Can-do Americans courageously go about their duty in Iraq - mostly unafraid that a culture of 2,000 years, the reality of geography, the sheer forces of language and religion, the propaganda of state-run Arab media and the cynicism of the liberal West are all stacked against them.

This is something that Donald Trump has been very effective at exploiting because throughout our history, one of the things that was important to galvanize the country against a perceived threat has been philology.

There's just no - nothing like this country, which is the only, really, multiracial country that's tried to share in a common culture in the history of civilization that's pulled it off. A lot of the times, we want perfection. If we're not perfect, we're not good.

Multiculturalism is a good reminder that when standards are relative, there are no standards at all.

It is rather the nature of America - our freewheeling, outspoken, prosperous, liberty-loving citizens extend equality to women, homosexuals, minorities, and almost anyone who comes to our shores, and thereby create desire and with it shame for that desire. Indeed, it is worse still than that: Precisely because we worry publicly that we are insensitive, our enemies scoff privately that we in fact are too sensitive - what we think is liberality and magnanimity they see as license and decadence. If we don't have confidence in who we are, why should they?

If the Democrats feel they have lost the public's confidence in their stewardship of national security, then the threat of Iran offers a Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, or John Kerry an opportunity to get out front now and pledge support for a united effort - attacking Bush from the right about too tepid a stance rather from the predictable left that we are 'hegemonic' and 'imperialistic' every time we use force abroad.

If I talk to black students on campus, they're not sympathetic to the people who are not sympathetic with [Black Lives Matter movement]. The fact that you want to argue rather than find some common ground, I think, has gotten a lot worse in the last years.