Free Republic

There is little remaining controversy over the measures necessary to thwart terrorism. After the radical Islamist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the foiled effort to ram a fourth jet into the Capitol in Washington, no one envisioned that there would follow eleven years without another major attack. Since September 11, 2001, over 45 terrorist plots have been uncovered and foiled in the United States; al-Qaeda, as a terrorist threat, seems regionalized and without the ability to inflict mayhem on a similarly large scale on the Western world; bin Laden is no more; and the Arab...

Virtually every left-wing attack on Bush can legitimately be turned against Obama. It could not last — the attendee of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church sermonizing on tolerance; the practitioner of Chicago politics lecturing on civility; the most partisan voting record in the Senate as proof of a new promised bipartisanship; earlier books and speeches calling for hard-core progressivism as evidence of a no-more-red-state-blue-state conciliation. And in fact the disconnect did not last, and Barack Obama finds himself dealing with assorted chickens coming home to roost. In the summer of 2004, Michael Moore released a crude propaganda film, Fahrenheit 9/11,...

As gas prices climb back toward $4 a gallon, the Obama administration -- facing a tough re-election campaign and rising Middle East tensions -- is once again considering tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. For years, administrations have bought and stored oil for emergencies, in fear of a cutoff of imported oil, as happened during the Arab embargo of 1973-74. But since 2009, the U.S. government has declared most federal lands off-limits to new oil and gas exploration -- despite vast recent finds of energy and radically new means to tap it. President Obama also canceled the most vital sections of...

Sometimes societies find themselves in pernicious cycles in which the perceived medicine seems worse than the known disease. The Roman satirist Juvenal lamented the ill effects of free food and free entertainment for the masses (“bread and circuses”) in part because he knew there was no remedy for the pathology in sight — and thus only a slow decline toward fiscal insolvency or riots were on the horizon. Any Roman emperor bold enough to rein in the Praetorian Guard, charge the mob for grain, and curb gladiatorial shows would earn a usurper marching on Rome from the provinces. So most...

Driving across California is like going from Mississippi to Massachusetts without ever crossing a state line. Consider the disconnects: California's combined income and sales taxes are among the nation's highest, but the state's deficit is still about $16 billion. It's estimated that more than 2,000 upper-income Californians are leaving per week to flee high taxes and costly regulations, yet California wants to raise taxes even higher; its business climate already ranks near the bottom of most surveys. Its teachers are among the highest paid on average in the nation, but its public school students consistently test near the bottom of...

The chief tenet of postmodernism is that truth and facts are arbitrary constructs, set up by the privileged to manipulate others less fortunate. In the case of our first postmodernist president, Barack Obama, there cannot be facts, past or present, only a set of shifting assertions that gain credence to the degree that they prove transitorily useful for progressive causes. A sympathetic biographer, David Maraniss, noted that almost all the touchstone events in Barack Obama’s mythographic memoir were fabricated. Of course, Obama would object to such a value-laden term and instead call them composites, impressions stitched together and presented as...

George Miller’s 1981 post-apocalyptic film The Road Warrior envisioned an impoverished world of the future. Tribal groups fought over what remained of a destroyed Western world of law, technology, and mass production. Survival went to the fittest — or at least those who could best scrounge together the artifacts of a long gone society somewhat resembling the present West. In the case of the Australian film, the culprit for the detribalization of the Outback was some sort of global war or perhaps nuclear holocaust that had destroyed the social fabric. Survivors were left with a memory of modern appetites but...

The Thrill Is Gone The last thirty days have made it clear that Barack Obama is not going to win the 2012 election by a substantial margin. The polls still show the race near dead even with over five months, and all sort of unforeseen events, to come. But after the Obama meltdown of April and May, I don’t think he in any way resembles the mysterious Pied Piper figure of 2008, who mesmerized and then marched the American people over the cliff. Polls change daily; gaffes and wars there may come aplenty. But Barack Obama has lost the American...

Forgotten in the latest hype about illegal immigration is the cycle of lawlessness that follows illegal entry into the United States. The simple fact is that once someone chooses to enter the U.S. illegally and remain here illegally, breaking the law, either deliberately or through indifference, becomes easier and habitual: obtaining false IDs, avoiding normal bureaucratic requirements, violating zoning laws, etc. And when the host, whether federal, state, or local government, sends a message that the issue is now entirely political rather than legal, often the illegal immigrant senses that he is (and should be) generally exempt from the mundane...

The 2012 election will hinge on the economy, not on U.S. foreign policy, unless there is a major overseas crisis — an Israeli attack on Iran, an Iranian detonation of a nuclear weapon, a Middle East war, a North Korean attack, or something of that sort. That said, there is much to lament in the current administration’s foreign policy. But Mitt Romney should be careful in critiquing the status quo, given that it is full of paradoxes and contradictions.The war on terror? Forget the absurd euphemisms like “overseas contingency operations” and “man-caused disasters,” the hypocrisy of railing against waterboarding...

