I was raised by polite and loving parents, so I often heard expressions such as, “Don’t say anything if you can’t say something nice.”

Or, “Don’t speak ill of the dead.”

Thus the passing of Andrew Breitbart has left me in a state of reserved comment for the better part of a week. I want to be fair to a man whose voice can no longer raise a defense. But I also want to speak my own mind while I still can.

Legacy matters. What is left behind still exists, to elevate or damage, in the wake of a life.

Christopher Hitchens died Thursday from complications related to whiskey and cigarettes.

I followed the progression of his mortal illness in the same way I followed his many arguments and criticisms: whenever I came across something he wrote, I read it. In the last year, almost everything I read by Hitchens was about his gruesome, losing battle with throat cancer. With his death approaching, Hitchens was aware that many people were not reading the articles as much as they were just slowing down to get a glimpse of something horrible trapped in highway wreckage. He had enraged quite a few by writing about religion the way he did. If Hitchens was not going to recant on his deathbed to their satisfaction, at least they could assure themselves he was already beginning to writhe in hell.

In those last encounters with his work, I sensed that Hitchens was writing to those who understood him to be, at least on one level, a journalist covering the contemporary experience of death. His final reporting was filed from a combat zone near oblivion, and the deadline was unrelenting.

I do not believe that Sarah Palin really wants to be President, and that is why I think she will run in 2012.

Palin feeds on the lucre of celebrity, and her Facebook page and Twitter account form a kind of peanut gallery from which she can transmit tiny encyclicals without having to be right or even informed on the subject of her pronouncements. Her genius is the ability to remain unaccountable for behavior and utterances that would fatally wound anyone else in public life. Like a student who gets caught looking at the work of another during an exam, only to explain that her learning style just looks like cheating, Palin supplies her own rules.

Sarah Palin will run in 2012 because she is beyond politics yet addicted to our attentions.

These remarks were delivered at the Distinguished Alumni Award Ceremony in San Marcos, Texas, October 1, 2010.

I am grateful to the selection committee at the San Marcos Education Foundation for this recognition tonight. And I thank those who moved my nomination by Virginia Witte forward after her death last summer.

Success and achievement in life is certainly related to performance. If you show up, work with energy and passionate purpose, you have a good chance to make something of yourself in the world.

But what I want to talk about tonight is that accomplishment is also about being lucky. It’s about having good fortune in the relationships and circumstances that shape your life. I have been very lucky...

Lately most of what I have read about Facebook is complaints about security and privacy. It’s legitimate to worry about how a company might appropriate all the personal information exchanged by those who use the site. Whether all of that data is being adequately protected from stalkers and scam artists is important too.

But in the last forty eight hours I have also seen how Facebook users have turned a social network site into a support network for a beloved teacher. Today there are scores of former students reaching out to let Virginia Witte know that her battle with cancer is our battle too.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal should step aside as a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. Clear evidence exists that Blumenthal has engaged in a pattern of misrepresenting himself, and allowing others to misrepresent him, as a veteran who served in Viet Nam during the war.

Blumenthal points to other times when he has more clearly indicated that he served in the Marine Reserves during the war without implying that he was deployed into the combat zones of Viet Nam. Thus, Blumenthal argues, he simply “misspoke” on multiple occasions when he referred to his service in Viet Nam.

I don’t buy that he simply misspoke, and I don’t think it matters all that much if he did. Based upon primary results so far, this is not shaping up to be a good year for candidates or parties that aim for getting through one more election cycle with the same old approach.

There are all kinds of reasons, from both the left and the right, why Elena Kagan might not be the best choice to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court. In the next six weeks we will hear all of them.

But, coming from Republicans, the complaint that the current Solicitor General does not have experience on the bench by which to evaluate her past decisions is as disingenuous as any argument could be.

The reason Elena Kagan does not have judicial experience is because the GOP never allowed her earlier nomination to the federal bench to proceed when they were running the Senate while Bill Clinton was President.

President Obama has indicated that he would like to announce his nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens soon, perhaps as early as next week. What interests me more than the list of floated names on the President’s presumed short list is the list of characteristics we are no longer allowed to seriously consider in a Supreme Court Justice. The White House is daily warned, by voices from both parties, to avoid sending up any nominee who is “liberal,” “activist,” “outside the mainstream,” or “difficult to confirm.” Then the politician or pundit who is warning the president adds that there should be no “litmus test” for a potential jurist on the highest court.

A list of what’s unacceptable in a judge is already a litmus test. And why are we not allowed to consider how a variety of well-articulated but competing legal perspectives might enable the law to better address the complexity of problems we face in our lives?

Like many Americans, I was unable to watch the health care “summit” live last week because I was at work. But I did stay up until about 2 a.m. watching the replay on CSpan. Even at the time I thought it was a little nuts to stay up so late to watch a political event that essentially meant nothing and accomplished nothing. I had already read much of the post-event analysis; I had watched a number of clips capturing some of the more dramatic moments. But that’s just it: I was getting somebody else’s commentary, and viewing what somebody else considered the “highlights,” like it was a football game and all that mattered were the touchdowns. My wife is sane, so she went to bed. I sat in the darkness watching government on television.

Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life (PublicAffairs Books, 2009) is the story of an exceptionally privileged daughter of corporate power who somehow stretched beyond the constraints of journalism to become a beloved icon of progressive ideals. Armed with a devastatingly precise wit, Ivins embraced her passionate subjectivity and fought like hell – for civil liberties, for all those who suffer the consequences of a corrupt and oligarchic public life, for liberals who needed laughter with their morning outrage. She unleashed a voice that mooned scoundrels who seek public office so they can pimp government to the desires of private lucre. Ultimately, the story of Molly Ivins is the tale of a life lived tall and big-grinned, driven by moral purpose and the good times, but not without a share of the sadness that makes a life full.