Free Republic

Watch as the ultra-feminist sisterhood back away in horror from Sarah Palin, John McCain's new running mate. Mrs Palin is technically female, but she's enthusiastically married, hates abortion and thinks criminals should not be the only people allowed to own guns. She's everything Hillary Clinton isn't. In short, she's the wrong kind of woman. Gun-ho: Governor Sarah Palin gets on the range in Kuwait in 2007 Which just goes to show that ultra-feminists are not actually interested in promoting women because they're women.

Forty years ago this week, the greatest English-language poet of the 20th century sat down and wrote an eight-line verse: The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech. About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips While drivel gushes from his lips. W.H. Auden did not give this telling piece of brilliant doggerel a grandiose name. (He had, after all, called his finest poem "September 1, 1939," simply after the day on which it was composed.) But...

Excerpt - While it is almost certainly true that Moscow's action in the Ossetian and (for good measure) the Abkhazian enclave of Georgia has been, in a real sense, the revenge for the independence of Kosovo (on Feb. 14 Vladimir Putin said publicly that Western recognition of Kosovar independence would be met by intensified Russian support for irredentism in South Ossetia), it is extremely important to bear in mind that this observation does not permit us the moral sloth of allowing any equivalence between the two dramas. Perhaps one could mention just some of the more salient differences? 1. Russia...

This video series is titled “In Defense of World War II.” I didn’t realize we had to defend it, but regardless of that, here’s an education brought to you by Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Hitchens.

Feedback archive → Feedback 2008 Christopher Hitchens—blind to salamander reality A well-known atheist’s ‘eureka moment’ shows the desperation of evolutionists In a recent article in the leftist online magazine Slate, prominent atheistic journalist Christopher Hitchens (b. 1949) thinks he has found the knock-down argument against creationists and intelligent design supporters. Fellow misotheist Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) and another anti-theist Sir David Attenborough (b. 1926) agree. Not surprisingly, there have been questions to us about this, so Dr Jonathan Sarfati responds. As will be seen, their whole argument displays ‘breathtaking inanity’ and ignorance of what creationists really teach, and desperation if...

Napoleon Bonaparte’s test for generalship was a very simple one. Of a man recommended by others for gallantry or fortitude or strategic genius he would inquire only: “But is he lucky?” By this standard, Senator Barack Obama is already the greatest political leader of his generation. From a starting-point in the state Senate in Illinois only a few years ago, he now bestrides the narrow world like a colossus and is already beginning to exhaust the superlatives of the political commentary class. He has a few charismatic tactics that I suppose will soon begin to wear thin. When greeted by...

As immortalized by C-SPAN, here’s the incident I had in mind yesterday in writing about the Berlin speech. Click the image and scroll down to chapter 17 to watch. In fairness to the left, no one except the most embarrassing, slackjawed Obama disciples went as far as to compare the speech to the Gettysburg Address. And of course it’s not the case that Lincoln’s speech was universally recognized as a masterpiece immediately afterwards. But it’s surely true that Barry O aspires to Lincolnesque heights of oratory, in which case I humbly offer two bits of advice. One: When you’re hunting...

Satire, according to Jonathan Swift, is "a mirror wherein every man will commonly discern every face but his own". The New Yorker’s cartoon of Barack Obama and his lady wife, according to its editor David Remnick, "takes a lot of distortions, lies and misconceptions about the Obamas and puts a mirror up to them to show them for what they are." Swift’s satire on satire could hardly have been better, er, illustrated. The cartoon, by veteran satirist Barry Blitt, omitted no detail in showing the Obamas kitted out as a combo of Muslim and Black Panther, with a photo of...

Religion – including Christianity and Judaism – is "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children." At least that's according to the No. 1 New York Times bestseller "God is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything" by journalist Christopher Hitchens. In the news business, we often cite a nation's current top-selling books – for example, the popularity of anti-Semitic titles in Arab countries – as evidence of the mindset of the people. Well, in the United States of America right now, some of the...

Neither faith nor science can answer the most important questions. So why are believers and atheists still bickering? I went to a debate recently in New York between a rabbi and the famous polemicist Christopher Hitchens, on the question "Does God exist?" Hitchens was called on to speak first, and he won the debate with his first two sentences: "I don't know why I have to speak first. He has the burden of proof." The mostly secular ... audience heartily applauded this sally, which was based on the premise -- never challenged by the rabbi -- that science provides an...

