Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.

We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.

The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism.

The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, it has often been argued, were fueled by the most radical of all American political ideas.

Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.

At heart, Sussman was a theoretician. In another age, he might have been a Talmudic scholar. He had cultivated a Socratic method, zinging question after question at the reporters: Who moved over from Commerce to CRP with Stans? What about Mitchell's secretary? Why won't anybody say when Liddy went to the White House or who worked with him there? Mitchell and Stans both ran the budget committee, right? What does that tell you? Then Sussman would puff on his pipe, a satisfied grin on his face.

The Congress is a dysfunctional institution; its broken. One of our three branches of government is broken.