Free Republic

WASHINGTON -- Veterans groups are angry at President George W. Bush for supporting a 1995 government decision to rescind an old promise of free lifetime health benefits for military retirees. This is the man who told veterans and active-duty military personnel after the 2000 campaign that he would make sure "promises made to our veterans will be promises kept." So why does he persist in short-changing the retirees, especially when he is preparing for another war and hoping to lure more volunteers for the military? Many World War II and Korean conflict veterans have been hopping mad ever since the...

WASHINGTON There was no smoking gun last night. There was merely a smoky allusion. President Bush tried to sell skittish Americans on a war with Iraq by alluding to the possibility of a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Outlaw regimes seeking bad weapons, Mr. Bush said, "could also give or sell those weapons to terrorist allies, who would use them without the least hesitation." The axis of evil has shrunk to Saddam, evil incarnate. Iran and North Korea were put aside with the dismissive comment: "Different threats require different strategies." The state of the union is skeptical.

WASHINGTON Karl Rove came back to his West Wing office after yet another fruitless meeting on the topic of "How to pry the Senate gavel from Trent Lott's cold, dead hands while pretending to be mildly supportive," to find his desk occupied. Lee Atwater was spinning around in Karl's chair like a little kid."Wow, man, you really got it goin'," Lee's ghost told his old protégé, his raspy drawl tinged with envy. "The planets are lined up in your orbit. Bush's personal approval ratings are rockin'. You killed in the midterms. How'd it happen without me? You and me, the...

WASHINGTON — On Thursday night, I watched a cerebral catfight about Communism between Mary McCarthy, Trotskyite, and Lillian Hellman, Stalinist, circa 1949. The two literary divas conjured up in Nora Ephron's new Broadway play, "Imaginary Friends," sit in a scarlet deco bar in the third circle of hell, having a schism over an ism that's now an anachronism.It was fascinating to see people get so hot and bothered over ideas that are so out of date.On Friday, I went back to work, where I could see people get hot and bothered over ideas that are up to date: segregation, cross-burnings,...

WASHINGTON Some hush-hush bang-bang is going on at the vice president's house: big blasts twice a day, morning and night, that cause the whole neighborhood to quake and shake. Rattled neighbors cannot learn what's going on at Mr. Cheney's Disclosed Location from the Navy, which maintains the official residence on the grounds of the Naval Observatory."We're doing infrastructure improvements and utility upgrades," says the Navy's Cate Mueller.If Dick Cheney won't tell us which energy fat cats drew up our energy policy, he's not going to tell us why we're paying to renovate his pad.The construction, which could last 16 months,...

He's Ba-a-ack! By MAUREEN DOWD WASHINGTON — It's an inspired choice. Bold, counterintuitive, edgy, outside the box. Who better to investigate an unwarranted attack on America than the man who used to instigate America's unwarranted attacks? Who better to ferret out government duplicity and manipulation than the man who engineered secret wars, secret bombings, secret wiretaps and secret coups, and still ended up as a Pillar of the Establishment and Nobel Peace Prize winner? It was Dick Cheney's brainstorm, naturally. Only someone as pathologically opaque as the vice president could appreciate the sublime translucency of Henry Kissinger. And only someone...

Bill Clinton, the president who used to ape Ronald Reagan, told Democrats yesterday what they must do to take on George W. Bush, the president who now apes Ronald Reagan. They've got to get the Gipper swagger."When people are feeling insecure," a ruddy Mr. Clinton instructed a Democratic Leadership Council meeting at New York University, "they'd rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than somebody who is weak and right."Democrats have been turned into eunuchs by the warlike Bushies. Some are skittering left. Some are skittering right. Most are just cowering behind the barn hiding from Sheriff Bush and...

WASHINGTON — It's an inspired choice. Bold, counterintuitive, edgy, outside the box. Who better to investigate an unwarranted attack on America than the man who used to instigate America's unwarranted attacks?Who better to ferret out government duplicity and manipulation than the man who engineered secret wars, secret bombings, secret wiretaps and secret coups, and still ended up as a Pillar of the Establishment and Nobel Peace Prize winner?It was Dick Cheney's brainstorm, naturally. Only someone as pathologically opaque as the vice president could appreciate the sublime translucency of Henry Kissinger. And only someone intent on recreating the glory days of...

WASHINGTON For almost a year, he'd gone dark.Then he pops back up trash-talking our vice president, saying Dick Cheney has killed more people in Baghdad than Hulagu of the Mongols, whoever that guy is; mixing up Rummy, with his slicked-back hair and wire-rimmed glasses, with Robert McNamara as "the butcher of Vietnam," and raining imprecations on "White House gangsters.""It is time that we get even," Osama bin Laden said on the tape delivered to an Al Jazeera reporter in Islamabad. (Can't we assign a C.I.A. drone to every Al Jazeera hack?)It was the usual rancid rant cloaked as sacred chant.The...

A gaggle of my girlfriends are surreptitiously smitten with Eminem. They buy his posters on eBay. They play him on their Walkmen at the gym. They sing along lustily to "Cleanin' Out My Closet" and "Lose Yourself" in the car. They rhapsodize that his amazing vignettes of dysfunctional families make him the Raymond Carver of hip-hop. They crowd into movie theatres along with teenage boys in watch caps, and then insist that Eminem's rapping his way out of a Detroit car factory in "8 Mile" is way hotter than Jennifer Beals's dancing her way out of the Pittsburgh steel mill...

