Free Republic

Just when it seemed the insults hurled at Barack Obama had reached the apex of absurdity, al-Qaida weighs in with a bit of retro name-calling of its own. In a video released last week, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the top deputy to Osama bin Laden, denounced Obama as a “house Negro” and compared him unfavorably to “honorable black Americans” such as the late Malcolm X, the black nationalist who practiced Islam. Zawahiri also showed a still photograph of Obama wearing a yarmulke while visiting Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall last summer. The implication was that Obama had become nothing more than a “tool of...

The politics of the Grand Old Party's ultra-conservative religionists produce the oddest cognitive dissonance. This campaign season has illuminated the jarring contrast between the public piety of conservative Christians — a significant faction in the Republican Party — and their intense anger toward illegal immigrants. That hostility is all the more jarring at Christmastime, when Christians around the world commemorate the birth of Christ. You'd think that the season would bring forth an outpouring of compassion, mercy and generosity. After all, the Bible, which conservative Christians hold out as the inerrant word of God, includes several admonitions to practice kindness...

For many sophisticated conservatives, Mitt Romney is an appealing presidential candidate. Before he served a respectable term as governor of Massachusetts, he rescued the scandal-plagued Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. He has also been very successful in business, making millions as the co-founder of a private equity investment firm. Though his hyperpandering to the narrow-minded in this campaign has cost him some honor, he's still smart, accomplished and photogenic. He's also a Mormon, a biographical note that has caused considerable consternation among the ultraconservative Christians who make up a sizable portion of the GOP's core constituency. Many of them reject...

First, violent crime. Now, teen birth rates. After declining for more than a decade, births to unmarried teenagers suddenly increased 3 percent among 15- to 19-year-old girls between 2005 and 2006, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Like the uptick in violent crime, this could signal a worrisome trend —- another sign that undesirable social phenomena the nation struggled to curb in the 1990s have begun to ooze back up through the sewer grate. The one-year increase in births to teen moms could be an anomaly. Maybe the numbers for 2007 will show another decline, as adolescent girls...

No prison time for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Not a year, not a month, not a day. Unlike the unconnected, the unrich, the uncelebrated —who are shunted off to do their time unceremoniously — the former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney has been spared the indignity of a prison cell. President Bush says he commuted Libby's sentence because he considered it "excessive." So, while the president "respects the jury's verdict," he clearly disrespects the values of U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, who was first appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan. If 30 months in prison —...

Every once in a while I come across an op-ed that leaves me speechless – so utterly flabbergasted that I have to walk away for a day before I can come up with a cogent response. That was the case when I read Cynthia Tucker’s piece on our “worn military” committing “massacres” in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on May 11. Her complete and utter failure to grasp even simple facts still has me shaking my head. Tucker laughingly described Haditha and the Anbar province as “restive” in November 2005. She must have overlooked the Marines killed in an ambush less...

The black men I know best are all hard-working, accomplished professionals. They include my brother, a physician, and my buddies — lawyers, college professors, political consultants, journalists. I live in an insular world of middle-class affluence, rarely stumbling into the troubled universe of marginalized underachievers. Until recently. After a contractor walked off the job, I was assigned the task of helping my mother find laborers to help complete her new house in my hometown, Monroeville, Ala., a small place with a declining textiles industry. The assignment led me into an alternative universe of black men without jobs or prospects or...

If they really wanted to, your representatives in Washington could dry up illegal immigration almost before you could say, "Tom Tancredo is a tiresome demagogue." All they would have to do is require U.S. employers to check the legal status of all employees and impose stiff sanctions — including multimillion-dollar fines and prison time — on employers who flout the law. After a few executives had done the perp walk, others would get the message. Illegal hiring would drop precipitously. Since the vast majority of illegal immigrants come to this country to work, many of them would leave if they...

Now that public support for the war is sinking — and trust in President Bush right along with it — you'd think the White House might take the opportunity to admit some of the mistakes it has made. At the very least, the president could stop trying to link Saddam to the atrocities of Sept. 11. But no-o-o-o-o. This White House is nothing if not consistent. Bush and Vice President Darth, uh, Dick Cheney have taken to the hustings to repeat, with minor modifications, the same cascade of lies and distortions they gave before the invasion — including implicit attempts...

A week after Hurricane Katrina roiled the waters of the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain and flooded southeastern Louisiana, conservative commentator George Will compared the crisis with urban riots of the 1960s. On ABC's "This Week," Will voiced skepticism about the prospects for economic recovery in the region. "I hope New Orleans recovers," he said. "Newark hasn't from the '67 riots. Detroit hasn't from the '67 riots." At the time, it seemed an odd moment in an otherwise mundane discussion of the politics of natural disaster, since Katrina's devastation was fueled by nature, not social unrest. But Will's comments merely foreshadowed...

