Date Rape, Charlie Sheen, Anti-Semitism ...

And other topics we'd rather not touch with a ten-foot pole.

For whatever reason, possibly because we’re pretentious, the writers in The Mark Newsroom have so far avoided writing much about Charlie Sheen. But to paraphrase the great Paul Simon, who are we to blow against the wind?

The Montreal Gazette’s Denise Duguay says she’s not watching Sheen’s “suicide-by-interview” because as the child of addicts and a “longtime bar maid in a former boho-poet life” she’s seen where this is going and it does not end well. She swears she’s not judging those who do watch, it’s just that Sheen makes her sad. “I know this is sucky and sounds like an end run on the moral high ground,” she writes, “but it's not.” She is technically correct because it doesn’t take a very lofty vantage point from which to see that news outlets the world over are making money off of a sick man, but she still comes off as a bit judgmental. But hell, what’s wrong with that?

For a real shot of moral indignation, an always reliable source is Rex Murphy, who unleashes the full force of his purple prose in the National Post today to decry the “compulsive, reckless sex obsessive” Sheen, “the tart-infested, doxy-ripe, trollop-thick tenure” of Silvio Berlusconi, “pure skinhead anti-Semit[e]” John Galliano, and the culture that spawned them. “Behaviour that so short a time ago would have been showered with contempt and shaming, now, lands Sheen $2 million an episode,” he writes. What “short time ago” was that, we wonder? The 60’s, when the drug-abusing, womanizing Beatles became the darlings of their generation? The 40’s, when Coco Chanel cavorted with the Nazis in Paris?

The Post’s Kevin Libin says that the anger against the Manitoba judge who let a convicted date rapist off with no jail time because his victim dressed provocatively is “slightly misplaced.” Judge Robert Dewar did convict the rapist after all, and recognized that there was no consent involved. Libin says the real targets of outrage should be, wait for it, the Liberals! Them and anyone else who opposes the Conservatives’ plans to do away with Canada’s lax sentencing laws.