When Donald Trump yells at his supporters to throw somebody out of the hall - and usually that somebody is brown or black or often is - that means he's galvanizing a kind of mob spirit, which is also a racial mob spirit.

Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked. Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.

This is what Newt Gingrich has wrought - is a politics in which it's very easy to destroy and very hard to build.

You don`t have to be foreign policy expert to succeed as president, but you have to have ice water for blood.

I think that bias is not a fixed thing. It's not as though some people are biased and others are not. It ebbs and flows. It can be manipulated. It changes according to a person's circumstances.

I would caution anyone who thinks the solution is to get out to realize that Iraq will be our problem, whether we're there or not, for years to come. It will not be Vietnam; it will not let us go home and lick our wounds.

Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.