From a viewer, in response to Friday’s episode of What’s Your Problem?:

Dear Jonah,
Your tete-a-tete with Peter Beinart on Pam Anderson and popular culture was riveting (even though you didn’t include any shots of her, the way our friends at Fox News would have done). But with respect to the issue of conservatives not getting credit for condemning the moral tawdriness of pop culture, even when the pop stars repent years later, I think you’ve overlooked a crucial point. Lefties feel that conservative critiques of the culture are toothless because it’s capitalism — yes, big greedy corporation — that manufactures, distributes, and profits from this soulless stuff, and conservatives are content with moral posturing than the real business of dismantling the whole capitalist structure and replacing it with, oh, Stalinist-style puritanism, I guess. But the lefties (and liberals) also pat themselves on their collective backs at the same time for appreciating the “transgressive” qualities of pop culture that cleverly undermines capitalism from within. (The artists embroider the rope that the capitalists will hang themselves with, so to speak.) Thus, they have it both ways: They’re hipper than you and more truly moral as well. It’s the cultural version of blacks who say that “Western civilization is totally repressive and racist — and besides, we invented it all in Africa before you did anyway!” I’m tempted to say one can’t win, but I’ll leave morbid thoughts like that until after the conventions next summer.