Barack Obama, both substantively and symbolically, ran in 2008 as a much-needed healer. He was to bring the nation together as never before — a vow taken to heart by millions of voters of all backgrounds who ensured Obama’s 2008 victory. His biracial background and his uncanny ability to navigate through both Harvard Law School and the politics of Chicago community organizing seemed to make him ideally suited to usher in a postracial era — as was acknowledged, albeit quite crudely and insensitively, by both Harry Reid and Joe Biden in the 2008 campaign. Yet quite the opposite development tragically...

Until last week, Chief Justice John Roberts was vilified as the leader of a conservative judicial cabal poised to destroy the Obama presidency by overturning the federal takeover of health care. But with his unexpected affirmation, Roberts suddenly was lauded as the new Earl Warren -- an "evolving" conservative who at last saw the logic of liberal big government. Among our elites -- journalists, pundits and academics -- liberal Supreme Court justices are always deemed "open-minded," even as they are expected to vote in absolute lockstep liberal fashion. In contrast, a conservative justice is written off as reactionary or blatantly...

I have a confession to make: I don’t quite understand the jubilation among the conservative-Republican forces during the last two months of the Obama crack-up, and here, unfortunately, is why: 1. The so-called Obama crash. I believe that Obamism — 41 months over 8% plus unemployment, anemic GDP growth, serial $1 trillion deficits, unsustainable rates of new aggregate debt, the takeover of health care, record numbers on unemployment insurance and food stamps — is not only strangling the country, but in the long run will be seen as such by most Americans. Obama is incoherent ... (snip) What Does It...

A sign of an undisciplined mind is serial lapses into self-contradiction, or blurting out a thought only to refute it entirely on a later occasion. For a president to do that is to erode public confidence and eventually render all his public statements irrelevant. That is now unfortunately the case with Barack Obama, who has established a muddled record of confused and contradictory declarations. Last week, the president invoked executive privilege to prevent the release of administration documents related to the Fast and Furious operation. All presidents on occasion use that tactic, but rarely after they have put themselves on...

The next five months should be interesting — given that Barack Obama is now experiencing something entirely unique in his heretofore stellar career: widespread criticism of his performance and increasing weariness with his boilerplate and his teleprompted eloquence.Starting with his Occidental days, and going on through Columbia, Harvard, Chicago, the U.S. Senate, and the 2008 campaign, rarely has Mr. Obama faced much criticism, much less any accountability that would involve judging his rhetoric by actual achievement.Yet what worked for so long now does no longer. Obama simply cannot run on 40 months of 8 percent–plus unemployment, a June 2009...

The recent indecisive Greek elections could be summed up by two general themes: Greeks want to stay in, and expect help from, the eurozone. But they still do not want to take the necessary medicine to stop borrowing billions of euros from northern Europeans, who want a radical Greek reform of the tax code, deregulation of labor laws, fiscal discipline, massive cuts in bureaucracy, and greater transparency -- all unlikely given Greek history and contemporary culture. So what lies in the future for Greece as it is slowly eased out of the euro zone and its civilization goes into reverse?...

June 15, 2012 Are We in Revolutionary Times? Victor Davis Hanson Legally, President Obama has reiterated the principle that he can pick and choose which U.S. laws he wishes to enforce (see his decision to reverse the order of the Chrysler creditors, his decision not to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, and his administration’s contempt for national-security confidentiality and Senate and House subpoenas to the attorney general). If one individual can decide to exempt nearly a million residents from the law — when he most certainly could not get the law amended or repealed through proper legislative or judicial...

Ancient Sparta turned its conquered neighbors into indentured serfs -- half free, half slave. The resulting Helot underclass produced the food of the Spartan state, freeing Sparta's elite males to train for war and the duties of citizenship. Over the last few decades, we've created our modern version of these Helots -- millions of indebted young Americans with little prospect of finding permanent well-paying work, servicing their enormous college debts or reaping commensurate financial returns on their costly educations. Student-loan debts now average about $25,000 per graduating senior. But the percentage of youths 16 to 24 who are working (about...

RUDESHEIM, Germany -- This week I am leading a military history tour on the Rhine River from Basel, Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You can learn a lot about Europe's current economic crises by just ignoring the sophisticated barrage of news analysis and instead watching, listening, and talking to people as you go down river. Switzerland, by modern standards, should be poor. Like Bolivia, it is landlocked. Like Italy, it has no real gas or oil wealth. Like Afghanistan, its northern climate and mountainous terrain limit agricultural productivity to upland plains. And like Turkey, it is not a part of the European...

Within the past couple of days, there was an article by Victor Davis Hanson on "Why Culture Still Matters" or something to that effect. It was a series of poignant observations about Europe in particular and our own social decay. As usual Hanson pulled no punches. I read it here on FreeRepublic and now I cannot find it. No keyword searches are bringing it up for me and it is not posted on his private papers website. Does anyone else recall the article or know where I can find it?