Tony Blankley

An interview with my favorite member of Left, Right, and Center on his new book. He is right wing, but utterly reasonable. To me, his positions are pretty much like the flip side of the same coin as someone like Obama...both born of reason, experience, and sharp intellect.

On a side note - how awesome would watching a debate between Obama and Newt Gingrich be? I'd pay for that shit.

Most interesting points:

"This was a relatively small war. Now, what happens if the Jihadis overthrow the Pakistani government -- a very unstable government. ...They have nuclear weapons. If we want to stop the Jihadis from getting nuclear weapons, we'd have to go into Pakistan and try to stop that. We don't have remotely the number of troops to do that."

"I think that what has happened in the last 30 or 40 years is that we have not forgotten at all what rights we have -- whether it's the right to be a 96 year old and get comprehensive health care subsidized by our fellow citizens in the last months of our lives....I just went through, with my dad, he had been healthy until he was 92, never had a dollar's expense for himself or the government, but in the last three years of his life, God only knows how many hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent between Medicare, insurance, our out of pocket -- to keep a man who had been vigorous, but lost that vigor, alive for just a few more months.

Is that really a right we have or should we show a little more forbearance in clamoring for every last buck we can get? I think we need to start thinking a little bit about what we owe our country. It goes back to Jack Kennedy's famous phrase, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Does the ACLU have to assert every last inch of every possible right, even when it goes against the general interests of our society? I think not.

I don't think being physically in the United States, legally here, and being a citizen is simply a geographic expression. I think it's also a moral proposition and that citizens have some duties. "