"I’m not annoyed that the Obama administration is lying to us about Benghazi, David Petraeus and the rest of this messy, farcical story.

"I’m annoyed that they expect us to believe them. ...   

"I’d like to believe that our president would never lie to us about a terrorist attack that killed four Americans, including an ambassador. I’d like to believe that our president is above politically manipulating the resignation of a CIA chief and successful general. 

"I’d like — no, I’d love — to believe it all. Unfortunately I can’t. Can you?"

"David Petraeus, who might have been the most respected man in America, has resigned due to a personal scandal that threatens to turn into a national-security scandal. ...

"Rather than looking to Petraeus, we should look — as we have looked for a decade or more — at the hundreds of thousands of men and women, most of whose names we do not know, who have chosen a life of sacrifice and service in our nation’s military.

"[...] Individually, they are awash in flaws, as we all are. Taken as a whole, they are exactly the authority figures the nation needs and deserves — examples of sterling human conduct that overcome personal weaknesses rather than examples of personal weakness that serve to discredit human achievement."

"Having suffered not one but several humiliating defeats on Tuesday, Republicans are in danger of embracing 'comprehensive' immigration reform — which is to say, amnesty — out of panic. The GOP does need to do better among Hispanics and other voters, but this is not the way to achieve that — and, more important, it is bad policy. A formal policy of refusing to enforce the law is not obviously the best substitute for an informal policy of refusing to enforce the law. ... 

"The Republican party and the conservative movement simply are not constituted for ethnic pandering, and certainly will not out-pander the party of amnesty and affirmative action. Republicans’ challenge is to convince Hispanics, blacks, women, gays, etc., that the policies of the Obama administration are inimical to their interests as Americans, not as members of any collegium of grievance. That they have consistently failed to do so suggests that Republican leadership is at least as much in need of reform as our immigration code."

"They lose and immediately the chorus begins. Republicans must change or die. A rump party of white America, it must adapt to evolving demographics or forever be the minority. …

"Additionally, warn the doomsayers, Republicans must change not just ethnically but ideologically. Back to the center. Moderation above all! …

"The answer … is not retreat, not aping the Democrats' patchwork pandering. It is to make the case for restrained, rationalized and reformed government in stark contradistinction to Obama’s increasingly unsustainable big-spending, big-government paternalism.

"Republicans: No whimpering. No whining. No reinvention when none is needed. Do conservatism but do it better. There’s a whole generation of leaders ready to do just that." 

"Barack Obama won a moderately close victory over Mitt Romney on Tuesday. But oddly, nothing much has changed. The country is still split nearly 50/50. There is still a Democratic president, and an almost identically Democratic Senate at war with an identically Republican House, in a Groundhog Day America. 
 
"Obama's win did not really reflect affirmation of his first term, given that the president made only halfhearted efforts to defend Obamacare, the stimulus, huge Keynesian deficits and his attempts to implement cap-and-trade. So if there is a second-term agenda, even Obama supporters don't quite know what it will be. ...

"Popular lore attests that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Let's hope that the same Democratic president, the same polarized Congress and the same divided country do something differently from the last lost four years."

"Barack Obama won a second term but no mandate. Thanks in part to his own small-bore and brutish campaign, victory guarantees the president nothing more than the headache of building consensus in a gridlocked capital on behalf of a polarized public. 

"If the president begins his second term under any delusion that voters rubber-stamped his agenda on Tuesday night, he is doomed to fail. 

"Mandates are rarely won on election night. They are earned after Inauguration Day by leaders who spend their political capital wisely, taking advantage of events without overreaching. Obama is capable -- as evidenced by his first-term success with health care reform. But mandate-building requires humility, a trait not easily associated with him."

"Who wins?  

"Who knows?"

"By tomorrow night we’ll likely know the name of the next president. But we already know the loser in this election cycle: political reporters. They’ve disgraced themselves. Conservatives have long complained about liberal bias in the media, and with some justification. But it has finally reached the tipping point. Not in our lifetimes have so many in the press dropped the pretense of objectivity in order to help a political candidate. The media are rooting for Barack Obama. They’re not hiding it. ... 

"By the next presidential cycle most of these people will be gone. They’ll have moved on to academia or think tanks or Democratic senate campaigns, or wherever aging hacks go when their union contracts finally, inevitably get voided. They’ll be replaced by a vibrant digital marketplace filled with hungry young reporters who care more about breaking stories than maintaining access to some politician or regulator.
 
"All of this was probably inevitable, but it came faster than expected. Through their dishonesty the legacy media hastened their own end. Their moral authority has evaporated. So has their business model. Wave them goodbye on the way out."

"Should they summon the skill and dexterity, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan could guide the country to the restoration of a more austere and modest government with more restrained entitlements and a more equitable and efficient tax code. Those achievements alone would mark a new trajectory --  a return to what Reagan started three decades ago. 
 
"Every four years we are told that the coming election is the most important of one’s life. This time it might actually be true. At stake is the relation between citizen and state, the very nature of the American social contract."

"It comes down to numbers. And in the final days of this presidential race, from polling data to early voting, they favor Mitt Romney. ... 

"Desperate Democrats are now hanging their hopes on a new Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News poll showing the president with a five-point Ohio lead. But that survey gives Democrats a +8 advantage in turnout, the same advantage Democrats had in 2008. That assumption is, to put it gently, absurd. 

"In addition to the data, the anecdotal and intangible evidence -- from crowd sizes to each side's closing arguments -- give the sense that the odds favor Mr. Romney. They do. My prediction: Sometime after the cock crows on the morning of Nov. 7, Mitt Romney will be declared America's 45th president. Let's call it 51%-48%, with Mr. Romney carrying at least 279 Electoral College votes, probably more."