Free Republic

I see that I shall have to come out of retirement and become President. It is the only hope for the country and the world. That I am willing to undergo the humiliation of the office is a measure of the depth of my sense of duty. Though perhaps I will do it under an assumed name. First things first. I will need a stirring bumper sticker, this being the key to high office. What? I’m considering “Fred! Piss Poor but Look at the Rest.” Or “A Fred in Every Pot,” or perhaps “Better Fred than Dead”? Or “Tippecanoe and...

Brutality In Mexico The Horror. The Horror. April 19, 2006 Bobbling about on the web, like flotsam in some drear tidal pool, is a piece purporting to show that Mexico mistreats immigrants in all manner of ways offensive to the North American soul. Most curious. I am one of those immigrants, and still waiting to be mistreated. The specific charges: “In brief, the Mexican Constitution states that: Immigrants and foreign visitors are banned from public political discourse. Immigrants and foreigners are denied certain basic property rights. Immigrants are denied equal employment rights. Immigrants and naturalized citizens will never be treated...

When Thompson blew his brains out, a door closed somewhere and you could hear the latch click. The main man had gone. Most of us can easily be replaced. There was only one Hunter Thompson. I’ll heist one tonight to a fine, fine writer, a voice of his time, the embodiment of an age the like of which there never was and which, for good or bad, will never come again. The Sixties look drab now—unkempt Manson girls, the lost and unhappy, kids bleak and bleary-brained after waking up with too many strangers in too many sour crash pads. There...

I get email from people who say they wish that journalists would engage in objective coverage of the war in Iraq. They are always indignant and often bitter, but they mean opposite things. Those against the war assert that the fascist press is slanted in favor. Those in favor assert that the leftist press is slanted against. All agree that reporters are reprehensible. I wonder whether either group has any idea what it is talking about. When people say that they want the press to be objective, they usually mean that they want reporters to cheerlead for their point of...

Faking It A Brief Textbook Of American Democracy Monday, January 19, 2004 While the United States is freer and more democratic than many countries, it is not, I think, either as free or as democratic as we are expected to believe, and becomes rapidly less so. Indeed we seem to be specialists in maintaining the appearance without having the substance. Regarding the techniques of which, a few thoughts: (1) Free speech does not exist in America. We all know what we can’t say and about whom we can’t say it. (2) A democracy run by two barely distinguishable parties...

American Airlines Like Sinus Drainage, But With Wings    August 4, 2003   You've heard of air rage? I've got it. I'm building an invisible plastic chain-saw with a six-hundred horse motor to cut the wings off every airplane owned by American Airlines, before chopping the flight crews into runny gruel. Friday morning, August first, San Francisco International. I showed up to catch a hop, AA 482, to Dallas-Fort Worth en route to Guadalajara. The line in front of the American ticketing was just flat huge. For an hour and twenty minutes by my watch people waited to check in....

Yes, Mommy: A Well-Regulated State We tell ourselves that in America we are the Free People. I wonder whether we might not better be called the Obedient People, the Passive People, or the Admonished People. I doubt that any country, anywhere, has been so regulated, controlled, and directed as we are. We are bred to obey. And obey we do. It begins with the sheer volume of law, rules, and administrative duties. Most of the regulation makes sense in isolation, or can be made plausible. Yet there is so much of it. Used to be if you wanted a dog,...

Going Faster And Faster The Acceleration Of Decline One must be careful in remembering better days. Memory presents an improving mirror, smoothing rough edges of rougher times, giving a warm glow to things that were less roseate when they happened. Like a good editor, it revises things for the better. Thus one recalls, or half-imagines, the idyllic boyhood in Mississippi, the favorite grove where one played in the slanting afternoon sunlight that probably wasn't as golden as one recalls, with childhood companion who perhaps weren't as admirable as they now seem. One forgets, or half forgets, the drunken parents and...

Florida, Hillary, And Airports Maybe Them Terrorists Just Got Their Towels Wrapped Too Tight The whole curious affair began when Fatima Ali Rezah, a citizen of Algeria, refused to unveil for a driver's license photo in Florida. The clerk, who didn't follow society carefully, thought she was joking. She wasn't. Her religion, she said, prohibited baring her face. The laws of the United States were irrelevant. The clerk stared at her, puzzled. She was covered head to toe in black cloth and looked, he later told friends, like a large raisin. He was what is nowadays called a good ol'...

Race, Rushton, And Us: Getting Used To What We Can't Change One marvels that a creed widely doubted in private, unsupported by evidence, and manifestly incorrect, can become compulsory in a society, shape its policy, and arouse furious support. Radical egalitarianism is such a creed -- the notion that people, both individually and in groups, are born equal and, preferably, identical. It would then follow that all differences arise from nurture. What if they don't? As a matter of daily experience we observe that some individuals are bigger, smarter, better athletes, superior artists, better singers. It isn't all nurture: Raise...