John McCain from the very beginning has been unflinchingly loyal to Sarah Palin. He has never thrown her under the bus. He has never conceded it was a bad decision to pick her. He has never ever said a bad word against her.

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.

Having a place out of the city is a shortcut toward the mental reset I need.

The day after the Republican convention ended, there was another political bomb that was dropped on the U.S. presidential election [2016] from Russia. The day after the Republican convention ended, right before the Democratic Convention began we got what U.S. intelligence agencies believed to be the next big Russian incursion into our election. We got the first WikiLeaks dump.

The John Podesta WikiLeaks dump came just about one hour after the "Access Hollywood" tape was published. The "I like to grab them by the p-word" tape, one hour after that came out is when WikiLeaks dropped the first tranche of John Podesta e-mails hacked by the Russians.

It's not just the small-potatoes post-9/11 Homeland spending that feels a little off mission. It's the big-ticket stuff too.

I don't want to be president. Like, "Today your job is Libya, Japan, unemployment, the government shutdown - oh, and by the way, Yemen, Syria and Jordan. That's your job today. And you'd better get it right."