Free Republic

Words, words, words. Stonewall Jackson famously told soldiers to “make short speeches, and when you draw the sword throw away the scabbard.” Barack Obama is obsessed with words, and he never learned to make a short speech, and he’s certainly no Stonewall Jackson. The Israelis understand that, however well-meaning he may be. The president may even believe most of the stuff he hears himself say. Mr. Obama made another pretty speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, on Sunday that was thrilling only to those who gorge on the romance of rhetoric. Mr. Obama and his teleprompter...

The great media toaster isn’t broken, exactly, but it doesn’t work like it once did. By all accounts, Herman Cain should be toast now, served hot, a bit scorched around the edges and left unbuttered. But try as they might, his tormentors have not yet had him for breakfast. The tormentors, journalists, lawyers and an assortment of ladies who appear to have been around the block a few times, have so far failed to destroy him and thus his candidacy. They still have to come up with lower-mileage ladies to make the accusations stick with the Republican base. Mr. Cain’s...

The actor and comic Stephen Fry is considered by some to be a national treasure who adds greatly to the gaiety of the nation. It’s a role to which he self-consciously plays up as raconteur, wit and genial host for any TV occasion. But why, then, does he feel compelled so egregiously to abuse this privileged position? At the weekend, a preview was published of a self-regarding interview to be transmitted on TV in June in which Fry talks about the fact that he was addicted to cocaine for a period of 15 years. Did he express any concern or...

One of the great bulwarks of a democracy is an independent judiciary, which acts as the ultimate defender of liberty because the judges are free from political control. In Britain and Europe, however, something very alarming has taken place. The judges are increasingly becoming a positive threat to liberty because they have usurped the political process. As a result, they are straying — no, actually marching with banners flying and drums beating — into territory which should lie well beyond their remit. In recent days, there have been two such outrageous court rulings. The European Court of Justice, the judicial...

David Cameron’s claim that failure to arrive at a ‘two-state solution’ to the Arab-Israel impasse has caused terrorism and instability and helped excuse authoritarianism is surely a first for a British Prime Minister in its perversity and ignorance. First, the current unrest convulsing the Arab and Muslim world demonstrates that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is actually irrelevant to the protesters’ concerns, which are about the enslavement imposed upon them by their own regimes. And then he gets the relationship between the ‘peace process’ and terrorism the wrong way round. The failure of the two-state solution is not...

The red carpet appears to be about to be rolled out once again for an exhibition of preening egos. Hundreds of flashbulbs will pop as stars of the celebrity circus primp and prance.It will be yet another glittering outing for the tacky and the tawdry who comprise our celebrity culture. No, I’m not referring to next weekend’s Oscars. I am talking about the wedding of HRH Prince William of Wales to Kate Middleton. It is reported that one of the invitations to this ‘wedding of the year’ has plopped onto the diamante-studded doormat of David and Victoria Beckham. The football...

The future of Egypt following the departure of President Hosni Mubarak remains opaque. No one can currently predict whether it will end up as a democracy with free elections, a military dictatorship, or an Islamic theocratic tyranny. But the Western Left has known one thing for certain from the very start of the protests: that the tyrannical dictator Mubarak had to go, that the protesters in Tahrir Square were all on the side of freedom and that the convulsions presaged a joyous new dawn of democracy and human rights. This was despite the serious risk of an Islamist takeover in...

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The prospects are dim but the process is right. The Obama administration is to be commended for structuring the latest rounds of Middle East talks correctly. Finally, we're leaving behind interim agreements, of which the most lamentable were the Oslo accords of 1993. The logic then was that issues so complicated could only be addressed step by step in the expectation that things get easier over time. In fact, they got harder. Israel made concrete concessions -- bringing in Yasser Arafat to run the West Bank and Gaza -- in return for which Israel received growing threats, continuous...

It can be far easier to tell a lie than it is to refute one. This is a fact that leftists ruthlessly exploit. For them, lying is a moral imperatives. Americans have seen this with respect to their southern border. Obama lied about illegal immigration and he lied about protecting the border and those who near it. To fully refute the lies that are told about the need for illegals one needs to use both history and economics. This is what the following article does. It is written for those who want to counter leftist arguments in favor of illegals....

Is it possible to base an entire presidency on venal acts of jealousy and illicit confiscation? This essay argues such is currently the case. If one accepts that Obama has socialist/Marxist values, then he seeks, by definition, an economy based upon a shattering of the 10th Commandment… "Thous Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's House…." But the Greek pagan moralist writer Aesop had Obama's character pegged in his Dog in the Manger fable 2,500 years ago. If you run a campaign on the argument you are an unprecedented natural-born leader, despite utter inexperience — can you afford to let anyone else...

