Free Republic

On April 30, 2004 Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s book “The Politics of Truth” will be released. Wilson has been an opponent to the Iraq war, having proposed instead continued UN sanctions and inspections in a “containment” strategy. But his fame first derives from his well-known July 6, 2003 New York Times editorial piece “What I Didn’t Find in Africa”. Second, from the media exposure of his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA employee connected to studying proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In media reports Wilson is usually introduced as the person who disproved President Bush’s State of the Union speech...

If there is one nightmare common to all U.S. senators, it’s the possibility of an unexpected upset by an underdog challenger come Election Day. Not only do they lose their seat, but the shock of defeat becomes one of the most notable parts of their biography. This November, no one wants to be the Senate’s Eric Cantor. For my money, one of the most jaw-dropping Senate results in modern history occurred exactly 50 years ago. It’s barely remembered even by the political community, but it shouldn’t be forgotten. This old race teaches enduring lessons about politics, and in 2014 we’ll...

American literature classics are to be replaced by insulation manuals and plant inventories in US classrooms by 2014. A new school curriculum which will affect 46 out of 50 states will make it compulsory for at least 70 per cent of books studied to be non-fiction, in an effort to ready pupils for the workplace. Books such as JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird will be replaced by "informational texts" approved by the Common Core State Standards. Suggested non-fiction texts include Recommended Levels of Insulation by the the US Environmental Protection Agency, and...

Pro-family citizens have decided: No more anti-family activist judges in Massachusetts! Pro-family activists, including MassResistance, dominated the confirmation hearing on Wednesday for a left-wing `activist attorney, Kenneth Salinger, nominated to be a Superior Court judge by (the ultra-left) Governor Deval Patrick. The nominee, Kenneth Salinger, would be every pro-family citizen's nightmare as a judge. Salinger has given thousands of dollars to the radical activist group MoveOn.org, the pro-abortion group EMILY'S List, and various left-wing politicians across the country. EMILY'S list ("Early Money Is Like Yeast") funds pro-abortion politicians in the early stages of their campaigns against conservatives. MoveOn.org is a...

.D. Salinger died a year ago this Thursday, and in time for that anniversary, there's a newly published biography called, simply, J.D. Salinger: A Life. Fresh Air's Book critic Maureen Corrigan says Salinger, no doubt, would have cringed at what Holden Caulfield calls "all that David Copperfield kind of crap" that biographies necessarily expose, but readers who revere Salinger will find a lot that's surprising in his early background. Here is her review. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Here's Holden Caulfield at the beginning of The Catcher in the Rye uttering not only one of the most famous passages in that novel, but one...

The news of the death of J.D. Salinger recalled the famous Dorothy Parker quip on being told that Calvin Coolidge was dead: "How can they tell?" Of all the iconic writers of the second half of the 20th century, Salinger let us down most. Like one of his characters who demanded "authenticity," the author hid behind being authentic only to himself. He escaped constant public acknowledgement after publishing "The Catcher in the Rye" and only a dozen or so short stories. He was not a man of his time. In our contemporary culture, which catapults good, mediocre and lousy writers...

This brings me to the book The Catcher in the Rye, which is in the news again after the death of its author, J.D. Salinger. Like so many others attending high school in the early 1980s, I had to read Catcher. Now, I guess I was "supposed" to relate to it, but I never did. I didn't experience teen "angst," and I didn't think everyone was a phony, either. Furthermore, if any of my friends related to the book, they certainly never said anything about it. Nor did any of my friends — or the teens I would work with...

They come in threes - celebrity deaths: Will we have a trinity of nilhilists? Howard Zinn dies Jan 27. JD Salinger dies Jan 29. Who is next?

NEW YORK - J.D. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and fugitive from fame whose "The Catcher in the Rye" shocked and inspired a world he increasingly shunned, has died. He was 91. Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the author's son said in a statement from Salinger's literary representative. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H. "The Catcher in the Rye," with its immortal teenage protagonist, the twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of anxious, Cold War conformity and the dawn of...

J.D. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and fugitive from fame whose "The Catcher in the Rye" shocked and inspired a world he increasingly shunned, has died. He was 91. Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the author's son said in a statement from Salinger's literary representative. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Bolstered by eyewitness accounts and the Internet, the explosion of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of New York 10 years ago spawned a slew of sinister conspiracy theories, most notably the belief that a missile from a U.S. Navy ship was responsible. So prevalent were these theories that the term "Pierre Salinger Syndrome" - the belief that everything on the Internet is true - entered the lexicon. For investigators, the conspiracy theories wasted time and diverted valuable resources. Investigators ultimately determined that Flight 800 was the victim of a center fuel tank explosion, most likely...

NORTH BERWICK, Maine — Plans for freshman at Noble High School to read J.D. Salinger’s "The Catcher in the Rye" in January may be in jeopardy following Thursday night’s School Administrative District 60 Board of Directors meeting. Andrea B. Minnon, a Lebanon parent whose 14-year-old son, Spencer, is a freshman at the high school, demanded the book be pulled from the curriculum because of its content. She submitted a Citizen’s Challenge of Educational Media form to the board outlining her problems with the book’s place in public schools. Minnon explained she never read the book but scanned through it and...

Precisely how old I was when I first read "The Catcher in the Rye," I cannot recall. When it was published, in 1951, I was 12 years old, and thus may have been a trifle young for it. Within the next two or three years, though, I was on a forced march through a couple of schools similar to Pencey Prep, from which J.D. Salinger's 16-year-old protagonist Holden Caulfield is dismissed as the novel begins, and I was an unhappy camper; what I had heard about "The Catcher in the Rye" surely convinced me that Caulfield was a kindred spirit....

PARIS - Pierre Salinger, a journalist and former press secretary to President John F. Kennedy, was also a prominent backer of the theory that the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 was caused by a Navy missile.

(no url available yet) NEW YORK (AP) — ABC News says journalist and former President Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger has died.

United Nations - CIA-Iraq chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, whose report cast doubt on Bush administration claims that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction, was blocked from reaching that same conclusion in 1999-2000 by the Clinton White House. Before officially joining the CIA weapons hunt earlier this year, Duelfer spent more than 8 years hunting WMD at the United Nations, first for the noted Swede Rolf Ekeus, than the flamboyant Aussie Richard Butler. Butler, known for his repeated clashes with Iraq officials, was eventually forced out of his U.N. job by the French and Russian ambassadors in June...

Many Helped Iraq Evade U.N. Sanctions On Weapons By Craig Whitlock and Glenn Frankel Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, October 8, 2004; Page A01 BERLIN, Oct. 7 -- As part of its stealth effort to evade U.N. sanctions and rebuild its military, the Iraqi government under President Saddam Hussein found that it had no shortage of people around the world who were willing to help. Among them: a French arms dealer known only as "Mr. Claude," who made a surreptitious visit to Iraq four years ago to provide technical expertise and training. Mr. Claude worked for Lura, a French company...

<p>A FORMER staffer at Harold Ober Associates, which represents reclusive literary legend J.D. Salinger, is peddling a memoir that lifts the lid off Salinger's secretive life.</p> <p>The juiciest bits of Jaime Clarke's "O What Fun We'll Have! O The Times!" - leaked to publishers this week - involve the author of "The Catcher in the Rye," who lives in seclusion in Cornish, N.H.</p>

<p>A Chantilly High School student says his English teacher instructed the class to repeat a common two-word profanity 10,000 times as a way of desensitizing them to its appearance in the novel "Catcher in the Rye."</p> <p>Jeff Daybell, 17, a senior at Chantilly, said he brought the incident to the attention of school administrators because he was shocked at the teacher's instructions.</p>