Warren's departure

Warren Kinsella is now officially off Team Iggy.

But I don't want to talk about that. All internecine backroom wars--and I'm familiar with them--play out much the same. Differences become personal; offices begin to resemble a Canada Packers' kill floor; and at the end, there are battered winners and gutted losers, all with stories to tell, but they usually don't.

I'm more interested in the reaction in certain quarters to what is, in fact, reheated news.

It's my fortune--or misfortune--to have friends who despise each other. They know me better than to try to enlist me in their mutual antagonisms. And normally I know better than to get involved in them--but there are exceptions.

I get on pretty well with Warren, but I have no problem with Skippy Stalin, who loathes the man, dissecting his reasons for departing. It's all fair, witty and well-written comment wherein good points are made, if not exactly damp with the milk of human kindness. But some political types aren't content to maintain focus. If they hate someone, then no one in that person's immediate vicinity is safe. Skippy, in fact, knows precisely what I'm talking about.

I do have considerable difficulty, therefore, with this kind of thing. There is no excuse whatsoever for it. Is that what political discourse at Jay Currie's place has become? Waving a person's private life around in the air, no matter whom it hurts, to a chorus of dirty schoolboy sniggering?

Stay classy, Jay.

I won't bother offering that admonition to your baying regulars, because they had no class to begin with. But you know better, and are better, than this. Or so I have believed up to now.