[D]rawing up 'secret war plans' for a possible attack on Iraq wasn't irrational. The low-level war against Saddam was 12 years old, with no end in sight. American and British pilots were getting shot at, sanctions weren't working, and Bush was getting warnings that Saddam had all those terrible weapons and would use them against America. Bush would have been a fool not to draw up plans. Gee, wait till the critics find out that FDR, without ever informing the media, was plotting to fight Japan and Germany before Pearl Harbor.

You can't run a society or cope with its problems if people are not held accountable for what they do.

If winning is the only value, why debate when you can suppress?

Do we really need more romance attached to the act of blowing people away?

The political terms 'will' and 'popular will' have a long track record in Western history going back to Rousseau. That record is profoundly anti-democratic, essentially inviting elites to interpret what the common people believe and want. In litigious modern America, that would be a judicial elite telling us how we meant to vote or should have voted.

The modern campus is deeply obsessed by race and gender, and not much else.

By the mid 1920s the typical American town was in full sexual bloom. The change came with erotic fashions, literature and movies, and an unsuspected sexual aid, the automobile.