Even non-democratic allies no longer trust America. Barack Obama has alienated our most important and longest standing Arab allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Both the anti-Muslim Brotherhood and the anti-Iran Arab states have lost respect for him.

You will be a happier person if you don't do what you want to do, most of the time

Of all the characteristics needed for both a happy and morally decent life, none surpasses gratitude. Grateful people are happier, and grateful people are more morally decent.

I recall asking the late eminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, in a public forum in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, if he would say that America was, all things considered, a better, i.e., more moral, society than Soviet society. He said he would not.

Who has created more peace in the world, the Peace Corps or the Marine Corps?

I am supposed to worry about oceans rising 70 years from now, on climate models that have already proven to be utterly flawed?

Most young people have tremendous respect for older people's views.