QUOTES

I'm not a member of a political party, and I feel very, very comfortable being independent. Even if I weren't a journalist - if I were doing whatever - I would be an independent.

'MAD Magazine' put out a book that was a collection of Trump cartoons, and they asked me to do the forward because they knew that I was a fan because I'd done stories and tweeted about 'MAD.' So I did the forward and asked them if I could do a cartoon. They let me, and I did caricatures of myself and Wolf Blitzer.

I think there are periods in this country when behavior is abhorrent: McCarthy, Watergate, Bill Clinton. It's just a question of how the checks and balances in the American system work and how leaders stand up to it or don't stand up to it.

I think that I'm doing my job, and it's nice to be recognized, but I also know that a lot of the people who are happy with me now are not going to be happy with me in four to eight years and that I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing.

What would McCarthy, what would Nixon, what would Bill Clinton have done if they'd had Twitter?

The Patriots cheat. This is just a fact as established by investigations. They're a cheating team.

It matters to people that the president tell them the truth.

There are news sources that are just out-and-out lies coming from Europe, coming from other parts of the world.

You know who has done a lot of questioning of generals? President Trump.

I'm a collaborative person - it makes me better - and sometimes taking that collaboration to Twitter is helpful.

CNN is in the business of sussing out what is true and what is false.

I choose to make it my job to not automatically believe what the U.S. government says.

Nastiness and mockery and meanness sometimes seem as if they're spreading like a contagion.

I think there is room for improvement for all of the media, and that certainly, and especially, includes me.

There's a long tradition in this country of questioning generals.

My job is to be skeptical: skeptical of people like Edward Snowden and skeptical of the U.S. government.

McCarthyism and Trumpism are very different. They stand for very different things, but the technique of the big lie, smearing and telling lies, you know, McCarthy was doing that. At the time, the media, Democrats, and Republicans were all paralyzed - not all, but most of them were paralyzed. They didn't know how to deal with this.

Professionally and personally, I try to be as agnostic as possible, try to see things as objectively as possible.

I did freelance cartooning off and on from college graduation in 1991 through ABC News hiring me in 2003. I did a weekly comic strip for 'Roll Call' for about nine years. I sold cartoons and caricatures to 'The Los Angeles Times' and 'The Washington Post.' I drew as much as I could. It's really tough to make a living doing it.

Politicians lie.

I'm quite calm when all is well.

Actors are tough because they're not used to challenging questions - other than from paparazzi. And so you just ask one perfectly legitimate question, but one that they're not comfortable answering, and all of a sudden they look at you, and you're the paparazzi.

We often think our legacy will be our achievements. But often our legacy will be whether we set a moral standard.

It's not always easy for a mainstream organization to accept what a blog is.

Probably like a lot of people, my personal politics are all over the map.

I lost a great uncle in World War II who was with the Royal Canadian Air Force.

I get a lot of heat from the Left, which is bizarre. I get a lot of heat from the Right, too, but the vitriol is from the Left.

When you write fiction, there were things about Washington that I've experienced and wanted to write about, including the swamping nature of it, the compromises people come to town and are forced to make, and also, when writing about Joe McCarthy, the indecency and lies that he put forward that people didn't take a stand about.

My job, in general, is nonfiction, so writing fiction was liberating. If you can't find the answer to something, you just make it up!

It took me years to realize I wanted to be in journalism.