Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.

Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools - and use it on the teachers.

Political systems must love poverty-they produce so much of it. Poor people make easier targets for a demagogue. No Mao or even Jiang Zemin is likely to arise on the New York Stock Exchange floor. And politicians in democracies benefit from destitution, too. The US has had a broad range of poverty programs for 30 years. Those programs have failed. Millions of people are still poor. And those people vote for politicians who favor keeping the poverty programs in place. There's a conspiracy theory in there somewhere.

Most of us had never seen a sober redneck before, and we have the Reagan Landslide to testify that none of us ever wants to see one again. It was a horrifying apparition. And ever since Jimmy Carter, all of us rednecks have had to be very careful to be drunk rednecks lest we turn into some kind of awful creature with big buck teeth and a State Department full of human-rights yahoos.

Who does Bill Clinton think got off the boat and stepped on Plymouth Rock? Peace Corps volunteers?

This country was founded by religious nuts with guns.

The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.