Toronto hasn't figured out that Frum and Bannon live on the same side of the tracks

There's quite a few well-meaning liberals in Toronto soiling their undergarments at the prospect of the vile Steve Bannon beshitting their fair town. Today the Sunday Star had an opinion piece by Amira Elghawaby and the indefatigable Bernie Farber, who are aghast that Bannon is coming to The Munk Debates to take on David "Axis of Evil" Frum.

That's bound to be as fake a "debate" as any in history, but both these guys are seasoned media veterans who know how to put on a show. Frum long ago abandoned the Canadian liberalism that he imbibed with his mother's milk, to embrace the siren of American Exceptionalism. He's a hard-right, free-market, America first, (right after Israel) kind of Republican.

Bannon is a Navy veteran who joined Goldman Sachs after an honourable discharge. He worked his way up the corporate ladder, and walked away as a Vice President of Goldman Sachs.

He was rich. He was bored.

Rich and bored... a toxic combo if ever there was one. Some guys handle it OK. They spend their time boinking bimbos, snorting pharmaceutical-grade coke, buying sports teams, and commissioning super-yachts. It keeps them busy and the general public is relatively unscathed.

Other guys, unfortunately, think they need a different kind of hobby. Politics.

These are the guys who crave the spotlight, and Big Media certainly has provided Bannon with plenty attention. Here's a backgrounder on Bannon in Forbes. The guy owns a slice of the residuals from the Seinfeld show, for fuck's sakes!

All this press he gets is just free advertising for his political consultancy. He's another Podesta or Manafort. He's a hustler flogging a product. Isn't that what made America great?

Steve Bannon is every bit as much a devotee of American Exceptionalism as is David Frum.

They just have different marketing strategies.

If Dog Lives Matter, the scourge of political correctitude must be pretty much down for the count...

Gotta admit that in my adventures in literacy BLM used to mean "Bureau of Land Management." That's the government bureaucrats who prevent redneck white cowboys from running their cattle on public lands for free.

I kinda thought that wasn't a bad idea, keeping private cattle off public lands, which made me a bit of a socialist at the time. If not a communist.

Then Black Lives Matter comes along and I have to do a double check on any BLM headline. Are they talking about this BLM or that BLM?

There's not a heck of a lot of common ground between the two BLMs.

The black BLM is kinda floating along on the winds of political correctitude.

The Bureau of Land Management, not so much.

 The other BLM has taken umbrage over appropriations of their slogan. White Lives Matter? That's disrespectful of black lives. Blue Lives Matter? That's beyond the pale.

But when pop-culture mega-star Axl Rose tweets that "Dog Lives Matter" we don't hear a lot of complaining from the Black Lives Matter campaign.

Why not?

Well, because dogs are dogs and cops are cops. Whites are white and blacks are black. Axl Rose is... well Axl Rose I guess, and as a pop culture superstar he has a license to say whatever he wants to say, without censure.

But it does seem to pencil in some limits to political correctitude... as in, you can transgress the boundaries if you are a bona fide star in the pop culture firmament.

Otherwise, you're a racist shit-bag.

Speaking of shit-bags, Mr. Trump sure hit the wall this weekend, did he not? That wildly misogynistic tape put him dead to rights, eh?

Well, I'm not so sure. Here's one of the left's (and I'm talking about the actual left, not the Clintonesque-Dem fake left that today finds itself to the right of the Republican candidate on practically everything) uber-swamis, Counterpunch grandee Jeffrey St. Clair, musing about the long history of senior pols on both sides of the aisle proving themselves at least as misogynistic as Mr. Trump.

I was surprised he forgot to mention Trump's fellow Manhattan billionaire, Michael Bloomberg.

Surely the virus of political correctitude has infected all parties on all sides. Just as the scourge of misogyny did before it.

But what bothers me is that our corporate media found copious acres of space available for Trump's alleged transgressions this weekend, which are utterly irrelevant, and absolutely no space for the thousands of Podesta emails that were leaked this weekend, which have an immediate bearing on the future of America should Hillary become the next President of the United States.