Video of Christopher Hitchens on the presidential candidates and their spouses. Key quote "If the Republican Party was a dog, it should be shot."

Sometime later, after the events of 1968, I would look back at Hayden’s Bratislava speech as a turning point not only in the short history of the New Left but also in the history of American radicalism. Protesting against America’s wars has an honorable tradition, running from Thoreau to Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas. But starting with Hayden and continuing in the turbulent outbursts of 1968, that tradition of legitimate democratic opposition morphed into outright collaboration with the enemy.

Posterity may well remember the Hillary Clinton campaign as the nearest that a member of the female gender had thus far gotten to the nomination of a major political party. But the episode will be recalled for many other salient features as well. The first time that the wife of an ex-president had leveraged her first-lady status into a senatorial seat and then a bid for the presidency. http://www.slate.com/id/2193684/

Dear Dubya… Surely Mr President, you are not leaving so soon? Must you run? Very well then, since you say so. Can it really be eight years since you ran against Vice-President Gore and criticised his schemes for "nationbuilding" and the export of democracy on the point of a US bayonet? When you were first elected, our Prime Minister Tony Blair came to Camp David and you found you used the same brand of toothpaste. There wasn't a great deal more overlap with our politics than that. Advertisement Click here to find out more! The general view was that you...

Is there any one shared principle or assumption on which our political consensus rests, any value judgment on which we are all essentially agreed? Apart from abstractions such as a general belief in democracy, one would probably get the widest measure of agreement for the proposition that the second world war was a "good war" and one well worth fighting. And if we possess one indelible image of political immorality and cowardice, it is surely the dismal tap-tap-tap of Neville Chamberlain's umbrella as he turned from signing the Czechs away to Adolf Hitler at Munich. He hoped by this humiliation...

I have detested the Clintons ever since I covered the New Hampshire primary in 1992. The man I saw was not the silver-tongued charmer who seems to have bewitched so many people. Up close, he seemed like a red-cheeked, piggy-eyed bully with a mean streak a mile wide. And when he lied - which he more or less did for a living - he had a hard-faced little spouse to step into the TV studios to cover up for him. This woman put up with A LOT from Bill over the years but could always tell herself it was worth...

I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama's 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be "read" at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language. Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she's much influenced by the definition of black "separationism" offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black...

If you want to read a serious book about the intervention in Iraq, look to Douglas Feith. When Bush's Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill defected from the Cabinet in 2002 and Ron Suskind told O'Neill's story of being surrounded by fools, Michael Kinsley observed that the president deserved all he got from the book. Anyone dumb enough to hire a fool like O'Neill in the first place ought to have known what to expect. So it goes with the ludicrous figure of Scott McClellan. I used to watch this mooncalf blunder his way through press conferences and think, Exactly where do...

The other night, I was having dinner with some friends in a fairly decent restaurant and was at the very peak of my form as a wit and raconteur. But just as, with infinite and exquisite tantalizations, I was approaching my punch line, the most incredible thing happened. A waiter appeared from nowhere, leaned right over my shoulder and into the middle of the conversation, seized my knife and fork, and started to cut up my food for me. Not content with this bizarre behavior, and without so much as a by-your-leave, he proceeded to distribute pieces of my entree...

The endorsement of Senator Barack Obama by former Senator John Edwards is a signal, though not an absolutely decisive one, of a shift in the commitment of the Democratic Party's unpledged centre. It is partly a result of sheer momentum - Edwards said as much when he said that the voters had evidently made their choice "and so have I" - but partly also a feeling of alarm at the way in which Mrs Clinton has polarised the campaign, and gone so far as to polarise it along ethnic and racial lines. Edwards himself ran a campaign very much along...

Today's article on smoking restrictions and the "wellness" movement makes no mention of a politically incorrect truth: some people smoke because they find net positive benefits in it. Nicotine is not just an addictive drug, it is a powerful drug which affects the mind in ways that are often positive. Now let me add that I do note advocate people taking up smoking. I have no financial interest in tobacco, have never owned a tobacco stock, and if tobacco companies have advertised on American Thinker, I have not noticed it. (I would not get rid of their ads if they...