The critical question Roman Catholics around the world have about the new Pope Benedict XVI is whether he will continue the hard-line defense of church doctrine that marked his service under Pope John Paul II. Now that the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is out from under the shadow of his much beloved predecessor, many Catholics, especially in the United States, are prayerful that he will emerge as a more progressive figure on the key issue of collegiality — allowing local bishops a greater say in adapting church doctrine for their congregations. The views often attributed to Cardinal Ratzinger, as the...

Barack Obama - who just a year ago was a little-known state senator from the South Side of Chicago — is gaining the rock star status that envelops politicians who exude a certain charm and charisma. Like Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger, he draws cheering, clapping throngs who want to share a photo, get an autograph, touch the hem of his garment. Having bested several opponents to win the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate from Illinois, he vaulted into the ranks of political superstars with an inspiring — occasionally soaring — speech at the Democratic National Convention. Now, coasting...

The presidential candidates have sparred over the war on terror, jobs and tax cuts. Each man has run advertisements disparaging the other's fitness for office. But President Bush and Sen. John Kerry have barely begun to discuss what may be the most important issue of the campaign: the fate of the U.S. Supreme Court. While many voters may believe Iraq is the most important issue, Bush and Kerry don't hold out dramatically different plans for handling the U.S. occupation. But the two men do offer acutely different descriptions of the sort of justices they would appoint. And one of those...

Saddam Hussein made a mistake that few Americans would ever make: He gave Washington politicians more credit than they deserved. He thought any U.S. president would be able to see straight through his big bluff over weapons of mass destruction and know at once that he was aiming his fiery rhetoric not at us but at Iran. He thought we'd understand that he was pretending to have WMD in the same way that some homeowners pretend to have an electronic security system — they put a big sign in the front yard, but they don't actually wire the house. All...

As much as we Americans like to brag about our democracy, it's still a work in progress. Not until the 1960s did the nation begin to honor its promise of full equality for all. And we're still stuck with a vestige of the Founding Fathers' disdain for the wisdom of the average citizen — the Electoral College. Because of the college, not every vote counts in a presidential contest. If you're a Bush supporter in California or New York, your vote won't count. The same is true if you're a Kerry supporter in Georgia or Texas. That's because the majority...

The Bush administration is trying to quash a rumor that keeps cropping up in cyberspace. For several months now, e-mails from an unknown source have warned that President Bush plans to reinstitute the draft if he wins a second term. The rumor persists despite repeated denials from top-level administration figures. In Thursday's debate, Bush declared that the U.S. military will remain an all-volunteer force. Recently, Secretary of State Colin Powell told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that "President Bush has no plans for a draft, nor is a draft needed." And Congress would just as soon debate the revival of Prohibition, because...

Call it the Cosby Consensus. Across the country, middle-class black Americans are applauding comedian Bill Cosby's insistent campaign to draw attention to the bad habits and poor choices that limit black achievement. There has been little disagreement about his main points — that drug use, poor classroom performance and the embrace of outlaw culture have done nothing but cement the black underclass at the bottom of American society. An ethic that dismisses serious scholarship as "a white thing" has handicapped middle-class black kids, too. In early September, Cosby spoke at a Washington forum sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation,...

Zell Miller wants you to believe that he is dispensing a dose of discipline to his beloved Democratic Party — pointing out the foibles and foolishness that have led to its loss of the South. Miller claims he only wants the Democrats to regain their traditional values before it's too late. Miller is a hypocrite. As a historian, he knows exactly why the Democratic Party is teetering in the South: It's precisely because the Democrats set aside a century and a half of ugly traditions that it has lost so many rural white Southerners. Miller knows better than most; he...

Just suspend disbelief for a little while. If you can do that -- forget those annoying facts, ignore the complexities of world affairs and disregard chaos theory -- you can believe that President Bush will win the war on terror. You can believe. You can believe. But it requires selective amnesia. You have to forget that Osama bin Laden -- "We'll smoke him out of his cave," Bush declared three years ago -- is still at large and planning murderous attacks. You have to ignore the aggressive insurgency in Iraq, ordinary Iraqis' resentment of the U.S. occupation and the failure...

"I'm back!" said Cynthia McKinney. She's ba-a-a-ck, said the rest of us. McKinney, a controversial liberal Democrat who lost her seat in Congress two years ago, is on the verge of winning back her post. If she succeeds, she ought to stop off at the Oval Office to thank her unofficial political strategist, President Bush. She couldn't have won without him. McKinney was ousted after she made incendiary remarks suggesting that President Bush had known about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 but did nothing to stop them so that his friends could profit from the resulting war. And that...