The best reason to diminish social programs is not to put more money in people's pockets but to put more responsibility in people's pockets.

If you look at the range of Hollywood movies playing in most cities in the developing world, you'd hate the America they portray, too.

The Democrats smell blood and don't want to be told that it's their own.

Popular culture as a whole is popular, but in today's fragmented market it's a jostle of competing unpopular popular cultures. As the critic Stanley Crouch likes to say, if you make a movie and 10 million people go see it, you'll gross $100 million - and 96 per cent of the population won't have to be involved. That alone should caution anyone about reading too much into individual examples of popular culture.

How ridiculous! You're going to have the first black president apologize for slavery?

Once you accept you're a child in the government nursery, why shouldn't Nanny tell you what to do?

Most mainline Protestant churches are, to one degree or another, post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbelieving to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left clichés, on the grounds that if Jesus were alive today he’d most likely be a gay Anglican bishop in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally friendly car with an “Arms are for Hugging” sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams.