Free Republic

The realization that Hollywood is more than just rotting cultural compost hits conservatives at different times, but there is always a moment when you suddenly and clearly see the elitist preaching buried beneath the rotting lettuce and apple cores, when the relentless effort to push leftist dogma abruptly swims into focus like the hidden image in a 3D stereogram. And like a stereogram, once you see the image within, there’s no avoiding it ever again. Much to my wife’s dismay, this has forever impaired our ability to enjoy the simple pleasure of a good movie. With me, it was the...

Rush Limbaugh has it wrong. He stated Wednesday that "[c]onservatism did not lose, Republicanism lost last night. Republicanism, being a political party first, rather than an ideological movement, is what lost last night." (here) This statement ? a statement echoed by Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and other conservative pundits to whom a nation of shell-shocked conservatives turned for cathartic analysis ? fails a simple test. If the electorate was demanding conservatism, then why did strong, principled conservatives lose? Incumbent conservatives such as Rick Santorum, George Allen, J.D. Hayworth and Curt Weldon to name a few. Superb conservative newcomers such as...

John Kerry, the recent Democrat Presidential candidate, talked about the importance of world opinion in American government in 2004. "But if and when you do it [launch a pre-emptive war], Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons." Enlightened Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy crafted a capital punishment decision in 2005 that took into international law into account: "It is proper that we...

Giddy Liberals Commentary by Aslan, 10/28/06, 11:55pm. To retain Congress, the GOP needs the same conservative voters who carried the day in 2004 to hold their noses next month and pull the lever for Republicans one more time. The theory is that by holding their noses, stalwart conservatives can block out the stench of Republican weakness and duplicity, thereby avoiding a vastly fouler stench: the stink of Democrats in power, raising taxes, stopping judges, embracing terrorists and impeaching Bush. Giddy liberals believe that enough conservatives will avoid the whole reeking mess on November 8th to relinquish control of Congress to...

The Path to 9/11 concluding tonight on ABC is riveting, a superb visceral presentation of the root causes of September 11th. Conservatives everywhere are giddy with excitement that a member of the Mainstream Media chose not to whitewash the Clinton Administration’s confused and ineffectual response to terrorism. The actual record of the Clinton Administration – the disaster in Mogadishu, multiple opportunities to kill or capture bin Laden missed, the Gorelick Wall between justice and intelligence – is profoundly worse than portrayed in The Path to 9/11, but the movie nonetheless makes it crystal clear that the Clinton Administration was criminally...

Fuzzy Moral Math Editor's Note: The fiction of 100,000 Iraqi civilian casualties has survived to this day in part because of the tantalizing propaganda value of such a large number. How many lightly informed people have tossed this number at you in debate without even realizing that the Lancet study doesn’t measure casualties at all? Now the number of 100,000 Iraqi civilians has new relevance, as the Iraqi Survival Count has surpassed the Lancet tally of "excess deaths." While I am not hopeful that the Iraqi Survival Count will enjoy the same exposure in the media as the Lancet death...

The Civilian Casualty Fable II: What Haditha Reveals Haditha does not reveal what anti-war liberals want it to reveal: the savagery of an unwelcome and fatigued U.S. military and a war out of control. Oddly enough, they are entirely unaware that their obsession with Haditha is in fact an admission that the civilian casualty figures tossed around these last three years are, and have always been, propaganda. This civilian casualty fable began with the Lancet study in the fall of 2004, which claimed 100,000 civilian dead and painted a picture of indiscriminate U.S. military destruction: "Making conservative assumptions, we think...

Earlier this week I attended a retired general and flag officer conference at Fort Carson, hosted by MGen Bob Mixon, the 7th Infantry Division Commander which calls the Fort its home. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ft. Carson, it is a huge installation located to the south of Colorado Springs; it’s in the process of becoming one of the larger Army installations in the country (26,000 soldiers); and it is the test location for the new "modular brigade" concept that will reflect the Army of tomorrow by 2008. It is also the home post of the largest...

Songs of the Simpleminded Opposition to all war makes no distinction between the combatants. The nation that invades another to steal wealth and kill women and children is no more reprehensible than the nation that sets down its pots and plows and takes up arms to defend those women and children. After all, both are at war, and war, what is it good for, absolutely nothing. What must underpin the logic of anti-war songs is a belief that no one possesses the moral credibility to take up arms, to pass judgment on the actions of another. If nations are or...

