Hurtling the Pentagon into an unprecedented budgetary meltdown is horrifically irresponsible. Obama doesn't care. This is war - not against the Taliban, but war against the GOP. He has Republicans on the ropes, and that's a victory he savors and desires - unlike Afghanistan, where he seems only to want to turn tail.

While negativity is politically useful, it is also demoralizing unless it is accompanied - and to some extent overshadowed - by elevated and inspiring ideas about the American future.

That distinctive presidential conduct is now gone forever, banished to the snows of yesteryear by Barack Obama. From the beginning of his presidency to the present, he has spoken specifically and in unprecedented fashion of Republicans as his rivals, his stumbling blocks, the primary cause of his troubles.

Insulting the electorate and accusing it of spiritual weakness and sinfulness are not the ways to get yourself the job of president.

Obama is talking to voters as though he is their boss, or their principal, or their father. He is not any of those things. He is their employee. And employers don't like it when their employees yell at them - even if their employees have it right.

Making recess appointments when the Senate isn't in recess is neither rational nor moderate. It's a raw misuse of executive power by a president whose love of government is his most vulnerable spot with the electorate.

Conservatives must avoid the siren song of schism, or all is lost.

Bouncing a sitting president requires conscious action, a national decision to redirect the country's course. This cuts against the grain, and that's why incumbents have a natural advantage.

For Obama to save himself, he should be thinking about the example of an unlikely Republican predecessor: Richard Nixon.

America is great not because it's a team. America is great because it is a nation whose founding documents elevated the rights of the individual.

Vice presidents are at times tasked with issuing direct broadsides against enemies while the top guy stays above the fray. But never before has a vice president served as an attack dog against his own party's voters.

Some candidates need to say provocative things that make noise to break through the media muffle and get themselves noticed.

She needs to seem tough, and whatever Hillary's weaknesses, tough is a pretty good word to describe her.

Whatever Romney's failings, he certainly doesn't suggest that the United States is teetering on the brink of a moral cesspool.

Why, listening to Obama talk about his economic triumphs over the last three years might make you want to move to the country he was describing. Too bad that country exists primarily in his own head.

The 2004 presidential election that saw George W. Bush win with 51 percent of the vote was the last one Republicans will ever win with the overwhelmingly white and male coalition they have now.

Romney is right that the Obama vision is too centered on government. But his is too centered on the promotion of business and wealth creation at the expense of everything else.

All non-incumbent campaigns promise hope and change, but Obama took the promise to a new level of absurdity. He suggested that a vote for him would literally transform the Earth.

Comedians and impressionists used to be two different showbiz animals entirely, but now there's no such thing as a comedian who doesn't do impressions.

I was wholeheartedly attracted to the conservative atmosphere that permeated the city of Washington.

By keeping most tax rates at present levels, Obama and the Democrats will claim that they have championed tax cuts for the middle class.

But like a born actor who only really wants to direct, Gingrich has always been unsatisfied with what he's brilliant at. He can't still his hunger to deliver grand pronouncements on life, liberalism, conservatism, religion and whatever else swims into his consciousness.

Let us now praise Barack Obama.

Conservatives have long been suspicious that Romney isn't truly one of them. The release of his tax returns should settle the matter once and for all: He's not only to be accepted, but admired and emulated - and by liberals as well as conservatives.

Newt Gingrich never received more than 100,000 votes in his life. He'll never be president.

Here's a very good rule of thumb in politics: losing begets losing.

Many people crave security and stability rather than risk-taking, and that doesn't make them any less American. They are the workers rather than the job creators, and all societies need both.

Whether my columns are worth reading isn't for me to say.

Nixon in 1968, unlike Obama 2008, was elected as a minority president with only 43 percent of the vote. Yet, in 1972, he won what, in some measures, was the most lopsided election in American history with 61 percent.

Obama lost his ability to push his agenda through Congress when he received what he himself called a 'shellacking' in the November 2010 elections. That shellacking was primarily the result of massive policy overreach when he had a Democratic Congress in his pocket.

Obama is defining himself in a way that will destroy him.

For the record, I am not an admitted homosexual, nor am I a homosexual, though I do know the lyrics to every show tune ever written, which might perhaps account for the confusion.

There is a new conservative establishment in America, made up of those who claim to be the anti-establishment.

Is victory sweet because your side wins - or is it really because the other side loses?

Electoral contests have nothing but polls, which is why people have grown so obsessed with them; we're desperate for an objective rendering of what is happening and what may happen.

Newt Gingrich has a restless and outsized intelligence that is tragically unleavened by any kind of critical sensibility.

Obama's coalition would have consigned him to the political margins as little as 12 years ago, but the nation's demographic changes are moving far more quickly than most Republicans anticipated.

The great mystery is why robots come off so well in science-fiction films when the human characters are often so astoundingly wooden.

The classic rule of thumb is that if you are an intellectual ideological magazine, you do better in opposition than you do if your views are reflected by people in power.

As a matter of policy, increasing taxes on the most economically productive group, which already generates 60 percent of the nation's federal revenues, during a sustained period of economic doldrums is a wretched idea.

I look at 'The New York Review of Books.' It's what it has been for 35 or 40 years, which is a highly sophisticated vehicle for anti-American self-hatred.

Back in 1995, Bill Gates himself didn't understand that the internet was the direction computing was going.

When you have controversial parents, people have expectations about you. If every day at work I thought to myself, 'How does this relate to them?' I'd be paralyzed.

Obama's claim is that he wants to give. The GOP is saying it wants to take.

Obama's explanation for the slowdown in economic growth is that the public sector is hurting, and that's where Washington must step in and act.

The presidency is not an entry-level electoral job.

This has always been the way of presidential politics. The president rises above the fray while his surrogates go on the attack. They throw the spears and fling the mud; he sits upon the throne.

Newt Gingrich is a very intelligent man, if he says so himself.

Barack Obama is one of the greatest politicians in American history.

I don't feel alienated from American culture, but I understand people who do.