Free Republic

This has been a bad year for dreams of dynasties. The Bush dynasty has been dismantled with Jeb, who was the first favored son, writing finis to the family dream of a trifecta. Hillary Clinton, who started plotting her path to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. when she was a law student at Yale, took a detour through Arkansas and if she still wants to be a president will have to settle for Wellesley, or Smith or one of the other Seven Sisters. But it won’t be anything in Arkansas.

Hillary Clinton may think those creatures making wide, gentle circles over her campaign are bluebirds of happiness, but they’re looking more and more like buzzards. They look hungry.

"Everything about the so-called deal with Iran, including the reputations of the men who negotiated it, is a lie. It’s likely to be a deadly lie for millions of people who will die on account of it. The world should mark well everyone responsible for it."

The Democrats owe a growing debt to the Republican red-hots pursuing the fantasy of impeaching Barack Obama. They're collecting a lot of cash -- probably not as much as they claim, but a lot -- from the naive and excitable folks in the Democratic base. Outrage is easily convertible to cash, as every bagman knows, and the Republicans should get a cut of it. Fair is fair. Sarah Palin, who as a former governor knows better than to confuse hoping with doing, is leading the baying hounds this week. She told an audience the other day that "the many impeachable...

The Park Service appears to be closing streets on mere whim and caprice. The rangers even closed the parking lot at Mount Vernon, where the plantation home of George Washington is a favorite tourist destination. That was after they barred the new World War II Memorial on the Mall to veterans of World War II. But the government does not own Mount Vernon; it is privately owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association. The ladies bought it years ago to preserve it as a national memorial. The feds closed access to the parking lots this week, even though the lots...

Something useful from a blunder February 28, 2006 It's an ill wind that blows nobody good, and that hot wind out of Dubai is useful, too. It reveals the fault lines of the modern Republican Party while there may be time for someone to do something about it. Or maybe not. John McCain, the senator from Arizona with a gift for saying things other people won't, decries the uproar over the Dubai ports deal as "hysteria." A lot of the noise sure sounds like it. Some of the president's friends quickly turned their ire away from the president's partisan critics...

The vultures of the venomous left are attacking on two fronts, first that the president didn't do what the incompetent mayor of New Orleans and the pouty governor of Louisiana should have done, and didn't, in the early hours after Katrina loosed the deluge on the city that care and good judgment forgot. Ray Nagin, the mayor, ordered a "mandatory" evacuation a day late, but kept the city's 2,000 school buses parked and locked in neat rows when there was still time to take the refugees to higher ground. The bright-yellow buses sit ruined now in four feet of dirty...

<p>Of course not. Taking offense and demanding apologies has become the No. 1 sport in certain precincts, exceeding baseball, soccer and camel racing. In some societies, collecting insults approaches the pursuit of sex.</p> <p>Nobody plays this game better than our late-starting Muslim friends. Newsweek's greatest gaffe, as it turns out, was not in incorrectly reporting that guards at Guantanamo "flushed" a copy of the Koran down a toilet, nor even in offering a tepid apology for doing so. The magazine's gravest offense is that the story ain't necessarily so. It's hard to make a profit from an apology for something that didn't happen.</p>

What will our soreheads do when every obstacle to happiness is removed, every slight is avenged, every rough place is made smooth and every unpleasant fact erased from our history books? We may soon find out. The job is just about finished. We're down now to mopping up the trivial stuff. A school administrator in Cupertino, Calif., banished the Declaration of Independence from the curriculum because its references to God might damage the psyches of aspiring little atheists in junior high civics classes. A little learning can be a dangerous thing, so we must impart as little l

Blowing hard is risky business. Kofi Annan got a pie in his face last week, delivered by Colin Powell, and last night Dan Rather left the set at CBS News glowing red at both ends, his face from embarrassment and his bottom from a boot applied by a rascally Internet gang. [snip]When the pastemaster general of the United Nations, ever eager to pass along and paste together rebukes and reprimands of the United States, told the BBC that the liberation of Iraq was "illegal" and a violation of international law, the secretary of state gave him a tutorial in how...

