I would never have guessed that Norman Spector would be a topic for my book club. And he wasn’t just a topic, he was the subject of passionate debate.

Spector is the right-wing pundit on Bill Good’s CKNW political panel, which I will be hosting tomorrow morning.

Last Monday, Good asked him and Bill Tieleman, who argues from the left, for their thoughts on Foreign Minister Peter MacKay, Belinda Stronach’s ex-boyfriend, allegedly calling her a dog in Parliament.

Spector defended MacKay, saying Stronach is a “rich girl who’s never made an intelligent statement in her life . . . I think she is a bitch . . . for the way she’s broken up Tie Domi’s home and for the way she dumped Peter MacKay.”

He said he uses the word all the time to refer to “treacherous, malicious women.”

In other words, Spector thinks MacKay was justified in calling Stronach a dog because, in his opinion, she is a dog. A female dog. A bitch.

She’s uninformed, she sleeps around, she’s a bitch.

Spector has carved out a comfortable niche for himself as a commentator. He works with CKNW, writes a newspaper column and keeps a blog. He wants to be taken seriously.

But it was hard to see him that way after last Monday’s outburst. Name-calling doesn’t count as intelligent public comment.

Canada’s foreign affairs minister shouldn’t hurl personal insults at his ex-girlfriend in Parliament. Nor should pundits toss out epithets that you can’t use in front of the kids.

People with the good fortune to comment on the world for a living should have the grace to be decent and, hopefully, the skills to be thoughtful.

Spector gets paid to critique the way politicians do their jobs — not the way they conduct their personal lives.

When he dragged her private life into the debate, he wasn’t talking about her as a politician, he was criticizing her as a person.

Then, when he called her a bitch, he was insulting her specifically as a woman.

If he has criticisms, say what they are. Call her dumb, spoiled, lazy or whatever. Don’t call her a bitch.

Bitch suggests that Spector’s real problem with Stronach is that she’s single, attractive and freely admits she finds men attractive too. Maybe if she wore Laura Ingalls dresses and went to knitting club on Friday nights, Spector would go easier on her.

It’s true many of us also use the word. Whether it’s offensive depends on our audience. It’s always offensive to some. Others, like Spector, think it’s perfectly acceptable to use it often.

But on radio, you don’t know who your audience is. It might include bikers and priests and mothers with little kids in the car.

You shouldn’t call someone a bitch on air, particularly when there are hundreds of other words to describe what you want to say.

My book club’s advice is unanimous: Norman, please apologize. We want to spend our December meeting discussing a book.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 5th, 2006 at 1:01 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.