Free Republic

Earlier this month Andrew Sullivan, a well-known writer, once in the center, now on the left, nominated me for what is apparently his lowest badge of distinction for defending citizens who shoot to wound graffiti vandals, or "taggers," while committing their vandalism. Under the heading, "Malkin Award Nominee," Sullivan provides a quote from my radio show: "'So you will now say -- I hear the voice of an ACLU member -- 'Dennis, do you think that this guy should have shot these people spray painting graffiti on his shop?' To which my answer is yes. I do. Not to kill....

In all the discussion of John McCain's recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar? According to the Bush administration's definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured. Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. In the one indisputably authentic version of the story of a Vietnamese guard showing compassion, McCain talks...

I called Orson Swindle, a fellow POW who is campaigning for McCain, to ask him about it. “I recall John telling that story when we first got together in 1971, when were talking about every conceivable thing that had ever happened to us when we were in prison” Swindle told me a few minutes ago. “Most of us had been kept apart or in small groups. Then, in 1970, they moved us into the big cell. And when we all got to see each other and talk to each other directly, instead of tapping through walls, we had 24 hours...

Why is it so close? That’s been the chatter after these past two weeks in the three-month run of the Obama-McCain smackdown. The Obamaphiles are nervous that their man has stalled in the polls after what, objectively, was a successful trip overseas. The McCainites, terrified of a Democratic wave, are taking solace in the failure of Barack Obama to break away. The straggling Clintonites are busy preparing their told-you-sos. There are any number of theories offered for the tightness. One is that Obama is too temperamentally aloof for most Americans. According to the columnist Maureen Dowd, he is the Mr...

The day Andrew Sullivan found out Santa Claus does not exist: A few things have unsettled me these past couple of weeks about the Obama campaign. It is not the small adjustments to previously-held positions - FISA, the Second Amendment, Iraq. It's a sense that Obama's ample self-regard is lapsing into hubris. The signs of this are pretty trivial on the surface, but they are troubling nonetheless. That simulated faux-presidential seal was both tacky, silly and presumptive - a small version of "Mission Accomplished" Obama could well do without. The decision to give his acceptance speech in a stadium, rather...

Osama vs Obama 20 May 2008 06:05 pm Well: one person agrees with Bush's and Cheney's and Lieberman's loathing of Iran. (he links to an external site, showing Osama's hatred of Iran.)

From the very beginning, the premise and the promise of Barack Obama’s campaign was that it would transcend race. And last autumn the Obama team also knew this was the only way it could win. The Clinton brand among black voters was so strong, so unbreakable, so resilient a force that even the first credible black candidate for the presidency remained stuck 20-30% behind Hillary Clinton among African-American voters. She was, after all, the wife of the “first black president”, as the author Toni Morrison called Bill. She had almost all the black political establishment behind her. Her husband, from...

It is for many in the Obama camp an unthinkable thought. But politics is sometimes the art of adjusting today to what seemed inconceivable yesterday. I'm talking about the possibility — and the powerful logic — of a unity Obama-Clinton ticket for the Democrats. I never thought I'd even consider it; but times change; politics shifts, and in the roiling flux of this American campaign, a bold unifying gesture could make the Democratic ticket — and an Obama presidency — unstoppable almost overnight. It's still highly unlikely, but so was JF Kennedy running with Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan running...

One email has really got me thinking. The best point of those who disagree with my earlier post on Walker/Spann is that Walker wasn't/isn't really a lefty. He's actually a right-wing religious zealot. Here's the case: "Maybe I missed something, but I am not sure how a religious fundamentalist and zealot like John Walker is an embodiment of the American Hating Left. He is a right wing religious nut just like the guy arrested here in Cincinnati last week for sending fake anthrax to abortion clinics. While you may be correct that his permissive parents and his multicultural context may ...

Barack Obama made a call for nonviolence in the aftermath of the Sean Bell verdict - infuriating the Rev. Al Sharpton, who accused the presidential candidate of trying to "grandstand in front of white people," sources told The Post. I think that is part of Jeremiah Wright's view of Obama as well: he will never forgive him for winning so many white votes, and breaking the pattern and ideology of victimhood and marginalization that forged Wright's identity. This dynamic is very powerful in minority circles. In the gay world, for example, the younger generation faced enormous hostility at first in...

