Free Republic

Rome paid tribute to the barbarians clamoring at her gates. It didn't do any good. Paying ransom only postponed the inevitable sacking, burning, and looting of the empire's capital. The UK's Neville Chamberlain sought to pacify Hitler, only to see Brits hiding in basements from the blitzkrieg a few years later. Instead of remembering history's lessons, the Washington Post today indulges in feel-good, intellectual rationalization of Muslim intolerance and hatred. In a 5-page manifesto entitled, "Anatomy of the Cartoon Protest Movement," authors Anthony Shadid and Kevin Sullivan exercise unlimited poetic license, calling Islamist hooliganism "a rare moment of empowerment among...

SYRACUSE — Ithaca attorney William P. Sullivan, Jr., 62, of 417 North Aurora St., pleaded guilty Thursday to four counts of failing to file his federal income tax returns for the years 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001, federal officials said. Sullivan's guilty pleas were entered in U.S. District Court, Syracuse, before U.S. Magistrate Judge George H. Lowe. By his plea, Sullivan admitted that he failed to file his federal income tax returns for those four years. By his plea, he also admitted that the total taxes owed to the IRS for those four years was $34,691. Sullivan faces up to...

Washington is a strange city because, unlike New York, money doesn’t confer status and, unlike Los Angeles, neither does celebrity. The elusive element that structures life and work here is power or the appearance of power. Like electricity, this substance cannot easily be seen. But when it emerges decisively, you feel the atmosphere change in the city. And last week something shifted. Fourteen senators made a deal. All the president of the United States could do was look on. In a finely balanced Senate, a centrist faction of seven Republicans and seven Democrats shelved the notion of abolishing the judicial...

THE WASHINGTON TIMES "New Testament": It's a mighty name for a 70-ton battle tank.     The biblical words are neatly printed on the main gun of an M1A1 Abrams tank rolling along somewhere near Haditha, Iraq. To the Marines of the 4th Tank Battalion, "New Testament" is a fierce beacon and impervious to insurgent mortar fire.     But some critics grumble that an official photo of the tank accompanies a Marine Corps press release about the company's mission with a caption that reads, "The 'New Testament' ... prepares to lead the way during a recent mission." The name of the tank is...

Tin SoldierAn American Vigilante In Afghanistan, Using the Press for Profit and Glory By Mariah Blake In April 2004, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier named Jonathan Keith Idema started shopping a sizzling story to the media. He claimed terrorists in Afghanistan planned to use bomb-laden taxicabs to kill key U.S. and Afghan officials, and that he himself intended to thwart the attack. Shortly thereafter, he headed to Afghanistan, where he spent the next two months conducting a series of raids with his team, which he called Task Force Saber 7. By late June, he claimed to have captured the...

I wonder what Pope Benedict XVI would have thought of John F Kennedy, the first Catholic president of the United States. Kennedy was a proud defender of the West against Soviet communism, while the new pope has equated the godless materialism of western freedom with Nazi and communist dictatorship. Kennedy’s domestic politics, moreover, were based on a simple, remarkable assertion: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute — where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act … I believe in an America that is officially neither...

The Case for Eliminating Abortions – Mr. Sullivan Take Note          If you have not already read Andrew Sullivan’s article published in the Time Magazine Essay on March 7, 2005 and posted on March 3, 2005 by upchuck, here is the link: The Case for Compromise on Abortion           Let me be clear about my stand on abortion. It is not only immoral but an abomination, and Roe v. Wade must be overturned, and it will be if President Bush is able to appoint three conservative pro-life Justices.  Mr. Sullivan says he is pro-life, but then praises Hillary Clinton for moderating...

Andrew Sullivan has now weighed in on my debate with Ryan Sager. What all of us are grappling with is the expansion of the federal government under President Bush. How should those of us who want a much smaller federal government respond when Bush, for example, imposes steel tariffs? We should denounce the tariffs and bash Bush for imposing them. On this much, I take it, all three of us agree. But Sullivan and Sager write as though the problem were simply that Bush is for big government — as though the problem would go away if Bush would simply...

MY REVIEW of C.A. Tripp's The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln for THE WEEKLY STANDARD has caught the attention of several bloggers--but Andrew Sullivan seems to have been the most irritated. Indeed, his website contains half a dozen angry references to my essay--and that's not counting the drive-by blast he fired off in a column for the New Republic.Perhaps Sullivan deserves some answer, for he insists THE WEEKLY STANDARD must apologize for my calling Tripp's book a hoax and a fraud--although one would have more confidence in Sullivan's complaints if he gave a stronger sense of having actually read my...

IN scandals, chronology can be everything. The facts you find out first, the images that are initially imprinted on your consciousness, the details that then follow: these make the difference between a culture-changing tipping point and a weatherable media flurry. With the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, the photographs, which have become iconic, created the context and the meaning of what took place. We think we know the contours of that story: a few soldiers on the night shift violated established military rules and subjected prisoners to humiliating abuse and terror. Chaos in the line of command, an overstretched military,...

