Free Republic

Those of you who have not been vacationing on Tierra del Fuego for the last three months will surely remember the sad sight of Larry Summers dressed in gray long-underwear and cutaway coat, a squashed top hat on his bowed head, carrying a sandwich sign—Dump on Me!—round and round Harvard Yard. The surrounding crowd, members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, stood around brandishing razor sharp ibids and op. cits, screamed imprecations at poor Larry. "Colonialist," they shouted, "quagmire," came the response from the junior faculty lately released from their library carrels who weren't quite sure of what was...

Martin Peretz, a principal owner, chairman, and editor in chief of The New Republic (TNR) magazine, that Liberal bastion, is an authentic, even quintessential Liberal himself. For a number of months now, he has been fingering the worn, tattered fringes of his Liberal cloak and discovering what a threadbare garment it is. In February, Mr. Peretz published in TNR a quite remarkable essay declaring that Liberalism, his only intellectual/political home for all his adult life "... is now bookless and dying. ... Liberalism now needs to be liberated from many of its own illusions and delusions. Let's hope we still...

Sick and tired of ordinary hospitals? You owe it to yourself to check out and check into Equality Diversity Hospital, where caring is sharing and weepers are sleepers. Our staff of desiccated professionals—practical nurses, practical surgeons, cooks, caterer's assistants, manicurists, porters, mortars, pathologists, phrenologists, ornithologists, herpetologists, lepidopterists, and a few dendrologists for full flavor—that is, the whole kit and caboodle—Shave all been hired in proportion to their representation in the general population. No hospital in the entire US is as equal as Equality Diversity—or as diverse. Approximately fifty-three percent of ED staff are apparently female (we ask, but they don't...

The Word is out. Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman and Robert Reich and a vast Left wing chorus agree. "Oh my God. We are living in a theocracy." What's the proof of this proposition? Where is the evidence of theocratic rule? Do you mean the stoning of fornicators on the Library steps in Little Rock? The branding of adulterers in Beverly Hills? The ceaseless up and down of blasphemers in Bronx River ducking stools? None of the above, obviously. You rely for proof upon an aura emanating from a penumbra in the Red state heartland. It's the zeitgeist's terrible swift...

Dear Senator Kerry: The guys down to Daryl's Bait Shop here in Lagniappe, Louisiana, have asked me as Designated Letter Writer, to address a few questions and make some observations concerning your recent actions on the political scene in pursuit of the 2008 presidential nomination We are concerned that you have let slip from your mind, overburdened as it is with cosmic considerations, the promise you made a month and a half ago to Tim Russert on Meet the Press. So please let this e-mail remind you that you haven't filed a Form 180 to make public your Navy records....

Dear Mr. Beinart: Surely, since you are Editor of a prestigious political journal, The New Republic, you regularly peruse a number of public affairs blogs on the Internet so you must be aware that I am the designated letter for the guys down to Daryl's Bait Shop here in Lagniappe, Louisiana. My e-mails since May of last year, mostly to Senator Kerry advising him on tactics and strategies have been published on many Internet sites, although we must admit that there is no evidence that our suggestions have been acted on. We—most particularly, Smilin' Jack Boudreau and Armen Yazoo—have encountered...

Does anyone remember novelist Jane Smiley's outburst at the Bible-toting bloodlusting knuckle-draggers who re-elected George W. Bush? Why has no enterprising journalist sought her comments after the purple revolution in Iraq, the uprising of the Lebanese and the downfall of their puppet-regime? Why has no one asked her about the turnover by Syria of 29 Iraqi Ba'athist stalwarts, those Moore-ish Minutemen? Has Miss Smiley's tantrum simply vanished down the old memory hole? The darling of the EU, J-F Kerry, promised faithfully on Meet the Press four weeks ago that he would sign and submit to the Navy a Form 180...

Is there enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Maurice Hinchey has deserted his constituents in upstate New York's 22nd Congressional District and trotted off to Cloud Cuckoo Land? I'm referring to the Maurice Hinchey who, while speaking on Social Security to a meeting in Ithaca last Saturday strolled off topic to assert that Karl Rove, Minister of Dirty Tricks for the Bush Administration, had forged and planted the Rathergate memos. Hinchey: They've had a very very direct, aggressive attack on the, on the media, and the way it's handled. Probably the most flagrant example of that is...

The disarray of the Left has been obvious since at least the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989. All the splendid achievements of socialism in the glorious shadow of the Soviet Union, poverty and misery, oppression, fear, and murder on a grand scale could no longer be masked. The collapse and dismemberment of imperial Soviet Russia followed within a couple of years and removed any lingering doubts about the merits of socialism. Clearly, socialism couldn't deliver the goods. The capitalist economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore encouraged Mao's successors to let loose the reins of communist...

Suppose you were publisher of the New York Times and you discovered that your newspaper had been scooped by the Toledo Blade, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, by Michelle Malkin (a girl, for heaven's sake) by Romy Abovits and Hugh Hewitt, The Weekly Standard, Fox News, The New York Sun, The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times, Captain Ed Morrissey, the folks at Power Line Blog—yes, all of the above and Romy Abovits, too—don't forget ol' Romy— And further suppose that the intrepid and enterprising Iowa raptor, David Burge, bestower of scarlet birettas, had already published a...

