Free Republic

We’re trying to think of something nice to say about 2020. OK, here goes: Nobody got killed by the murder hornets. As far as we know. That’s pretty much it. In the past, writing these annual reviews, we have said harsh things about previous years. We owe those years an apology. Compared to 2020, all previous years, even the Disco Era, were the golden age of human existence. This was a year of nonstop awfulness, a year when we kept saying it couldn’t possibly get worse, and it always did. This was a year in which our only moments of...

World War II is the story of the 20th Century. The war officially lasted from 1939 until 1945, but the causes of the conflict and its horrible aftermath reverberated for decades in either direction. While feats of bravery and technological breakthroughs still inspire awe today, the majority of the war was dominated by unimaginable misery and destruction. In the late 1930s, the world's population was approximately 2 billion. In less than a decade, the war between the nations of the Axis Powers and the Allies resulted in some 80 million deaths -- killing off about 4 percent of the whole...

A model wears a three-piece suit designed by Yves Saint Laurent. France, 1967. He reworked the rules of fashion by putting women into elegant pantsuits that came to define how modern women dressed. By putting a woman in a man’s tuxedo, he changed fashion forever, in a style that was never dated. “Chanel gave liberation of the body to women,” said Pierre Berge, Laurent’s longtime business partner, “and Saint Laurent gave power to women with the men’s clothes.”

Blue Moon: a review by John Haber in New York City Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color (Oscar Bluemner's Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art through Feb. 12, 2006) Have I ever stepped off a museum elevator into such a blaze of color? Have I ever had my idea of an artist so thoroughly and instantly overthrown? I doubt it, but in 1915 Oscar Bluemner had quite a year. He found a great dealer, and he had his first show with Alfred Stieglitz just when war had made New York City the temporary capital of modern art. He found...

MANY myths and half-truths about the Vietnam War whipped up by the communist propaganda machine have been allowed to persist unchecked in discourse about Iraq. Today, on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, perhaps some lessons can be learned from this painful chapter in history. A point of view held by the anti-Vietnam War movement in the 1960s and still taken as fact by some people today is that the Vietnam War was a civil war, not one fomented or directed by the communist north, which, in turn, was being instructed by China. With that...

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Adored by some, attacked by others, Pope John Paul is perhaps the most widely recognised person in the world. On the world stage, he has been at once a champion of the downtrodden and an often contested defender of orthodoxy within his own church. In recent years, the world has watched the decline in the health of the 84-year-old Pope, who suffers from Parkinson's disease and severe arthritis. He has been unable to complete his prepared speeches and has difficulty pronouncing his words. On Thursday, the Pope was rushed to hospital in Rome for the second...

As a Bush re-election later this year looks increasingly likely, some left-wingers worry that Howard Dean is too risky a candidate to put up against a popular President. There is, of course, the obvious comparison to McGovern and the fear that a true believer may inevitably be a sure loser. There is also the worry that Dean may not in fact be so true a believer in the first place: he did support Newt Gingrich's Medicare reforms, after all, and has been a little too cozy with gun rights advocates; might he not betray the Left in order to appeal...