The manner in which free societies lose their moral compass is always incremental. Step by step by step, certain core values are whittled away. There is rarely a moment at which a government stands up, and asks its people if they wish to abandon such "quaint" notions as the Geneva Conventions, the rule of law, humane interrogation or habeas corpus. These things are abandoned incrementally or secretly, slice by slice, euphemism by euphemism, the chronology always clearer in retrospect than at the time. And each incremental step is always portrayed as a small but essential temporary sacrifice for the sake...

Last week was officially the moment that the race for the Democratic nomination slipped through the looking glass into surrealism. Here is a brief list of those people who are now actively supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy: Pat Buchanan, a charming man slightly to the right of Genghis Khan; Rush Limbaugh, the most voluble and incendiary of right-wing talk-show hosts; Richard Mellon Scaife, the media mogul who financed the virulently antiClinton crusades of the 1990s; and, if you read between the lines, even Karl Rove, the “architect” of the past decade or so of Republican dominance in electoral politics. Am I...

Even after all the hype, this Tuesday’s vote in Pennsylvania will be a watershed primary election. This isn’t because it could determine whether Hillary Clinton’s campaign continues on its brutal, nihilistic path towards the destruction of the most promising figure in the Democratic party since Kennedy. It isn’t because it’s been an age since the last primary vote and every nasty toxin in American culture has been drawn to the surface by the Clinton poultice. It isn’t even because Pennsylvania is an indisputably important and large state that any Democrat needs to win in November. It is because the Clintons...

...The latest revelations on the torture front show - the memo from John Yoo - as well as revelations from Phillippe Sands' book - means that Donald Rumsfeld, David Addington, John Yoo should not leave the United States any time soon. They will be at some point indicted for war crimes. They deserve to be...

In the initial shock of the September 11 massacre, one small notion lodged itself into the mass psyche. It is perhaps best summed up by the phrase: "Who could have seen that coming?" Because of the sheer audacity of the attack, its novel use of kamikaze-style jets, its uniquely horrendous death toll, most of us tended to exculpate the leaders of the United States for any responsibility for the lax security and failure of intelligence and foreign policy it represented. But nearly three weeks later, as the sheer extent of America's unpreparedness and vulnerability comes into better focus, one other ...

It’s alive! We thought it might be over but some of us never dared fully believe it. Last week was like one of those moments in a horror movie when the worst terror recedes, the screen goes blank and then reopens on green fields or a lover’s tender embrace. Drained but still naive audiences breathe a collective sigh of relief. The plot twists have all been resolved; the threat is gone; the quiet spreads. And then . . . Put your own movie analogy in here. Glenn Close in the bathtub in Fatal Attraction – whoosh! she’s back at your...

March 9, 2008 The Clintons, a horror film that never endsAndrew Sullivan It’s alive! We thought it might be over but some of us never dared fully believe it. Last week was like one of those moments in a horror movie when the worst terror recedes, the screen goes blank and then reopens on green fields or a lover’s tender embrace. Drained but still naive audiences breathe a collective sigh of relief. The plot twists have all been resolved; the threat is gone; the quiet spreads. And then . . . Put your own movie analogy in here. Glenn Close...

It’s alive! We thought it might be over but some of us never dared fully believe it. Last week was like one of those moments in a horror movie when the worst terror recedes, the screen goes blank and then reopens on green fields or a lover’s tender embrace. Drained but still naive audiences breathe a collective sigh of relief. The plot twists have all been resolved; the threat is gone; the quiet spreads. And then . . . Put your own movie analogy in here. Glenn Close in the bathtub in Fatal Attraction – whoosh! she’s back at your...

<snip> There are plenty of reasons to be perturbed when loons and hate-mongers support a candidacy. But this game of guilt-by-association can be played endlessly. I tend to place greater emphasis on loons and hate-mongers that candidates actively seek out. Pat Robertson is a loon and an anti-Semite and a vicious homophobe who blamed Americans for 9/11. Giuliani didn't receive some unsolicited money from him; he actually stood on a platform and embraced him. Why one standard for Paul and another for Giuliani? If Obama embraced Louis Farrakhan as a supporter, you think Goldfarb and Kirchick would be silent? They'd...

It's not as if Frank Rich has a deep and abiding hatred of his nation's leadership, or contempt for his fellow Americans. It's just that he accuses the Bush administration of using tactics worthy of the Gestapo -- the Nazi secret police headed by Heinrich Himmler -- and his fellow Americans of being like citizens of Hitler's Germany who turned a blind eye to the atrocities in their midst. Those "see no evil' residents of the Third Reich came to be known as the "good Germans," and Rich unsubtly sets the tone for his New York Times column of this...