George Soros is one of the planet's wealthiest men, 38th on Forbes' latest list with about $7,000,000,000 which he keeps in a steamer trunk in a bomb-proof vault guarded by platoons of fanatically loyal mutant ninjas. The man is no fool. Last election cycle, Soros dipped into petty cash to toss about skaity-nine million bucks to a variety of campaigns to defeat George W. Bush. Move-on.org, a principal recipient of Soros' largesse, is dedicated to the canonization of Bill Clinton. It used Soros' money to get the anti-Bush message out. America Coming Together (ACT) got a bucketful of Soros cash...

Last Friday at a conference on economics at Harvard, Larry Summers, economist and President of that university ventured to explain the paucity of women at high levels of science and math; it might be due in part to "innate differences" between men and women. Fortunately, it was winter in Cambridge so no fans were in operation, but the hit was palpable. "Innate differences!" Horrors. It would take a master parodist to construct a more Victorian response than that given by Nancy Hopkins, an MIT biologist. She was "profoundly disturbed" "I felt I was going to be sick." "My heart was...

The shrill denunciations have abated. Jane Smiley's public tantrum, her indictment of 60,000,000 of her countrymen for the crime of electing George W. Bush is largely forgotten. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, the Clinton family counselor called to active duty during Monica-gate was able to rally only about 400 souls to protest Mr. Bush's certification by the Electoral College. Senator Barbara Boxer's outpouring of tears at the same event was more ceremonial than effective. Still, the Left hasn't recovered from its defeat last November following their defeats in November two and four years ago. Small wonder, since the usual excuses availeth...

For four months, Rathergate gestated in the belly of the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR). Finally, the mountain labored and brought forth a pipsqueak.Corey Pein, a stalwart of that noble guardian of media matters has published a long, (3400 words) tedious, and foolish analysis whose primary point is to absolve CBS and Dan Rather of the blame for publicizing the famous Burkett forgeries last September on 60 Minutes II. Pein signals his disposition in the title of his piece—Blog-Gate. The offence, you see, was the blog world's exposure of the forgeries with astonishing swiftness and transparency. Then, sheeplike, to their shame,...

At the same time, 1984, as the eminent Harvard professor of economics, J. K. Galbraith was discovering the multitudinous benefits of socialist productive capacity in the USSR, any schoolkid in that evil empire could have told him that had the Soviets taken over the Sahara, in two years there would be a shortage of sand. If Galbraith had spoken with Soviet factory workers out of sight of their overseers, he would have heard them say, "Yes, we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." But double-domed Lefty Galbraith was immune to facts of everyday existence in the workers'...

In 1984, as all devoted readers of Conversations with Trentino know, John Kenneth Galbraith visited the Soviet Union and praised it for the prosperity he saw in its "exfoliating apartment houses" well stocked stores, and traffic-filled streets. Professor Galbraith took particular note of labor efficiency: he observed that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics used its manpower efficiently, unlike the US. Galbraith was then the grand panjandrum of economics, a professor of that dark science at Harvard, erstwhile president of the American Economic Association, a founding member of the ADA, and formerly US Ambassador to India. A card-carrying liberal in...

E-mail to Eli Pariser, Director, Moveon.org From: James (Cooter) Thompson re: Buying and Selling Dear Mr. Pariser: I am Designated Letter Writer for the guys down to Daryl's Bait Shop here in Lagniappe, Louisiana. I and Jack Boudreau and Armen Yazoo been communicating with your late candidate John Forbes Kerry for a number of months, actually since last May. We been advising him on matters of campaign tactics and strategy on a purely pro bono (for the public good) basis. You can find copies of our correspondence here.We see you been at the same game full time and for considerable...

Peter Beinart, Editor of The New Republic, deserves a modest amount of praise for attacking head on the problem of the Democratic Party's present crisis: its incoherence, its inability to win elections, its consequent minority status, and its dim prospects for electoral victory any time soon. Additional modest praise is due Beinart for attempting to analyze the problem by looking into the ideas that have propelled it off course. My polite but restrained applause is directed at Beinart's long article in TNR, An Argument for a New Liberalism. A Fighting Faith. (shortened and partly rewritten by him for the New...

The London Daily Mirror's headline following George W. Bush's re-election went directly to the core of the problem: How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb? You see, according to the Mirror and to Lefty luminaries such as Garry Wills, Bill Moyers, Gerry Ferraro, Jane (Bloodlust) Smiley, Teresa Heinz Kerry and an assortment of the professoriate of institutions like Berkeley and Harvard, anyone who voted for George Bush in preference to John Kerry is stupid. That's it. We're stupid. There's no other possibility for such gross error, certainly no reason to question whether John Forbes Kerry (who served in Vietnam) was...

Summing Up Let's sum up, OK? In 2000, the Republicans intimidated black voters in Florida and refused to count their ballots so Bush was elected Dictator for Life. Bush appointed John Ashcroft to head up the KGB and threw all dissenters into prison. No, that's not quite right. The Republicans won in 2000 because they conspired with the Supreme Court which selected the fascist illiterate moron George W. Bush in preference to Albert Gore, Jr., an erudite Alpha male who dressed in earth tones. No, that couldn't be right, either. The Supremes would have had no role in the election...