I'm going to set up a Commission of Inquiry," said the Sow.
"What's that?" asked Lorina.
"It's a way of putting things off, said the Sow, "in the hope that the problem will go away.

Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness

Not at all tricky.  We do this sort of stuff every day before breakfast.  Then I fly to work on my winged pig, Swilma.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.

The appalling reality in American politics today is that, when ideology and money mix, truth is a mere inconvenience.

As with our colleges, so with a hundred ‘modern improvements;’ there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at...