Free Republic

If you must read Bill Clinton's book, skip pages 1 through 869. Is there anything interesting in "My Life" by Bill Clinton? Oh, yes. Page 870. The Clintons are in New Zealand and finally get to meet "Sir Edmund Hillary, who had explored the South Pole in the 1950s, was the first man to reach the top of Mount Everest and, most important, was the man Chelsea's mother had been named for." Hmm. Edmund Hillary reached the top of Everest in 1953. Hillary Rodham was born in 1947, when Sir Edmund was an obscure New Zealand beekeeper and an unlikely...

That's the problem for the Democrats. If "resolve"' is the issue, can you beat it with "nuance"? If I had to name the definitive Kerry campaign headline it would be this, from Britain's (left-wing, Kerry-backing) Guardian last week: ''Kerry Says His 'Family' Owns SUV, Not He.'' That Chevy Suburban in the yard has nothing to do with him. Who you gonna believe? A respected senator or your lying eyes? ...

COVALIS, Oregon — Barred from writing columns for the Oregon State University Daily Barometer, senior David Williams is in the eye of a storm some call a racial double standard. The newspaper's editor fired him after he wrote: "I think blacks should be more careful in deciding whom they choose to support. They need to grow beyond the automatic reaction of defending someone because he or she shares the same skin color and is in a dilemma." Williams, who is white, was referring to examples such as when singer R. Kelly (search), who is accused of being a child pornographer,...

I've never been to Gaza, but I have mooched around the West Bank and, compared to such nascent nations as Slovenia or East Timor, it's all but impossible to detect evidence of any plausible nationalist movement. Everywhere you go, you see the glorification of the martyrdom movement and the Jew-killing movement, and evidently those are such a hit that Palestinian nationalism has withered in their wake, except insofar as when all the Jews are gone, what's left will by default be Palestinian. Ariel Sharon has decided that one cannot negotiate with a void, a nullity -- and even sentimental European...

A healthy society needs censorship to survive, 1950s musical icon Pat Boone said yesterday. He added that he would welcome strong content restrictions governing movies and other artistic works. "I don't think censorship is a bad word, but it has become a bad word because everybody associates it with some kind of restriction on liberty," said Mr. Boone, who is in Washington making the rounds as the national spokesman for the 60-Plus Association, a conservative senior citizen lobby.

In the summer of 2002, Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, issued a stern warning to the BBC: a US invasion of Iraq would "threaten the whole stability of the Middle East." As I wrote at the time, "He's missing the point: that's the reason it's such a great idea." I thought about Mr. Moussa a lot this past week. I was invited to speak at the United States Naval Academy's foreign affairs conference, a great honor for a foreigner. I wasn't the star attraction — that was Condoleezza Rice; I was merely a warm-up act. Anyway, I was...

In making that choice, Spanish voters have given radical Islamists (not to be confused with the religion of Islam itself) a symbolic triumph of monumental proportions -- and all it took was the detonation of a dozen or so backpack bombs. In the minds of the murderous jihadi fundamentalists, the swift capitulation of Spain has to be seen as a historic moment in their struggle to reverse the centuries-old humiliation of the "Reconquista" -- the reconquest of what is now Spain and Portugal by Christian forces several centuries after the Moorish invasion in 711 had extended Islamic rule to most...

Oil for Memories How the U.N. can begin paying its debt to Iraq's people. BY CLAUDIA ROSETT Wednesday, April 21, 2004 12:01 a.m. Having helped sustain and humor the tyranny and fraud of Saddam Hussein for years via the massively corrupt Oil-for-Food program, the United Nations has for the past year been seeking a new role for itself in Iraq. Presiding over the legitimation of a new Iraqi government, which seems to be the current grand ambition, is not a good place for the U.N. to start. At the very least, a project of such complexity, requiring the highest possible...

At least now we know where John Kerry is meeting these unnamed foreign luminaries: "I mean, you can go to New York City and you can be in a restaurant and you can meet a foreign leader," he said on "Meet the Press." Happens to us all, you know; one moment you're at Denny's garnishing your hamburger, and the next you have the Guatemalan undersecretary for bauxite slapping you on the back and expressing a fervent desire for your victory. You nod, you smile, you play along. And he goes on and on about Kyoto until you note that while...

This week, Sen. John Kerry accused the administraton of playing global politics with gas prices.Under scrutiny, that scandalous charge raises more questions about Mr. Kerry than President Bush.

