A nation that hates politics will not long survive as a democracy.

Here you had John McCain and Lindsey Graham in a very principled way standing up and defending Barack Obama. You had people like Gene Robinson and a lot of other liberals, who said, and this I personally agree with, however flawed Rand Paul was as a messenger, we need a debate about this. The administration has not been forthcoming enough about its drone policy.

God forbid that Americans earning, say, more than $1 million a year be asked to pony up a little more in taxes to support a larger military at a time when, we are told over and over, the country is in the middle of a war on terror. Millionaires can't be asked to sacrifice even just a little bit. No, they deserve to have their taxes cut while others fight and die.

When [Republicans] say they can reduce taxes and trim deficits at the same time, they are either deluded or deceptive, and they are playing voters for fools.

At the heart of my argument is the view that religious faith, far from being inevitably on the side of the status quo, should on principle hold this world to higher standards.

The closeness [of Rex Tillerson] to [Vladimir] Putin will be one of the unifying issues between the Republican critics and Democratic critics.

The new culture war is about national identity rather than religion and 'transcendent authority.' It focuses on which groups the United States will formally admit to residence and citizenship. It asks the same question as the old culture war: 'Who are we?' But the earlier query was primarily about how we define ourselves morally. The new question is about how we define ourselves ethnically, racially and linguistically. It is, in truth, one of the oldest questions in our history, going back to our earliest immigration battles of the 1840s and 1850s.