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX SAT NOV 23, 2002 10:59:47 ET XXXXX DOWD DECLARES EMINEM IS 'THE BOOMER CROONER' She's back from her Sheltering Sky-like odyssey to Saudi Arabia. Not quite Debra Winger roaming aimlessly on back of camel looking for a mid-life reset, but NY TIMES queen columnist Maureen Dowd appears to have found rejuvenation; back in Washington, fresh and fun in tomorrow's filing. "My girlfriends are surreptitiously smitten with Eminem," Dowd declares, according to newsroom sources. "They buy his posters on eBay. They play him on their Walkmen at the gym. They sing along lustily to "Cleanin' Out...

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — The DKNY shopping bag was delivered to my hotel room at 1:30 a.m. Inside was a ribboned box from the Al-Nahda Philanthropic Society for Women, containing a black silk abaya with red and blue embroidery on the sleeves and a long black chiffon scarf. The tag said size 59, an alarming, hopefully metric sight you would never see in that other city of palm trees, swimming pools, pampered royalty, 24-hour traffic and male dominance, Los Angeles, where the dresses trend toward size zero.I wasn't sure if the gift was a polite message that on Friday, the...

IYADH, Saudi Arabia — I had been wanting to catch a glimpse of the mutawwa, the bully boys from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice who go around harassing and arresting Saudis in the name of Islam. But since I grew up with "I Dream of Jeannie" and tales of Aladdin's lamp, I should have known that Arabia is not the place to make wishes lightly.The religious police were reputed to look angry and have long, scraggly beards, and to clean their teeth with a tree root called miswak. They had been so out of...

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fired off a memo last week revoking the longstanding title "CINC," or "commander in chief," bestowed on Tommy Franks and the cadre of other four-star military chieftains who plan and fight American wars around the world. He's been on a rampage for months about top generals and admirals getting to call themselves commander in chief.Himself, as Rummy is known behind his back at the Pentagon, is not being a total tyrant. He says the "combatant commanders," as he's rechristened the CINC's, can use whatever's left of their stationery with the old titles. The Pentagon...

<p>TALK radio's Rush Limbaugh went after Maureen Dowd yesterday after she dubbed President Bush "the Boy Emperor" in her New York Times column. "The most embarrassing thing I have read in a major American newspaper," Rush ranted. "It's just mean, despicable, childish and immature . . . It's obvious Maureen Dowd hasn't gotten over her breakup with Michael Douglas, who she thinks is the real American president . . . He blew it by running off with Catherine Zeta-Jones, leaving Maureen Dowd in the lurch. All she's got now is bourbon for mouthwash, and it's showing in her columns."</p>

Maureen Dowd, in her Oops!-Ed piece Sunday, disparaged the president's mental capacity in a supremely clichéd rant: "The Boy Emperor picked up the morning paper and, stunned, dropped his Juicy Juice box with the little straw attached," is the manner in which she summed up President Bush's behavior upon learning that North Korea had nukes, as if he didn't already know. Next, this fantastic exchange from the mind (if one can call it that) of the pernicious Pulitzer pontificator: "The Boy Emperor was starting to feel bamboozled by his war tutors ... ‘Didn't you insist that Saddam and Al Qaeda...

LIMBAUGH: DOWD GARGLES WITH BOURBON; STINGING ATTACK ON NYTIMES COLUMNIST In a ferocious assault that echoes the great journalistic feuds of the past, the nation's number one radiotalker Rush Limbaugh took to the waves of Monday to counter NEW YORK TIMES opinion queen Maureen Dowd, who this weekend labelled President Bush a "Boy Emperor"! Limbaugh called Dowd's column "the most embarrassing thing I have read in a major American newspaper." MORE Dowd referred to Bush as a "boy" ten times on Sunday. "The Boy Emperor picked up the morning paper and, stunned, dropped his Juicy Juice box with the little...

WASHINGTON — The Boy Emperor picked up the morning paper and, stunned, dropped his Juicy Juice box with the little straw attached. "Oh, man," he wailed. "North Korea's got nukes. Sheriff Musharraf was helping them. Al Qaeda's blowing stuff up again. The Pentagon's speculating that the sniper might really be Qaeda decoy teams trying to distract the law while they plan a bio-blitzkrieg or a dirty bomb attack on the capital. Tenet's broken out in hives about the next 9/11. Powell spends all his time kissing up to the Frenchies. Saddam's ranting about a river of American blood. Jebbie's in...

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX SAT OCT 19, 2002 11:42:34 ET XXXXX DOWD: BUSH 'BOY EMPEROR' NY TIMES op-ed queen Maureen Dowd is planning to rip President Bush like she has never ripped before in a dispatch set for Sunday publication, sources close to the columnist tell DRUDGE. Dowd, courting controversy, declares: "The Boy Emperor picked up the morning paper and, stunned, dropped his Juicy Juice box with the little straw attached. 'Oh, man,' he wailed. 'North Korea's got nukes... 'Get me Condi!' the boy yelled. 'And a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.'" Dowd refers to Bush as a "boy"...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones (news) and her Oscar-winning husband, Michael Douglas (news), are expecting their second child next spring, their spokesman said. The 33-year-old raven-haired beauty gave birth to the couple's first child, a son named Dylan Michael Douglas, in August of 2000, three months before the two movie stars were married. Much to the delight of Zeta-Jones' father-in-law, veteran actor Kirk Douglas (news), young Dylan carried on a prominent Douglas family trait -- the dimpled chin of his grandfather. Michael Douglas, 58, an Academy Award winner as best actor for his 1987 role in "Wall...