Free Republic

“In one of contemporary history’s intriguing caroms, European politics just now is a story of how one decision by a pastor’s dutiful daughter has made life miserable for a vicar’s dutiful daughter. Two of the world’s most important conservative parties are involved in an unintended tutorial on a cardinal tenet of conservatism, the law of unintended consequences, which is that the unintended consequences of decisions in complex social situations are often larger than, and contrary to, those intended.” That’s the elephantine lead of George Will’s recent column, headlined “Today’s Germany is the best Germany the world has seen.” The real...

"The Closing of the American Mind"If I had reread The Closing of the American Mind 10 years ago, when my own children were themselves under 10, I confess I would have thought Bloom’s portrait of educational decline was overwrought. And then they grew up and went off to college. ..............[Allan] Bloom wrote a moment before the population of modernity’s Holy Trinity - Marx, Freud, and Darwin - decreased by two-thirds. Marx lost his allure, at least nominally, after the collapse of the murderous regimes that had been built from his ideas. Freud was demoted from scientist to cultural observer, and...

PRESS MAN: Pundit (Declined) ANDREW FERGUSONPeter Beinart is one of those journalists, common in Washington, who is less interesting for what he says than for who he is, or who he wants to be thought to be. He’s an exemplar, and when, this May, he published an essay in the New York Review of Books announcing that “morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral,” he deserved the considerable notice that the article brought him. As a piece of reasoned argument, or even as an anguished moral plea, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” was a mess: a goulash...

Anyone who wants to understand Barack Obama would do well to stay away from the radio and the TV. Obama is a theatrical presence. That's what it means to be "charismatic": To an unnerving degree his appeal relies on sight and sound rather than sense. Better, in my opinion, to stick to the printed word. On paper (or the computer screen) his words can be thought about and chewed over. You can understand him at your own pace, undistracted by that rich baritone, the regal bearing, the excellent drape of his Burberry suits. The printed word has its problems too,...

In his recent memoir, Alan Greenspan says he's been pushing a constitutional amendment of his own devising. It reads: "Anyone willing to do what is required to become president of the United States is thereby barred from taking that office." If the Greenspan amendment is ever enacted, it will at last clear the field for Fred Thompson, who might then become president. But not until then.

OVER THE PAST YEAR, as Howard Dean's Children's Crusade emerged from the dorms and classrooms and ecstasy raves of America's colleges, and the young crusaders began tilting their wooden (and very sharp) swords toward the heart of what remains of the Democratic party establishment, some of us turned our thoughts to the first Children's Crusade in American politics--the one led against the party establishment in 1968 by the improbable figure of Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. Hoary ruminations on McCarthy may well become unavoidable in the next few weeks with the appearance of a new biography by a British historian...

ON THE EVENING OF FEBRUARY 10, the board of directors of WETA-FM, the only commercial-free classical music station in Washington, D.C., voted overwhelmingly to eliminate its music and arts programming. At the end of this month, someone will flick a switch and--thud!--WETA will fall to earth as just another all-news, all-talk station, and the nation's capital will be left without a public radio station devoted to beautiful and intelligent music.WETA's transformation is a blow to the cultural life of the Washington metropolitan area, of course, which despite its succulent demographics in income and education levels has always struggled to maintain...

Marching to November From the August 30, 2004 issue: The politics of chest-thumping. by Andrew Ferguson 08/30/2004, Volume 009, Issue 47 FOR THE PAST couple weeks Republican activists have bent themselves to the task of proving that John Kerry, who was awarded five medals during four months of service in the Vietnam war, isn't a war hero, and the marvelous intensity of their exertions started me thinking. As normal Americans lose interest in politics, and as their moderating influence fades from the general conversation, politics has become increasingly the plaything of obsessives. And what obsessives bring to politics, unsurprisingly, are...

June 29 (Bloomberg) -- A political activist rang me up and told me I had to see the new documentary about the president. ``It's chilling,'' he said. ``It shows what a slimeball this guy is.'' So I saw the movie, and it was -- how to put this? -- a crock. Watching it I thought: Whoever produced this slanderous mess deserves to be run out of polite society. That was 10 years ago, and the documentary was a slapdash confection of lies and innuendo called ``The Clinton Chronicles.'' It accused Bill Clinton -- slyly and indirectly -- of drug- running...

What was the meaning of the past remarkable nine days? You cannot stop the American people from feeling what they feel and showing it. From the crowds at Simi Valley to the hordes at the Capitol to the men and women who stopped and got out of their cars on Highway 101 to salute as Reagan came home--that was America talking to America about who America is. It was a magnificent teaching moment for the whole country but most of all for the young, who barely remembered Ronald Reagan or didn't remember him at all. This week they heard who...

