It makes sense in that environment that you would hold on in the U.S. government to the people who know their way around this particular block.

Senator [Tom Cotton] got a ton of blowback. He became the star of fake missing person`s signs, encouraging folks to call if they saw him and also to call him and ask why he had been missing while his constituents were looking for him.

Clearly, there has been a lack of imagination about how much can go wrong.

I'm hopeless by e-mail, by phone, by text.

These are career non-partisan apolitical staffers with a combined 150 years of experience at the State Department gone, just like that right off the top [right after Secretary Rex Tillerson was sworn in].

Humans are ambitious and rational and proud. And we don't fall in line with people who don't respect us and who we don't believe have our best interests at heart. We are willing to follow leaders, but only to the extent that we believe they call on our best, not our worst.

the American public has been delicately insulated from the actuality of our ongoing wars. While a tiny fraction of men and women fighting our wars are deploying again and again, civilian life remains pretty much isolated in cost-free complacency.