What kind of man is Paul Krugman? His New York Times articles reveal a spiteful, deeply bigoted, outrageously dishonest and thoroughly hateful excuse for a human being. The bile he calls political and economic commentary would cause acute embarrassment to any newspaper with a shred of integrity. Fortunately for Krugman, integrity is the one thing you will not find at the Times. Like all truly committed Democrats Krugman's first loyalty is to the party and not his country. In fact, I sincerely doubt that he has a patriotic bone in his entire body. This has been brought out — as...

When an accident on an oil rig results in an environmental catastrophe, it surely takes a particular genius to turn the oil company involved into the victim. Yet, remarkably, that is precisely what ... Barack Obama appears to have achieved. When, after many weeks, BP still hadn’t managed to prevent its damaged well from spewing tens of thousands of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, Obama turned upon it savagely, saying he would like to sack its chief executive and threatening the company with unlimited financial punishments. More than that, he appeared to be using the disaster to...

Fishing boats are reporting icebergs off the Timaru coast. Two fishing boats - the Nidaro and the Amber Wave - have reported seeing icebergs heading north. Nidaro skipper Blendon Laurie did more than report sightings of icebergs - he got up close enough to take a piece home to show the kids. An iceberg appeared on the horizon while the boat was about 60 kilometres out from the Timaru coast. "We saw it on the horizon, and weren't sure what it was, but then we saw it was an iceberg." Mr Laurie estimated the iceberg was about 30 to 45...

A joint New Zealand-Australian task force arrived in riot-torn Tonga this afternoon in a show of force after rioting left eight dead and businesses destroyed. Commander Joint Forces New Zealand, Rear Admiral Jack Steer said the New Zealand contingent included a 62-strong New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF), a small contingent of New Zealand Police and other Government personnel. Two C130 Hercules would transport additional cargo and up to four light operational vehicles, he said. A further 80 Australian Defence and Federal Police personnel would join the NZDF contingent in assisting the Tongan government as part of a New Zealand led...

Escalating rates of diabetes among indigenous cultures could make the Maori and Polynesian races "extinct" before the end of the century, an Australian expert warns. Professor Paul Zimmet, director of Monash University's International Diabetes Institute, said the rising number of diabetes victims among the world's indigenous communities would decimate entire cultures. "Without urgent action there certainly is a real risk major wipings out of indigenous communities, if not total extinction, within this century," he said. "Life expectancy is already low and dropping, diabetes is hitting them very hard and the infections, amputations and kidney disease will just wreak more havoc."...

As Hillary Clinton is being touted as a presidential candidate for the 2008 election we should take the time to reflect on her co-presidency that did so much to humiliate and degrade America. Let us not forget how the mainstream media covered up — and still is — those Clinton White House scandals that severely compromised US security and put at risk the lives of millions of Americans. I am of course alluding to the transfer of sensitive military technology to China. This technology greatly improved the accuracy of Peking’s ICBMs that are now targeting American cities. Being the outrageous...

Deconstructing Clinton is a lot easier than parsing sentences. Language has its own structure and rules, what we call grammar and syntax. It is these things that allow us to communicate efficiently with each other, even when we are not schooled in the rules of language. But in Clinton’s post-modernist world there are no rules because there is no reality. Existence is a matter of opinion and reality is what I think it ought to be. In such a world facts are fiction and fiction is reality with each reality being as good as any other. Hence whatever I say...

Jimmy Carter, you’re the father of the Islamic Nazi movement. You threw the Shah under the bus, welcomed the Ayatollah home and then lacked the spine to confront the terrorists when they took our embassy and our people hostage. You’re the Runner-in-Chief. Bill Clinton, you played “ring around the Lewinsky” while the terrorists were at war with us. You got us into a fight with them in Somalia, and then you ran from it. Your weak-willed responses embolden the killers. Each time you failed to respond adequately they grew bolder, until 9/11. John Kerry, dishonesty is your most prominent attribute....

Jews were victims of Nazi oppression and ethnic cleansing the result of which was the extermination of over five million Jews. By perpetrating such a heinous crime Hitler engraved his name in history as one of the most notorious criminals who immersed himself in the blood of innocent people... We are not going to dispute that. In fact, we, more than anybody can fully grasp the agony of the holocaust. A body recovered from a mass grave in Iraq We have had a first hand experience with the very same horrors. Freshly dug mass graves bare witness to the plight...

Despite the fact that I was born a Leo and the symbol of the lion, I have always considered myself a pussycat. And, I never thought that my words of wisdom would need any reason to re-access my thinking in how I phrase them. After all, my publishers never seemed to mind that I had a tendency to be a tad politically incorrect. I just told them that I had a compulsion to tell it like it is… and they loved me for it! Maybe a little too much. Because, folks, it seems that I have been blackballed for being...