“There is a small industry out there called media training. It offers i...” — Neil Macdonald Quote

There is a small industry out there called media training. It offers instruction on how to 'control a narrative,' to use that awful term. Most politicians are clients.

The hungry little radge never takes a vacation, which is why, when legislatures aren't sitting and other news-generating institutions are on summer schedule, assignment desks will pounce on anything that even smells like news.

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.

The other danger of the Snowden disclosures, of course, is that they reveal methods that should make any sensible person more careful about what he or she says on a cellphone or landline, or in an email.

I'm never going to wake up and look in the mirror and think, 'Yes, I'll go out and meet people.' Most of the time, you wake up, look in the mirror, and want to give up. And that doesn't change. It isn't awful; it's just the way I feel.

I have an awful lot of energy.

It's exhausting to always be writing and thinking about a new person being racist or sexist or otherwise awful. It's exhausting to feel compelled on a consistent basis to defend your claim to dignity.

I don't particularly like children. That sounds awful, but I have nothing to say to them.

Donald Trump has been president for nearly three years. He's been on Twitter for more than 10. Yet the only thing more surprising than Trump's increasingly awful, hideously unpresidential, deeply divisive tweets is that we still manage to be surprised by them.