HH: We begin this Wednesday as those Wednesdays when we are lucky with Christopher Hitchens of Vanity Fair fame. Christopher Hitchens, you thought that Hillary's relentlessness would in the end get her back into the White House. What are you thinking this morning after she barely survived last night? CH: What I'm thinking is that in a little while, people will be marveling over who well she's done in West Virginia and Kentucky. And by that time, the vote will have become thoroughly racialized, if you don't mind that rather disgusting expression.

Of all the slogans that Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama might have picked to distinguish themselves from one another, “Prolier Than Thou” was probably the least convincing. Yet in the closing days of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, it seemed as if the two graduates of the nation’s most privileged law schools, and the two former residents of the Ritziest parts of Illinois, were in a race to don the bluest collar and the most stained factory overalls. Not since a desperate George Herbert Walker Bush (father of the current incumbent) started munching on pork-rinds, donning a...

So, a fresh and sly political subtext in a very bizarre campaign season. The two Democratic nominees remain icily calm when in each other's vicinity—plain as it is that they cordially loathe and despise one another—while huge shudders of molten rage continue to shake the ample and empurpled yet graying frame of Bill Clinton as he broods on the many injustices to which life has subjected him. What a good time to shift the subject to the temperament (or temper) of Sen. John McCain and to hint, as did Michael Leahy in a major piece in the April 20 Washington...

Well, it’s fairly easy to see why Barack Obama made his speech in Evansville, Indiana last night rather than Pittsburgh or Philadelphia or any other Pennsylvanian centre of population. Indiana, after all, is still in the radiant future that Senator Obama keeps promising everyone young or old, black or white, male or female, Anglo or Hispanic. Whereas in Pennsylvania, where he spent eleven million dollars as opposed to the five million shelled out by Mrs Clinton, and lost by a double-digit margin (thus getting half as much for twice as much) the problem is in the present. The black vote,...

It's been more than a month since I began warning Sen. Barack Obama that he would become answerable for his revolting choice of a family priest. But never mind that; the astonishing thing is that it's at least 11 months since he himself has known precisely the same thing. "If Barack gets past the primary," said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the New York Times in April of last year, "he might have to publicly distance himself from me. I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen." Pause just for a moment, if...

When Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, I was 19 years old and fancifully considered myself to be far to the left of him. Notwithstanding that, he felt to me like one of my moral elders and tutors (as he still does). When I was first asked to sign a petition to make his birthday a national holiday, on a Manhattan side street in 1970, I was 21 and signed with pride. When, in 1983, President Ronald Reagan finally signed also, authorizing the bill for the King holiday, I was humbled to think of how far along I was in...

The punishment visited on Sen. Hillary Clinton for her flagrant, hysterical, repetitive, pathological lying about her visit to Bosnia should be much heavier than it has yet been and should be exacted for much more than just the lying itself. There are two kinds of deliberate and premeditated deceit, commonly known as suggestio falsi and suppressio veri. (Neither of them is covered by the additionally lying claim of having "misspoken.") The first involves what seems to be most obvious in the present case: the putting forward of a bogus or misleading account of events. But the second, and often the...

How did I get the Iraq war so wrong? I didn't Christopher Hitchens | March 20, 2008 [Snip} AN anniversary of a war is in many ways the least useful occasion on which to take stock of something like the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq, if only because any such formal observance involves the assumption that a) this is, in fact, a war and b) it is by that definition an exception from the rest of our engagement with that country and that region. We were never, if we are honest with ourselves, "lied into war". We became steadily more aware...

It's been more than a month since I began warning Sen. Barack Obama that he would become answerable for his revolting choice of a family priest. But never mind that; the astonishing thing is that it's at least 11 months since he himself has known precisely the same thing. "If Barack gets past the primary," said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the New York Times in April of last year, "he might have to publicly distance himself from me. I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen." Pause just for a moment, if...

In a flood of bestsellers by skeptics and atheists charging a nonexistent God with crimes against humanity, Timothy Keller stands out as an effective counterpoint and as a defender of the faith. His new book, "The Reason for God," makes a tight, accessible case for reasoned religious belief. And his national tour of college campuses has drawn overflowing crowds. "This isn't because I'm well-known," Keller told me, "but because of the topic." < snip > The final part of Keller's book will be the most difficult for many readers to accept. He contends that the God of space and time...

