Free Republic

Like one of those telenovelas that are so popular on Latin American television stations, the slow yet inexorable deterioration of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, was soaked in drama and cloying sentimentality. Chavez died March 5 following a two-year fight with cancer. For most of that time, he claimed – falsely – to have been cured. But less than two months after winning a fourth term in last October’s election, Chavez was spirited back to Cuba, where Fidel Castro’s doctors treated him. Now, Chavez’s death affords the opportunity for a critical reassessment of his tenure. In his fourteen years in power,...

Fox correspondent Erik Rush has just published a book, Negrophilia, with a profound premise. A biracial conservative, Rush decries the Left’s slobbering love affair with blacks. Like necrophilia, liberals’ obsession with black people is a sick and creepy fetish. In 50 years, this country has traveled from segregating blacks to elevating them onto pedestals. But not all blacks, of course; not Condi Rice or Thomas Sowell or Rush himself. Liberals save their lust for liberal PhDs like Cornel West, as well the black urban underclass. Of course, you can’t say any of this out loud. Citizens are forbidden to challenge...

AMERICANS, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald’s near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad. For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be...

The disease of America Hatred now has reached pandemic proportions in many corners of the globe, spreading far beyond the predictably hopeless fever swamps of Islamic militants, French intellectuals, or Latin American demagogues. In fact, many citizens within the USA itself energetically embrace the basic assumptions of America Hatred, perceiving their country as an unequivocally negative force on the world scene. John Tirman, director of MIT’s prestigious Center for International Studies, recently wrote a book called “100 Ways America is Screwing Up the World.” When questioned on my radio show, he refused to dismiss the notion that humanity might have...

HAVANA (AP) -- Leftist intellectuals and human rights activists from around the world pleaded with the United States on Monday not to interfere with Cuba while Fidel Castro recovers from intestinal surgery. Many of the 400 signers of the open letter are from Latin America, and numerous Nobel Peace laureates are listed, such as former Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and activist Rigoberta Menchu of Guatemala.

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - A new TV station backed by Venezuela's government began transmitting Sunday in various countries across Latin America, carrying praise by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the American actor Danny Glover and others. The Telesur network, which organizers call a Latin alternative to large media outlets like CNN, was being seen in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil and Cuba as well as Venezuela, Chavez said. "This is part of an awakening of our peoples," Chavez said by phone to a televised inaugural ceremony in Caracas. Chavez, a close ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, called the channel a key...

It was a peculiar group that slipped, quietly, into a restaurant called Upstairs on the Square, near Harvard University, for lunch last Tuesday. Over hamburgers and crab cakes, Pat McFadden, Tony Blair's political secretary, chatted amiably with Robin Cook, one of the Prime Minister's harshest critics. The Liberal Democrat Charles Kennedy, Sir Menzies Campbell and Lord Razzall exchanged pleasantries with Matthew Doyle, Labour's chief press officer. Had they known about the event, Labour backbenchers might have suspected a secret attempt to renew the Lib-Lab pact. In fact, the eclectic collection of politicians, brought together in Boston by a Liberal-leaning lobbyist,...

My first name is my Irish grandmother’s family name. Over the years, I have run across the writings of a number of Butlers whose views of life seemed to parallel my own, leading me to wonder if there might be some genetic connection. Samuel Butler’s satirical political views along with his interest in a collective unconscious; the poetry of William Butler Yeats; and the Realpolitick of Smedley Butler, provide a few examples. Smedley Butler is a name with which you may not be familiar, even though he twice won the Congressional Medal of Honor. If he were to appear on...

Last week in these pages I argued that U.S. unconditional surrender policy and refusal to negotiate with Saddam Hussein had cost hundreds of Iraqi civilian lives and led to the despicable atrocities such as the loss of priceless and irreplaceable 5,000 year old artifacts. See "Unconditional Surrender leads to Atrocities." Well, now ABC News has uncovered the "smoking gun" (or in this case, the smoking ruins of a house) showing that the U.S. in fact did everything possible to prevent a negotiated surrender. "Missed Opportunity? U.S. Attack May Have Ended Saddam Surrender Attempt." According to ABC news, Hussein sent his...

PILGER: BLAIR IS A COWARD Jan 29 2003 John Pilger: His most damning verdict on Tony Blair William Russell, the great correspondent who reported the carnage of imperial wars, may have first used the expression "blood on his hands" to describe impeccable politicians who, at a safe distance, order the mass killing of ordinary people. In my experience "on his hands" applies especially to those modern political leaders who have had no personal experience of war, like George W Bush, who managed not to serve in Vietnam, and the effete Tony Blair. There is about them the essential cowardice of...