People like Fred Thompson. So far as I can tell, that is currently the prime rationale for his candidacy for president of the United States. He doesn’t need to launch a media blitz to achieve this level of public fondness. His avuncular, crumpled tower of a personage is well known from many episodes of Law & Order. In this year’s race, only one other Republican candidate has even minimal charm – the obscure Mike Hucka-bee of Arkansas, who is obviously (and rather successfully) running for vice-president. Rudy Giuliani is many things, but likable isn’t one of them. Mitt Romney has...

Read TNR's accounting. It is as I predicted: honorable and, except for one small inaccuracy, it checks out. All the aspects aggressively challenged by the usual propaganda organs have been verified and corroborated. The military is now conducting its own investigation. Given the record of such formal investigations, I'm not as confident in the Pentagon as I am in TNR. Can we now expect apologies from the people who smeared and maligned the magazine and its soldier-reporter? I doubt it. The attackers are not the kind to acknowledge their own errors.

he idea that the party of Eisen-hower or Goldwater would have suspended habeas corpus indefinitely, as Bush has done for “enemy combatants”, would be unthinkable. The idea that they would have tried to occupy and rebuild an entire country in the Middle East is unimaginable. They were ferociously anticommunist, but also wary of direct engagement in foreign countries and deeply suspicious of all wars. This kind of prudence and caution was once the hallmark of the middle of the country and its Midwestern American values. Paul reminded Americans of this past. He told them that the Republicans opposed the second...

I couldn't help thinking about both last night. This week's South Park was its usual sharp, subversive self. And the visual games they play with race and gender and sexual orientation, and the language they use, leaves Imus in the dust. And yet South Park is not in the slightest bit offensive to me at all. This week, they had a hilarious parody of 300, including a battle between a phalanx of determined lesbians defending a gay bar called "Les Bos" and a group of Eurotrash Persian club owners threatening to take over the club and fill it with velvet...

"Edwards Suspends Campaign" was the title of an Andrew Sullivan post at 12:17 p.m. EDT today: He does it because his wife has a recurrence of cancer in some degree to be further explored. It is of a piece with his character to do this; and a simple testament that he has the right priorities and values to be a president of the United States. Sorry, Ms Coulter. But this man will be remembered for a character you do not even want to possess. But it turns out Edwards didn't suspend his campaign, even though his wife's cancer has recurred....

Two weeks ago, in this column, I suggested that Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, would have difficulty wooing conservatives because of his "anti-torture positions." Commentator Andrew Sullivan immediately pounced on my phraseology: "Good to see plain English being used on the right. Pity the use of torture is now a plus for some in the Republican primaries. But, hey, that's what American conservatism now stands for." Sullivan is perhaps the leading proponent of a blanket ban on torture of terrorist detainees. In an article he wrote for The New Republic back in December 2005, he elucidates his position. "Torture is the...

More and more, I wonder whether lefties mean it, any of it. Take Rosie O’Donnell. The other day, one of her co-hosts on “The View” was musing on current events and opined, “If you take radical Islam and you want to talk about what is going on there you have to…” And at this point Rosie interrupted. “One second. Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have a separation of church and state.” Does she really believe that? That “radical Christianity” is “just as threatening” as “radical Islam”? These terms are...

The Christianist Candidate In case you were unaware, it's Mitt Romney. As with most Christianists, the idea of allowing different states to try different solutions to the same problem is dispensable when moral absolutes are involved. In other words, the fundamentalists have no interest in federalism. If federalism means that California can have marriage equality and medical marijuana, today's GOP base wants none of it. Here's Romney's discussion of John McCain's approach: Romney was less charitable to McCain, who on Sunday told ABC News: 'I believe that the issue of gay marriage should be decided by the states.' McCain also...

This evening on CNN's "The Situation Room," anchor Paula Zahn hosted a brief discussion on the Iraq War with writers Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens. She began with: "Let's bring in a pair of conservatives with distinctly different points of view, Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens." But Mr. Hitchens wasn't going to let that introduction pass: ZAHN: Good to see both of you. So Christopher, at a time... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, "VANITY FAIR": I'm not a conservative. ZAHN: Our pleasure. At a time when the time American population.... HITCHENS: No, no, wait. You didn't get it. I'm not a conservative. ZAHN:...

