On CJAD800 with Brian Lilley I discussed the history of jiggery-pokery and worse in U.S. presidential elections.
“It isn’t silent majorities that drive things, but vocal minorities. Don’t count heads; count decibels.”
George Jonas in National Post May 4, 2013 [as part of “A reader asks if I have learned some ‘home truths’ in three decades of commenting on world affairs. I think I have. Here are a few, in no particular order”]
“Of course, it would be worth while to pay a big price to get a well-informed people. At the present moment we are paying an abominably big price to get a more and more ill-informed people.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly, as header quotation on Dale Ahlquist “Chesterton University” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
In my latest Epoch Times column I said the scariest thing about the current debate over social programs is that there isn’t one. We tried 30 years ago, realized it was hard, gave up and spent our way to economic and social ruin.
“Power is always dangerous. It attracts the worst and corrupts the best.”
Ragnar Lothbrok, quoted in an email from a friend, and it turns out to be from a TV series called Vikings, in 2015 (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3623674/characters/nm1379938).
In my latest Loonie Politics column I take up my dusty cudgel on the crucial point that our whole system of government crumples if the legislators we elect cannot control the executive we do not elect. It was true in the days of Bad King John and George III, and it’s true in those of Justin Trudeau.
“To speak of Dickens is to think of Bumble the beadle, and that carries our mind at once to a whole crowd of thick-headed magistrates, interfering philanthropists, tyrannical administrators of the Poor Law, and the like. Have you ever noticed the fact that in Dickens, in Shakespeare, in Fielding, in the whole range of English literature, a person in petty authority, a minor official hardly ever appears, except to be made ridiculous? There seems to be a deep conviction in our minds that the man who carries some wand of office is more likely than other men to be half knave and wholly fool.”
Transcript from the improbably surviving one of two records used to transport C.S. Lewis’s May 1941 talk to Icelanders, which we don’t even know if it was ever broadcast, quoted in Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis
In my latest National Post column I say the reason neither party can pull ahead in the American Presidential contest is that they’re both right about how awful their opponent is and dead wrong about how good their candidate is.