Comically, absurdly, the jaw-droppingly stupid kleptocrat Tony “Gazebo” Clement waded into a teapot yesterday to fire a round of wet spaghetti at the Globe @ Mail’s Stephen Wicary.

Wicary is heading to Cuba to join his spouse, there at the behest of CARE Canada, a charity apparently not yet under the Conservatives’ gun. This, almost predictably, resulted in yet another manic-panic melt-down by SunTV’s premier faux-journalist Ezra Levant.

At about the same time, Tony was preparing to turn over the sum of $2.5 million (156,250 Oda Units) to establish an “interpretive centre” in Gravenhurst, Ontario, commemorating the life and times of Norman Bethune, unrepentant Communist and a hero to billions of Chinese.

Wicary wondered aloud when Levant would start in on Clement. He didn’t get an immediate answer from the Mouth, but from Clement himself: “My point,” quoth Clement, “was to celebrate things other than his communism. You chose to live in a communist country. Big difference.”

Well, so did Bethune, of course, and not merely to be with his partner. But this is Canada’s new politics, best appreciated on brown acid.

From the Toronto Sun, where cognitive dissonance must surely be reaching explosive levels by now:

Treasury Board President Tony Clement, who breezed in to the centre’s grand opening Wednesday in a bright orange rickshaw [outlawed in China —ed.], told the crowd he wasn’t celebrating Bethune’s ardent Communist ideology but his other values.

“What I see in Dr. Bethune is his spirit of humanitarianism,” he said.

Well, heck, me too. Bethune volunteered as a doctor on the anti-fascist side during the Spanish civil war, where his system of mobile blood banks saved countless lives. Later, in China, he developed a portable operating theatre, and worked tirelessly, prodigiously, even under heavy artillery fire, even as he was dying of septicemia.

How might people learn all this? From a Canadian government website.

Bethune is a Canadian mensch. Too bad they can’t award the Order of Canada posthumously.

There is something not a little incongruous, however, about the Harper government’s celebrating the achievements, real as they were, of a Communist. Especially when conservatives—now including a Minister of the Crown—are blatting on and on about a respected journalist’s move to Cuba to be with his wife.

But…we’re talking about China. Our great trading partner and Alberta tar sands owner. The not-so-missing piece of this multi-media charade.

“Don’t bait the bear,” said Clement to Wicary in a second Tweet, apparently referring to himself, which for some reason immediately makes me think of this:

Stay down, Tony. Or you might fall out of that orange rickshaw of yours.