Self-proclaimed "neoconservative" Andrew Sullivan thanks "neoconservative" Weekly Standard for running another anti-Rumsfeld article; (didn't the neocons - including WStandard - used to love Rumsfeld, when he first launched their war? Why must he be blamed because he bought their bad idea?): """WHY RUMSFELD MUST GO: Fred Kagan sums it up eloquently. Kudos to the Weekly Standard for keeping up the pressure: ""With more troops in Iraq during and immediately after the war, we would have been able to do the following things that we did not do: * Capture or kill thousands of Iraqi soldiers who were at that time...

As nominees go, Alberto Gonzales, the man George W Bush has chosen as his prospective attorney-general, is an appealing figure. A boyish-looking 49-year-old, he’s a Latino from humble beginnings who is poised to become America’s chief law enforcement officer. In his Senate confirmation hearings last week, he was poised, calm, even beguiling when evasive. But his nomination has raised issues a little deeper than mere biography or charm. You know things have become somewhat dark in Washington when one of the first questions Gonzales was asked — by the Republican chairman of the judiciary committee no less — was: “Do...

PHILADELPHIA -- Third-year medical student Lea Sullivan walked out of a grocery store Sunday afternoon onto a busy sidewalk in one of the city's most vibrant neighborhoods, and met a savage, inexplicable end. A burly man in a ski mask attacked the former homecoming queen from behind, clubbing her in the head with a baseball bat and continuing to beat her after she fell. The attack lasted seconds -- a minute, tops. Although South Street was crowded with shoppers, no one tried to stop the attack.

The sun set, the moon rose, the unchilled milk attained room temp, the dog had to pee, the match was struck and guttered out, the earth moved along its prescribed orbit, and Andrew Sullivan endorsed John Kerry. Some notable rationales: Kerry has said again and again that he will not hesitate to defend this country and go on the offensive against Al Qaeda. I see no reason whatsoever why he shouldn't. This would be a reasonable statement if Sen. Kerry had just popped fully-formed from Zeus’ brow, howling for justice, but there’s the inconvenient matter of three decades of public...

Kerry? I cannot know for sure. But in a democracy, you sometimes have to have faith that a new leader will be able to absorb the achievements of his predecessor and help mend his failures. Kerry has actually been much more impressive in the latter stages of this campaign than I expected. He has exuded a calm and a steadiness that reassures. He is right about our need for more allies, more prudence, and more tactical discrimination in the war we are waging. I cannot say I have perfect confidence in him, or that I support him without reservations. But...

For his weekly CNBC interview program this weekend Tim Russert got together with Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens for what was a most interesting hour (probably - I caught only the last forty-five minutes). Most of the conversation covered the war on terrorism, and both Sullivan and Hitchens were supportive of the President's actions in the war and emphatic that we must stay in Iraq until we finish what we started there (Sullivan: "saying he'd pull out of Iraq in six months is alone enough to mean Kerry shouldn't be president"). Hitchens was quite positive in talking about the progress...

Bob Dole Slams Kerry By Andrew L. Jaffee, August 23, 2004 Home   Search   Forum   Terms Nothing has really changed for Democratic hopeful John Kerry, except that real war veterans, like Bob Dole, are questioning the “superficial wounds” and resulting “medals” he received during four (4) months service in Vietnam. Kerry is still flailing, trying to cover up a career punctuated by extreme left-wing politics and flip-flopping by talking to voters about his military service. He squandered his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention by trying to convince Americans that his tour of duty in Vietnam will make him a great commander...

So John F Kennedy really is John Forbes Kerry’s role model after all. What did Kennedy do to sneak a razor-thin victory over Richard Nixon in 1960? He outflanked Nixon on the right on national security. What did this 2004 Boston convention signal to the American people? That the Democrats are once again a war party, that winning the war on terror is not something they will cede to the Republicans, that 9/11 was their tragedy too and that America is their country to fight for as well. Good for them. And about time. The first scene broadcast by the...

Here's from Andrew Sullivan's blog this morning (in which he calls himself a "pro-war neocon" - go figure): Edwards gave an immensely tough, hawkish pro-war speech. They really are pulling a Kennedy in 1960. One passage stood out, resplendent: ""We will lead strong alliances. We will safeguard and secure our weapons of mass destruction. We will strengthen our homeland security, protect our ports, protect our chemical plants, and support our firefighters, police officers, EMTs. We will always... We will always use our military might to keep the American people safe. And we, John and I, we will have one clear...

The old Nixon saw had it that all campaigns had an arc. They tilted to the true believers during the primary season and then they tacked to the centre in the summer and autumn. You shored up your political base — and then you made a pitch to the middle. Hyper-liberal or hyper-conservative positions in the winter were finessed by the summer convention, where the candidate had a chance to win over all those undecided voters. There is one thing, however, that this scenario didn’t quite take into account: what if there are decreasing numbers of genuine swing voters in...