Our distraction du jour is the sudden revelation that Oprah Winfrey, the self-made billionaire conduit of moist feelings and product placement, may challenge Donald Trump, huckster suprème, for the presidency he won in 2016. Winfrey’s letter-perfect job application dropped last Sunday night at, appropriately, the Golden Globe Awards. 

Everyone has their goals for 2018. A cursory twirl around the internet will reveal any number of scribblers who’ve ventured a list calling for world peace and freedom to the oppressed masses.

My list is somewhat less ambitious. Here are simple requests that would make (my) world a better place in the next 12 months.

As the Chinese will readily tell you, Canada’s prime minister has no self-esteem issues. Justin Trudeau parades his moral certainty the way Charlton Heston brandished the Ten Commandments in the movies. It was Trudeau’s insistence on playing to his base on social issues rather than engaging the reality of Chinese diplomacy that scuttled the promised trade deals with the regime in Beijing.

After the Alabama senatorial election, the prevailing media opinion is that the state is Yahoo Central, a boiling cauldron of humanity’s worst instincts. The highly regrettable candidacy of Roy Moore, 40-year-old charges of sexual indiscretion, six-shooters, confederate statues… the special election had all the clichés beloved of the coastal elites.

The Donald Trump/ Russia collusion case has only one certainty: Anyone who gets too close will get hurt. Ten months since Trump’s inauguration, the attempt by the stunned liberal left to negate his election has spun a web of deceit and confusion.

Now appearing in a hell near you: Matt Lauer. The uber-successful NBC host of the Today Show has become the latest news notable to be removed from his job for sexual indiscretions. An unnamed NBC colleague accused Lauer of inappropriate sexual behaviour. The network also hinted at other unsavoury stuff in its press release announcing his abrupt firing.

The lame tweet said it all for Mainstreet, the polling firm hired by PostNews to monitor the 2017 Calgary civic election

I am re-reading the diaries of satirist David Sedaris, who is a very sly funny man. Hearing to his trenchant observations on people from the 1990s and 2000s reminded me that social critics never saw themselves at the centre of the culture. While, like Michaelangelo, artists worked for popes and princes, the artistic class revelled in having their best friends in low places.

It was inevitable. The prime minister who wanted to make everyone happy is suddenly finding out that the math of nice is hard. Very hard.

I was walking along a major downtown street in Toronto recently and had to step around a homeless person sleeping on a heat grate. I’ve seen this pathetic sight for many years now in Toronto and always wonder, “Why don’t the cops remove him? Where are the people to care for him? Can’t we do better?”

This week saw a walkout by Liberal members of the Committee on the Status of Women over the nomination of a Conservative pro-life chairwoman. With their prime minister having forbidden pro-life elements from his caucus, discussion of the new chair was more than unwanted. It was unthinkable for Liberals. 

Progressive: You can’t blame a young Latino for something his parents did 20 years ago.

Also Progressive: Whites can never make up for things their ancestors did 200 years ago. 

“A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul” —George Bernard Shaw

While no one would suggest that Justin Trudeau is a great consumer of Shavian literature— he’s a feelings kind of guy—he has digested at least one morsel of GBS political cynicism. 

As the DACA debate rages in the U.S., which is the greater public complaint with immigration? 

A) The flooding of Europe with millions of undocumented refugees, a southern U.S. border as porous as cheesecloth or the thousands of refugees wandering across the Quebec/ Manitoba border this summer?

Or B) The smug assumptions made long ago by the political and media establishment that created these crises and deceptions?

A judge has thrown out Sarah Palin’s libel lawsuit against the New York Times. Even though the Times admitted it lied about saying she caused the Gabby Gifford shooting with her talk. Even though the paper admitted its editing process had failed. This judge still figured the Grey Lady had not acted with malicious intent in saying Palin was accessory to a near-murder.