IF THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BLACKSMITHS AND BUGGYWHIP MANUFACTURERS had held a convention in 1910, in those last sullen moments before the Horseless Carriage put them all out of business, then this is what it must have felt like--the same forced cheerfulness laid over the same defeated air, the same stiff upper lip at the prospect of the inescapable end. Outside the Hilton Clearwater Beach Resort, on the Florida coast near Tampa Bay, the beach was streaked with wind and black thunderheads stacked up along the horizon. Inside the hotel, members of the Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio...

EVEN THOUGH ROUGH WINDS do shake the darling buds thereof, I think we can all agree that May is a fabulous month, flush and lusty as the poets say, a time to gather knots of flowers, and buds and garlands gay. It is the month above all of Mother's Day, made doubly so by the decision of the United States government to transform itself for a few weeks every May into a kind of Mom for everybody--your Mom, my Mom, even our Moms' Mom. And this national Mom has a few things she'd like to get settled right here and...

The books come and go, but the plot is always the same--vanity, duplicity, flattery, and guile.WASHINGTON WENT THROUGH one of its Woodward spasms last week. It unwound in the usual manner. First came the faint, premonitory rumors, gaining force as the publishing date approached, about what might be in Bob Woodward's latest book; then the suggestive news reports dribbled out over the premiere weekend, until one news organization or another boldly broke the publisher's embargo, followed by stories about the story that broke the embargo. At last on Sunday there was the television kickoff on 60 Minutes, in which Woodward...

Postmodern candidates talk like handlers, and voters talk like pundits. WE DIDN'T ARRIVE here overnight, all at once--here at the tail end of this hallucinatory primary season, when politics slipped down the rabbit hole of postmodernism and became an activity that is only about itself. Scanning back through the last few years and my own meager experience, I can find three landmarks that, had I been paying attention, might have offered a hint of what we, the people, were getting ourselves into. The first landmark, everyone has heard of. On January 15, 1992, during a gruesome New Hampshire "town meeting"...

According to the publisher's press release, Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, by Douglas Brinkley, "was never intended as a political biography"--meaning, I suppose, that it is not meant to be confused with those ghost-written, election-year puffers and potboilers under whose weight the remainder-tables of America's bookstores are already beginning to buckle and break. Tour of Duty is intended to be a real book that makes an enduring contribution to the national letters--akin to the moving and beautifully written "Faith of My Fathers," by John McCain and Mark Salter, rather than "A Charge to Keep," by George...

John Edwards, not just another pretty face. Greenville, South Carolina LIKE A FEW OTHER excessively nice-looking human beings, John Edwards is a victim of reverse lookism. Common experience, lately reinforced by the most rigorous scientific research, demonstrates lookism's effects: Ugly people never catch a break, while the well-configured among us always receive favored treatment. In the past, Edwards has undoubtedly been lookism's beneficiary. Having no political connections or experience to speak of, he would never have been elected senator from North Carolina, nor been fingered early on as a presidential prospect by the national press corps, if he had had...

Eugene McCarthy The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism by Dominic Sandbrook Knopf, 352 pp., $25.95 OVER THE PAST YEAR, as Howard Dean's Children's Crusade emerged from the dorms and classrooms and ecstasy raves of America's colleges, and the young crusaders began tilting their wooden (and very sharp) swords toward the heart of what remains of the Democratic party establishment, some of us turned our thoughts to the first Children's Crusade in American politics--the one led against the party establishment in 1968 by the improbable figure of Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. Hoary ruminations on McCarthy may well become...

Had Enough? A Handbook for Fighting Back by James Carville with Jeff Nussbaum Simon & Schuster, 306 pp., $23 Big Lies The Right Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth by Joe Conason St. Martin's, 245 pp., $24.95 The Lies of George W. Bush Mastering the Politics of Deception by David Corn Crown, 337 pp., $24 Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right by Al Franken Dutton, 377 pp., $24.95 Thieves in High Places They've Stolen Our Country--and It's Time to Take It Back by Jim Hightower Viking, 280...

<p>Andrew Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.</p> <p>Anti-Americanism Is Older Than You May Think: Andrew Ferguson Nov. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Once upon a time, anti-Americanism was scientific. Now it's merely ubiquitous.</p> <p>Or so at least it seems to an American who travels abroad -- especially if he's President George W. Bush, whose visit to London last week set off still more expressions of anti-American sentiment and, even worse, heavy-breathing lamentations from pundits inside and outside the U.S.</p>

<p>Andrew Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.</p> <p>Who Is Governor Arnold? George Shultz's Hunch: Andrew Ferguson Oct. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Former U.S. Treasury Secretary George Shultz, sitting in serene retirement in his office on the campus of Stanford University, likes to tell this story about Arnold Schwarzenegger.</p>