Free Republic

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...

HERE WE GO again. Suddenly, conservatives, libertarians and other souls of a rightish bent are pondering whether a “conservative crack-up” is nigh. In their book, “The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America,” John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge offered some insight into what could stop the conservatives from prospering: if they became “too Southern, too greedy and too contradictory.” Libertarian law professor and influential blogger Glenn Reynolds says the conservatives are “aiming for two out of three” of these opportunities to yank defeat from the jaws of success. Elsewhere, the New York Post’s Ryan Sager, another libertarian, laments that the Republican...

Bush is the last anchorman for a nation drifting apart Last week saw the retirement of Tom Brokaw, a man with a speech impediment and impeccable Midwest credentials who anchored the NBC Nightly News for more than two decades. Brokaw’s retirement followed the abrupt resignation of Dan Rather, the fathomlessly batty liberal who had anchored CBS News’s nightly spot for ever as well. Rather left in less celebratory a context. He had been caught running a story on George W Bush’s service in the National Guard that relied on faked documents. After nine days of being mauled by bloggers, Rather...

THE IMPACT ON GAYS: I've been trying to think of what to say about what appears to be the enormous success the Republicans had in using gay couples' rights to gain critical votes in key states. In eight more states now, gay couples have no relationship rights at all. Their legal ability to visit a spouse in hospital, to pass on property, to have legal protections for their children has been gutted. If you are a gay couple living in Alabama, you know one thing: your family has no standing under the law; and it can and will be violated...

Back in the early spring, I bet Michael Barone that Kerry would win this election. I'll buy him a drink if I'm wrong. And to be honest, I don't know who's more likely to win at this point. But here's a prediction I don't mind making. This election won't be close. Presidents seeking re-election very rarely win or lose a second time narrowly. Either they get trounced - Carter, Bush 41 - or they get re-elected handily - Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton. People make a simple decision whether the guy's worth re-electing. Of course, the alternative makes a difference. My...

Just listening to Andrew Sullivan on CSPAN2. He thought Cheney was terrible. Thought he looked tired and snarled a lot. I don't know what debate he was watching, but it certainly wasn't the one I was watching!

This is the great thing about rabid fundamentalism. You really just don't have to give a damn. Take the environment. I mean, isn't it just a little pointless to care so damn deeply about the air and the soil and the water and the stupid little disposable animals on this silly spinning ball of expendable rock when the Second Coming is imminent and a blood-soaked fire-breathin' Jesus who looks remarkably like Mel Gibson will return very soon to smite the heathens and the gays and the vegetarians and the Francophiles, and who will rescue all those who worship patriarchy and...

THE MILLER MOMENT: Zell Miller's address will, I think, go down as a critical moment in this campaign, and maybe in the history of the Republican party. I kept thinking of the contrast with the Democrats' keynote speaker, Barack Obama, a post-racial, smiling, expansive young American, speaking about national unity and uplift. Then you see Zell Miller, his face rigid with anger, his eyes blazing with years of frustration as his Dixiecrat vision became slowly eclipsed among the Democrats. Remember who this man is: once a proud supporter of racial segregation, a man who lambasted LBJ for selling his soul...

Are you there, God? It's me, George W. Come in, Almighty. Do you read me? It's about 8:00 pm and it's just after my last bubble bath of the day and here I am again, kneeling here in the Oval Office all by myself in my most favoritest PJs, the funny ones with the little M-1 tanks and baseball players all over them. I gots some problems, Lord. Look, I've done everything you asked. I've been good. Haven't I? I take the message to the people, don't I? I spout that evangelical born-again crap in pisswater Podunk conservative churches across...

It's somewhere around 1977 and I'm about 10 years old and I'm up past 10 pm watching juicy riveting prime-time "Magnum, P.I." (or whatever), and of course right at that moment I want nothing more from the universe than to stay up another hour and watch even more TV so as to feel, you know, older, and wiser, and somehow cooler. And right about then my mother walks in and says hey kiddo, time for bed, and I plead and whine and protest and say no no no please please please why why why, and she says, slightly exasperated and...

<p>Let's get this straight. Ronnie Reagan allowed AIDS to flourish for years after it was discovered and did next to nothing to stem its virulent, lethal tide, and wouldn't even utter the word until the end of his term, when it was too late. Ronnie Reagan denied the existence of the nation's homeless problem that he largely created, and then blamed the problem on not enough people caring to get out there and get a job as he meanwhile slashed civil services and assistance for the poor.</p>

I am a walking time bomb. Like millions, I live deep deep deep in the digital storm, aswim in the electronic morass, irrevocable and irreversible and never to return to the ways of old because, as everyone knows, once you step foot into the rushing miasma of Net commerce and e-communication, you are imprinted onto the digital Void pretty much forever. The Net, it washes over your life in a tidal wave of logins and passwords and cookies and AutoFill forms and account summaries and credit card numbers and semisecure Web sites, each promising on a stack of ridiculously defective...

It was just like cocaine -- but without the rehab and the stroke and the painful deviated septum. It was that mad tingling heart-stopping hormone-soaked high school rush you enjoyed when you finally worked up sufficient nerve to pick up the phone and call that insanely delicious guy/girl you had that mad inexplicable unrelenting crush on because, well, you just had to. Remember? And then it happened. You heard the click and her voice uttered this mellifluous "Hello?" and time suddenly stopped and your breath caught in your throat and your stomach leaped into your eternity, and you hung up...

I get this a lot: Mark, how can you write about light fluffy inconsequential things like dogs or yoga or car design or sex or music when there's so many vile gut-wrenching soul-curdling life-threatening atrocities and gang rapes and beheadings and Rumsfelds happening in the world right now that deserve immediate attention? How the hell can you possibly write a whole column extolling, say, the virtues of single-malt scotch or of having sex in the backseat of small luscious European cars, when BushCo is right this moment ravaging the planet and eviscerating the human spirit and the environment is teetering...