Explore Quotes by John Podhoretz

As the Republican nominee, it was Romney's job to find a way to speak to some of those groups of voters and offer practical solutions to their difficulties that both resonated with them and sounded plausible to them.

We must say something, even when we know nothing.

You know, you just know, that after the president goes out there and announces he wants to make community college free for all Americans - as though anything government does is 'free' - or is unilaterally and unconstitutionally legalizing millions of undocumented immigrants, he comes back to the offices, pulls out the presidential BlackBerry, and gleefully follows along as the Right goes completely ape over these wild policy decisions.

Imagine his delight after it 'leaked' that he will propose raising taxes on the wealthy by $320 billion over the next 10 years, including increases to the capital gains and inheritance taxes.

This, of course, has no chance of passing. But then Tuesday night'€™s State of the Union address could be the first one in history deliberately designed solely to generate a Pavlovian rage response in members of the opposing party.

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.

You want a political culture that works to create conditions under which an economy can thrive? Since signing the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, Israel has spent two decades working to unshackle its economy from its socialist roots, with remarkable results.

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.

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.

There's no light at the end of the tunnel in the Republican message, no promise of better things to come. There's only the present stagnation, followed by a slow decline.

The United States established itself as a trustworthy new nation in its first two decades after the Revolutionary War by paying its debts, even when many in the country believed it had no obligation to do so. Alexander Hamilton, the founder of this newspaper, insisted on it.

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.

The idea that the rest of the world was somehow being held hostage by the Arab-Israeli conflict once had a minimal basis in reality. In the first 20 years of Israel's existence, every Arab country was in an active state of war with the Jewish state.

The Middle East Media Research Institute has spent decades detailing the diseased messages emanating from Palestinian TV and textbooks, instructing children in the glories of suicide terrorism against innocent Israelis.

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 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.

The most passionately anti-Obama Republican politicians and activists consider themselves the truest and purest of conservatives, and often unleash their scorn and fury on others who also call themselves conservative but differ on strategy and tactics.

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.

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.

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.

Romney is a good, intelligent, extraordinarily generous man who put on a great fight. But he didn't understand the country or the people he sought to lead, and that is why he lost.