In my latest National Post column I ask why, if Orange Man Bad has swept aside the U.S. Constitution while we in Canada uphold peace, order and good government, Donald Trump is having trouble getting his budget past his own party in Congress while Mark Carney isn’t bothering submitting his to Parliament.
In my latest Epoch Times column I call it the height of mendacious hypocrisy, not to mention fatal to national self-confidence, for Canadian elites to keep insisting that the country is on stolen land they have no intention of giving back.
“When Donald Trump was elected President of the United States in November 2016 an immediate reaction in the media, among Democrats and discomforted Republicans, and many besides, was that he should not be ‘normalized’. That such an ignorant, intemperate, corrupt buffoon was President was an enormity that was to the country’s shame and must be resisted. When Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister in November 2015 there was no such reaction in Canada. That a callow young man who had led a meandering life, who had never shown any interest in government, who was evidently both conceited and silly, should be Prime Minister simply because he had been famous since shortly after his conception, was nice looking, and was the son of a man who had been a bad Prime Minister for fifteen years over 30 years before, should sweep the country in the 2015 election was shameful. No one seems to have noticed.”
John Pepall in Dorchester Review #29 (Vol. 14 #3 Autumn 2024)
“The two strategies for ending the culture war – incremental restrictions, and ‘leaving it up to the states’ – have a history. In the 1800s, the Democratic Party wanted to leave slavery up to the states. In those days too Democrats were ‘pro-choice,’ but about slavery, not abortion. In those days too they thought ‘leaving it up to the states’ would end their culture war. That hope was futile. It didn’t end the culture war over slavery, but only prolonged and inflamed it. Eventually we had a real war which nobody wanted. ‘Leaving it up to the states’ won’t end the culture war over abortion, any more than it ended the culture war over slavery. As slavery exercised a malignant influence on our politics and culture then, so abortion exercises a beastly influence on our politics and culture today. Ironically, in our time the mantle of ‘leaving it up to the states’ has been taken up not by Democrats, but by the Republicans. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision is treated as an excuse to drop the whole issue. I am not surprised that the Democrats of our own day take ‘joy,’ as they say, in the liberty to kill children, but I am gravely disappointed that the Trump/Vance campaign is repeating the mistakes which the other party made over slavery. One would have hoped that they would take their inspiration not from Stephen Douglas, but from his opponent Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance, we are listening.”
J Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” September 9, 2024 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/ending-the-culture-war-over-abortion]
“Business is taboo at the dinner table, but crime and criminals aren’t, and the Rosenberg case hogged the conversation all through the anchovy fritters, partridge in casserole with no olives in the sauce, cucumber mousse, and Creole curds and cream. Of course it was academic, since the Rosenbergs had been dead for years, but the young princes had been dead for five centuries, and [Nero] Wolfe had once spent a week investigating that case, after which he removed More’s Utopia from his bookshelves because More had framed Richard III.”
Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue in Rex Stout Death of a Doxy; Wolfe had been reading Invitation to an Inquest and had ordered a transcript of the trial.
“an earsore”
A caller to our “Thinking Aloud” radio program on CFRA in Ottawa Oct. 21, 2004 [specifically re Teresa Heinz Kerry]
“Angry people want you to see how powerful they are. Loving people want you to see how powerful you are.”
Chief Red Eagle, quoted in an email from a friend July 6, 2024 without further attribution [but it is widely available online and it seems that he's a real person who really did say it, William Weatherford/Red Eagle being born around 1765 (or 1780 or 1781), dying in 1824, and being a mixed-race Creek who fought American forces but was also a significant slaveholder in Alabama].
“Democrats remain stuck on what Barack Obama used to call admiring the problem…”
Susan Glasser, “Staff writer, @NewYorker”, on X 10/7/24 [specifically re Biden having gone senile thus jeopardizing the election, but clearly it applies far more widely]