Free Republic

*Excerpt*"...only saw him once up close, which happened to be when he got a question he didn't like. Was it true that his staff in the 1980 debates had stolen President Carter's briefing book? (They had.) The famously genial grin turned into a rictus of senile fury: I was looking at a cruel and stupid lizard..."

As American post-conflict combat deaths in Iraq overtook the wartime number, the administration counseled patience. "The war on terror is a test of our strength. It is a test of our perseverance, our patience, and our will," President Bush told an American Legion convention. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice embellished the message with what former White House speechwriters immediately recognize as a greatest-generation pander. "There is an understandable tendency to look back on America's experience in postwar Germany and see only the successes," she told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in San Antonio, Texas, on Aug. 25. "But as some...

Ann Coulter, the right wing's dial-900 girl--a rail-thin, chain-smoking, hard-drinking, big-eyed leggy blonde who winkingly serves up X-rated ideological smut on liberals--is at it again. "Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy," Coulter writes--or sneers--in Treason, her follow-up effort to the best-selling Slander. Like its predecessor, Treason sits atop the best-seller charts, riding higher than one of Coulter's signature miniskirts. But this time around, it isn't the liberals who are up in arms; it's the conservatives. Coulter's slurring of Democrats--from Harry Truman (soft on communism) to Tom Daschle (soft on Iraq)--has set...

Chatterbox is gratified that the country has come to share his enthusiasm for dissecting the lies uttered by or on behalf of President Bush. Or rather, for dissecting one lie: Bush's assertion, in this year's State of the Union address, that Saddam had "recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." This information, the Bushies now concede, was based almost entirely on documents that the CIA and the White House knew to be false. (Pedants' corner: Bush actually said that British intelligence had "learned" about Saddam's yellowcake safari, but the attribution amounted to a lie because you can't "learn" something...