Next to the all but impenetrable shadows of power, wealth, celebrity, influence, and professional sports talent, virtually all of us are "insignificant," "inadequate," and "unknown." In another word, normal.

Let's do the math on this ultra elite segment of society. If we add up all the Members of Congress,...

Admit it. You go through your entire day without once thinking about our young men and women fighting and often dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. As they are not part of the fabric of our everyday lives, they are invisible. They don't exist. They don't count.

As we wake in...

Just about a year ago in this space, I endeavored to defend Bill Clinton against a highly suspect and agenda driven attack launched at him from the pages of Vanity Fair. Now, I will attempt to do the same for Governor Sarah Palin knowing that such a defense will be...

Two blatant and mind-numbing acts of racism by Republicans were just reported in the news -- and unfortunately and unwisely, GOP "leadership" has chosen to remain silent. Why?

The first involved a former election commission chairman from South Carolina who, upon hearing a gorilla had escaped from the local zoo,...

As the Republican Party struggles to reinvent itself, they have created something called the "National Council for a New America." Part of the mission of the NCNA being to reach out to Black and Hispanic America.

Strange. As one who is married to a Hispanic-American, speaks Spanish, and has written...

In the 1998 movie Armageddon, audiences thrilled as Bruce Willis, Steve Buscemi and Ben Affleck scrambled to save life on Earth from destruction by an asteroid -- and the vast majority left the theater safely confident that such a far-fetched threat could not possibly reflect reality.

They should not have...

As actors Sean Penn and Tom Hanks have recently demonstrated, emotions are still running very hot when it comes to Proposition 8 and gay marriage. At the Academy Awards, Penn just said that traditional marriage voters should "sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame...

My old boss and friend Bob Dole would always say, "How easy it is for those who refuse to step into the arena to criticize those who do." How right he is.

With each passing year, the criticism of those who choose to enter the arena of national...

I confess to being one of the millions of Americans who have seen Paul Blart: Mall Cop since it opened on January 16th. More than that, I confess to having thoroughly enjoyed the film.

Having made that now public confession, Nathan Lee of The New York Times...

While doing publicity for my new novel The Apocalypse Directive, a number of interviewers asked me who served as the inspiration for the Evangelical President of the United States who professes to speak directly to God and so twists his Christian faith that he is preparing to carry out the...

Congratulations to President-elect Barack Obama. As a conservative who has been fearful of an Obama victory for the last several months, I'm more than a little surprised at how calm I am with the dreaded result and how stress-free it is to offer genuine felicitations for the historic win.

Part...

When the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call labels your latest novel "a Christian Jihad," angry emails are sure to follow.

My new novel entitled, The Apocalypse Directive, is out this week. Unfortunately, long before the book came out, I started to get emails from self-proclaimed Evangelicals who had seen the...

I simply can't take it anymore. I have decided to defect and officially renounce my citizenship. Not to the United States, but rather to "Blackberry Nation."

Over the course of the last year or so, I've noticed more and more of my friends, relatives and business colleagues morphing into the...

Several years ago, in a column for the Los Angeles Times, I weighed in on the subject of "liberal bias" in film and almost instantly became a figurative piñata in print, on blogs, and by email. From a polite, if somewhat off-base spanking via letter-to-the-editor by director Joe Dante, to...

All that has made much of the American electorate sour on the media and the political process is now on display in the current issue of Vanity Fair. In a very lengthy article that can only be described as irresponsibly vengeful, the magazine and the author attempt to systematically smear...