In my latest Loonie Politics column I lament that far too many voters still believe politicians can shower them with free money and not germinating a nasty crop of debt and inflation instead of wealth and social services.
In my latest National Post column I summon the shade of former U.S. President and master of Realpolitik Richard M. Nixon to discuss the ominous parallel implications of the collapse of the Afghan and Vietnamese missions for Western credibility in the world.
“It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard in 1978 (www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978)
In my latest Epoch Times column I say our constitution has deteriorated so far into populism that elections are no longer about issues, only who gets unchecked power until the next vote.
“Is there a possibility that the government of nations may fall into the hands of men who teach the most disconsolate of all creeds, that men are but fireflies, and that this all is without a father?”
John Quincy Adams, in the Letters of Publicola, quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind [Kirk added that the specific target was Thomas Paine and that Adams went on that rather than such an outcome “Give us again the gods of the Greeks.”]
“A hasty general is the worst of generals nowadays; the best is a sort of von Moltke, who is passive if any man ever was passive; who is ‘silent in seven languages’…”
Walter Bagehot Physics and Politics
“The underlying cause of the dependent underclass… is a subset of that fact [Solzhenitsyn’s explanation of the Soviet nightmare “Man has forgotten God”]: ‘American policymakers have forgotten God.’”
Tom Bethell, quoting Marvin Olasky, in Turning Back the Welfare State: A Report on a Major Conference of the Claremont Institute (1994)
Dr. Tammy Nemeth, of the “Nemeth Report” on international activists’ campaign against Alberta oil, interviewed me for her podcast on the Chinese Communist Party’s exploitation of western concerns about climate to further its sinister geopolitical ambitions.