When I see hipsters wearing Mao hats or Lenin T-shirts, I'm grateful. It's like truth-in-labeling. For now I know you are: Woefully ignorant, morally stunted, purposively asinine, or all three.

The mainstream perception that conservatives are close-minded and dogmatic while liberals are open-minded and free-thinking has it almost exactly backward. Liberal dogma is settled: The government should do good, where it can, whenever it can. That is President Obama's idea of pragmatism and bipartisanship: He's open to all ideas, from either side of the aisle, about how best to expand government and get the state more involved in our lives.

We are a species that must try to impose and find systems - systems of thought, ways of organizing and categorizing reality.

The problem is I think Howie is exactly right, is that Donald Trump would rather be at the center of a media controversy in a negative way than allow the limelight to move to Hillary Clinton and let her actually take heat in the public - in a public arena. And it just sucks up all of the oxygen.

If you write for the critics, only the critics will read you.

Pragmatism is the disguise progressive and other ideologues do when they want to demonize competing ideologies.

There was no intellectual movement in American history called social Darwinism. The people who were supposedly the leaders of the social Darwinist movement never embraced something called social Darwinism. It didn't exist.