"This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper." I'm saving the end of the world for my final column, but T S Eliot's words seem at least as pertinent to the present war – or "war", according to taste. It will be decided not by the bangs – whether in Fallujah or Bali or elsewhere – but by the whimpers. And, although the bangs have got a little louder in recent weeks, it's the whimpers that have become deafening. Whimpers, whimpers everywhere. On American TV, the network sob-sisters tut sympathetically with the "Jersey...

Human nature constantly seeks to transcend its own limitations. Some of civilization's greatest accomplishments -- one modern example being aerial flight -- have been produced by this effort. Still, each of us realizes our bodies cannot fly unassisted by machines. If we don't recognize this reality, we are likely to wind up committed to the funny farm. Yet when it comes to irrational utopian political ideas, there seems to be no similar awareness of the difference between wishful fantasy and reality. Reading John Kerry's latest critique of our government's Iraq policy demonstrates the imperviousness of such fantasies when confronted with...

Having labored in the vineyards of the journalism farm for more than three decades, I've always been of the mind that no one cares how many thorns we encounter or how much sweat falls from our brow. If a reporter has to cool his heels for hours before the great person is ready to give an interview and then endure any number of slights to get the story, I don't believe the reader cares, or that the press is under any obligation to pass that on. Like Tommy Lee Jones encountering "The Fugitive" Harrison Ford who professes "I didn't kill...

General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of the 2,500 U.N. peacekeepers, said he could prevent the killing [in Rwanda] if he had 5,000 men. Instead, the Clinton administration blocked him from taking any action and got the blue helmets to pull out. Why was this? Well, Somalia, of course. When 10 Belgian peacekeepers were hacked to pieces in Rwanda, it reminded the administration of those 18 U.S. servicemen in Mogadishu. As Samantha Power writes in her book A Problem From Hell: ''The news from Rwanda only confirmed a deep skepticism about the viability of UN deployments. Clarke believed that another...

Victoria's Secret has canceled its TV show, citing the new chill wind blowing through the airwaves since Janet Jackson got pawed in prime time. Unless they have plans to drape tarps over all their storefronts in the malls of America, this seems a bit exaggerated. No one watches a Victoria's Secret TV special expecting modesty and cerebral pursuits; they watch to see women composed mostly of legs and lips parade around in articles of clothing containing up to 16 molecules of silk. No one sees "Victoria's Secret Special" in TV Guide and thinks it's a program about a 19th century...

The Mirror of Fallujah No more passes and excuses for the Middle East Victor Davis Hanson What are we to make of scenes from the eighth-century in Fallujah? Random murder, mutilation of the dead, dismemberment, televised gore, and pride in stringing up the charred corpses of those who sought to bring food to the hungry? Perhaps we can shrug and say all this is the wage of Saddam Hussein and the thirty years of brutality of his Baathists that institutionalized such barbarity? Or was the carnage the dying scream of Baathist hold-outs intent on shocking the Western world at home...

Islam is a religion we can no longer blow off like Courtney Love and relegate to a concerned but removed one-hour National Geographic special. Since 9/11, Islam has been forcefully, painfully shoved into the American spotlight and our increased awareness has been very unpleasant.  Ever since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Islam has officially ceased (for many myopic Americans) to be just an out-of-the-ordinary, mysterious religion that we watch from time to time on cable.  Truth be told, at the end of the day, the growing threat of Islamic jihad still hasn’t really got our...

Most Telegraph readers who celebrate Easter will be doing so in medieval stone churches in leafy shires, as English as anything in our landscape. Like the white clapboard meeting houses in my part of the world, they make Christianity seem so indigenous it's easy to forget Jesus never saw a New England church or an Anglican vicar in a dog collar. Nineteen hundred and sixtysomething years ago, He was celebrating Passover. Christ's Last Supper was the first day of Pesach, the same ritual those Israeli diners were observing on Wednesday when a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated himself, killing 20 and injuring...

County studies, readies rifle bill By Peter Felsenfeld CONTRA COSTA TIMES All it would take is a willing mind and a powerful explosive to turn Contra Costa's hulking oil refineries into giant chemical bombs. In an age of terrorism and readily available weapons, neither prospect can be completely discounted. So Contra Costa supervisors are scheduled Tuesday to take aim at a readily available gun they say presents just such a threat. The board is expected to ask county attorneys to draft an ordinance that would ban the sale of .50-caliber BMG rifles in unincorporated areas. The measure would be based...

Why do the republicans allow the democrats to continue to distort and misrepresent the the employment figures ? Let's look at the simple facts. President Bush's first budget was not enacted until November of 2001. Until that point we were operating under a Clinton budget. Yet, we allow the democrats to hang their hat on the distortional claim of "since Bush took office". Here are the real statistics: