Bill Clinton gives the appearance of taking stands-for some sort of tax cut, some sort of welfare reform, some sort of balanced budget-but these are ploys, mirages: they exist only to undermine positions taken by the Republicans. He doesn't fight for anything substantive-except of course, re-election. ...He has fallen into the dangerous habit of lip synching the presidency: he gives the appearance of leadership, but not the substance.

You know, larger-than-life politicians have larger-than-life strengths and larger-than-life weaknesses.

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.

Dictating to dictators doesn't work; they are congenitally delusional about their own indispensability.

I've been described as a grizzled political veteran.

Affirmative action was always racial justice on the cheap.

Back in George W. Bush's second term, when diplomatic realism began to overtake foolish bellicosity, the president developed one of his patented nicknames for the two most powerful neoconservative journalists, William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer: he called them 'the Bomber Boys.'