Good journalism should challenge people, not just mindlessly amuse them.

You can't serve the public good without the truth as a bottom line.

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.

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

There's something totally crazy about this.

John Paul was the first modern pope to grow up in a secular culture: He attended public schools, danced with girls - indeed, as a teenager he had a crush on a beautiful Jewish girl who fled his hometown just ahead of the arrival of the Germans.

For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal.