The National Security Adviser is supposed to be an arbiter of policy and open minded in internal debates. But the playing field was never balanced. It was always tilted toward Rumsfeld's position, which is obviously the same as Bush's.

I think for the great majority of the American people, they've suffered economically under Obama and they really are looking forward to Trump delivering more money in their pocket. I think they haven't lost faith yet.

The funny thing is, this is what everyone assumes, that anybody who talks has an axe to grind. I've been around a long time, and yes, there obviously are people who disagree with policy who talk to me, but it's less axes to grind than people who are really motivated. One of the terrible things about this Administration is that nobody wants to hear bad news.

I'm worried about people who say Bush is lying. It's much more frightening that he's not lying, that he believes what he believes: that it's his mission to change the Middle East into a democracy. That's more unnerving.

We'd be better off if the whole purpose of the adventure in Iraq was, say, to protect Israel or to protect the flow of oil to America and keep it at a reasonable price and try to get some more control. If it was about oil, going into Iraq, I guess, could have made sense. But at a certain point, when the insurgency began and we were in real trouble, there would have been some awareness that we were going to jeopardize the oil.

I have a theory in life that there is no learning. There is no learning curve. Everything is tabula rasa. Everybody has to discover things for themselves.

We have this wonderful capacity in America to Hitlerize people. We had Hitler, and since Hitler we've had about 20 of them. Khrushchev and Mao and of course Stalin, and for a little while Gadhafi was our Hitler.