More Irishmen died fighting for Britain in World War I than died fighting against her in all of Ireland's bids for independence combined.

[democrats] hated Richard Nixon, and no wonder. It was Nixon who sent Alger Hiss to jail, and Nixon who waged the Vietnam War after the Democrats gave up.

Journalism can go right up to the door of the room in which the decisions are made. A novel can go inside the room - and inside the character's heads.

Elites are inevitable in politics. That is how politics is going to work. The question is, are your elites responsible, public-spirited? Do they think about the interests of others, not just themselves? And the story of Western politics since the beginning of the century is that as elites become more separated, more selfish, as they leave behind their populations and don't think about them, they become discredited. And the people look for alternatives. But the alternative is worse. Those rules of the game protect us all. And they are more precious than almost any political outcome.

The five million people who watch cable news are the political nation, the people who really care.

One of the things that always drives any practitioner of journalism crazy is you'll run it people who say why doesn't the media cover this or that? Well of course the media covered it. Why didn't you read about it? And, you know, it's, you know, there you are, it's not the journalist's job to knock down your door, you know, punch the URL into your computer and force you to stop watching the Kardashians and to read, you know, a report on integrity in government instead, it's your job.

Anybody who imagines that an election can be won under these circumstances by banging on about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright is ... to put it mildly ... severely under-estimating the electoral importance of pocketbook issues. We conservatives are sending a powerful, inadvertent message with this negative campaign against Barack Obama's associations and former associations: that we lack a positive agenda of our own and that we don't care about the economic issues that are worrying American voters.