For the past several years, I’ve been harboring a fantasy, a last political crusade for the baby-boom generation. We, who started on the path of righteousness, marching for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam, need to find an appropriately high-minded approach to life’s exit ramp.

Faith, unaccompanied by rigorous skepticism, is a recipe for myopia and foolishness.

You can’t get all of your news from Jon Stewart, especially since it’s a comedy show.

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.

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.’

I’ve been described as a grizzled political veteran.

Dictating to dictators doesn’t work; they are congenitally delusional about their own indispensability.

We journalists are never so idiotic as when we analyze things that we shouldn’t be analyzing.

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.

What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they’re really like.