Men are from Mars. Marsden is from Pluto.

I just can’t say how happy I am that the National Post has dumped Rachel Marsden after just two months as a columnist. The brief national nightmare is over. It reassures me that the world is not completely depraved, and the Post not utterly insane.

I was shocked to see she had been picked up by both the National Post and Fox as a “conservative” commentator. I knew her as a feminist bully of the most vicious sort, someone who ruined careers with false charges of rape and harassment.

Granted, she is not a bad writer. Derivative: she does an Anne Coulter impersonation. She also leans heavily on all the latest journalistic clichés. But so do many other journalists: that’s how they get to be clichés.

But my problem is not with her ability; it is with her morality.

Quick hypocrisy check here: are her ethics my business? Do I have a right to cast stones?

If it were merely a matter of personal morality, I’d say no. But she has used her gender in the courts and tribunals against others; she has trashed lives; she advertises her sexuality. She has herself made the personal political.

And when it comes down to it, if we on the right cannot hold the moral high ground, then screw it. Nothing else is worth sacrificing values. That is what values are about.

I suppose it is not easy to be, as Marsden is, bright, articulate, and quite good-looking. I suppose it poses special temptations. I suppose the rest of us should be grateful for having been spared this. Most of us would not be helped by posing semi-nude on our web pages.

Still, there is nothing creditable about exploiting one’s looks, one’s sex, and one’s sexuality to get ahead at others’ expense. Slice it any way you want; in the end, it’s still whoring.

And this woman has ego issues. A quote: “Fifty percent of people want to sleep with me, and the other fifty percent want to kill me.”

She is apparently of the opinion that Rachel Marsden, one way or the other, vitally concerns all the rest of humanity.

Fifty-one percent of the population is female; she apparently also believes that all men, plus some women, want to sleep with her.

I can vouch personally that this is not so.

Marsden is a parasite. While she may be a decent writer, there is reason to believe, since she’s dodged being judged on pure merit, that her loud voice is still drowning out someone better. All suffer from this, not least the conservative cause.

Writing, more than most other jobs, is a calling, a vocation. Writers are in a real sense direct successors to the Biblical prophets: there to speak truth and morality against the excesses of the present powers that be. Because of this office, and because writing engages so much of one’s being, one can never write without exposing one’s character. A flawed character will always out. As Jesus said of false prophets, “by their fruits you shall know them.”

Indeed, Marsden’s writing itself is ultimately immoral. Funny, but mostly wildly ad hominem; she regularly distorts to support her position. She appeals to prejudice, not reason. Does one generally learn anything by reading a Marsden column? No; one is merely encouraged in one’s prejudices.

Let’s take one recent example: she says of Jonathan Chait that “reasonable people” question his sanity. He “rants.” Jane Fonda is a “treasonous twit.” Bill Clinton’s morning jogs were round trips to his mistress’s place. The left wear “tin-foil hats”—there’s a cliché waiting eagerly for retirement. Liberal thinking—sorry, “ideology”--is “spewed forth.”

You get the drift. No thinking here, no facts, no analysis; just invective.

It is really the same garbage used on the left by someone like Michael Moore. It has poisoned our discourse, our journalism and our politics. It is deplorable, on the left or on the right.

Yes, this condemnation also applies to Anne Coulter. At least Marsden exposes Coulter for what she is, by showing how easy it is to imitate her. Anyone can be over the top. Coulter, frankly, gets away with murder because she is a good-looking woman.

Unprincipled egotists like Marsden are now flocking to the right. This is a good sign, in a way. Such people are interested in only two things: power, and self-aggrandizement. They are infinitely calculating, and they have made the calculation that the right is where power soon will be.

But if and when current conservatism becomes received wisdom, they may next be calling for the guillotine and the gulag, figuratively speaking, and greeting the rest of us with ice picks. Because power, not principle, is what they are after; and they know no ruth.

Now, thankfully, it looks as though Rachel Marsden at least will not be around to cheer the tumbrels. Good riddance.