Frank Rich quotes:

What are Americans still buying? Big Macs,Campbell's soup,Hershey's chocolate and Spam--the four food groups of the apocalypse.

No one is better placed or more philosophically suited than Obama to construct the new counter narrative as we go forward in our new New Deal. But many masters of the old universe, including quite possibly his chief economic adviser, can't recognize that the world has changed or should change.

In that sense, when a Bush or a Gore, or whomever, goes on David Letterman, that's the news, too.

For a man who purports to have learned of media ethics only this month, Mr. Williams has spent an undue amount of time appearing as a media ethicist on both CNN and the cable news networks of NBC.

Feckless as it was for Bush to ask Americans to go shopping after 9/11, we all too enthusiastically followed his lead, whether we were wealthy, working-class or in between. We spent a decade feasting on easy money, don't-pay-as-you-go consumerism and a metastasizing celebrity culture.

Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans' anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed.

Up in the Air' may be a glossy production sprinkled with laughter and sex, but it captures the distinctive topography of our Great Recession as vividly as a far more dour Hollywood product of 70 years ago, 'The Grapes of Wrath,' did the vastly different landscape of the Great Depression.

Nation editor Katrina van den Heuvel told me that the failure to adequately cover the Downing Street Memo epitomizes the timidity, the cowardice of a media that has been manipulated, intimidated, bullied by an administration that has taken it to a high level. . lapdog news media.

The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly 'changed everything,' slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable.

In the bubble decade, making money as an end in itself boomed as a calling among students at elite universities like Harvard, siphoning off gifted undergraduates who might otherwise have been scientists, teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, artists or inventors.

History is cyclical, and it would be foolhardy to assume that the culture wars will never return.

Looking back at my high school years, I'm struck by how slowly history can move.

'Up in the Air' is not a political movie. It won't be mistaken for either a Michael Moore or Any Rand polemic on capitalism.

Someday we'll learn the whole story of why George W. Bush brushed off that intelligence briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.' But surely a big distraction was the major speech he was readying for delivery on Aug. 9, his first prime-time address to the nation.

While F.D.R. once told Americans that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, Mr. Ashcroft is delighted to play the part of Fear Itself, an assignment in which he lets his imagination run riot.

My particular historical vantage point is a product of my upbringing as that odd duck, a native Washingtonian whose parents were not in government. The first presidential transition of my sentient lifetime, Kennedy's, I remember vividly.

As America knows, Obama turned down the lucrative career path guaranteed to the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review to pursue the missions of service and teaching instead. The potential rewards for our country, now that that early choice has led him into the White House, are enormous.

One would like to say in the aftermath of the 2008 election that everyone lived happily ever after. But the American drama, especially when it involves race, is always more complicated than that.

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those 'good Germans' who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo.

Anything But An Apologist for the Lefties and All of Their Causes.

What was most striking about the Obama speech in Berlin was not anything he said so much as the alternative reality it fostered: many American children have never before seen huge crowds turn out abroad to wave American flags instead of burn them.

Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years.

I'm always struck by the kids who turn up in New York and LA, and places in between. Chicago. Wanting to do theater, wanting to do independent film. Wanting to break into television or radio.

It is kind of tedious after a while, to parse politicians doing the same thing over and over again. The facts change from week to week, but the sort of masquerade doesn't.

If Obama needs to be criticized, I will criticize him. There's a tremendous amount of excitement about him. And a corollary of that is, as we're learning, from newspapers and magazines that are going into overdrive reprinting Obama editions, etc.

One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans' reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news.

There have been at least three other cases in which federal agencies have succeeded in placing fake news reports on television during the Bush presidency. It was a really good tour. It seemed maybe about a week too long.

After 9/11, we realized that all these silly culture wars, and arguing about rock lyrics... who cares? You know, we, for some reason, remembered what our real problems are.

Of course most Americans don't know how A.I.G. brought the world's financial system to near-ruin or what credit-default swaps are. They may not even know what A.I.G. stands for. But Americans do make the connection between their fears about their own jobs and their broad understanding of the A.I.G. debacle.

Nationalization would likely mean wiping out the big banks' managements and shareholders. It's because that reckoning has mostly been avoided so far that those bankers may be the Americans in the greatest denial of all.

When something really comes from the soul, I think it has a truth that you cannot find in politics.

The only truly shocking thing about last Tuesday's election is that the Democrats didn't do far worse, or as badly as they deserved.

To me, the fun part of both jobs is to always try to push the discussion and debate forward in some way. The most fun part of being a theater critic for the Times was always to try and champion something that maybe other people didn't like, or that was produced under obscure circumstances or had to fight for its life. And I would say in the column what I try to do is in some ways related in that I'm trying to fight for a point of view. I'm not trying to be a kingmaker in either job, and don't want to be, and shouldn't be.

The truth is that a lot of plays aren't political at all. In American theater history, political theater has tended to crop up when there's a crisis, a national crisis.

The principal House sponsor (of the Defense of Marriage Act), Bob Barr of Georgia has been married three times--which raises the question of why the act doesn't contain a three-strikes-and-you're-out provision.

The actor doesn't merely command the stage, he seems to own it by divine right.

Yul Brynner's performance in "The King and I," . . . can no longer be regarded as a feat of acting or even endurance. After 30-odd . . . Mr Brynner is, quite simply, The King.

Hollywood no longer depicts reporters in ruthless pursuit of criminals, high and low. Now they are the criminals.

The most wonderful street in the universe is Broadway. It is a world within itself. High and low, rich and poor, pass along at a rate peculiar to New York, and positively bewildering to a stranger.

I grew up in Washington, D.C. But also loving the theater.

There's nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn't recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht.