Bush the Elder's stature as president grows with every passing year. He was the finest foreign policy president I've ever covered and a man who defied his party on tax increases while imposing budget restrictions on the Democrats.

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.

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.'

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

Diversity has been written into the DNA of American life; any institution that lacks a rainbow array has come to seem diminished, if not diseased.

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

Affirmative action was always racial justice on the cheap.