George Jonas is a total idiot or The Killer Nic-fit

I'm not just using this as title because I often find myself at odds with the former Mr. Barbara Amiel, no, today I'm convinced the man is actually one of the stupidest columnists writing in Canada.

Some backstory: Paul Wells was touting his former employer's new website and, in all fairness to their web design people, it does look better. Nonetheless, this lured me into reading the Opinion section where I stumbled across George Jonas' theorizing about the RCMP killing of Robert Dziekanski.

According to Jonas, the real way that the state killed Mr. Dziekanski was by forbidding him to smoke in the airport! No really he says:

"Before the armed agents of the state ran wild, though, the unlucky Pole ran a bit wild himself. Why did Mr. Dziekanski start throwing things around at the Vancouver airport, which eventually conjured up the Taser-toting agents of the omnipotent state?

The probable answer is nicotine starvation. Before Big Nanny deprived Mr. Dziekanski of his life, she deprived him of cigarettes. There's a chance the enthusiastic East European visitor to our shores, gung-ho enough to keep a Canadian flag at home, who talked about looking forward to seeing grizzly bears in British Columbia, ended up dying to smoke. Literally."

Wow. That's an excellent use of Eastern European stereotypes. The real killer here is that people can't smoke wherever they want? Now in fairness, further on in the column, Jonas does concede that the RCMP electrocuting Dziekanski may also have had something to do with his untimely end, and that that too, was unwise. But a nic-fit as a cause of death in this case, I mean come on! Do we even know that Dziekanski was a smoker, and if so, even a heavy one?

Is it okay to stereotype Poles again? George Jonas, you are an idiot at best, a racist demagogue at worst.

Day: Hey you! Don't watch that! Watch this!

This has to be the worst attempt by a government to change the channel on an issue. Stockwell Day has tried to pit the police killing of Robert Dziekanski against the problem of drunk driving. This issue has been done quite a bit, so I won't dwell on it too much - it's just indicative of how inept the Minister of Public Safety (our own Robespierre?) really is.

And now here's the 1980s ska band that gave me the title to this post, ladies and gentlemen, Madness:

Excited Delirium = Bullshit?

The RCMP talking points are coming together now and you can bet that they will lead with the "excited delirium" line that's getting airing in the media already. What is excited delirium? How would we know if Robert Dziekanski was suffering from it? Well, what do medical and psychological professionals say about? The CBC article says this:

"In fact, the term is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association, a handbook for professional psychologists and psychiatrists."

Oh. So it's not even a real disease. In fact it looks more like a post-hoc explanation. If the taser kills you, then you had it. Why not just say that the person in question had crazyitis? It has about as much medical merit.

Either way, expect to see "excited delirium" emanating from an RCMP mouthpiece near you.

A National Disgrace

There's been so much written about the apparently cold-blooded killing of a confused traveler by the RCMP - and rightly so. I was disgusted listening to rationalizations of an RCMP spokesman on CBC radio last night.

I think this is perhaps the time to take it one step further: break up the RCMP. In Ontario and Quebec there are provincial police forces that do the vast majority of what the RCMP does in all the other provinces. Before Robert Dziekanski there was Ian Bush, part of 267(!) deaths at the RCMP's hands hands of police in BC.

Here's why a break-up might help: It appears, whenever there are problems with the RCMP they seem to disappear down a bureaucratic rabbit hole. It wasn't until there was real trouble for the RCMP's complicity in the rendition of Maher Arar that anyone even knew who Giuliano Zaccardelli was. Giving the RCMP's role to new provincial forces would shorten and clarify the lines of accountability. When, say, the OPP does mess up, we can draw a line from the officers on the ground right up to the premier if we need to.

Let the RCMP do horse parades and perhaps guard federal buildings and foreign dignitaries (we can work out their new, limited role). I do not have confidence in them to do much else. Dismantle the RCMP.