NatPost columnist Colby Cosh recently made the mistake of buying a new computer game which allows you to re-create the assasination of JFK, and made the further mistake of writing rather gleefully about the game on his blog:

You can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you, Mr. President

“With the “chaos level” of the motorcade increased in the game settings, shooting the driver can create what I am obliged to describe as frankly delightful pandemonium; sometimes his weight falls on the gas pedal and the limo shoots off crazily into the distance, hitting a tree or jumping General Lee-fashion over the entrance to the Triple Overpass. Often the passengers end up flying through the air like ragdolls and dying without having even been wounded. (The ballistics report that follows the gameplay is careful to fill you in on stuff like that.)”

Now, Cosh took an enormous risk in writing such a post when the forces of political correctness are forever thoroughly marauding the internet. I am speaking, of course, of Warren Kinsella:

“A Canadian newspaper columnist has purchased the infamous “game” in which players get to assassinate John F. Kennedy…A game in which you get to murder John F. Kennedy (or George W. Bush, for that matter) isn’t even remotely “funny.” That is so obvious it barely merits saying. What isn’t obvious is why the columnist in question is still employed by a reputable Canadian newspaper. If I ran it, he’d be gone, and pretty damn quick, too.”

In sum: In Warren Kinsella’s world, people are fired for playing video games. I’ve heard of hard-ass managers, but this is ridiculous.

And rather amusing given the pride with which Kinsella wears the label “liberal.” I visited the game’s site, and was frankly repelled. My fiance empathized with the pain that such a game would inflict upon the Kennedy family. Certainly, I would neither buy nor play it myself, but it does not follow from this that I think people who do so should be fired from their jobs. Tolerance, putting up with that which you hate, is apparently an aspect of liberalism that is lost on Kinsella.

Not that we should be suprised by this, given his difficulty in applying labels to himself. For example: Kinsella identifies himself with the “Albertan Diaspora” which apparently exists in Ottawa. Except that a diaspora consists not simply in displaced peoples, but in a cultural and sentimental attachment of those peoples to the “mother ship.” Obviously Kinsella, given his propensity to turn his back on his native province, has no such attachment to Alberta.