“the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”
George Washington’s 1789 Inaugural Address [https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/inaugtxt.html].
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say it would help us clean up political discourse as well as understand the Middle East if friends and foes alike could set aside head-banging and acknowledge what Trump has characteristically gotten very right, and characteristically gotten badly wrong, on Iran.
“The president [Ronald Reagan], apparently, was so totally unaware of where his foreign policy was that he had to appoint a distinguished commission to help him locate it, and when they commissioners called him in to testify, he told them, essentially, that he couldn’t remember what it looked like. Now, if Richard Nixon had claimed something like that you would at least have had the comfort of knowing he was lying. You could trust Nixon that way. But with this president, you have this nagging feeling that he’s telling the truth.”
Dave Barry Greatest Hits [re Iran-Contra mostly].
In my latest Loonie Politics column I draw a connection between the mental paralysis of cultural relativism and the inability of Western nations to defend themselves militarily.
In my latest National Post column I call on Parliament to rein in the overweening pride and overreaching presumptions of Canada’s courts, especially the Supreme Court.
In my latest National Post column I urge media, observers and citizen-voters to devote less attention to partisan ephemera and more to deep structural problems that will bring self-government crashing down if not addressed and fairly soon.
“When there are people who espouse the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy or the Tate murders or the Marin County Courthouse kidnappings and killings or the University of Wisconsin bombing and killing as ‘revolutionary acts,’ then we are dealing with people who are merely hiding psychosis behind a political mask.”
Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [he also warns that it is counterproductive, disgusting and scaring normal people].
“Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul...”
“Thomas Paine” quoted as 2nd of 3 header quotations in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [before even the table of contents].