The fierce excuses and imaginative explanations are dying in gleeful laughter, but Dan Rather still can't find the frequency. Kenneth seems to have disappeared, too. Rarely has a media organ been so shamefully exposed, publicly ridiculed, and, against a tsunami of evidence, so stoutly (and less believably) defended. The documents that Dan and CBS attempted to sell to the gullible as proof that George W. Bush was a slacker, shirker and goldbrick during the Vietnam War are already regarded by everyone but Dan and perhaps one or two of his CBS colleagues as "the National Guard forgeries." The forgeries join...

Like father, like son? George H.W. Bush blew his re-election chances in 1992 with a big tax increase and a lackluster campaign, never taking Bill Clinton seriously until it was too late. The lasting image of that campaign was of the president looking at his watch midway through the final debate. In more ways than one he didn't know what time it was. George the junior hasn't blown his chances, not yet, but he shows signs of making the same fatal mistake, of scorning his base much in the way his daddy did 12 years ago. Early on in the...

John F. Kerry has succeeded in making his military service in Vietnam an issue in the campaign, but not quite in the way he expected.      The war hero who threw away his medals (or medals borrowed for the occasion) thought his Silver Star and three Purple Hearts would render him the Sergeant York and Audie Murphy of his generation.     Maybe those medals will do it yet. The jury is still out on exactly who and what Lieutenant Kerry was in Vietnam, but it's a jury that Candidate Kerry never expected to be called to sit in late judgment on...

Opening night was set aside to show off the ladies, but a couple of them couldn't wait. Monsieur Kerry and his nervous wise men were not amused, but the rest of us were. The loose lips that sink ships and political campaigns were all that kept us awake on Day One.     By the time the party's most famous "wife of" stood up last night to stand by her man with the most eagerly awaited introduction of the season, the dance cards of the 15,000 reporters, editors, pundits, bloggers, interns, researchers and other expendables accredited to the Democratic National Convention were...

The Washington Timeswww.washingtontimes.com Hating the crime, hating the criminalBy Wesley PrudenTHE WASHINGTON TIMESPublished July 20, 2004 Hate is not nice. Everybody knows that. But trying to define and eliminate hate with legislation is not as easy as the busybodies think it is. You could ask Tony Blair.     The lessons Mr. Blair is learning the hard way have application elsewhere, specifically here in America, where our own busybodies as well lust to fit the tongues of all with chastity belts, and where our own leaders sometimes pander to alien religious leaders who cry peace, peace, when and where there is no...

<p>Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party, but that doesn't necessarily include all good women. You could ask Hillary Clinton.</p> <p>Better yet, you could ask the mister. Whether you should necessarily believe him is a topic for another day. He's not under oath, after all.</p>

Watching the intimate moments of courtship of others embarrasses most of us, or at least some of us. But the public displays of affection that shocked our grandparents are regarded in our time as fit for Sunday school.     Holding hands is no longer enough. The two Democratic candidates can't wait to get on stage for sessions of arm-gripping, face-fondling, knee-rubbing, neck-nuzzling, thigh-slapping and bear-hugging. This is not the political love that dare not speak its name from a closet, but the contrived warmth, born of the focus group, that shouts from the rooftop. And why not? We've become the therapeutic...

The Washington Timeswww.washingtontimes.com A grave offense against the faithBy Wesley PrudenPublished July 6, 2004 Touring the heartland is fatiguing for a monsieur, but John Kerry's a trouper. (He's a Vietnam veteran, too, so the story line goes.)     He spent the holiday weekend out in the heartland, alien territory for a Massachusetts man, having mounted an expeditionary force to scout out prospects where only Lewis & Clark were brave enough to go before.     He attended a barbecue, rode in a Fourth of July parade, played a game "somewhat resembling cricket" in a famous Iowa field of dreams, dropped in with...

<p>Bill Clinton and Al ("I am Gorrrrrrre, hear me rooooaaaarrr") Gore are back, and it's just like old times.</p> <p>Bill is wistful and a little forgetful, waving an ominous cigar and reminiscing about his women, at least the ones he recalls. Al is just a guy in from the street and off his meds.</p>

<p>That's egg on toast, or maybe boiled sheep's eyes on pita, all over certain faces over at the September 11 commission.</p> <p>The commission's vague and fuzzy conclusion that it can find "no credible evidence" of a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden enabled John F. Kerry, the New York Times, The Washington Post and even the Associated Press to apply what looks a lot like whitewash to certain pesky facts.</p>