One test of un homme sérieux is that it is possible to learn from him even when one radically disagrees with him. - Christopher Hitchens

What a country, and what a culture, when the liberals cry before they are hurt, and the reactionaries pose as brave nonconformists, while the radicals make a fetish of their own jokey irrelevance.

I would smile quietly while these young men cheered him on and hear-hear’d. Just wait, I’d think, knowing the moment would arrive when the ideological fiddler would have to be paid, when the host would change the topic and the earnest and happy young men would be reduced to looking at their shoes and muttering Oh, well, yes, I suppose. I like to think of this as the Mother Teresa Moment, named for Hitch’s most incendiary cultural dissent but applicable to any subject that might startle the Christian soldiers of the Bush administration into remembering that, apart from Saddam Hussein, Hitch remained entirely his unreconstructed secular and socialist self.

"In the very recent past, we have seen the Church of Rome befouled by its complicity with the unpardonable sin of child rape, or, as it might be phrased in Latin form, "no child's behind left.