When Cromwell instructed his portraitist to paint him 'warts and all', he meant both halves of that equation. To teach the warts alone is morbid and unhealthy.

Can't spell, can't spot fake Shakespeare, can't tell one wacky foreigner from another: it's increasingly obvious that Barbra is some deep sleeper planted by the Republicans to discredit the very concept of activist celebrities. Poor old Democrats, in thrall to her fundraising: people who need Barbra are the unluckiest people in the world.

Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. A nation that takes Barack Obama's current rhetorical flourishes seriously is certainly well advanced along that dismal path.

General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary.

The Western front is the important one in this war - the intersection between Islam and a liberal democratic tradition so mired in self-loathing it would rather destroy our civilization just to demonstrate its multicultural bona fides.

In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London’s mall for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later . . . Let’s not go there.

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.