Free Republic

Mike Allen reported over the weekend that "Gregory B. Craig, a well-known Washington lawyer who quarterbacked President Bill Clinton's impeachment defense, has been chosen White House counsel by resident-elect Barack Obama". Believe it or not, the time Craig spent shilling for Clinton may have been his most honorable days of work ... In the early 1980s, [Craig] was an attorney for John Hinckley, the man who shot President Reagan and three others. Craig helped put together an insanity defense that led to Hinckley's acquittal. Nine years later, he advised Ted Kennedy in the Palm Beach rape case involving the senator...

    France was the capital of the Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century intellectual movement spearheaded by writers who called themselves philosphes. They had waged a campaign of relentless criticism of the church and revealed religion, which their leader Voltaire called "The infamous thing." The crusade was so effective that by 1778, when an eighty-three year old Voltaire returned to Paris after decades away, he was received like a "victorious general," as Peter Gray describes it.  The Jesuit order had been suppressed, and various indicators showed a decline in devotion among the public. The effects were most profound in the ranks of the...

Apparently PBS has turned Joshua Muravchik's book Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism into a 3 hour documentary. They showed it in July but PBS in NYC is rerunning it late at night and other PBS stations may do so, as well. His book does a good job of explaining why socialism and democracy don't miss. I didn't hear about it so I thought a posting here might be useful to anyone who is interested.

Wouldn't. Couldn't. Shouldn't. These were the refrains of the cognoscenti in response to President Bush's inaugural address. Many conceded that the speech had moments of eloquence. But as a framework for U.S. policy, they found it had no hope of success and could lead to a passel of troubles. They took comfort only in the thought that the president did not really mean what he said. Peggy Noonan, writing on this page, reminded the president that "this is not heaven, it's earth." In a similar vein, Mark Helprin called the president's advocacy of "evangelical democracy" a "manic idea." "Will we...

Kerry's Cambodia Whopper By Joshua Muravchik Tuesday, August 24, 2004; Page A17 Most of the debate between the former shipmates who swear by John Kerry and the group of other Swift boat veterans who are attacking his military record focuses on matters that few of us have the experience or the moral standing to judge. But one issue, having nothing to do with medals, wounds or bravery under fire, goes to the heart of Kerry's qualifications for the presidency and is therefore something that each of us must consider. That is Kerry's apparently fabricated claim that he fought in Cambodia....

There are 22 Arab countries. Of the world's 170 other governments, 121, or 71 percent, are elected. The number of Arab countries with freely elected governments: 0.In The End of History, Francis Fukuyama likened the nations of the world to wagon trains carrying American pioneers west. Their speeds and routes varied, but they were all headed in the same direction. Are the Arab states the last wagon train to democracy? Or is there something that sets them apart? Are they headed in another direction? Or have their wheels come off, leaving them forever stuck in place?These are questions to which...

WASHINGTON — Mark the date: July 9. That’s when opponents of the Iranian regime have called a general strike that they hope will expand to topple the government there and bring freedom and democracy to the Iranian people. The strike is being organized by profreedom student groups to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the last student uprising in Iran that saw thousands of students take to the streets against the Islamic Republic’s ruling mullahs. The planned event — indeed, the Iranian freedom movement as a whole — could take on a new dimension now that Iran’s western neighbor, Iraq,...