There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today's pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent.

It is an axiom of political life that you never raise expectations, whether in a political or military campaign, because your defeats are then magnified and your victories discounted.

The medical malpractice system is totally out of control. Everybody in the system knows it. And it's not just of the outrageous judgments, it's not just the fact that some people get millions of dollars, others get nothing, and the one people who get rich are lawyered, it's just that it causes doctors to practice defensive medicine.

The liberal vision of America is that it should be less arrogant, less unilateral, more internationalist. In Obama's view, America would subsume itself under a fuzzy internationalism in which the international community, which I think is a fiction, governs itself through the U.N.

Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country - and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.

Third parties in America gravitate not only to the extremes, but to irrelevance. (John Anderson's upcoming presidential campaign will undoubtedly confirm both tendencies.)

I think if you're going to master policy, especially world affairs, you've got to know history.