“One of my favorite hangouts was The Follies. There were so many closeted neocons who trolled for cock and ass there, particularly cock and ass on younger men…

“One of them I would later recognize as Larry Craig. I followed him …to a Capitol Hill neighborhood.. We walked up the alley and through the back door of a house, with him repeating several times, ‘You were never here. You don’t know me. Right?’ and me responding, ‘Right!’ in boyish submission…Then, he stripped naked and asked me to suck him. I complied for a while, then he disappeared and returned with lube and a condom to fuck me with. It was a clumsy and unremarkable fuck…Still, he blew his load, ripped the dirty condom off and ordered me to get dressed without wiping myself…

“As he reached for the door, he took a $20 bill from his wallet, shoved it in my front pocket, adding ‘Remember, I can buy and sell your ass ten thousand times over. You were never here. Don’t try to come back here. You don’t know me.’”

“Snow and Stiffler were angry that they had been having sex with a man — when they thought they were having sex with a 12-year-old, authorities said.”

“Sorry, but I was impressed. In the year’s most psychotic media moment, Britney created something more real than reality TV: entertainment without borders, an unconsciously brilliant deconstruction of American Idolism, a disintegration in slo-mo. You could almost call it art.”

“Spartans! Ready your breakfast and eat hearty — for tonight we dine in hell!”

“Isn’t it amazing how self-pitying and self-aggrandizing the religious freaks in this country are? It’s not enough that they can make straight-faced professions of ‘faith’ at election times and impose their language on everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to the currency. It’s not enough that they can claim tax exemption and even subsidy for anything ‘faith-based.’ It’s that when they are even slightly criticized for their absurd opinions, they can squeal as if being martyred and act as if they are truly being persecuted.”

“Honestly, I’m not a country singer.”

“He is what he is, and I have the right to say what I say about him.”

“But, of course, what we see on television is the one bombing a day that discourages everybody.”

“The story of Lot and the Sodomites is eerily echoed in chapter 19 of the book of Judges, where an unnamed Levite (priest) was traveling with his concubine in Gibeah. They spent the night in the house of a hospitable old man. While they were eating their supper, the men of the city came and beat on the door, demanding that the old man should hand over his male guest ‘so that we may know him.’ In almost exactly the same words as Lot, the old man said ‘Nay, my brethren, nay, I pray you, do not so wickedly; seeing that this man is come into mine house do not this folly. Behold, here is my daughter, a maiden, and his concubine, them I bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you; but unto this man do not so vile a thing.’ Again the misogynistic ethos comes thorough loud and clear. I find the phrase ‘humble ye them’ particularly chilling.”

“Save the cheerleader; save the world.”

“The most memorable accomplishment of the TV ad depicting Mitt Romney jogging along a tree-lined road — huffing and schvitzing as he goes — is assuring voters that his hair is not actually carved out of granite.”

“If this book is not sitting next to Harry Potter on the fiction shelf then Rita Cosby is going to be wrapped up in one of the most expensive lawsuits ever,”

“I was brought up in Washington. When you are brought up in a zoo, you know what’s going on in the monkey house. You see a couple of monkeys loose and one is President and one is Vice President, you know it’s trouble. Monkeys make trouble.”

“What Mr. Craig did in that men’s room isn’t an offense either. He didn’t have sex in a public place. He didn’t expose himself. His toe tapping, hand signals and ‘wide stance’ were at most a form of flirtation. As George Will has rightly argued, if deviancy can be defined down to ’signaling an interest in sex,’ then deviancy is what ‘goes on in 10,000 bars every Saturday night in our country.’ It’s free speech even if the toes and fingers do the talking.

“The Minnesota sting operation may well be unconstitutional, as the A.C.L.U. says. Yet gay civil rights organizations, eager to see a family-values phony like Mr. Craig brought down, have been often muted or silent on this point. They stood idly by while Republicans gathered their lynching party, thereby short-circuiting public debate about the legitimacy of the brand of police entrapment that took place in Minnesota.”

“In a way, it was liberating — now it’s all over, and so what. I don’t have to keep up some great pretension that I’m the most dignified, eloquent, elegant, perfect, smart-thinking, kind, generous person. I mean, after poor Britney Spears with her poor little legs open, I’m not the least bit upset about it.”

“Less dressy! What do you think this is!”

“Well, every family has a black sheep.”

“For the last seven years we’ve been subjected to hero-worshipping prose about Bush’s faith and fortitude and his appealing to a ‘higher father’ for guidance and succor, and saintly photographs of the presidential seal forming a golden halo around Bush’s warrior profile…

“Concern trolls in the squishy center knitted their brows about the widening ‘faith gap’ between Repubs and Dems and called for a restoration of religion in the fabled ‘public square’ that doesn’t really exist anywhere but inside the minds of journalistic platitude mongers.

“But now that Mike Huckabee [who bills himself as a 'Christian leader'] has flapped his arms and scattered the pigeons, jeopardizing the candidacies of expensive empty suits such as Romney and Fred Thompson… the media’s collective bobblehead brain trust has rediscovered the virtues of secular firewalls…

“This is what happens when purity tests and theological thumb-wrestling take hold in the political process. Conservatives wanted to cram religion down everyone’s throats when they thought it was to their advantage. Now they’re the ones gagging on it.”

“Today, Trouble spends most of her time relaxing by the pool and playing in the afternoon.”