Canadians did it again. One Françoise Ducros, Director of Communications in the Chrétien government, put her Canadian foot in her French-speaking mouth. "Bush is a moron," she asserted before an assembly of reporters at the NATO Summit in Prague. Mr Chrétien, after turning down Mrs Ducros resignation, showed how big a fool he is by declaring that Mr Bush is his friend and "not a moron at all." That is why witty Canadians call Mr Chrétien "Mr Crétin," perhaps the best pun coming out of Quebec in a century. Chrétien finally let Mrs Ducros go, stating for the occasion---against all evidence---that she "had served with skill," thereby digging himself into a deeper hole.

So, I decided to retaliate by substituting "Canadian" for "blonde" in the dumb-blonde jokes that I get in my e-mail and that I forward to my friends. This may be small potatoes---petty?---but serves the dual purpose of putting down Canadians who loathe us, and countering unjustifiable attacks on blonde women, whom I consider a wonder of nature.

This, of course, brings to the fore the controversial question of ethnic jokes. Political correctness and the business of victim groups have killed the genre. That is unfortunate, because ethnic jokes were a stalwart testimony to our now sacrosanct diversity. Everybody would poke fun at everybody across ethnic or religious lines, and wit ruled the game. But humorless bluenoses drummed in by the fashion of Heightened Group Sensitivity set out to put an end to it. A new code soon applied. Only members of groups claiming victim status could make ethnic jokes in public, and the jokes had to target the group of the joke teller. But restrictions on a free market always result in a decline of quality, and the joke market was not exempt. Blacks rehash the same old sort of jokes about blacks, Jews, about Jews, and Catholics, about Catholics. It seems that each comedian gets his material from the Exclusive Joke Factory of his respective group, and just regurgitates stock stuff. Boring. Yet, the politics of victimization had bred a new ilk of comedian, the comedienne. The most celebrated comediennes have a propensity to specialize in off-color jokes about feminine physiology, the kind that even the worst cads would shun. They also like to ridicule male anatomy, which is not any better. All that is not funny. It is crude and boring, but critics applaud it as "pushing the envelope," as if foul-mouthed comediennes were in the same league as test pilots.

Here and there, the new rules of comedy have inspired a few people outside the official victim category. Mr Garrison Keillor, a star of tax-supported PBS, made a fortune by poking fun at Minnesota Lutherans. Apparently, this is all right because Mr Keillor was born in Minnesota, and Minnesota Lutherans cannot claim victim status since they are whiter than the rest of the population, as many of them trace their ancestry to Scandinavia. Thus, Mr Keillor, who has a cute way with words, is the rage of the Volvo-Saab liberal boomers soaked with political correctness, who delight in his shows where they can forget for a while their social guilt and feel so superior to a rustic Whitey they secretly despise.

Ethnic jokes, however, have the characteristic property of being transferable. One can take a Polish joke, substitute "Swiss" for "Pole," and preserve the humor. This is what I did in one of my places of work that had a susceptible fellow of Polish descent and no Swiss. Then, when I moved to another company, I made another substitution---"French"---so that the Swiss, Polish, and Italian members of my department could not complain about a "hostile work environment" and get me fired. People found the jokes very funny, because nobody likes the French. Now, what is one to do when the audience’s ancestry is unknown to the joke teller?

Aha! Enters the "dumb blonde." Obviously, a blonde is of the race that the current political correctness has stigmatized as The Great Oppressor, and cannot claim victim status. Even though in most jokes the blonde is a woman, everybody, blond or not, can beat on her. Victoria Jackson, alumna of Saturday Night Live, can attest to that. Actually, I suspect that most blonde jokes are refashioned Polish and other ethnic jokes. To support the racial allusion of my argument, try tell that kind of joke with the substitution of "Jew," or "woman," or "black" for "blonde" and see whether you are not called an anti-Semitic, or sexist, or racist jerk. Now, for another experiment, tell the same joke but, this time, replace "dumb blonde" with just "dumb." Well, that will just make you a jackass insensitive to the differently gifted. So, would the dumb-blonde allegory have some sort of magic to it?

Indeed, it has. The truth is that blonde women are not only beautiful, but also very smart. Many of the blondes who appear on cable-television political shows are conservative. It is well-known that conservatives are brainy, as their political choices result from reasoned analysis, while liberals are just driven by emotions. This is why leftist-cum-feminist icons like Hillary Clinton and Susan Estrich bleach their hair. Not only do they think that it improves their looks, but they also hope to fool people into believing that they are smart. Smart people, however, do not buy the goods because they remember that Susan Estrich managed Dukakis’s silly presidential campaign, and that Hillary Clinton dismissed rumors of her husband’s antics as fabrications of a vast right-wing conspiracy. Amazingly, this infatuation with the blonde ideal is even found in black women of true achievement and beauty, like Beyonce Knowles of Destiny’s Child and Serena Williams, who also sport bleached hairs.

So, why should fair lasses complain about being the targets of jokes when these jokes so evidently stem from envy? Well, they do not complain. They are smart and they know.