John Podhoretz

“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.”

“While in Israel, Mitt Romney said something every sane person knows to be true: There is great cultural and political meaning in the fact that Israel has prospered while the Palestinians have festered.”

“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.”

“Political folk talk a lot these days about 'messaging' - a neologism designed to describe the way in which parties and politicians consciously characterize their efforts. It is only intended to be positive - i.e., 'Our messaging is designed to show we care.'”

“America may be in a dour condition, but it is not going to elect a dour president.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You want a culture where citizens are free to express themselves and so live in the openness necessary to the functioning of a successful economy? Israel has a free press, much of it openly hostile to the parties in power.”

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

“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.”

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

“What people adore about superhero movies is the signal quality of the Christopher Nolan films - their complete lack of irony when it comes to the portrayal of heroism and the need for heroes to confront evil.”

“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 thing is, Obama is right that it would be a calamity for the government to default on its debt by not meeting its obligations. Such a thing has never happened and can't be allowed to happen.”

“It has never made any sense to argue that, unique among the people of the world, Arabs are more concerned on a day-to-day basis about the treatment of people they don't know than they are about how they're going to put food on their own tables, or whether their sons will ever find a job.”

“The defense of ObamaCare's constitutionality relies mainly on the truism that everyone is sure to get sick at some point in their lives, and this makes the health-care market unlike any other market.”

“The real story of the Ground Zero mosque is that the project only became feasible because of the appalling and astonishing fecklessness of the officials who were charged with the reconstruction of the site and the neighborhood all the way back in 2001.”

“The presidency is not an entry-level electoral job.”

“As a member of the Mormon church, Romney is instructed to tithe 10 percent of his income. That's in keeping with most charitable giving: Religious institutions get about one-third of all contributions, according to 'The American' magazine.”

“Memories of the last nine years have turned Ground Zero from a site of horror, to a reminder of grief, to an occasion for ludicrous artistic posturing - and now to something very close to parody.”