Blowing Smoke

War bestows upon the front-line journalist the chance to wear its badges, suffer its extremes of feeling and be able to tell the stories and write the book afterwards. Dangerous as it occasionally is, it offers the opportunity to have had the fun. It is work that influential columnist Christie Blatchford, writing for the National Post in 2006, declared to be infinitely preferable to the beat in Ottawa, where politicians blow smoke up one another’s bums for a tedious time.

~ Noah Richler What We Talk About When We Talk About War