Extremists in the Conservative Party of Canada had a spasm this week, a kind of convulsion so out of place in political summertime that it was hard to believe they planned it. Maybe they drank too much coffee at the meeting. They really emptied the urn.

For they were in some kind of altered state when they wrote American op-eds, appeared on Fox News of all places, and performed a “Fake News!” video attack on every journalistic institution in Canada.

It was disorienting to see them go pro-Trump in the dodgier bits of the U.S. media. They did this on the same day that President Donald Trump took the wheel of a big red fire engine parked at the White House and made vroom vroom noises, trying to distract from the Trumpcare debacle.

The poor man was celebrating Made in America week, holding up local baseball bats with an air of wonder. As the Guardian put it, the White House looked like “an Amazon warehouse with lots of stuff: beer, door hinges, fried chicken, horseshoes, guitars, a lawn mower, a NASA space suit, wheelbarrows and, inevitably, golf clubs.”

It was Depths of Humiliation Day for this emotionally fragile Humpty Dumpty. Back away from the Trump, would be my advice.

So why were Conservatives using the Omar Khadr settlement as a hook to get the message to Americans that Canadians are baby Trumpsters? They are not. They overwhelmingly detest him, though the two Trump-admiring Ontario retirees the New York Post managed to unearth were quite polite. “We don’t want to upset or offend anyone,” said Dave Bowen, interviewed at his cottage in Peterborough County.

MP Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill) went on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox to deplore the Khadr payment. The result was incoherence.

“A lot of people in Canada, including those who have been legitimately mistreated by the Canadian government, could use $10 million,” said Carlson. What is “legitimate” mistreatment?

Neither mentioned factual awkwardness, like the U.S. torture of a 15-year-old boy with lousy parents, or Canadian officials going along with it, or the Supreme Court of Canada rulings that lay behind the settlement. Carlson and Rempel just talked money, guns and feelings.

“Canada values the relationship we have in terms of our men and women in uniform serving shoulder to shoulder with each other,” Rempel told Carlson. I don’t know what that means.

MP Cheryl Gallant (Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke) did a weird Facebook video on “GNN” (Gallant Nightly News) calling everyone — the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, CBC, CTV, Global, National Post and even Ottawa Citizen — “fake news” and accusing them of colluding with government.

But the fake news meme is purely American. It doesn’t work here. Even those who denounce the CBC ad nauseam will concede that its reporting on wire barbecue brushes has been stellar. (I binned mine immediately.) Health Canada is now looking into the matter. Is that collusion?

According to Gallant, “We are already seeing some of these new media companies rebel against the elite-stream consensus ... Only by getting the word out about alternatives to the elite-stream media will more and more Canadians learn the truth about what’s going on.”

The thing was soaked in a weird paranoia more suited to Alabama than the Ottawa Valley. There’s no elitist plot. There’s no Big Khadr hauling in bloody terror dollars, no Big Wire conspiring to choke chewers of meat. The Star very much wants its readers’ gullets free and clear.

Conservative MP Peter Kent (Thornhill) wrote a bleak, icy op-ed for the Wall Street Journal’s meanest page headlined “A Terrorist’s Big Payday, Courtesy of Trudeau” defending appalling American behaviour, litigiousness and unreason. I’m surprised it wasn’t written in all-caps in green ink.

Everyone is entitled to deplore his own country and government. I do it. Americans made desperate by Trump have been praising us a little too highly lately, and I will argue with them. We are ... pretty good, I say.

But to allege that Khadr “confessed” while not mentioning why he did so — he was being tortured, and Canadian officials were fine with it — reveals a blitheness about human pain.

Kent’s anger is massive, his compassion selective. According to him, Prime Minister Trudeau has now affronted “all men and women in uniform” on the planet Earth. This is Trump rhetoric. It is distressing.

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But then everything about the Khadr story puzzles and saddens me. I don’t grasp the concept of U.S. soldiers’ families suing the enemy individually in wartime for what they see as wrongful death.

Did any battlefield ever offer anything else?

hmallick@thestar.ca

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