By Conrad Black
National Post May 02, 2009.
It must be said that Barack Obama tosses out apparently feckless suggestions about important matters rather flippantly. He wants to share the wealth; told a pre-election questioner that he would raise capital gains taxes even if it reduced government revenues, out of “fairness”; and has transformed the foreign visit into an itinerant, vicarious, confessional, where he seeks expiation for his country and his own predecessors, interspersed with the exchange of unlikely gifts — an iPod to the British and Commonwealth monarch of 57 years, and the “Idiot’s Bible” of Latin American socialism from Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Continue Reading »
Posted: January 22, 2009 by NP Editor Full Comment.
Irwin Cotler
The Israeli-Hamas conflict, with its evocative images of human suffering, has engaged the hearts and minds of people the world over. Indeed, the death of any innocent — Israeli or Palestinian — is a tragedy, and no one can fail to be moved by the human suffering and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Continue Reading »
Lorne Gunter, National Post
Published: Monday, December 29, 2008
Suppose you lived in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills and people from the suburb of Scarborough — about 10 kilometres away — were firing as many as 100 rockets a day into your yard, your kids’ school, the strip mall down the street and your dentist’s office.
A trip to the cleaners to pick up your shirts would be a life-risking act. Going to the grocery store would involve thinking through in your mind the location of all the shelter sites along the way, in case rockets started raining down on the road as you drove by. Continue Reading »
By John Thompson
There are a lot of people who seem cheered by the weakened status of the United States at the moment. They are fools and one can only hope that if their wishes come to pass, they become the first victims of the world that emerges when the Pax Americana ends. Alas, the universe simply isn’t that fair.
Peace is something whose existence we can construe from the occasional absence of war. In European history, between the creation of the modern nation state with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 (which ended the ghastly Thirty Years War) and the final downfall of Napoleon after the battle of Waterloo in 1815, there was scarcely a year without a war going on somewhere on the continent. Continue Reading »
Obama’s victory marked by a wealth of opportunity
Posted: November 15, 2008, 10:30 AM by Kelly McParland
Conrad Black, Full Comment, U.S. Politics
Having confidently predicted the victory of John McCain, and having stuck with that until his blunderbuss campaign blew up, I will offer a few thoughts to the incoming U.S. administration. Rarely have such comments been so profoundly unsolicited. Barack Obama has ignited more excitement and positive curiosity than any incoming government leader in the world since John F. Kennedy. He starts with an immense and fervent public relations honeymoon.
As one who drove with university friends in the early and mid-Sixties for a few weeks each spring in the United States, and well remembers the racial segregation even in the North, and the idle hopelessness of the sprawling, surly, black slums of the great cities of the North and Mid-West, I can only render deep homage to the reformist conscience of America. Continue Reading »
Given that free advice is usually worth what one pays for it, but that ideas do sometimes drop out of the sky, I’m taking the liberty of sending this to you. It’s been on my mind.
Gwyn Dyer has recently predicted that a day will come when Euro and US powers will throw up their political hands in disgust and leave the near and middle east to its own political devices – leaving the people there to create their own nation states.
The entire area is the birthplace of Western Civilization. Its peoples have been trampled over by as many overlords as history records. Current borders were imposed by outsiders.
Rivers don’t divide, they unite like the veins of a leaf. The valleys of river systems form coherent ecosystems. Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has settled river valleys. Why not apply this reality, and historical tribalism, to new states’ borders. Continue Reading »
