If racism is not the whole of the Tea Party, it is in its heart, along with blind hatred, a total disinterest in the welfare of others, and a full-flowered self-rationalizing refusal to accept the outcomes of elections, or the reality of democracy, or the narrowness of their minds and the equal narrowness of their public support.

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But he still says so. There was no link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida. But he still says so. And thus, gripping firmly these figments of his own imagination, Mr. Cheney lives on, in defiance, and spreads - around him and before him - darkness, like some contagion of fear. They are never wrong, and they never regret - admirable in a French torch singer, cataclysmic in an American leader.

Matt Millen, you draft a wide receiver every year. HOW DARE YOU SIR, HOW DARE YOU!

Your anger will cool into hardened passionate insight if you wait a day. Most of the things that make me angry I let them sit. The heat that remains will be sufficient. The stuff that evaporates is the stuff that would have simply offended or made it histrionic.

I was one of the first people to put [Ambassador] Joe Wilson on TV and, of course, exposing that entire attempt to smear him by exposing his wife [CIA operations officer Valerie Plame Wilson]. And we sat down to do a long interview by satellite and we publicized it for several days.

I just think if you're 44 years old and you're not smarter than you were when you were 35 years old or 25 years old, just stay in your room.

Wanting to be on television is a mental illness. Wanting to be president of the United States, wanting to be an actor - these are degrees of the same mental illness. If you need to be approved of simultaneously by more people than are in this room now, there's a problem.