I've been described as a grizzled political veteran.

I'm in favour of politicians having extra-marital relationships. Oh yeah. It makes them more understanding of the flaws that the rest of us have.

Americans who feel the most ignored these days are not the screamers. They are the solid citizens who are sick to death of pols who play to the rant.

You know, larger than life is always better than smaller than life in politicians. And, you know, God save us from mediocrities.

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.

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.

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.