William of Ockham would be baffled. The medieval thinker who popularized the idea that simplest explanations are usually the best would not know what to make of our immigration problem. On one hand, there is a fundamentally simple creature known as the "politician." It is true that the politician appears complex as the subtle pressures and influences of political life swirl beneath the surface producing inconsistent behavior that frustrates voters. But in the end, the politician is slave to one easily understood master: public opinion. If the public cries out with one voice that everyone should wear briefs and only...

The Left’s hatred of George W. Bush has no rival... ...or so it once seemed. But not so fast. There is a new breed of GWB hater: the Betrayed Conservative, a creature of surprisingly intense emotions for a member of the rational Right. The Betrayed Conservative is good news and bad news for the conservative movement. The good news is that there are vocal, passionate conservatives out there – large numbers of them – unwilling to accept anything less than sound conservative policy out of Washington. They are angry and active and have imposed some measure of discipline on that...

(Graphics prevent complete copying of the article) Hollywood needs a King Canute. This legendary Viking warrior who came to rule over England, Denmark and Norway a millennia ago knew the limits of power. "Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings." When courtiers flattered him, exclaiming that his power was limitless, he had them remove his throne to the seashore to teach them a lesson in real power. There he sat down and commanded the tide to come no further, demonstrating how small was the power of men. Like Canute's courtiers, Hollywood is delusional. Unlike...

Hang 'Em High What is the rationale for capital punishment? Before deciding what capital punishment is, it is helpful to understand what it is not. Capital punishment is not revenge, for revenge is "punitive action taken in return for an injury or offense," and clearly supporters of the victim are not taking any action whatsoever. Most victim’s family and friends are in fact abused by a system that dispenses justice at a glacial pace and fills the intervening years between crime and punishment with high-minded advocacy on behalf of the criminal and little regard for the victims (i.e., Tookie Williams)....

A Lesson in Conservation 0.0105% (2,000/19,000,000) In this number, we see Environmentalism clash with Conservation once again. In the Environmentalist world, mankind is not worth 0.0105%, whereas in the world of Conservation, 0.0105% actually is conservation, and damn good conservation, too. 0.0105% The question of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge comes down to this number - the 2000 acres out of 19,000,000 that make up ANWR proposed for oil exploration. Very much like our inability to grasp the budgetary billions that are tossed around in congressional appropriation subcommittees, our minds have difficulty grasping how small 0.0105% really is....

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September 11, 2001 happened for one reason: America was perceived to lack resolve. At a deeper level, a lack of resolve born of an unwillingness to endure hardship and sacrifice life in defense of closely held beliefs. The determined ideal of Patrick Henry ("Give me liberty or give me death") and Nathan Hale ("I regret that I have but one life to give for my country") was, in the mind of bin Laden and other terror leaders, dead in America and the West, while in the Islamic world the idea of sacrifice flourished, codified in religious doctrine. But bin Laden...

The Audience Goebbels Wanted "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." – Joseph Goebbels Even today, Joseph Goebbels remains the acknowledged master of propaganda. He understood the devastating effect of British propaganda in WWI, particularly surrounding the fictional Belgian atrocities, and resolved that Germany would never again be victimized by words. At the end of 1943, a very difficult year for the Third Reich, Goebbels brazenly proclaimed: "The enemy did not succeed in the past year in affecting in a serious way our war effort in any critical area....

In its eagerness to weaken President Bush, The Journal Sentinel displays a profound ignorance of the role of the Law in our representative republic, tacitly promoting the idea that people of different races rule differently on constitutional matters, and that those rulings should reflect the majority opinion of their subgroup.

Article excerpt from Logic Times. The Iraq Body Count study reports 24,865 civilian deaths in the first two years of the Iraq War, an apparent ringing endorsement of the "Iraq in chaos" position. But a curious statistical anomaly jumps right off page one: over 81% of the civilian casualties are men. Even stranger, over 90% of civilian casualties are adults in a country with a disproportionate percentage of the population under 18 (44.5%). This contradicts a basic tenant of the civilian casualty argument, namely that we are describing collateral damage during a time of war. Collateral damage does not differentiate...

"Cost of U.N. Renovation Soars to $1.9 Billion By MEGHAN CLYNE - Staff Reporter of the Sun, November 17, 2005 A 60-day, top-to-bottom review of the United Nations's renovation plans - meant to bring down the $1.2 billion cost of the project, described by many real estate experts as over-inflated - has instead sent the project's estimated price tag soaring to $1.9 billion." In light of this hefty price tag, it is past time to ask if the U.N. is salvageable. The United Nations has proven to be a dysfunctional world body, but is this the fault of a corrupt...