We have staring us in the face here an enormous opportunity to actually find a way forward to have peace and stability in Syria, to reconstitute it. It'll take years to do that. This will not be an easy fight even with concerted coordination with respect to ISIL. But it is far more doable with that kind of approach than otherwise.

Those localized efforts take a long time and they don't deal with the larger issue of ISIL and the question of what you're going to do to really have a solution here. We have to save Syria.

For those of us who are fortunate to share an Irish ancestry, we take great pride in the contributions that Irish-Americans.

Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They have left the real stuff of their reputation bleaching behind them in the sun in this country.

It's pretty standard fare in political discourse. You misconstrue what somebody said. You isolate a statement, you lend your interpretation to it and then feign moral outrage. And Democrats have been doing it for years.

I think that our own crisis of democracy is in its own way affecting our ability to leverage in the same way that we used to in the world.

Confronting climate change is, in the long run, one of the greatest challenges that we face, and you can see this duty or responsibility laid down in scriptures, clearly.