My point about adultery is this. Newt's adultery is irrelevant in the general election because a person can repeatedly cheat on his wife and be a good president, even a great president. We can pretend this isn't true because it wouldn't be true if life were just, but life isn't just and it's true. Right now, we need a good president very, very badly. If I had to choose between Obama being faithful and Newt cheating, I'd take a cheating Newt. If I had to choose between Mitt being faithful and losing to Obama...  Newt. Stinks, I know. And when God appoints me judge over my fellow man's private morality, I'll take a different tack. But when that happens, boy oh boy, you're all in trouble.

I have been in make-up at Fox many times and not once has the make-up lady said anything like this to me.  I can't understand it.

Good onya, Mollie. As the official Most Happily Married Man on Earth, I can testify that the Biblical model not only works like magic but it actually provides a model for a balance of power. It's two different kinds of power, but still. It definitely beats feminist "equality" which seems always to leave the man a shriveled, secretly angry version of himself, harried by a continually disgruntled woman.

Peter, I was just signing on to post this article. I believe I said something similar to Jonah Goldberg during one of our immortal podcasts. Far from this being unthinkable, it's what I began to suspect even before his election. It's not that Obama is actually stupid, it's that his inexperience and misguided ideology echo off each other, each enlarging each. When his ideology fails, he hasn't the experience to modify it, when his inexperience is revealed, he falls back on his ideology. It creates the same effect as stupidity, especially when it's all wrapped up in an arrogance that will never allow him to find that beautiful place where one says, "Holy canoli, everything I ever thought I knew is wrong!"

I was just signing on to link to this wonderful column, but you got there first, Mollie.  Beautifully written, wonderfully observed, made me laugh out loud - and I was in the middle of reading it to my wife when I thought, "Hey!  That's OUR Mollie!"  Is Ricochet a cool place to hang or what?

Hilarious video, but I have to go with James on "I could care less."  The Brits are always accusing Americans of having no sense of irony, but it's clearly the ironic or sarcastic version of I couldn't care less.  Like saying, "Right.  I care."

My wife and I have a running disagreement over "It is what it is," which she hates but I rather like for its tone of tragic-but-heroic resignation.  Hate to disagree with my wife because she's so often right...  but it is what it is.

Well, because politics is what they wrote about and not to mention it on a conservative culture blog would've seemed disingenuous.

Sarah herself cared more about Homer than, say, Thatcher.  But whenever I would voice one of my increasingly right wing opinions, she would bark, "Drew!" in such a manner as to nearly make me somersault backwards out of my chair.

This is brilliant, Peter - as we would expect from you - but subtle too.  Most of those kids they interviewed think the internet, like liberty itself, descended from the skies.  And most Harvard-educated economists would be horrified by the elevation of deflation as the the gold standard of the economy.  But it is.   I keep pointing out to people:  televisions get cheaper in price for only one reason - there's no government control over the television market.  Might as well be talking to...  well... you.

As always, I agree with Rob Long.  But seriously, the problem here is not whether Westlake is wonderful - he was.  But to isolate him as the best is to miss how many great ones there really are.  Not only are so many great modern American novelists crime writers, but so many of the best modern American "literary" novels - "East of Eden," "American Tragedy," "In Cold Blood," "Executioner's Song" leap to mind - are crime stories.  That said, I second (or third) the nomination of John D. MacDonald to the list.  If he'd only written the Travis McGee series, he'd be up there, but he also wrote the tales that inspired, Cape Fear and the great TV show "Run for Your Life," plus the delightful fantasy, "The Girl, The Gold Watch and Everything."

I'd also like to add that having Norm Hapke comment on Ricochet may raise the intelligence of the conversation to the point where I can no longer participate.

I have come to feel morally certain that  Al Gore is a lunatic.  For me, he has exactly the same authority as that Camping guy who declared the world was going to end whenever it just didn't.  I try to keep this under wraps so my wife doesn't find out, but I'm actually all in favor of "empowering women" if that means giving them the same human rights as men.  But my observation is that fewer babies from educated women simply means the stupidest people reproduce...  ala Idiocracy...  which by a circular chain of thought, brings us back to Al Gore. 

Hahahaha...  this is a wonderful post....  but let's get our facts straight!  It's "Meep meep!"   "Me-meep!" is also acceptable. 

I have to say I'm much more militant than you guys.  Of course there's a blacklist - half the time they don't even know they're doing it.  And of course we should shout about it, write books about it and ultimately break it.  The culture matters.  We need to create new paradigms, say the unsayable, write heroes who are openly, outspokenly pro-American and conservative, make the good-guy politician the one who crushes the stupid new program to help the sad-eyed child instead of the other way around... and so on.  We shouldn't say "Duh," we should say...  well, I can't say what we should say and remain a gentleman.  But we should say it, often and loudly.  We're right and they're wrong, why shouldn't our movies, books and TV shows reflect that?

That said, I wouldn't work with Rob either.  Something shifty about him.

Yes, I want to add my vote to Claire's in support of this weirdly delightful post.  I've frequently reflected that, if you could only remove the human suffering caused by evil, all that would be left of evil is the comedy.  What a world.

To each his own, but for me, asking if children make you happy is like asking if life makes you happy.  Before I had kids, I thought I was living, but I was living in two dimensions.  With kids, it was as if I suddenly realized that what I thought was the horizon was in fact a cheap picture painted on a screen and beyond the screen was - well - everything; the emotional richness of living; life.  Of course when you say this out loud, those without children complain that you've hurt their feelings.  Then you have to slap them.  Sometimes kick them.  Which can tire you out.  But it's a small price to pay for being self-satisfied and irritating.

That's great, really tops! 

Well, of course, you recognize the wonderful Gary Sinise in the first video.  The ladies in the second video are: Emmy Award winner Patricia Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond, The Middle), Angie Harmon (Law & Order, Rizzoli & Isles), American Idol runner-up Katharine McPhee, Jaime King (Pearl Harbor, Sin City), Tamera Mowry (Sister, Sister), Lacey Chabert (Party of Five, Lost In Space, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past), Kristy Swanson (original Buffy The Vampire Slayer) and Leeann Tweeden (Model and Fox's Best Damn Sports Show Period).