Free Republic

Barack Obama is proving himself to be a destructive nihilist with capitalism, the Constitution, the Rule of Law, and the traditional American experience in his crosshairs. In today's American culture there are other sorts of nihilism. Pop culture nihilists much more common, comprising a virtual demographic segment of self-satisfied know-nothings. Destructive nihilists are rarer, but more fearsome. They believe western civilization is so corrupt that wholesale destruction is the only solution. Nihilism, while easily abused by the casual thinker, is actually both political, and in a thunderingly empty way, deeply spiritual. Russian author Ivan Turgenev's character Bazarov explains in Fathers...

The President of these United States recently expressed his love for "the Urdu poets," a piece of inspired BS that nobody in their right minds believed for a second. But then the P was narrowcasting to Pakistan, he thought, and Americans weren't supposed to be listening. Yet character is revealed in those little snippets of Obama's mind -- his glorious fantasy life, his everlasting hope that somebody will fall for another piece of schtick, and his essential fraudulence as a human being. Obama's biggest audience is himself, and no doubt he preened and pranced in his mind's eye when he...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A forensic psychiatrist who examined John Hinckley Jr. this year said Tuesday the man who shot President Reagan should not be allowed to visit his parents without supervision, countering testimony by Hinckley's mother and his former psychiatrist that he is ready for more freedom. Robert Phillips, the first witness to testify for the government, said Hinckley still suffers from the same narcissistic personality disorder that drove him to shoot Reagan and three others outside a Washington hotel in March 1981. Hinckley has asked U.S. District Court Judge Paul L. Friedman to let him leave Washington's St. Elizabeths...