Free Republic

With Vladimir Putin’s dispatch of Russian troops into Crimea, our war hawks are breathing fire. Russophobia is rampant and the op-ed pages are ablaze here. Barack Obama should tune them out and reflect on how Cold War presidents dealt with far graver clashes with Moscow. When Red Army tank divisions crushed the Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956, killing 50,000, Eisenhower did not lift a finger. When Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall, JFK went to Berlin and gave a speech. When Warsaw Pact troops crushed the Prague Spring in 1968, LBJ did nothing. When, Moscow ordered Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski to smash...

Ron Smith, who came to Baltimore 38 years ago as a weekend TV anchorman but found his greatest success on radio as WBAL's "Voice of Reason," died Monday night of pancreatic cancer at his home in Shrewsbury, Pa.. He was 70. Mr. Smith spent more than 26 years on WBAL's airwaves, most of it in the afternoon drive-time period until a move to mornings last year, passionately talking politics from a conservative point of view. But it is not his politics for which he will likely be remembered as much as the informed conversation he helped create on Baltimore radio...

Pat Buchanan's new book Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025 is the bluntest and most cogent statement of the truth about the present course of Western civilization that has been seen in American bookstores in many years. In this book, Pat takes the gloves off and hits the American Left with the Hard Right. He knocks the liberal establishment out of the ring. Everything that real conservatives have privately known to be true for generations is finally aired in this brave and long overdue new book. Christianity is the foundation of Western civilization. As people of European...

"Are there even any real conservatives left in America?" recently asked the one eager for knowledge. "There are," responded the wise man, "but they are often called paleoconservatives." What are paleoconservatives? Well, as Russell Kirk once said, they are the only real conservatives left in America. The whole "conservative movement" has moved so far to the Left, or rather has been "neoconned," that many so-called conservatives are "conservative" in name only. What do paleoconservatives believe? Like mainstream conservatives, paleos are often religious, or at least reverent of religion. They are opposed to secularism, opposed to "gay marriage," opposed to the...

TAC would have prospered had it given its readers straight talk about race, and laid out that “humbler” approach to foreign affairs that George W. Bush had promised the electorate in 2000. On Saturday, I learned it is very likely that The American Conservative magazine is shutting down. This is a shame, because: 1. It was the first major conservative magazine since National Review, almost fifty years earlier, that was founded not to curry favor with the powerful, but to criticize them, and seek to change their minds. NR had long since turned largely into a coven of neocon court...

For generations, Republican politicians have spoken reverently of the rule of law. But since 2001, this hoary doctrine has been redefined to mean little more than the enforcement of the secret thoughts of the commander in chief. George W. Bush has added more than 750 “signing statements” to new laws since he took office. Earlier presidents occasionally appended such comments to new statutes, but Bush is the first to use signing statements routinely to nullify key provisions of new laws. He perennially announces that he will not be bound by limits on his power and that he will scorn obligations...

Anyone who believes that opponents of Muslim extremism are necessarily defenders of tolerance should see my e-mails from last week. I strongly condemned the violent reaction of many in the Islamic world to the now-notorious cartoons of Mohammed printed in a Danish newspaper, but also stressed that the cartoons were wrong, that Muslims had a case and that as a Christian I have little in common with western secularism. There was much support, but to hundreds of others I was either an idiot or a liar. How ironic that alleged defenders of free speech should abuse a journalist for, well,...

RARELY HAVE THE HOLDERS of any set of political views and policy preferences been so thoroughly caricatured as the "neoconservatives" of the Bush years. To critics, this group of policymakers (preeminently, in the Defense Department and the Office of the Vice President), along with their allies on the outside (preeminently, in the pages of THE WEEKLY STANDARD), is responsible for a kind of hijacking of U.S. foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. Intoxicated by American power and blinded by a utopian vision, the neoconservatives (in the critics' telling) set the country on a disastrous and unnecessary attempt to remake...

ESSAY Once Again, America FirstFrom left to right: Robert A. Taft, 1948; Russell Kirk, 1960; George Will, 1997; Patrick J. Buchanan, 1999. ON May 4, American conservatism took an unexpected turn. That morning, George Will -- the movement's most influential columnist, one of its icons -- slapped George W. Bush with a tart reprimand. For a year, Will had obliquely hinted of his grave misgivings about the Iraq war and the push to democratize the Middle East. But with the insurgency escalating, he now felt obliged to state his frustration bluntly. ''This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it...

"Das Geheimnis Pattons ist die Vergangenheit," says a captain in the German high command. "Patton's secret is the past." The secret of the man and the movie. I rented the 1970 film, Patton, last week, and saw it three times with my son. A fellow’s got to get his money’s worth. It made quite an impression on yours truly, though I’m not so sure about Richard, who is three-and-a-half years old, and is currently much more passionate about James and the Giant Peach. The moment Patton opens, you know this will be like no other war movie. General George S....

One day, this Iraq War will be thought of as the Intellectuals' War. That is, it was a war conceived of by people who possessed more books than common sense, let alone actual military experience. Disregarding prudence, precedent and honesty, they went off - or, more precisely, sent others off - tilting at windmills in Iraq, chasing after illusions of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and false hope about Iraqi enthusiasm for Americanism, and hoping that reality would somehow catch up with their theory. The problem, of course, is that wars are more about bloodletting than book-learning. Tilting at...

The Helpful Persuasion Revolt From the Heartland: The Struggle for an Authentic Conservatism By Joseph Scotchie, Transaction Publishers 2002 Review by Ryan McMaken Thomas Fleming once noted that he was struck, while reading about the American right prior to the Cold War, that there was a certain "admirable diversity and freedom of discussion" (to use Murray Rothbard's words) on the American right, and that there was no person or publication demanding adherence to a party line or "excommunicating" heretics who failed to live up to the demands of some self-appointed leader of the movement. This freedom of discussion, of course,...

The most intriguing item in the debut number of the American Conservative, the new biweekly magazine co-edited by Patrick Buchanan and "Taki," is an advertisement on Page 25 for something called the America First Party. "We salute Pat Buchanan and The American Conservative!" the ad declares in blue type alongside iconography borrowed from "liberty" movements of decades past: a calligraphy-ed and parchment-y "We the People" superimposed over the Statue of Liberty, itself superimposed over the Stars and Stripes. "Our party members were honored to 'ride to the sound of the guns' with you in battles past," the ad avows, evidently...