It’s almost hard to imagine anything more undemocratic than the view that political officials should not debate American wars in public, but only express concerns ‘privately with the administration.’ That’s just a small sliver of...

As always, imagine how great the press corps would be if it devoted 1/1000th the energy to dissecting non-sex political wrongdoing

A number I’d love to know: the % of those now saying ‘we have to vote Obama to stop an attack on Iran’ who will support one if Obama does it.

For those suggesting criticisms of drone kills should wait until the election: that’d be reasonable if he stops killing until the election.

Courage is contagious.

They’re called ‘facts’, and my role is to amplify those, not cheerlead. And I don’t care at all what you think of my motives.

American political culture quickly and always outpaces any attempt to satirize it.

The same president who has insisted that core moralism drives him has brought America to its lowest moral standing in history.

When journalists are ‘accused’ of being ‘advocates’, that means: challenging and deviating from DC orthodoxies.

Incestuous, homogeneous fiefdoms of self-proclaimed expertise are always rank-closing and mutually self-defending, above all else.

But even when the principle of equal treatment was betrayed, American leaders in every era have emphatically affirmed it, not so much out of hypocrisy as out of aspiration. Indeed, for those who were devoted...

Terrorism’: the word that means nothing, yet justifies everything.

Revealingly, the central function of the Constitution as law–the supreme law–was to impose limitations not on the behavior of ordinary citizens but on the federal government. The government, and those who ran it, were not...

The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what they [the government] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what...

The term propaganda rings melodramatic and exaggerated, but a press that—whether from fear, careerism, or conviction—uncritically recites false government claims and reports them as fact, or treats elected officials with a reverence reserved for royalty,...

Terrorist’, noun: 1. Someone my government tells me is a terrorist; 2. Someone my President decides to kill.

Bush violated FISA […] because he wanted to violate the law in order to establish the general ‘principle’ that he was not bound by the law, to show that he has the power to break...

I don’t have a ‘side’—I’m responsible for what I say and nothing else.

If you expose what it is that we’re doing, if you inform your fellow citizens about all the things that we’re doing in the dark, we will destroy you. This is what their spate of...

The hallmark of an authoritarian idiot is yelling TERRORIST-LOVER! at anyone questioning the definition of Terrorist.

Hinzu kommt der Ton, in dem die Medien des Establishments über Fehlverhalten der Regierung berichten. Die journalistische Kultur in den USA gebietet es, dass Reporter jegliche eindeutige oder konkrete Aussage vermeiden und auch noch so...

Every time I do an interview people ask similar questions, such as “What is the most significant story that you have revealed?” […] There really is only one overarching point that all of these stories...

Fearlessness can be its own form of power.

Beyond all the other reasons not to do it, free speech assaults always backfire: they transform bigots into martyrs.

Washington likes to threaten the people over whom they exercise power.

He’s the President—it’s the responsibility of every citizen to criticize aggressively when they think it’s warranted.

A president who is burdened with a failed and unpopular war, and who has lost the trust of the country, simply can no longer govern. He is destined to become as much a failure as...

I think Dianne Feinstein may be the most Orwellian political official in Washington.

I know it’s a really hard concept to process, but the fact that Govt accuses someone of being a Terrorist doesn’t mean they are.

The fact that war is the word we use for almost everything—on terrorism, drugs, even poverty—has certainly helped to desensitize us to its invocation; if we wage wars on everything, how bad can they be?

It is hard to imagine having a government more secretive than the United States. Virtually everything that government does, of any significance, is conducted behind an extreme wall of secrecy. The very few leaks that...

It’s common to go from ‘crashing the gate’ to guarding it.

Michael Ledeen—a contributing editor of National Review and a Freedom Scholar at the influential neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute—wrote on the National Review blog in November 2006: ‘I had and have no involvement with...

Forgoing privacy in a quest for absolute safety is as harmful to a healthy psyche and life of an individual as it is to a healthy political culture. For the individual, safety first means a...

I’d like to vote for the candidate similar to the one the Right absurdly claims Obama is.