  Now some videos.

And one more…

Let’s see how this works…

     I have been a Red Sox fan my whole life since falling head over heels for Mike Greenwell in the late 80s.  But at this point, I am almost embarassed to be a Red Sox fan.  Not as ashamed as I would be were I a Yankees fan, but close.  After all, it’s kinda like being a fan of Britney Spears, isn’t it?  A Red Sox fan isn’t cheering for a ragtag bunch of hardscrabble kids working their way through the regular season only to put it all together when the year’s on the line, like a Twins fan does.

     Instead, like a Britney Spears fan, we celebrate the end result only – the product that is created when millions upon millions of dollars are thrown at the best talent in the world (in the case of the Red Sox, players – in the case of Britney Spears, producers) and that talent produces World Series rings and playoff appearances.  Or Circus.

     But being a Blue Jays fan must be awful.  I will tell you this right now, Blue Jays fans.  You will never, ever again make the playoffs.  Winning a World Series is out of the question, but making the playoffs will be impossible from here on in.  Remember when Favre left the Packers and wanted to go to Minnesota?  And there was no way Green Bay would let him move to a team in their own division?  So he went to the Jets.  And now Minnesota.

     Roay Halladay is about to go to Boston.  Toronto management can cry and squawk and whine and bitch about it, but it’s a foregone conclusion.  Because there is nothing Toronto can do about it.  They simply can’t pay above market value for their best player.  And Boston can.  So can the Yankees.  Because Boston will get Halladay, the Yankees will go out and make a big play for Johan Santana or some such thing.  And they will finish 1-2 in their division again, loser gets the wild card.

     Other teams can win the World Series.  Even the Kansas City Royals could conceivably win the World Series some year.  All they have to do is win their division, then do well in the playoffs.  In a seven-game series, the Yankees or the Red Sox could lose.  But Toronto will never win again.  The best they can do is third, with some great young talent coming out of nowhere to make a great run.  And then the next year that talent will be in New York.  Or Boston. 

     So hi, Roy Halladay!  As a Boston fan, I am thrilled to see that you will soon be wearing the Red Sox uniform and helping us take back the division from the Yankees.  And I may be ashamed at the way we go about doing it, but at least I’m not a Blue Jays fan.

     I have been asked to move my blog to the official corporate website, so it can fit in with everyone else’s blog.  I’m not sure exactly what the benefits are – I think the main reason it has been moved is so it can appear on the “blogroll” on the front page of the CHEZ website.  I guess they will have to find another picture of me in my underwear to put up beside this blog, like they found for the Cynical Cinema site.  I guess that will work.  It will take me a while to figure out how to do all those things I did on my existing blog, like follow people and put links up and so forth.  The only real difference between my old one and this one, I am told, is that I will no longer be able to put spaces between paragraphs.  For some reason.

     I will eventually figure out how to put videos up and photos and so forth.  It took me a long time to figure out how to do that on my last blog, so it may take me a while to figure that out here as well.  I hope everyone who followed my old blog continues to follow me on this one – it’s a little more difficult to use and (so far until I figure it out) a little less interesting to look at, but at least we now get credit for the page hits!  Welcome!

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