[Cicero]

Boy, writing a comic article on Reverend Canaan Banana, African liberation movements, and homosexuality, without subjecting yourself to death by the language police, is like doing a sword dance while juggling five oranges.

Steyn pulls it off brilliantly and seemingly effortlessly. What a beautiful piece of work.

[xp38]

Agree completely. The greats often make the very difficult seem effortless. Mark is as they say in the zone.

[aculeus]

Steyn pulls it off brilliantly and seemingly effortlessly. What a beautiful piece of work.

Yes, but with Conrad Black out of the picture let's hope the new owners don't do something stupid.

[foreshadowed at waco]

Alas, when his guerillas saw fellow Christians, they didn’t always recognize them as kindred spirits: In 1978, in the Vumba mountains, Mugabe and Banana’s plucky “freedom fighters” slaughtered nine white missionaries, after raping the women and their four children - one a month old, another found with a boot imprint on her shattered skull.

Mark is just so brilliant...he mixes the comic and the profane in such a gut wrenching way...irony, word plays, they sparkle amidst the jagged and violent images of carefully selected hard hitting facts...he reminds me so much of Jonathan Swift, one of my very favorite writers...a master of language and political insight.