In the language of politics, there is only one translation for the phrase 'hope and change,' to wit: 'big, fat government.'
— P. J. O'Rourke
Raining on parades requires no skill or effort on the part of a politician.
The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.
America's grossly unfair tax system won't lead to class war. Or, if it does, the war will be brief.
I understand Twitter has become popular among politicians. This technology allows them to stay in perpetual contact with their constituents. The electorate now has instant information about what politicians have been up to.
Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life.
Nancy Pelosi says the angry opposition to health care reform is like the angry opposition to gay rights that led to Harvey Milk being shot.
Pete Seeger is a modest, unassuming, cheerful, and kind-natured man. He's a good folk singer, if you can stand folk singing. And he's such an excellent banjo player that you almost don't wish you had a pair of wire cutters.
No industry in living memory has collapsed faster than daily print journalism.
The District of Columbia is an extreme example of disconnect between financial input and educational outcome. Unfortunately, extreme is not the same as abnormal.
If you spend 72 hours in a place you've never been, talking to people whose language you don't speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don't understand, and you come back as the world's biggest know-it-all, you're a reporter. Either that or you're President Obama.
Democrats hate success.
We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren't there.
Obama, in pursuit of power, has been as greedy and irresponsible as any Wall Street tycoon in pursuit of money.
The problem, when comparing contemporary television to television in 1974, is that TV has become not just bad but sad.
Demolishing pretensions, especially worthy ones, is a hallmark of the baby boom.
China is trying to become America without democracy while America is trying to become France without cheese calories.
Rahm Emanuel is, we are almost certain, a vampire.
The killjoys initiated automobile crash standards so rigorous that we can't buy a car that hasn't been dropped from the top of a phone pole with our whole family strapped inside.
There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with.
I don't mind America becoming a Third World country. The weather is better in the Third World than it is where I live in New Hampshire. And household help will be much cheaper.
I'm not a tech-savvy parent. I communicate with my children via the old-media format called yelling.
Russians not only vehemently despise blacks, they believe Africa begins at the Ukraine border.
Even Jimmy Carter can't be wrong all the time.
As murderous industrial magnates go, Alfred Nobel is right up there with Ray Kroc, franchiser of McDonald's.
Public schools helped create the idea of America and inculcate Americans with a few rudiments of knowledge. To judge by that very American item, the Internet, a few rudiments is all anyone cares to have.
The problem in Afghanistan is really not so much land as water. It's a dry country with ample amounts of water running through it, but not to good enough effect.
Democrats hate America being a world power because world power gives power to the nation instead of to Democrats.
Democrats hate Democrats most of all.
For decades in America, there has been an effort to ensure that the rights of those who are not sane are the same as the rights of those who are.
President Obama has contempt for real money.
My working hypothesis is that stupidity in popular culture is a constant. Popular culture cannot get more stupid.
New Hampshire polling data are unreliable because, when you call the Granite State's registered Republicans and independents in the middle of dinner and ask them who they're going to vote for, they have a mouth full of mashed potatoes and you can't understand what they say.
Stupid is a great force in human affairs.
Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs is just the thing to make a little tin humanist in the Obama West Wing think he's admiral of the Uzbek Navy.
Philosophy was once considered science.
When you pay a hospital bill, you're really paying two hospital bills - one bill for you because you have a job and/or insurance and can pay the hospital. and another bill, which is tacked onto your bill, to cover the medical expenses of someone who doesn't have a job and/or insurance and can't pay the hospital.
Mistreatment of al Qaeda members and their friends and hangers-on is something I number among my moral concerns. But it's number 1,000,000,001.
I have never Twittered or Tweeted or even Chirped.
I live in rural New Hampshire, and we are, frankly, short on people who are black, gay, Jewish, and Hispanic. In fact, we're short on people. My town has a population of 301.
We all know the types who listen to Pete Seeger songs; even Pete admits they aren't interesting.
The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a joke - albeit a grim one. Alfred Bernhard Nobel famously invented dynamite and felt sorry about it.
America's public schools have served their purpose. Free and compulsory education was good for a somewhat unpromising young nation.
Kabul is a walled city, which sounds romantic except the walls are pre-cast reinforced concrete blast barriers, 10 feet tall and 15 feet long and moved into place with cranes. The walls are topped with sandbags, and the sandbags are topped with guard posts from which gun barrels protrude.
Democrats hate stay-at-home spouses, no matter what gender or gender preference.
In a free country, government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference.
I just wasn't cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I'm more of an Irish Setter Dad.
Our earliest evidence of government, in the ruins of Babylon and Egypt, shows nothing but ziggurats and pyramids of wasted taxpayer money, the TARP funds and shovel-ready stimulus programs of their day.
Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it's the only culture anyone notices.
Obama's space policy doesn't differ much from George W. Bush's.
