Free Republic

On March 5, 1997, the humor newspaper The Onion ran a story entitled "Crazed Palestinian Gunman Angered by Stereotypes." The gunman in question said, "Any time I enter a crowded temple with fully loaded AK-47s in both hands, people just assume I'm going to open fire. That really hurts." Here’s a headline from November 21: "Terrorist's family: We are proud of him." That’s not from The Onion. That’s from the Jerusalem Post. The terrorist was 22-year old Na'el Abu Hilayel of Bethlehem, who blew himself up on a bus in Jerusalem on November 21. A member of Hamas, he murdered...

Newsweek's Howard Fineman, the magazine's political beat reporter, isn't obnoxiously ideological. There's little doubt that he favors Democrats, but far more important to this pedestrian journalist is the thrill of elections and internecine Beltway squabbles. A scoop or correct prediction-not to mention more television appearances-trumps the implications of a turnover in a state's legislative makeup any day. Unlike many of his coleagues, I doubt Fineman gets into a lather about SUVs, "hate crimes," Kofi Annan's nonexistent backbone or President Bush's long-ago dealings with Harken Energy. Currently, Fineman's immersed in the 2004 presidential election. In a Nov. 27 MSNBC website dispatch,...

After Senator Tom Daschle created a stir by attacking Rush Limbaugh and other conservative voices in the media as somehow responsible for death threats to politicians like himself, his total absence of any evidence made him look ridiculous. However, this charge was followed within days by another attack on the conservative media by former Vice President Al Gore. Gore named Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and the Washington Times as being "part and parcel of the Republican Party" and "a fifth column in the media," which apparently is otherwise politically unbiased. This might be a joke, given the well-documented fact that...

The nation's two leading Democratic politicians have had public meltdowns in the past two weeks. First, Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., Senate majority leader until January, claimed that Rush Limbaugh was sending hit squads to his home. And now former Vice President Al Gore, taking a page from Hillary Clinton's playbook, has stepped forward to denounce the vast right-wing conspiracy among members of the press. The press? He's kidding, right? Apparently not. Here's what he told the New York Observer: "Something will start at the Republican National Committee, inside the building, and it will explode the next day on the right-wing...

They are the darkest, loneliest, most hopeless places on earth – hellholes that, during the past two decades, have swallowed up the lives of more than 200,000 souls. Wails of human misery still echo in their dank corridors, the unheard cries of men, women, and children destined to die in grief and anonymity – their whereabouts unknown to their loved ones who, in many cases, have not heard from them in years. These are the secret prisons of Iraq, of which there are roughly six dozen according to Amnesty International estimates. Amnesty spokesman Neil Durkin states that tens of thousands...

Ever since 9/11, much of the world has adopted a "good terrorist - bad terrorist" shtick, based on the old "good cop - bad cop" routine familiar from every bad police drama on television. According to this, those people who blow up innocent civilians are regarded as terrorists and barbarians, except where they target and murder Jews. In that case they are "activists," "militants," people with legitimate grievances, people whose demands must be met and with whom a deal must be struck. Much of the world's media, and especially CNN and the BBC, evidently have ironclad policies whereby Arabs who...

Although Republicans have regained control of the Senate, in a numerical sense, controlling the Senate in reality is a much tougher job. The ability of a minority in the Senate to filibuster things they object to means that real control may require 60 votes to shut off debate and allow votes to be taken. The Democrats cannot filibuster everything, and they certainly cannot filibuster each of the Bush administration's many judicial nominees that they kept bottled up when there was a Democratic majority in the Senate. But Democrats may well save a filibuster as a sort of political version of...

Pity the poor university chancellor. He is entrusted with the task of nurturing the free flow of ideas while upholding academic standards. And that ain't easy when students see the university not as a special place where they can learn to reason, but as a platform to inflict their juvenile politics on nonbelievers. Enter, stage left, U.C. Berkeley student Roberto Hernandez. Hernandez and some 30-odd students are facing disciplinary action for disrupting classes (during midterms, no less) when they took over a campus building in April to force the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel. Cal also...

Given every chance at redemption, and offered every opportunity for power, the Democratic Party still refuses to accept history's most obvious lesson: that a party once infiltrated by communist sympathizers, and now overrun by national self-hatred, will once again abandon any moral claim toward responsible leadership. For, where some privately saluted or secretly cheered the communist hammer, thousands more currently celebrate - and millions worldwide encouragingly echo - Islam's militant call. These individuals do not endorse theocratic laws and brutal punishments. Rather, these people support laws to prevent, and terrible actions to discourage, America's presence throughout the world -- as...

Feminists who demand that Augusta National Golf Club admit women should think twice. If they succeed, men may try to gain entry to places now open only to females. Located outside a small town in Georgia, Augusta National has been excoriated for its males-only membership policy. After the National Council of Women's Organizations planned to target sponsors of Augusta's 2003 Masters championship, the club preemptively asked several companies to withdraw their support for the golf classic. "Any entity that holds itself out as publicly as they do ought to be open to men and women alike," NCWO chair Martha Burk...