An "anniversary" of a "war" is in many ways the least useful occasion on which to take stock of something like the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq, if only because any such formal observance involves the assumption that a) this is, in fact, a war and b) it is by that definition an exception from the rest of our engagement with that country and that region. I am one of those who, for example, believes that the global conflict that began in August 1914 did not conclusively end, despite a series of "fragile truces," until the fall of the Berlin Wall...

-- snip --And that assumption (widely shared but seldom if ever articulated) is that our engagement with Iraq was somehow "a war of choice" -- to use a favorite catchphrase from a few years ago -- and thus that all of its costs, ranging from the physical damage to Iraqi infrastructure to the moral damage to our warriors, could have been avoided by abstention. I don't know anybody who knows anything about the subject who believes anything so frivolous...

HH: On the day after Super Tuesday, and she’s out of her box, the vampire got out of the dungeon before the light came up or the stake went through her heart, and Hillary Clinton is alive and taking to the wing. To talk about this ominous development, Christopher Hitchens, columnist for Vanity Fair, also writes at Slate and he knows the Clintons like few people. Christopher Hitchens, you must have been a little perturbed last night when Hillary got off of the ground and started gaining ground. CH: I had, just for a minute, let my attention wander. HH:...

One of the great moments among many in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is when we find the young Albert Brooks manning the phones in the campaign office of the man we know (and he does not) to be a double-dyed phony. On behalf of the empty and grinning Sen. Palantine, he is complaining to a manufacturer of lapel buttons. "We asked for buttons that said, 'We Are the People.' These say, 'We Are the People.'… Oh, you don't think there's a difference? Well, we will not pay for the buttons. We will throw the buttons away." Part of the joke...

"At his desk," wrote Christopher Buckley in his email to friends, "in Stamford this morning." Well, one had somehow known that it would have to be at his desk. The late William F. Buckley Jr. was a man of incessant labor and productivity, with a slight allowance made for that saving capacity for making it appear easy.

"At his desk," wrote Christopher Buckley in his email to friends, "in Stamford this morning." Well, one had somehow known that it would have to be at his desk. The late William F. Buckley Jr. was a man of incessant labor and productivity, with a slight allowance made for that saving capacity for making it appear easy. But he was driven, all right, and restless, and never allowed himself much ease on his own account. There was never a moment, after taping some session at Firing Line, where mere recourse to some local joint was in prospect. He was always...

fighting wordsThe Serbs' Self-Inflicted Wounds With Kosovo independent, Yugoslavia is finally dead.By Christopher HitchensPosted Friday, Feb. 22, 2008, at 12:51 PM ET Someone with a good memory of the conversation once told me how Lord Carrington, then one of the "mediators" of the incipient post-Yugoslavia war, came to the conclusion that Slobodan Milosevic was a highly dangerous man. Well-disposed toward Serbia (as the British establishment has always been), Carrington told the late dictator that he understood Serb concerns about significant Serbian minorities in Bosnia and Croatia. But why did Milosevic also insist on exclusive control over Kosovo, where the Albanian...

A sour old joke from prewar Germany has two elderly Jews sitting in a Berlin park, with one of them reading a Yiddish paper and the other one scanning the pages of Der Stürmer. The latter Jew is laughing. This proves too much for the former Jew, who says: “It’s not enough you read that Nazi rag, but you find it funny?” “Look,” replies the other. “If I read your paper, what do I see? Jews deported, Jews assaulted, Jews insulted, Jewish property confiscated. But I read Der Stürmer, and there’s finally some good news. It seems that we Jews...

Mr. President, Don't Forget Iran February 19, 2008 WallStreetJournal Christopher Hitchens Dear Mr. President: A few months ago, it became possible to hear members and supporters of your administration going around Washington and saying that the question of a nuclear-armed Iran "would not be left to the next administration." As a line of the day, this had the advantage of sounding both determined and slightly mysterious, as if to commit both to everything and to nothing in particular. That slight advantage has now, if you will permit me to say so, fallen victim to diminishing returns. The absurdly politicized finding...

