To go into Ukraine and to take over, to invade Crimea, is a huge step. And [Russian President Vladimir Putin] would only have done it with a president who has shown from the very beginning that [President Obama] is living in a fantasy world...They imagine the world as a new interconnected world where climate change is the biggest threat and they are shocked that the Russians actually are interested in territory.

The peasants have seen the future - Greece and France - and concluded that it does not work. Hence their opposition to Obama's proudly transformational New Foundation agenda. Their logic is impeccable: Only the most blinkered intellectual could be attempting to introduce social democracy to America precisely when the world's foremost exemplar of that model - Europe - is in chaotic meltdown.

Better to be paralyzed from the neck down than the neck up

After the Soviet collapse, Marxism is a relic, a pathetic anachronism reduced to its last redoubts: North Korea, Cuba, and the English departments of the more expensive American universities.

Ted Cruz is not the official spokesman for American conservatism. If you want somebody who has been out there, who has offered an alternative - the person who offered an alternative, for example, is... Paul Ryan.

In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.

I don't mind going into a liberal lion's den. That's where you test yourself.