"I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I'll fix it."

The political beliefs of Barack Obama, said Rick Santorum last week, come out of "some phony theology. ... Not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology, but no less a theology."

Yes, Virginia, there is a religious war going on. It is for the soul of America. And traditional Christianity is besieged.

After his fourth-place showing in Florida, Ron Paul, by then in Nevada, told supporters he had been advised by friends that he would do better if only he dumped his foreign policy views, which have been derided as isolationism.

U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul, Obama's man in Moscow, who just took up his post, has received a rude reception. And understandably so.

On Sept. 21, 1976, as his car rounded Sheridan Circle on Embassy Row, former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier was assassinated by car bomb. Ronni Moffitt, a 25-year-old American women who worked with Letelier at the leftist Institute for Policy Studies, died with him.

"They're vultures that are sitting out there on the tree limb, waiting for a company to get sick, and then they swoop in ... eat the carcass ... and ... leave the skeleton."

"Events are in the saddle and ride mankind."

In describing 2011, few cliches seem more appropriate. For in this past year, we Americans seemed to lose control of our destiny, as events seemed to be in the saddle.

For the Army and Marines who lost 4,500 dead and more than 30,000 wounded, many of them amputees, the second-longest war in U.S. history is over. America is coming home from Iraq.

Is a vote for the Republican Party in 2012 a vote for war?