Protesting is usually a serious business. But you can't help laughing at today's anti-war protesters. From stripping naked to holding "die-ins," these people are better than Comedy Central. In West Marin County, Calif., home to such world-renowned figures as John Walker Lindh, anti-war protesters simultaneously revealed their breasts and their stupidity. Believing that boobs do more for world peace than bombs, 50 intrepid women shed their clothing, then lay in the aptly named Love Field and spelled out the word "PEACE" with their bodies to show solidarity with the Iraqi people. But before you run to your computer to find...

There was a time, not so long ago, when there was a shortage of white male television news anchors. That's right...white males. For the longest time, all there were behind the desks were white males, who differed only in age, posture, and talent. But then came the diversity movement, and women and peopleofcolor were in such demand that no-talent stutterers were hauled off the street if they had breasts, a dark tan, or a missing limb. After a while, television newscasts featured more colors than a Trinitron explosion, all garbled and prosthetic, and having little to do with the news....

In analyzing the recent Democratic bath in the off-year election, black Representative Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., defeated in her own primary, accused the Democratic Party of "taking black voters for granted." Tavis Smiley, black NPR commentator, made the same assertion while chastising his guest, former Vice President Al Gore, for allegedly committing the same crime. The Democrats-take-black-votes-for-granted argument goes as follows: Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe insulted blacks by failing to provide greater financial assistance to black Democratic New York gubernatorial candidate Carl McCall. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend failed to choose a black running mate, instead...

For months, courageous protesters have braved riot police to oppose the depredations of a warlike and oppressive regime bent on world domination. No, I am not talking about the "anti-war" protesters who menace the cities of Europe and America -- the creeps who scale the barricade of a Starbucks storefront for no greater goal than the glee of smashing its windows. These are only brave and idealistic souls in their own warped self-image. I am talking about real courage and real idealism -- the kind shown by the young men and women manning the very real and very deadly barricades...

"Esteemed" media figures Bill Moyers and Helen Thomas are the face of modern liberalism, and that face is firmly affixed to the head of the Democratic Party, as proven by the landslide election of liberal Nancy Pelosi to the Democratic House leadership position. Pelosi is far left under any reasonable measure, and she's now at the helm of the House Democrats, ostensibly representing the interests of Americans throughout the nation, including every blue and red county in every blue and red state in the Union. This defiant move by House Democrats after their midterm repudiation is tantamount to the entire...

A friend asked if I understood the middle school concept of going out. "Coming out, staying out and camping out I understand completely," I said, "but going out is a mystery. It's like quantum physics, only harder." Going out, in case you've been under a rock, is something that kids around the age of 12 do. That said, kids as young as 10 have been known to be going out. Kids as young as 8. And they keep getting younger. No doubt, there is a three-year-old in a preschool somewhere who was just picked up from finger painting and has...

The fate of the alleged snipers (the younger of whom is reportedly singing his own praises as a killer) has inspired the latest round in the death-penalty debate. There are two basic positions. Position one: If these two are guilty, with upwards of 20 notches in their gunstocks, they should be turned over to the headman, or in these days the official needler, who will kill them in much the same fashion as dispatching a sick dog. Position two: Even if the snipers had 100 notches their lives should be spared, for by killing them we have stooped to their...

I'm waiting in line at the newsstand with my very observant two-year-old daughter, and she is pointing to Rolling Stone magazine. On the cover is 21-year-old singer Christina Aguilera, sprawled on a red velvet blanket. She is wearing black leather boots, black nail polish, one studded bracelet, ratty hair extensions, and as my child has so innocently noted, nothing else. Aguilera's privates are strategically hidden behind a guitar; her backside is tastelessly, tritely, exposed. The article lays bare all the silly, sordid details of Aguilera's new album (appropriately titled "Stripped"), her new hardcore music video (titled "Dirrty," with an extra...

The hatred of Western Civilization, and the corresponding urge to glorify anything outside it, especially if it can be depicted as a victim of the West, is a well-known phenomenon of the contemporary liberal mind. One of the forms it has taken in recent years is the attempt to artificially inflate the historic achievements of other civilizations beyond what the facts support. The noble savage myth is a commonplace; what is more complex is the myth that has been bandied about concerning the supposed "golden age" of Islamic civilization during what we know as the Middle Ages. The myth of...

The best ally you can have in breaking up a street fight is a grandmother. It has to be an honest-to-goodness Grandma, not an Old Crone. The difference between the two is that an Old Crone is just a scary crazy old lady with no attachments who hates the world. A Grandma is a woman who loves the world, and that's what makes her so fierce. She's got grandma genes, which means she's spent her life protecting things, preserving babies. In tense alpha-male situations -- I'm calling on my Texas childhood here -- the only all but certain way to...