Free Republic

NPR was jolted Tuesday by the release of a videotape that showed one of the organization’s fund-raising executives repeatedly criticizing Republicans and Tea Party supporters. The executive, Ronald Schiller, was recorded secretly by the Republican filmmaker and mischief-maker James O’Keefe. On the videotape, Mr. Schiller tells people posing as Muslim philanthropists that the Republican party has been “hijacked” by the Tea Party and that Tea Party supporters are “seriously racist, racist people.” Mr. Schiller indicates that he is sharing his personal point of view, not NPR’s.

Voices around the world, from Europe to America to Libya, are calling for U.S. intervention to help bring down Moammar Gadhafi. Yet for bringing down Saddam Hussein, the U.S. has been denounced variously for aggression, deception, arrogance and imperialism. A strange moral inversion, considering that Saddam's evil was an order of magnitude beyond Gadhafi's. Gadhafi is a capricious killer; Saddam was systematic. Gadhafi was too unstable and crazy to begin to match the Baathist apparatus: a comprehensive national system of terror, torture and mass murder, gassing entire villages to create what author Kanan Makiya called a "Republic of Fear." Moreover,...

Iran has laws in the pipeline that promise to make life in the country even more difficult. One such piece of legislation aims to impose a “standard Islamic garment” on all Iranians, meaning that Iranians will no longer be able to dress as they wish. There is an even more difficult to understand addition to the restriction: The colours of the projected “uniforms” are limited to sombre hues. As if life were so rosy for them! This new regimentation in the lifestyle of Iranians is supposed to apply even to children as young as four! It doesn’t make for a...