There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.

Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity.

Like wars, forest fires and bad marriages, really stupid laws are much easier to begin than they are to end.

George Bush and John Ashcroft were religious in a scary way, but the rational among us could always take heart that, deep down, the Bush administration was more cynical than messianic.

Criminal justice, as it pertains to the Goldmans and Morgan Stanleys of the world, is not adversarial combat, with cops and crooks duking it out in interrogation rooms and courthouses. Instead, it's a cocktail party between friends and colleagues who from month to month and year to year are constantly switching sides and trading hats.

'American Sniper' is a movie whose politics are so ludicrous and idiotic that under normal circumstances it would be beneath criticism. The only thing that forces us to take it seriously is the extraordinary fact that an almost exactly similar worldview consumed the walnut-sized mind of the president who got us into the war in question.

I think America has the best assholes in the world. I defy the Belgians or the Japanese to produce something like a Donald Trump.