All Joking Aside: Heather Mallick Carries--and Spills--Justin's Water

We learn via the NatPo's Chris Selley that Heather Mallick, for one (and she may be the only one), didn't think Justin Trudeau was endeavoring to be witty (always a bad move for him) with his Russia-Ukraine-hockey quip. Mallick, who says she's a Trudeau "partisan" and finds him "sophisticated" (now, that's funny!) insists, in all seriousness, that what he was doing was assessing the situation on the ground:

“It isn’t even that Trudeau made a joke that went wrong, it’s that it wasn’t a joke or even a witticism, it was such a general statement that it scarcely qualified as a remark,” she writes. “Trudeau meant that Yanukovych was in trouble … , the Russians had indeed been desperate for their $60-billion Sochi ghost town to produce hockey medals, that status-anxiety makes them brutal.”

Re that partisan pretzel-twisting masquerading as logic, Selley comments:

What absolute twaddle. That’s empirically not what Trudeau was saying. We know that not from his subsequent mea culpa, but because mere seconds after he said it, he described it as “an attempt to bring a light view of [the] situation” (our italics).

Well, he did succeed in doing that. People are laughing like crazy--at yet another Trudeau faux pas. 

You can, however, exclude NatPo deep thinker Andrew Coyne from that throng. In what is perhaps the biggest joke of all, Coyne sees a Liberal leader who "is in total control."

Wishful thinking much, Andrew?