I can hardly believe what I'm hearing in this interview listening to how prickly and thin skinned Sullivan is in this interview with Hugh Hewitt currently on Hewitt's radio program and continuing until 5PM Pacific, 8PM Eastern for any interested in hearing it. He is so aggitated that Hewitt is asking him to account for the things he's written in his own book. The guy is arrogant, priggish, rude, boorish, defensive, paranoid and childish. He refuses to answer most questions instead trying to somehow turn it around on Hewitt to try to make Hewitt look like some sort of depraved...

Powell leads the right in a Bush-whack Andrew Sullivan In my first year in America, as a budding young conservative, my old friend, the writer John O’Sullivan, invited me out to dinner. The dinner, it turned out, was with none other than William F Buckley, a man who remains the undisputed titan of American conservatism. Buckley became famous in America in the 1950s and 1960s for being a conservative intellectual when such a thing was regarded as axiomatically oxymoronic. He founded the National Review, the indispensable magazine for the burgeoning American conservative movement. He was one of the inspirations for...

I'm ashamed to say I had forgotten about this, but it is now bookmarked and will be played often..

Dave Weigel of Reason Magazine is guest posting at Andrew Sullivan's blog, and he currently has three posts where he discusses illegal immigration and Pat Buchanan's latest book. Perhaps we could work together to point out all the ways that he's wrong. In "Buchanan's Big Score" he says: Can anyone point me to the border towns where democracy has collapsed, supplanted by Latin American-style caudillos? Have Arizona, California, and the rest of the Southwest become less American or less loyal? Restrictionists are too quick to compare America's immigration with that of Europe or of collapsed empires of the past. But...

If you could save the victims of one of the following four events, which group would you save? 1. The victims of Fidel Castro's "revolution?" 2. The victims of Hezbollah's ambushes, rockets and missiles over the past three weeks? 3. The victims of the Seattle attack on the Jewish federation? 4. The victims of Mel Gibson's repulsive outburst of anti-Semitic venom? If all human life is valued equally, you'd have to save Castro's millions of victims, the Hezbollah's thousands, then the one dead and many injured in Seattle, and then Gibson's offended. As an extraordinary week draws to a close,...

First Dean, and now Lileks to my defense. Thanks to both. James is the Atticus Finch of the blogosphere, so it would have been fun to read, even if it hadn't been about me. As for Andrew Sullivan, I used to read him regularly and have repeatedly invited him on the program. He has repeatedly refused, though he has committed to appear for two hours when his book comes out, provided we talk only about the book. His attacks on various writers are in something of a rotation, and generally proceed from some fact not in evidence. His most recent...

"This is not America." Those words were President George W Bush’s attempt to explain the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison on the Arabic-language network Alhurra in 2004. He spoke the words as if they were an empirical matter, but a cognitive dissonance could be sensed through them. If the men and women who tortured and abused and murdered at Abu Ghraib did not represent America, what did they represent? They wore the uniforms of the United States military. They were under the command of the American military. In the grotesque, grinning photographs they clearly seemed to believe that what they...

See for example this thread first. The Brokeback Mountain columnist (Sullivan) coined the term Christianist Although he's a queer he must have no fear: as he would if Mohammed he dissed.

What does the term "Christianist" mean and why is Time peddling it? Time columnist Andrew Sullivan uses the term to describe evangelicals with whom he disagrees. He says his goal is to "take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist." He explains further, "Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state...

What I Got Wrong About the War As conservatives pour out their regrets, I have a few of my own to confess By ANDREW SULLIVAN Mar. 13, 2006 Was I wrong to support the war in Iraq? Several conservatives and neoconservatives have begun to renounce the decision to topple Saddam Hussein three years ago. William F. Buckley Jr., as close to a conservative icon as America has, recently wrote that "one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed." George F. Will has been a moderate skeptic throughout. Neoconservative scholar Francis Fukuyama has just produced a book renouncing...

A reader e-mails Andrew Sullivan: "I believe that if you compare the conduct of the Iraq war by the Bush administration with the record of Lincoln during the Civil War and Roosevelt during World War 2, the record will show that Bush is doing a better job than either Lincoln or Roosevelt. Check out 'Battle Cry of Freedom' by James McPherson, a history of the Civil War era. Lincoln faced continuous vilification by the Democrats and did not think until late in the campaign that he would win re-election. The Union military during the Civil War lost dozens of major...

