Every president inherits a mixed bag when he comes to office, and Obama's was hardly the worst.
It may be a truism that the country cannot be strong abroad unless it is strong at home, but it's also a fact that the country's economic prosperity depends on its security abroad - not only in the core of the liberal democratic world but often well beyond it, too.
I will never vote for Donald Trump.
I think that for the United States, Hillary Clinton, as awful as I find her, is a survivable event. I'm not so sure about Donald Trump.
Yes, Obama took over two wars from Bush - just as President Richard Nixon inherited Vietnam from President Lyndon Johnson and President Dwight Eisenhower inherited Korea from President Harry Truman. But at least the war in Iraq was all but won by 2009, thanks largely to the very surge Obama had opposed as a senator.
The United States survives so long as at least one of its major parties is politically and intellectually healthy. I don't think the Republican Party, or I should say the Republican Party as the vehicle for modern American conservative ideas, survives with Donald Trump.
The Arab world's problems are a problem of the Arab mind, and the name for that problem is anti-Semitism.
Successful nations make a point of trying to learn from their neighbors. The Arab world has been taught over generations only to hate theirs.
I write my columns pretty carefully.
Do I think police chiefs, many of which are African-American or Hispanic, wake up and say, 'Let's systemically oppress African-American communities?' No, I don't. Are there instances in which that happens? I'm sure there are.
It's normal that elections make fierce partisans of many of us. It's normal that Mr. Trump would attract the usual right-wing buffoons to his banners. Normal, also, is that many voters may not be troubled by Mr. Trump's cruder statements when they hear him addressing their deepest economic and social anxieties.
Donald Trump is a demagogue. Period. The fervor of his crowds recalls Nasser's Egypt. His convictions are illiberal. His manners are disgusting. His temper is frightening.
When those of us in the words-making world use the term 'overregulation,' we are mostly putting a name to a concept we rarely experience consciously.
I grew up with parents who liked the old line that they didn't leave the Democratic Party - the Democratic Party left them.
My father's political heroes were Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
Free trade was once a Republican conviction.
I don't see the point of belonging to a party on the increasingly dubious assumption that it's slightly less bad than the opposition.
I think there's always merit in getting out of our ideological silos and being exposed to points of view with which we don't always agree.
There was a time when the conservative movement was led by the likes of Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol and Bob Bartley, men of ideas who invested the Republican Party with intellectual seriousness.
It's important that Donald Trump and what he represents - this kind of ethnic, quote, 'conservatism,' or populism - be so decisively rebuked that the Republican Party, the Republican voters will forever learn their lesson that they cannot nominate a man so manifestly unqualified to be president in any way, shape, or form.