Rowan Williams' dangerous claptrap about "plural jurisdiction." In December 1931, George Orwell got himself arrested in the slums of East London in order to find out about conditions "inside," and then he wrote an essay about the people he met while in detention. One of them was a buyer for a kosher butcher who had embezzled some of his boss's money. To Orwell's surprise, the man told him that "his employer would probably get into trouble at the synagogue for prosecuting him. It appears that the Jews have arbitration courts of their own, and a Jew is not supposed to...

A few weeks ago, I wrote slightly disobligingly about Jay Lefkowitz, the man who holds the new congressionally mandated post of U.S. special envoy for human rights in North Korea. The North Korean state does not recognize the concept of human rights and considers every one of its citizens to be the property of the ruling family, so Lefkowitz’s job is admittedly an extremely difficult one, but I tried to call attention to the way in which he (in his rather slender annual report to Congress), and the administration in general, had gone somewhat quiet on the subject of North...

It is time to finally put to bed a malicious libel against Jews and Judaism that is getting increasing attention in modern media, namely, that Judaism will not allow for the breaking of the Sabbath to save a non-Jewish life. Given that Judaism is the religion that introduced the idea that all humans are created equally in God's image, and the rabbinical sages wrote 2,000 years ago that "even a gentile who studies God's law is equal to the High Priest," and "the righteous of all nations have a share in the World to Come," (Tosefta Sanhedrin 13) it would...

Christopher Hitchens -- the author of God is not Great -- is an anomaly: Unlike most secularists, he is deeply alarmed by the rise of Islam. While Hitchens tries to sound a warning trumpet, most of his fellow secularists are either oblivious to or even sympathetic to that against which he warns.

HH: As many Wednesdays, we are happy to welcome Christopher Hitchens, columnist for Vanity Fair. Christopher, welcome, it’s always a pleasure to speak with you. CH: Thank you, and Happy New Year, I think, isn’t it? HH: And it is. It’s our first meeting of the new year, and I appreciate your remembering that. Christopher, you’ve made something of a career watching the Clintons, haven’t you? CH: If you could call that a career. It’s barely a life. HH: It’s sort of like a prison sentence, actually. Well, we have some new and very exquisite Bill Clinton, vintage today, which...

Why on earth would we choose to put the Clinton family drama at the center of our politics again? ___ Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy "experience"—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to...

Tell Abbas to stop educating for war THE JERUSALEM POST Jan. 9, 2008 www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1198517337771&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull In his meeting today with Mahmoud Abbas, President George Bush will likely urge the Palestinian Authority president to implement his responsibilities under the road map, such as eliminating the infrastructure of terrorism. Abbas will claim that he is doing the best he can, and respond by demanding that Israel dismantle outposts and freeze settlements. And nothing will change. This sort of pointless, circular maneuvering has, at best, continued for the past 14 years, since the signing of the Oslo principles in 1993. At worst it...

There's something pathetic and embarrassing about our obsession with Barack Obama's race ___ To put it squarely and bluntly, is it because he is or is it because he isn't? To phrase it another way, is it because of what he says or what he doesn't say? Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois is the current beneficiary of a tsunami of drool. He sometimes claims credit on behalf of all Americans regardless of race, color, creed, blah blah blah, though his recent speeches appear also to claim a victory for blackness while his supporters—most especially the white ones—sob happily that at...

The sternest critic of Benazir Bhutto would not have been able to deny that she possessed an extraordinary degree of physical courage. (snip) The likeliest culprit is the al-Qa'eda/Taliban axis, perhaps with some assistance from its many covert and not-so-covert sympathisers in the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. These were the people at whom she had been pointing the finger since the huge bomb that devastated her welcome-home motorcade on October 18. She would have been in a good position to know about this connection, because when she was prime minister, she pursued a very active pro-Taliban policy, designed to extend and...

So much for our "way of life" - you know, the one our leaders told us they went to war to save. The deeply English, deeply Christian city of Oxford, one of the homes of free thought, is now being asked to accept the Islamic call to prayer wafting from mosque loudspeakers over its spires and domes. If that is not a threat to our "way of life", then I don't know what is. Allowing the regular electronic proclamation of Allah's supremacy in a British city is not tolerance, but a surrender of the sky to a wholly different culture....