"What is unique about American foreign policy today is not just that it is rudderless, but how quickly and completely the 70-year postwar order seems to have disintegrated -- and how little interest the American people take in the collapse, thanks to the administration's apparent redeeming message, which translates, 'It's their misfortune and none of our own.' ...

"Meanwhile, no one seems to much care that between 2009 and 2017, we will have borrowed 8 trillion more dollars. Yet for all that stimulus, the U.S. economy still has staggering labor non-participation rates, flat GDP growth, and stagnant household income. As long as zero interest rates continue, the rich make lots of money in the stock market, and the debt can grow by $500 billion a year and still be serviced. Financial sobriety is now defined as higher taxes bringing in record revenues to service half-trillion-dollar annual additions to an $18 trillion debt."

"'About a quarter of all non-elderly Americans with private insurance coverage do not have sufficient liquid assets to pay even a mid-range deductible, which at today's rates would be $1,200 for single coverage and $2,400 for family coverage,' the Wall Street Journal reported in March.

"So now, many of the same groups that agitated for Obamacare are agitating for new government spending or tighter controls on the insurance industry and businesses to 'solve' the problem. But perhaps the first question to ask is: How did those deductibles get so high in the first place?

"The answer is Obamacare. ...

"As the Associated Press noted, some Democrats see high deductibles and out-of-pocket costs as an issue they can exploit in 2016. But Republicans have a sharply effective response: Why should voters trust Democrats to solve a problem they made worse in the first place?"

"[I]n our effort to accommodate many Americans by making the last Monday in May, Memorial Day, we have lost sight of the significance of this day to our nation. Instead of using Memorial Day as a time to honor and reflect on the sacrifices made by Americans in combat, many Americans use the day as a celebration of the beginning of summer."

"Ramadi falls. The Iraqi army flees. The great 60-nation anti-Islamic State coalition so grandly proclaimed by the Obama administration is nowhere to be seen. Instead, it's the defense minister of Iran who flies into Baghdad, an unsubtle demonstration of who's in charge -- while the U.S. air campaign proves futile and America's alleged strategy for combating the Islamic State is in freefall. ...

"We are scraping bottom. Following six years of President Obama's steady and determined withdrawal from the Middle East, America's standing in the region has collapsed. And yet the question incessantly asked of the various presidential candidates is not about that. It's a retrospective hypothetical: Would you have invaded Iraq in 2003 if you had known then what we know now?"

"Estimates vary about how many Republicans are after the party's presidential nomination, but the number 19 keeps coming up. Nothing in nature comes in sets of 19. The only '19' in my memory is the Rolling Stones singing about someone's 19th nervous breakdown. Welcome to the world of GOP party officials, many on the verge of multiple nervous breakdowns over the flood tide of candidates. ...

"A GOP donor told me recently, 'Having 19 candidates is unseemly.' Politics? Unseemly? ...

"Between the GOP 19 and the Democratic One over the next year, give me an unseemly political spectacle."

"Hillary is beginning her trek to November 2016 with a built-in 'ick factor' regarding her essential truthfulness and the sense that she spends her life dancing around and about ethical lines. ...

"The tarnishment is permanent. The Clinton brand is damaged. The question is whether it's going to tarnish the Democratic Party."

"It has been apparent for some time that the United States lacks a strategy to fulfill President Obama's pledge to 'degrade and ultimately destroy' the Islamic State since it has no plan to root out the terrorists' base in Syria. There was hope, though, that Mr. Obama's half-measures might be enough to blunt the Islamic State's advances in Iraq, leaving the Syria problem for the next U.S. president. With the stunning fall of Ramadi on Sunday, even that modest optimism is questionable. ...

"Beginning almost a year ago, the Islamic State carved out, across large swaths of Iraq and Syria, a terrorist state of sorts that Mr. Obama deemed intolerable. He said in September that it is a threat to 'the broader Middle East,' including U.S. citizens and facilities, and 'if left unchecked . . . could pose a growing threat beyond that region, including to the United States.' Yet he refuses to commit the Special Forces and military assistance that could meet that threat, portraying any alternative to his minimalist policy as being 'dragged back into another prolonged ground war.' In fact, Sunni allies in the region will be reluctant to work with the United States until it has a Syria policy, and Sunni tribes in Iraq will not confront the Islamic State unless they believe the United States will stand by them. Every conflict will have ups and downs, as administration spokesmen said Monday. But it is Mr. Obama's unwillingness to match means to strategy that threatens to prolong this war."

"What to think about George Stephanopoulos? ...

"It is impossible to see how Stephanopoulos could do his job with any integrity in an environment in which the Clintons and their foundation will be central to the political news for the foreseeable future. Certainly not after concealing his relationship with the foundation. ABC News owes it to itself to live up to at least the standards of a small-town weekly newspaper. It owes them a lot more than that, in fact, but it cannot deliver the goods with Stephanopoulos at the desk."

"This was absolutely pathetic. If this was meant to reassure the Gulf States, I'm sure that their hair is still standing on end ...

"They should be terrified. In fact, in one of the other answers he was answering the objection that we would be unleashing billions of dollars into the Iranian treasury which they will obviously use for the mischief, the destabilization that they are doing in the region including Yemen, Syria, etc., threatening the Gulf Arabs.

"His answer was, among other things, not to worry, because Iran has a lot of economic needs and they have made a commitment to their people to invest in infrastructure.

"They are not going to spend it, I assume, on Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and all the others.

"That is preposterous and any Gulf Arab would be triply terrified."

"Barack Obama's romance with the Castro brothers is rapidly turning into a sour shack-up. That's what happens sometimes to romances under a tropic moon and the rustle of the coconut palms. Cuba wants to redefine the sanctity of embassies, and how they function. The public still doesn't know what concessions the president is making to keep a flame under the romance, but it doesn't sound good for our side. ...

"The State Department's record of managing real estate is not good. The new Russian embassy in Washington was built on Mount Alto on Wisconsin Avenue with an unobstructed electronic sight line to Foggy Bottom and beyond the Potomac River to the Pentagon. In exchange, the State Department deftly negotiated a site for a new American embassy in a swamp in Moscow.

"'There is a limit to what the United States in self-respect can endure,' President Dwight D. Eisenhower said on the break in diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961. 'That limit has now been reached.' Yes, Virginia, that'€™s how American presidents used to talk."