Tag: Donald Trump

If you want to know just how quickly a flawed but functioning democracy can descend into anti-democratic demagoguery, may I direct your attention south of our border. If you want to know how close to (or far from) that less than ideal we already are in Nova Scotia, may I direct your attention to the […]

The day after the US mid-terms, Donald Trump staged a rambling 90-minute press conference to spin the dross of Republican electoral loss into the gold of never-ending Trumpian triumph, and thus re-establish his personal ownership of the news cycle. The press made it easy for him. I’ve never been a fan of press-conference journalism. It […]

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner July 23, 2018. Americans are right to be outraged at the outrageous Russian interference in their 2016 presidential elections. They are correct to be appalled not only that their Putin-puttana-ed president continues to pretend that what happened didn’t happen, but also that their commander-in-chief and his principle-free, […]

  This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner July 9, 2018. “Border disputes do not go away; they fester. And when other factors push them back to the surface — the discovery of valuable resources, an assertion of national pride, a mishap at sea — the stakes can suddenly rise to a point where […]

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examine on April 23, 2018. “We need to go forward, but progress isn’t always a straight line or a smooth path.” Barack Obama victory speech, November 7, 2012 How to explain our current political whipsaw? You go to sleep one night knowing 6,000 delegates to this weekend’s federal […]

This column originally appeared in the July-August 2017 issue of Atlantic Business Magazine. For each of you who has lamented the lack of business acumen among our political ruling class, or longed for a shimmering titan of industry to step from the boardroom and lead us all to the promised political paradise of tax-limited, bureaucracy-free corporatist […]

You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand You see somebody naked and you say, “Who is that man?” You try so hard but you don’t understand Just what you will say when you get home Because something is happening here but you don’t know what it is Do you, Mr. Jones? […]

If you want to understand the un-understandable appeal of Donald Trump, you could do worse than begin with Stephen McNeil. That is not as far-fetched as it might initially seem. We are not talking here about Stephen McNeil, the individual, but Stephen McNeil, the symbolic end result of far too many years of all-too-usual politics […]