Free Republic

One of the popular post-9/11 sentiments has been the one that holds that Muslims are bent on conquering the world. The notion is that Muslims hate Christianity and Western freedom and values and that such hatred is rooted in the Koran and stretches back centuries. Thus, the United States has been drawn, reluctantly, into a war against Muslims. That’s why U.S. forces are in Iraq and Afghanistan, the argument goes — to defend our freedoms by killing Muslims over there before they get over here and kill us. I sometimes wonder whether the people who have this mindset have reflected...

1. America is at risk of more terrorist attacks - but not just from the Middle East According to a recent NYPD report, the greatest terrorist threat to United States citizens now comes from our own people - homegrown terrorists. This is not news to anyone who is aware of how different the terrorist threat is from any other enemy we've faced. John Robb, in his excellent book Brave New War, outlines the myriad ways that any dedicated homicide-minded individual can bypass America's woefully inadequate homeland security and exploit technology to wreak havoc on a massive scale: "We have entered...

It won't matter how high Ron Paul finishes in the Iowa caucuses this Thursday or in the New Hampshire primary Jan. 8 or anywhere else. He's already won his prize.... In April, shortly after he announced he'd run for president, Paul told the Trib that his goal -- besides winning, of course -- was to make an impact on the race and to spread his ideas about maximizing freedom, limiting the federal government and practicing nonintervention overseas.... Though his presence at the debates has shown what a bunch of unprincipled, flip-flopping, war-loving, faux conservatives Messrs. Romney, Giuliani, Huckabee and McCain...

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul contends that the federal government has overreacted by limiting personal freedom in the wake of terrorist attacks six years ago, noting more people die on U.S. highways in less than a month’s time compared to the number who lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001. “We have been told that we have to give up our freedoms in order to be safe because terrorism is such a horrible event,” Paul said today to more than 1,000 supporters who attended a rally at a downtown Chicago hotel ballroom. “A lot fewer lives died on 9/11 than...

Hugh Hewitt Interviews Ron Paul supporters at the Townhall.com Texas Republican Straw Poll...

Computer engineer Jonathan Morey says, "I have never voted for a Republican, ever." Nathan Hansen, a lawyer, says, "I've been a Republican all my life." Yet a political meeting in St. Paul, Minn., brought the 31-year-old friends together for the first time -- in support of presidential candidate Ron Paul. Officially, Mr. Paul is a Republican, elected to Congress 10 times and now running for the party's presidential nomination. But the party label hardly describes the obstetrician from south of Houston. And it certainly doesn't explain his appeal to a growing, if still small, number of voters across the political...

Pat Buchanan's new book has roared to the top of the Amazon best-seller list hitting the No. 1 spot within a day of its release. In his "State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America," Buchanan warns that the United States is witnessing its own death as illegal immigration destroys the fabric of the American nation. More: Buchanan says Mexico has been mounting a conscious effort to use the United States as a dumping ground for its poor and unemployed. Pat Buchanan reports that since 9/11, more than 4 million illegal immigrants have crossed our borders and...

One field in which the next conservatism will probably depart abruptly from current policy is homeland security. The departure will begin with foreign policy and national strategy. As previous columns have suggested, the next conservatism's foreign policy will seek to preserve a republic here at home, not build an American empire overseas. Logically, that will lead to a defensive rather than an offensive national strategy. In both cases, the next conservatism will not be innovating but returning to the policies our country followed through most of its history. It is no accident that when we eschewed empire and followed a...

In just two weeks, six retired U.S. Marine and Army generals have denounced the Pentagon planning for the war in Iraq and called for the resignation or firing of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who travels often to Iraq and supports the war, says that the generals mirror the views of 75 percent of the officers in the field, and probably more. This is not a Cindy Sheehan moment. This is a vote of no confidence in the leadership of the U.S. armed forces by senior officers once responsible for carrying out the orders of...

The Dubai Ports World deal is waking Americans up to a painful reality [...] we've abandoned the principles of tariff-based trade that built American industry and kept us strong for over 200 years. The old concept was that if there was a dollar's worth of labor in a pair of shoes made in the USA, and somebody wanted to import shoes from China where there may only be ten cents worth of labor in those shoes, we'd level the playing field for labor by putting a 90-cent import tariff on each pair of shoes. Companies could choose to make their...

One all-too-realistic geopolitical nightmare was a weapon of mass destruction terrorist attack on the U.S. West Coast. A nuclear device detonates in a container ship about to enter Long Beach, Calif. News had just broken about pollution of the U.S. food supply, most analysts assumed by transnational terrorism. The U.S. can prevail conventionally anywhere but seems helpless in coping with asymmetrical warfare. In quick succession: • The dollar ceases to be the world's reserve currency. • The shaky coalition governing Iraq collapses and civil war breaks out between Sunnis and Shi'ites. • Fear of the unknown produces a new consensus...

Political dilettante that I am, I often find myself both confused and fascinated by many things I read on a daily basis around the web. Whether my post-read mental state is the former or the latter, I almost always end up reading more about the subject that inspired my aforementioned state of mind. And thus, when I read about the shadowy "neo-con plots", I wanted to know more, particularly since the plots to which pejorative descriptions were applied appeared on the surface to be attempts to democratize otherwise totalitarian governments around the world. What was I to do? Well, friends,...

Democrats should face it: they are incompetent and Bush will be reelected. With less than two months to go before the election, John Kerry is yet to address a single important issue. William Rivers Pitt, who runs the liberal web site, "Truthout," vented his frustration by declaring the election the dumbest ever (Sept. 10). The entire election, thus far, Pitt says, has been about Republican and Democratic TV ads. Pitt lists the real issues that remain unaddressed before the electorate: a war based on intelligence manipulation and deception, the loss of jobs, health care’s rising cost and declining coverage, the...

http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/quiz/neoconQuiz.html

Normally, I would have gotten it sometime early this week. I haven't. I did get an unsolicited copy of the Claremont Review of Books, which has a lot of stuff from NR writers (not that I minded; it was a good read). I could just log on to NRO and read the issue there, but I like having the 'zine in front of me to read (since I read so much on the internet). Anyone else have this problem--or is it just me?

Congressmen attack Bush's isolationist policy 10:41 29 August 02 NewScientist.com news service US President George Bush has come under surprise attack from leading American politicians at the World Summit for the "disastrous consequences" of his isolationist foreign policy. In an early morning press conference which caused a mini-sensation in Johannesburg on Thursday, three democratic congressmen and a former state governor launched a fierce broadside against Bush for ignoring the world's attempts to cut poverty and pollution. "There are two Americas," said Jerry Brown, a former governor of California. One was "an America of isolationship and retreating from co-operation with the...