“Look, I love [his] work. But have you seen the man trying to communicate without a script? He’s about as articulate as a bag of potato chips. Warren Beatty couldn’t win a debate with a mime.”
Richard Roper in the Chicago Sun-Times regarding a potential Beatty presidential run quoted in Globe & Mail September 7, 1999
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say Pierre Poilievre’s overwhelming victory in the Conservative leadership contest, and Jean Charest’s hollow showing, demonstrates yet again that snobbery is no antidote to populism.
“there is little reason to believe that this socialism [that he saw coming in Britain and the U.S.] will mean the advent of the civilization of which orthodox socialists dream. It is much more likely to present fascist features. That would be a strange answer to Marx’s prayer. But history sometimes indulges in jokes of questionable taste.”
Joseph Schumpeter Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
In my latest Epoch Times column I say we should be very wary of proposals from people who express angry ignorance about our Constitutional monarchy, including “republicans” who have no idea what a republic actually is.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the goal of Parliamentary redistricting should be improving government not indulging a penchant for regional bickering. Happily, adding a lot more MPs will help achieve the former and avoid the latter.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I praise Mikhail Gorbachev for the fundamental decency that led him to permit the peaceful dissolution of Soviet Communism. But I insist that he was no statesman, and no thinker, and that credit for ending the Cold War properly belongs with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and their supporters.
“As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”
James Madison, quoted by Christopher Buckley in National Review November 22, 1999
Re a lot of the kids in Haight-Ashbury already by summer 1967 “They’re like zombies, people with deadened nervous systems, people who see themselves as skeletons festooned with flesh.... The result is a young person who has barbed-wire guts, to use a phrase suggested by [Erik] Erikson.”
Nicholas von Hoffman, We are the people our parents warned us against