No fops allowed

The Daily Howler is getting set to explore the question of why conservatives outshine liberals in the US spin wars. Howler writes "Why do liberals fail in our nation's spin wars? Over the weekend, we thought about that problem as we watched Woody Allen's Interiors . . . As we watched, we were mainly struck by the self-involved foppishness of all the central characters . . . right to this day, liberal interests have often been fronted by these very same foppish folk, by the deracinated Manhattan types who thought Interiors showcased great tragedy—the tragedy of a “mediocre novelist” who is furious because his wife, “an embittered poet,” gets better reviews than he does. Why do conservatives often do better in the nation’s endless spin wars? In part, it’s because liberal interests are often promoted by a wide array of self-involved fops."
Reading this, it struck me that we simply do not have this problem in Canada -- here, everybody speaks up.
We frequently see Chantal Hebert and Alan Gregg and Andrew Coyne and Rex Murphy on The National, articulating leftish and rightish views; we watch Harper and Martin and Layton in Question Period. We read Rick Salutin and Jeffrey Simpson and Margaret Wente in the Globe. There is nary a shrinking violet in sight.
Maybe its because so many of our left wingers came out of the union movement while our right wingers came out of the oil patch, but here both sides are tough, and ready to give as good as they get.