Neil Macdonald

“America's habit of distilling vicious, pitiless, cynical reality into a morality play can be an oasis.”

“While Trump, and, yes, Biden spend time with wealthy donors, Warren refuses big money. She also refused to participate in a Fox News town hall, wanting nothing to do with what she calls Fox's 'hate for profit' business plan. She is unafraid to name her enemies.”

“Among other things, Netanyahu is a master of timing. His emphasis on irrationality coincides with the annual burst of anti-Israel, anti-U.S. malevolence, delivered from the podum of the United Nations by Iran's bombastic and somewhat clownish president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

“In the U.S. - yes, sorry, the U.S. - surgeons and doctors usually give you their cell phone numbers, and tell you to call anytime if anything goes wrong. They often call to follow up after a visit, or go over test results. They have email.”

“Very deliberately, the central bankers have punished savers, pushing interest rates so low that any truly safe investment - and older people are always advised to play it safe - yields a negative return when inflation is factored in.”

“Conservatives generally think it's best to take enemies at their word, to believe their bombast and threats and make preparations, rather than dismiss them as crackpots and regret it.”

“The fact is, no modern president, Democrat or Republican, has shown the level of contempt for taking questions from the media that Stephen Harper has demonstrated.”

“At the very least, Donald Trump and his most rabid followers have been objective allies of the white supremacist movement, even if they thought they weren't.”

“Yes, American medicine has its pathologies, but Canada's does, too, and we need to wake up. Government controls everything here, and governments only pay attention to polls at election time, not to angry patients.”

“I often wonder, when I hear some important speaker rattle off the rote land acknowledgements that have become the standard introduction for official events in this country, whether Indigenous people are getting sick of being constantly and dolefully reminded of who owns their land now.”

“Canada needs to be flood-proofed, and somebody has to pay for it. Yes, there are other threats, too - fire, hail, wind, snow load, permafrost loss and shoreline erosion will all cost a great deal of money to remediate - but flooding is the big, urgent one.”

“Personally, I saw no organized malevolence toward reporters in the IDF; I'd dealt with enough Israeli soldiers to know that many of them operated by the book. But I also knew very well that others among them were fanatics, some from ultra-nationalist settlements, and considered foreign journalists enemies of the Jewish State.”

“Elizabeth Warren fully intends to change the system, and says so. When she said how good it felt to be with working people in a workers' hall, you knew it wasn't a platitude.”

“Quibbling over the definition of genocide does nothing but help obscure the long history of vicious racism and undeniable suffering of Indigenous people in this country. It's bad enough whatever you want to call it.”

“I am delighted to see the government spending more money to improve Indigenous life, and I would be happy to see even more spent.”

“People who don't own dogs can stay out as late as they please, or drive off on a whim for the weekend, and go on holiday as long as they like, whenever they like, without arranging a kennel, then feeling guilty about arranging a kennel, and then spending even more money to have someone stay in the house and dogsit.”

“Maybe the Tea Party dream is coming true, and the next Republican presidential nominee will be a blunt-object, red-meat down-the-line rightie.”

“I don't know anyone who thinks the SNC Lavalin mess was well handled, and it was all driven by Justin Trudeau. A smart prime minister would have realized early that the situation was unwinnable, that trying to have a prosecutor overruled was unwise in the extreme, and let it go.”

“France has long been regarded as the most adept at stealing trade secrets.”

“Pro-Israel media 'watchdog' groups and other activists in Canada, the United States and the U.K. are quick to attack, characterizing reporters whose coverage they don't like as Israel-haters or anti-Semites, urging their readers to mount letter-writing campaigns.”