An oldie but a goodie...

I'm in a hotel room in downstate Illinois watching daytime TV and I just saw a commercial for laundry detergent or breakfast pastries or tampons or something—can't recall, but it was a commercial aimed squarely at American moms—and Wanda Sykes did the voiceover. An African American lesbian who openly "hoped for the death of Rush Limbaugh," as outraged conservative bloggers wrote in their outraged blog posts about Sykes, is mainstream and safe enough to sell breakfast tampon detergent to the moms of middle America.

So, yeah, the culture war. We still have a long way to go politically, of course, but from where I'm sitting—on the edge of the bed in room 328 in the Holiday Inn in Carbondale, Illinois—it sure looks like we're winning the culture war.