Cynicism is what passes for insight among the mediocre.
You can't get all of your news from Jon Stewart, especially since it's a comedy show.
Barack Obama's inspirational whoosh to the presidency in 2008 was unusual. Most campaigns are less exhilarating; indeed, they are downright disappointing - until someone wins.
You can be as critical as you want of Black Lives Matter. I'm critical of him, too. But to say that they have caused shooting of police officers, I think is a bridge too far.
For me, a really radical position for journalism to take is to stop being cynical. Cynicism is what passes for insight among the mediocre.
We journalists are never so idiotic as when we analyze things that we shouldn't be analyzing.
Anonymous sources are a practice of American journalism in the 20th and 21st century, a relatively recent practice. The literary tradition of anonymity goes back to the Bible.
I believe, I believe that the people who voted in those primaries for Donald Trump were at least helping him along with his message of hate toward immigrants, toward Muslims.
Affirmative action was always racial justice on the cheap.
Diversity has been written into the DNA of American life; any institution that lacks a rainbow array has come to seem diminished, if not diseased.
Dictating to dictators doesn't work; they are congenitally delusional about their own indispensability.
The two-war strategy was a product of the cold war, when we had to have the ability to fight the Russians on the plains of Europe and fight the Chinese on the Korean peninsula at the same time. That costs an awful lot of money.
You know, larger-than-life politicians have larger-than-life strengths and larger-than-life weaknesses.
For those of us who consider ourselves political moderates, life is a dispiriting slog, a sorry mix of rectitude and ineptitude.
I've been described as a grizzled political veteran.
We`re facing a very different sort of threat now, a more amorphous threat, al Qaeda, terrorism, and so on. And so the military has abandoned the two-war strategy.
Political courage requires clarity. The Obama Administration chose the tortured route of arguing the legality of the individual mandate via the interstate commerce clause for one simple reason: it did not want to take the political risk of allowing opponents to call it a tax increase. That was stupid. The Republicans were calling it a tax increase anyway.
Americans who feel the most ignored these days are not the screamers. They are the solid citizens who are sick to death of pols who play to the rant.
We should never go to war unless we have been attacked or are under direct, immediate threat of attack. Never. And never again.
You know, larger than life is always better than smaller than life in politicians. And, you know, God save us from mediocrities.
What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.
I think that if you make a strong statement of principle, even if the folks disagree with you, people will respect you for it.
I'm in favour of politicians having extra-marital relationships. Oh yeah. It makes them more understanding of the flaws that the rest of us have.
Back in George W. Bush's second term, when diplomatic realism began to overtake foolish bellicosity, the president developed one of his patented nicknames for the two most powerful neoconservative journalists, William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer: he called them 'the Bomber Boys.'
Bush the Elder's stature as president grows with every passing year. He was the finest foreign policy president I've ever covered and a man who defied his party on tax increases while imposing budget restrictions on the Democrats.
