Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

The one man more responsible for destroying the Democratic centrist revival, for throwing away the Clinton legacy, and for suicidally pitching his party to the populist left was Al Gore

What I love about the Internet and what I try to do on the issues is insist upon the ability to have bad taste if one wants.

If religion is about truth, why is it so afraid of error?

There is no escaping this fight. It is civilization or Jihadism. We can and should debate tactics; but the sides are clear enough.

How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?

I actually bought the argument that if we democratized Iraq, we could create a space for venting some of the stuff that's going on in the Middle East in these autocratic regimes that is expressing itself through jihadism, because it has nowhere else to express itself.