Hillary Clinton could barely wipe the well-rehearsed rictus smile off her face Monday night during her first public showdown with Donald Trump. The woman with more skeletons in her closet than Dr. Frankenstein could only marvel at how easily she was skating while Trump thrashed in a verbal melt of his own making. 

To paraphrase the late NFL coach Dennis Green, “He was who we thought he was.”

Another Sunday. Another set of sit-down, fist-raised protests against the American national anthem by NFL players inspired by San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

Kaepernick, influenced by the radical black activist/ radio host he’s been dating, has decided the police in the U.S. disproportionately target blacks. So he will kneel in protest until this abomination (in his mind) ends. As we saw Sunday, this has inspired copy cats who also want to be seen as cutting-edge. 

Conservative Party leadership candidate Kellie Leitch made news when she called for a values test on all newcomers to Canada. As opposed to Donald Trump, Leitch didn’t specify which immigrants she thought might not adhere to the fairly liberal value set that defines Canada at the present moment. But it wasn’t hard to unlock the riddle.

The precious former PBS bore Garrison Keillor has taken pen (no doubt a quill) to paper in the Washington Post to warn followers of Donald Trump of impending disappointment. (http://goo.gl/a9yN0J) They’re not going to get what they think they’ll get from him.

Like many progressives, Keillor thinks the road to virtue comes via demolishing Trump personally. The more condescending the prose, the greater the glow for his personal halo. By that standard, his WaPo rant— he says Trump is running to win affection from NYC elites— must be worth a thousand years of liberal indulgences. 

Everyone knew that the National Energy Board’s hearings in Montreal concerning a trans-Canada pipeline were going to be divisive. Montreal mayor Denis Coderre had already signalled that, on behalf of his constituents, he would protest the environmental impact of the Energy East pipeline though the region. He would be joined by green activists protesting that fossil fuels are the devil’s work.

There was a telling moment last spring when Barack Obama’s farewell tour brought him to the Canadian Parliament. Obama was there to bask in the rapture of Canadians who, stuck with the bland Stephen Harper the past decade, were thirsting for a little something-something in their coffee. 

Unsurprisingly, Obama received a fawning welcome from the left side of the political spectrum assembled that day in Ottawa. The first black American president is as much a talisman of the Canadian left as he is for the progressives in America who believe, as Obama does, that “the arc of moral history always bends toward justice.” 

The showbiz maxim says you want to be the person who follows the person who succeeds a big star. We had a few examples this week that putting on big shoes can be a perilous fate.

Jian Ghomeshi was a sensation at CBC Radio in every way. A musician, a culture junkie and—for CBC the most important element— a man of colour, Ghomeshi raised the Radio branch to its long-desired moment of Zen. No longer was it Michael Enright playing Stan Getz or Stuart McLean ripping off Garrison Keillor. Or the geeks of Quirks & Quarks.

Von Clausewitz might have observed that the Olympics are simply politics pursued by other means.

The value of the Olympics is that they can be made to mean pretty much whatever you want them to mean. Myth making. Policy affirmation. Program shattering. The Rio Summer Olympics— almost a week old by now— have ample political implications for when things go right— and when they go wrong. 

The farewell tour from The Tragically Hip is one of the compelling stories of this summer. Travelling coast-to-coast in the shadow of lead singer Gord Downie’s terminal brain-cancer diagnosis the Hip have been selling out venues across the country. The finale in their hometown of Kingston, Ont., will be a national TV spectacle. Tickets are being sold online for tens of thousands of dollars. 

I loved being a liberal back in the day. Loved the speeches. Loved the passion. Loved the Hollywood A-listers working above their intellectual pay grade. Then, as Irving Kristol said, I got mugged by reality. Talk is cheap. Symbols don’t create prosperity. Hollywood isn’t reality. You only had to look at Philadelphia this week to see why.

Apparently Melania Trump is not going to be winning a scholarship for journalism any time soon. In her much-awaited speed to the Republican convention in Cleveland on Monday, Mrs. Trump blotted her copy with a clumsy plagiarism of a 2008 speech by Michelle Obama.

In a sentence-by-sentence lifting of some boilerplate about her family values, she managed to blunt what had, up till then, been a positive impression on America on behalf of her husband. Innocuous as the Trump campaign tried to make it sound, plagiarism is still unacceptable.

“In the old age black was not counted fair/ but now is black beauty’s successive heir”— Shakespeare Sonnet 127

It took 400 years, but The Bard might well have thrilled to the 2008 election of Barack Obama as president of the United States. To see blackness counted fair in the land that indulged slavery and its offshoots for so many centuries was drama in the vein of Othello. Even his opponents acknowledged the moment’s significance.

With the Summer Olympics hoving into view, it’s time to ask whether the IOC is missing a big opportunity by not including Grievance as a new medal sport. Just imagine the competitors for the gold this year.

I just finished watching the new O.J. Simpson series produced by ESPN. With all the stunning material available, the only surprise is that there isn’t a TV series done each year. His tragic tale is rife with metaphor. This new series, O.J. In America, decided to dabble in the racial politics of a man who was widely accepted by the white community and shunned by progressive blacks. 

There are two constants in the debate over gun control. First, the people making the loudest noises about guns typically know the least about how they work, what constitutes an automatic weapon and how lethal they are. 

The second constant is the same people decrying guns typically get their legal advice on gun purchasing from experts such as Kirstie Alley or Sean Penn talking to Jimmy Fallon. In short, it’s the bland leading the blind.

Upon the unveiling of his prime ministerial portrait on Parliament Hill, former PM Paul Martin was asked for a few well-chosen words about the role of government in our lives. After all, Martin was the courageous finance minister who got government debt off the backs of Canadians in the 1990s with an austerity program that helped Canada weather the  financial  turmoil of the next decade— a meltdown that almost bankrupted the United States.

But while the painting hanging over his shoulder looked like Martin, the person talking is now a changed man. 

My recent column on the transgendered bathroom debate provoked some predictable liberal outrage. Perhaps most telling: “What are you so worried about? There is no record of the transgendered assaulting people in bathrooms. Don’t transgendered people have rights too? In Europe, public washrooms are often unisex.”

Points of intersection between Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump are few, if any. But those that exist illustrate a singular truth of the current electoral climate: Don’t take the underdog for granted. As Stephen Harper and the Republican Party have learned to their chagrin, if you set your rival’s bar of accomplishment too low, you won’t be in office for long.