I'm going to do something that seems to get me into hot water every time I do it, but it's my blog, so there.

I'm going to congratulate Warren Kinsella.

From his blog for May 12:

Blogs don’t work if you aren’t as honest as you can be; they don’t work if you aren’t candid about your mistakes.

That said, I note here that I did a hit last night on Calgary’s CHQR with Rob Breakenridge, who is one of the better talk jocks in Canada. Rob asked me about my column in the Post (which decried the use of Nazi analogies to make a point). Then he asked me why I was photographed with DOA’s Joey Shithead, wearing a T-shirt calling George W. Bush an "international terrorist."

My answer, I admit, was not very lucid or compelling (cf. that truth is a defence, and that Bush’s war in Iraq is illegal). At all, at all. Time to critically assess my own conduct, and not just Bob Rae’s, eh?

That Rob Breakenridge is one smart journalist.

Now how many times have you heard anyone, on the left or the right, admit that they might have been hypocritical? Admit publicly that they need to consider their own behaviour, that they might not have been living up to the standards that they are suggesting others live up to?

How many blogs are used by people as a soapbox to lash out at those who have crossed them in some way?

Warren Kinsella could have used his blog to dump on Ron Breakenridge and tell us all how unfair the comment was about the T-shirt. And most of his readers would have accepted it and felt Kinsella was treated poorly. But that would not have been honest.

It's easy to play to your adoring fans. It's hard to tell them that maybe you were wrong, especially if it is in some way related to an issue you all feel so strongly about. To remind them that however justified your moral outrage, it does not place you above the rules you insist others live by.

Warren Kinsella did the hard thing. Good for him. That's why I like him.

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