Barbara Amiel wrote the following in the current Maclean's:

What does it matter if one well-off elderly white woman with too many pairs of expensive shoes now finds her social life largely limited to visiting her dearly missed husband in a U.S. federal correctional institution.

My headline summarizes my feelings about that sentence. :)

I first saw in a Toronto Star column by Bob Hepburn in which he called for Conrad Black to be stripped of the Order of Canada.

Amiel also wrote the following:

In the early days of this awful saga, when hostile investors were orchestrating a financial squeeze play on Hollinger, we had an emergency telephone conference call with the Hollinger Inc. directors who included myself, former high commissioner Fredrik Eaton, Douglas Bassett, lawyer Maureen Sabia, and a man who was the recipient of many favours from Conrad, former ambassador Allan Gotlieb. The call was a disaster. The directors refused Conrad's request for more time to raise money. When the meeting ended, Conrad quickly hung up his phone. I did not. Nor did the other directors who, believing both of us off the line, abandoned their serious tone and began laughing and joking about the stew they had put Conrad in. "I should get an Oscar for my acting," said Gotlieb in reference to his performance as a concerned director. "I could barely stop myself from laughing when Barbara referred to her concern for Conrad's reputation," said Fred Eaton. The woman I had recommended for the board, my old schoolmate from St. Catharines, Ont., Maureen Sabia, sarcastically replied, "All she's worried about is her own reputation," and joined happily in the dissing of us both. Here, writ plainly, was the future. These people were among Conrad's oldest friends.

In my skimming of this 4,000-word diatribe, Amiel goes on to paint two of Black's biggest flaws as being innocence and excessive loyalty.

However, Conrad sought out friends like Henry Kissinger, who was once told that one problem with him was how he had forgotten all his old friends. Kissinger reportedly replied that the secret to his success was that he'd forgotten all his old friends.

That would appear to be the code followed by a certain class of people. One shouldn't bleat about it when karma works its magic.