I consider myself to be culturally conservative, but I wish we could get past the idea that wearing a necktie makes you a serious person.

I think Ryan is suffering the stigma of having run on a losing ticket.

It's American male actors who are reluctant to appear nude on screen. Look at a list of notable names in the acting profession who have appeared frontally nude in films and you see that most of them are British, European, or Latin American.

Mark Wahlberg's "penis" in Boogie Nights was actually a prosthetic, so he doesn't count.

Kevin Costner did a nude scene in For the Love of the Game, but it was cut out when the studio decided to go for a PG-13 rating.

I stopped reading The New Yorker twenty years ago after Pauline Kael retired. Looks like I haven't missed anything.

Having grown up in East Texas in the 1970s I’ve seen the shoe on the other foot. My first exposure to politics in the classroom was during the 1972 election. My second grade teacher demanded to know which students supported Nixon and which supported McGovern. Of course, since these were only second-graders, what she really meant was, “For whom are your parents voting?” Everyone in the class raised their hands for Nixon except for one boy. This teacher then proceeded to grill the McGovern supporter as to his reasons. “Nixon’s been president too long,” the boy said. Oh, the derision that was then heaped upon this kid! (None of the other students were asked to justify their support for Nixon.)

A few years later, in the immediate aftermath of the Watergate scandal, I had a substitute teacher who would frequently take some of our fifth- and sixth-grade classes. She was a big Nixon apologist and felt that her classroom duties required her to defend the by-then ex-president. “They’re all crooks – he just got caught” was her favorite line. What a terrible message to send to kids!

In The Best Man  both the president and the upcoming political convention are of the same party. I don't remember if it's mentioned in the film but it's clearly the Democratic party. It's a big tent party, with a liberal wing and a (Southern) conservative wing, as the Democratic party was at that time (early 1960s). The liberal candidate (Henry Fonda) and the conservative candidate (Cliff Robertson) were both vying for the president's endorsement to be the party's nominee in the upcoming election.

Yes, that would be Beau Willimon. He was interviewed recently on BBC radio. The interviewer was incredulous about the film's extreme cynicism, but Willimon insisted upon its veracity.

The writer of this film supposedly worked on the Howard Dean presidential campaign in 2004 and on HRC's senate campaign in 2000. That might explain something.

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I've been an occasional reader of Archbishop Cranmer's blog for several years and I've never seen any indication that he is an actual archbishop, or indeed any official of the Church of England. I may be wrong but I always assumed that "Archbishop Cranmer" is just a blogging persona, and that he is an (anonymous) lay person who supports a more orthodox and socially conservative C of E.

Perhaps my post was poorly worded. My intention was not to defend their tax rates, but rather to point out that we Americans are living in a glass house.

 That's pretty funny.  But, given that Sweden's economy and public finances are in far better shape than ours, can we really afford to be so smugly dismissive towards their tax rates?

 Another thing:  Archie Bunker's unspoken generosity in supporting his freeloading son-in-law year after year, allowing him to live under his roof despite their constant clashes.

The show's overt social criticism aside, the overarching theme of the series is how family ties and responsibilities trump political and generational differences.  Surely that's something conservatives should appreciate.

Yet Archie Bunker's prejudices concealed a core of decency, and he could usually be counted on to do the right thing in the end.  And his liberal son-in-law, though acting as the mouthpiece for the "right" views, was often portrayed as vain, stubborn, and annoyingly self-righteous. This show was far more nuanced than some of its conservative critics give it credit for. 

And, contrary to what Ben Shapiro claims, it's never been out of syndication since the 1970s.

We bombed Soviet Russia?  When did that happen?