If there's one epithet the Right never tires of, it's 'elitism.'

The most important newspapers in this country need to exist. Our democracy needs them. Life as we know it would be unthinkable without them.

Online, you can't be scooped. If you are scooped, it's no one's fault but your own.

Abandoning traditions of responsibility and civility won the GOP control of both houses of Congress in 1994. Rejecting any compromise brought Republicans the perks and power of majority control for the first time in 40 years. Thus did the politics of total resistance become their path of least resistance.

Founded in rebellion against colonial tyranny, our country is naturally suspicious of government intrusion, interference, and snooping. European systems, by comparison, grow out of a tradition of the state providing social benefits for workers that stretches back to Bismarck and Germany in the 1880s.

Americans are defined by a history of immigration in pursuit of freedom and opportunity. We are more individualistic, enterprising, and protective of liberties that most Europeans do not expect, such as owning guns, working 70-hour weeks, or appreciating nature as it goes by at 60 mph on a snowmobile.

The cradle-to-grave welfare state diminishes individual initiative and can breed a pervasive sclerosis.

If Obama succeeds in turning health insurance and funding for college into universal entitlements, he will have expanded Washington's obligations on the scale of an LBJ or an FDR.

Professional politicians often claim they are not professional politicians. Trump genuinely isn't one.

Like academic Marxists, who are their sisters under the skin, libertarians are far more interested in an ideal world than in the one where ordinary humans live.

Republicans with any moral sense are desperate for a supportable alternative to Donald Trump.

To describe the world Michael Jackson has created around himself as a childhood fantasy isn't quite accurate. Thanks to wealth and celebrity, he has been able to live as a superannuated child. With the help of plastic surgery and dramatic affectation, he has made himself look and sound pre-pubescent.

Middle-class Americans really don't want to hear about sacrifices or trade-offs - except as flattering descriptions about how ready we, as a people, are, or used to be, to accept them.

Joe Lieberman can be cloying and sanctimonious.

Vietnam was a terrible mistake for the United States. But like Iraq, Vietnam was a badly chosen battlefield in a larger conflict with totalitarianism that America had no choice but to pursue.

Political analysts tend to overinterpret the results of isolated elections.

Both Left and Right take pleasure in mildly persecuting those who fail to meet their civic ideals.

Paternalism is the method of government activism most amenable to an impoverished public sector.

Most people prefer living in a healthier town.

To describe Peter Thiel as simply a libertarian wildly understates the case. His belief system is based on unapologetic selfishness and economic Darwinism.

People who live in hermit states like North Korea, Burma, and Cuba already suffer from global isolation. Fed on a diet of propaganda, they don't know what's happening inside their borders or outside of them. By increasing their seclusion, sanctions make it easier for dictators to blame external enemies for a country's suffering.

Though there are some debatable exceptions, sanctions rarely play a significant role in dislodging or constraining the behavior of despicable regimes.

Without medical records that he hasn't released, we can't know whether Gingrich may have inherited his mother's manic depression. Nevertheless, one observes in the former House Speaker certain symptoms - bouts of grandiosity, megalomania, irritability, racing thoughts, spending sprees - that go beyond the ordinary politician's normal narcissism.

We're quick to describe politicians whose views we find extreme or whose behavior seems odd as 'crazy,' and perhaps anyone who runs for president in some sense is. But I've long wondered whether Newt Gingrich merits that designation in a more clinical sense.