Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.

Promoting dependency is the Democratic Party's vocation. It knows that almost all entitlements are forever, and those that are not - e.g., the lifetime eligibility for welfare, repealed in 1996 - are not for the middle class.

If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.

Big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government.

Voting Liberal is a non-thing. Historically, it might be a good idea to have a Conservative government, because change is a good thing. But I don't know that I could bring myself to vote Tory.

With respect to Iraq, I did favour the continuity of American forces to work with the new Maliki government. They had enormous needs for intelligence, for training on everything from airplanes to more sophisticated ground equipment and the like.

Therefore, the question is not whether such democratization is possible, but instead how to meet the yearning of the masses in the Middle East for democracy; in other words, how to achieve democratization in the Middle East.

Large government is inevitably inefficient, but so, too, is large private enterprise.