Staunch conservative Member of Parliament Kenney is the kind of politician made for satire. Or as Mercer puts it: "Stupid and talking, my favourite combination in a politician." Kenney does things like berate an opponent, Don Boudria, for complaining that someone bought his domain name for an anti-same-sex-marriage website, making that look like Boudria's opinion. I'll let Mercer take over:

"Long story short, Jason told Boudria it was his own fault for not registering his own domain name. ... I started thinking, 'What are the chances that Jason Kenney is so stunned that he would call another MP ignorant for not having registered his domain name when he hadn't bothered to register his own?'

Not a chance, I figured. I am not that lucky.

Turns out the chances were pretty good. Before he was down in his seat I was the proud owner of www.jasonkenney.org."

What did Mercer do with this URL? First he pointed it to the Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada, then to Egale Canada ("Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere") in honour of Pride Week and of course in honour of Kenny, who famously said that gays and lesbians have always been allowed to get married, as long as they marry someone of the opposite sex, so what's the problem? Currently, it redirects to Liberal M.P. Michael Chong's website.

When the domain name came up for renewal, Mercer intended to let Kenney have it back. "But then I saw him on the news again, blathering on in that constantly incensed way of his, implying that anyone who is not on board with his vision of Canada is somehow anti-Canadian, and I just couldn't bring myself to do the right thing. So I renewed it until 2011."

I love spite. I Rick Mercer. I love his show, I love his blog. For that reason, I probably didn't need his book, which brought very little new into the mix. It was also a little discombobulating to cast my mind back to remember what was going on in the world back in February 2005, when Mercer's ranting about Prime Minister Harper's flip-flopping on the Iraq war, or September 2006, when Michael Ignatieff looked like the heir apparent to the Liberal leadership throne.

Still, if for nothing else than the picture of Canadian literary high priestess Margaret Atwood in a hockey goalie uniform, or the reminder of what Harper was saying before his position as head of a minority government made him tread more carefully, I'm glad to have Rick Mercer Report: The Book on my bookshelf, making the news of the last few years seem a little less dry.