America is great not because it's a team. America is great because it is a nation whose founding documents elevated the rights of the individual.

I've worked as someone's deputy, and now it's time for me to run something. It's time for me to run my own shop.

When Obama was inaugurated, he and his team had an insight - though whether the insight was conscious or not I don't know. But it was this: The TARP $700 billion price tag was a new kind of model.

The idea that the rest of the world was somehow being held hostage by the Arab-Israeli conflict once had a minimal basis in reality. In the first 20 years of Israel's existence, every Arab country was in an active state of war with the Jewish state.

Nixon in 1968, unlike Obama 2008, was elected as a minority president with only 43 percent of the vote. Yet, in 1972, he won what, in some measures, was the most lopsided election in American history with 61 percent.

Unquestionably, American political rhetoric can be repugnant, and the Right can certainly be as guilty as the Left.

Some candidates need to say provocative things that make noise to break through the media muffle and get themselves noticed.