I was able to do something that people cant do these days, which is to have quality time with the guys who were trying to be president and a number of them who got the job.

The fact is ... that when totalitarian nations like China and Saudi Arabia play ball with U.S. business interests, we like them just fine. But when Venezuela's freely elected president threatens powerful corporate interests, the Bush administration treats him as an enemy.

We've had the trivialization of our politics going on ever since we had electronic media.

I teach at USC, and it's obvious to anyone who teaches college students that they don't cover much modern history and certainly not the modern presidency.

Richard Nixon even before becoming president, before meeting Henry Kissinger, he said, "This is ridiculous. Communism is nationalist. The Chinese and Russian and Yugoslav and Cuban and - none of these communists get along, and the Koreans and the Vietnamese, and we can do business with them." And then he opened up to China, and that's when the Cold War started.

We pick governors from states where governors don't do anything, like Jimmy Carter from Georgia, George W. Bush from Texas.

The publisher, Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. Fortunately sixty percent of Americans now get the point, but only after tens of thousand of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher.