What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.

I came to political consciousness with John F. Kennedy's magnificent 1961 Inaugural Address. It seemed the start of something fresh and exciting, and it was.

The two-war strategy was a product of the cold war, when we had to have the ability to fight the Russians on the plains of Europe and fight the Chinese on the Korean peninsula at the same time. That costs an awful lot of money.

We`re facing a very different sort of threat now, a more amorphous threat, al Qaeda, terrorism, and so on. And so the military has abandoned the two-war strategy.

For me, a really radical position for journalism to take is to stop being cynical. Cynicism is what passes for insight among the mediocre.

I believe, I believe that the people who voted in those primaries for Donald Trump were at least helping him along with his message of hate toward immigrants, toward Muslims.

Political courage requires clarity. The Obama Administration chose the tortured route of arguing the legality of the individual mandate via the interstate commerce clause for one simple reason: it did not want to take the political risk of allowing opponents to call it a tax increase. That was stupid. The Republicans were calling it a tax increase anyway.