A reader writes to someone else for a change: "Dear Viacom,I am outraged that religious extremists have caused you to not air the "Trapped in the Closet" episode of South Park. Scientologists and Tom Cruise intimidating Viacom like 912_tomcruise_3 some radical Islamic cleric makes me lose all respect for your company. I will boycott everything but South Park and The Daily Show/Colbert Report that is owned by Viacom and am urging others to do the same. Don't knuckle under to religious extremism, especially from dopey Scientolologists. The word is being spread far and wide about your cowardice. It is already...

"I am so tired of Muslims of blaming 'culture' not the 'religion' for any trouble inside Muslim countries. If you need an example of the falsehood of that statement - look at India and Pakistan. The people are ethnically identical, speak the same languages and eat the same foods. (In fact they were the same country until Muslims demanded they get their own country). Today Pakistan is a military dictatorship and has been for most of its 50 plus year life. Its only claims to fame are killing journalists, operating jihadi camps, beating up women who try to run marathons,...

The rumors are now swirling. Who has really been cooperating with Fitzgerald? The new buzz is that it could be ... Colin Powell. Who ends up at the center of the Plame outing? The odds may be narrowing on Cheney. If that pans out, we could be about to hit Plamegate pay-dirt; and the Bush administration could be headed into a political Katrina. But this is still just Capitol Hill buzz; and my sourcing is still light. A blog is not a newspaper and what I've just detailed wouldn't (and shouldn't) get into a newspaper. But, hey, speculation is part...

Digital Man Yesterday we noted that Andrew Sullivan has been waging a one-man witch-hunt against "Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!," a cute children's book that tells the story of a pair of boys who open a lemonade stand only to be beset by an army of liberal regulators... Why is Sullivan so scandalized by "Help! Mom!"? Maybe because it's so true. Check out this story from Salem, Mass., in the Aug. 3 Boston Globe: "Dominic Serino, 9, and his neighbor, Ryan Decker, 11, were forced Saturday to shut down their lemonade stand at Salem Common after an...

Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) September 27, 2005 -- Liberals on the airwaves and across the Internet have assailed the bestselling new conservative children's book "Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed" (Kids Ahead; hardcover $15.95; ISBN 0976726904) since it was announced several weeks ago, but the criticism took a surprising turn on Monday when prominent liberal Andrew Sullivan waded into the controversy, this according to the book's publisher. Sullivan — the author of multiple books and a former editor for the magazine "New Republic" — claimed on his popular blog that the book contains nudity, a charge which set...

"A West Yorkshire hospital has banned visitors from cooing at new-born babies over fears their human rights are being breached," reports the BBC: A statement from Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax said staff had held an advice session to highlight the need for respect and dignity for patients. On one ward there is a doll featuring the message: "What makes you think I want to be looked at?"Meanwhile, a press release from World Ahead Publishing notes that the children's book "Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!" has come under attack: Liberals on the airwaves and across the Internet...

This is a picture of Father Mychal Judge, the pastor for New York City's fire-fighters, an openly gay priest who died with those he served in the ashes of the World Trade Center. According to the new Pope, he should never have been ordained.

Quick story. In the mid 1980s I went to a fancy Fifth Av. party for Senator Ted Kennedy. There were journalists there and lots of other bigwigs. The only time I'd seen Kennedy before was at a campaign stop in 1979 when he'd been seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. He might have won, but I realized at the party that it would have been a terrible thing because he was the drunkest human being I had ever encountered in my life, and chances were that it hadn't just started that night. Sure, he already had this reputation, but it was...

I've now read and re-read Senator Dick Durbin's comments on interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay. They are completely, perfectly respectable. The rank hysteria being perpetrated by some on the right is what is shameful. Hugh Hewitt should answer one single question: does he doubt the FBI interrogator who witnessed the appalling treatment of some detainees at Guantanamo? Here's the report: On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had...

She’s running. You can tell that by the opposition. A newly formed political action committee to derail Hillary Clinton’s 2006 Senate campaign is already in full swing, and has the cheerfully misogynistic name of Stop Her Now. You can also tell it from her supporters. The Nation, the hard-left magazine, just ran a long story persuading lefties to get over their qualms and learn to love the former first lady. You can tell it from her travels. What was she doing in Austin, Houston, and Dallas in Texas last March? Raising close to $500,000 for campaign work. You can tell...