In my latest National Post column I say, as a very reluctant interventionist, that the time has come to oust Venezuela’s dictator.

“There is a proof that common sense and the higher mysteries lie very close together. It is the fact that they are frequently and even continually absent simultaneously from the same person.”

G.K. Chesterton in Daily News April 2, 1904, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 # 6 4-5/05

“When the horse dies, dismount.”

“Anonymous”, quoted by Malcolm Hamilton in National Post Nov. 21, 2003

“The idea that church and state should never mix has always been popular among those who think churches should not exist…. To a faithful Christian mind, or Jewish, or Muslim, or Hindu, or Sikh … the issue can’t be as simple as that. The elector votes with his whole heart…. Moreover, the state does not exist in a moral and spiritual vacuum… Government and electorate are alike bound, even when they deny it, to standards deeper and older than themselves…. even in our present rather sunken condition of public life, the vast majority of people are prepared to distinguish right from wrong under earnest cross-examination. And so powerful is the hold of nature, and nature's law upon them, that they will more or less agree on the moral inadvisability of murder, extortion, theft, perversion, fraud, perjury and so forth. This hardly means they are free of temptation to crime themselves, in their private lives. Nor am I denying the existence of a growing vanguard who in the absence of real social pressure are prepared to argue that fair is foul and foul is fair.”

David Warren in Ottawa Citizen Nov. 20, 2005

“a man whose affection for the arts knows all bounds…”

Scott Feschuk in Maclean’s May 14, 2007 (the actual target was Stephen Harper)

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say despite media jeering at Trump for supposedly caving in, the real losers were… just about everybody.