Free Republic

The Economist has a good backgrounder on Lebanon. This country is in the process of seeing the democratic reforms of last year's Cedar Revolution undone by the creeping "direct action" of a Hezbollah-inspired street mob in Beirut. And the Western media ignore this attempt by a minority of 40% to seize the government by a coup de pouce while they are in a tizzy of fits and snits because President Bush has put his speech on Iraq off until January.

Matt Drudge, who may or may not be a willing accomplice to the distortion of news reporting, must be held responsible for the dissemination of the bias in the liberal press. Studies have shown that the readership of the Times is down — as it is in other liberal publications — and so are the television ratings of the alphabet networks and CNN and MSNBC, while Fox News is up. Nevertheless, the propaganda of the "enemedia"—--an excellent descriptive term coined by one poster to Lucianne.com--—continues to sully news coverage, thanks to Mr. Drudge. A study of press bias by a...

Russia is employing its normal brutal methods in breaking contracts signed in the early '90s when the opening up of Russia gave oil internationals like Shell and BP access to great deals in new oil and gas plays.

"President Carter's book on the Middle East, a title too inflammatory to even print, is not based on unvarnished analyses; it is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments." Besides the statement above, Dr. Stein pointed out a gross factual error that Carter used to bolster the argument that people "weren't listening to [him]."

The preposterous joke of a university whose reputation has sunk as low as the fortunes of its spectacularly inept football team, Columbia U., has a journalism school which is run by Nicholas Lemann, whose reputation as a journalist used to be peerless. The Peter Principle of Yore has caught up with Lemann, and with the craven coward Lee Bollinger who is the President of this woebegone institution, Lemann is way over his competence level and, it appears, way under his former moral stature. Bollinger of course is an "expert" on free speech, but is keeping mum about the spectacular threats...

US Intelligence has confirmed that Iranian sources are directly supplying Shiite militias with IEDs and other weapons used against US troops, ABC reports. Iranian-made munitions found in Iraq include advanced IEDs designed to pierce armor and anti-tank weapons. U.S. intelligence believes the weapons have been supplied to Iraq's growing Shia militias from Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which is also believed to be training Iraqi militia fighters in Iran. Evidence is mounting, too, that the most powerful militia in Iraq, Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi army, is receiving training support from the Iranian-backed terrorists of Hezbollah. Two senior U.S. defense officials confirmed...

Fouad Ajami sums up the situation better than anyone else. He diagnoses the real problems of the region while midget-twerps like Matt Lauer and Brian Williams pontificate on how Iraq has become a "civil war:" The sin of George W. Bush, to hear his critics tell it, is that he unleashed the forces of freedom in Arab-Islamic lands only to beget a terrible storm. In Iraq and in Lebanon, the furies of sectarianism are on the loose; and in that greater Middle East stretching from Pakistan to Morocco, the forces of freedom and reform appear chastened. Autocracy is fashionable once...

Chinese organ "donations" are one of the single biggest travesties in a world dedicated to hating the US and bashing Bush while Putin poisons his enemies, Assad kills Christian Lebanese politicos in a serial fashion, and Mugabe beggars his entire country while Darfur goes from one level of genocide to the next. But of course, the BBC treads very lightly on these matters, which must be gleaned from more straightforward members of the Euro-press, which bashes the US because it knows, in its craven cowardly spineless fashion, that Bush won't retaliate as Putin might and Mugabe already has by banning...

is too close to the US border and some of the toxic seepage coming across into the Detroit area has infected Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, but I digress. Just when I think the spineless whack-jobs to the North are irredeemably twisted like former PM Chretien's mouth [and garbled gargling diction like Vermont Sen. Leahy, our Senator from Canada], a few great polemicists like Mark Steyn and this gentleman linked above give me hope that their brains are not totally Molsonized: We might as well begin the story with that British MP, the bombastic George Galloway, because it was only...

Alan Dershowitz effectively demolishes the unfortunate episode between Gerry Ford and Ronald Reagan that was perhaps the worst presidency since James Buchanan. Carter hates Israel and American Jews for helping to organize his defeat in 1980, when John Anderson in the middle and Teddy Kennedy on the far left effectively pincered his candidacy enough to allow a Reagan win. Carter's diplomatic lurchings scared the friends of Israel enough to engineer this hapless feckless smiley-face into political oblivion. Here are some of Carter's unforced errors in a new book: • Carter emphasizes that "Christian and Muslim Arabs had continued to live...

Vladimir Putin is presently posing next to his good buddy George W. Bush, who famously claimed that he could read the measure of the Russian leader by the look in his eyes. I recall Richard Nixon saying much the same about Spiro Agnew, when explaining why he picked such a schnook for Vice President. Spiro ended up accepting bags full of cash from Maryland State Troopers. Putin is poisoning his enemies, apparently. The Financial Times bravely prints a piece that will not be picked up by the American MSM, as that might harm their access, as Eason Jordan eased up...

[url=http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnw/20061114/pl_usnw/dnc_statement_on_giuliani_s_potential_presidential_bid331_xml]Rudy Giuliani[/url] draws large poll numbers across the country and across the board. Although their combined RINO quotient is high and could spawn a third-party revolt if they got nominated, John McCain and Giuliani would be a dream team. That is, if one of these two egomaniacs could be persuaded to take the VP slot on the 2008 Republican ticket! Despite his frankly left-wing takes on many social issues, I like his support of school vouchers as this product of parochial schools does the right thing to enable kids to escape dead-end public education, over-funded and under-delivering because of huge...

President Bush and first lady Laura Bush hosted an Oval Office ceremony on Thursday to honor authors, historians and others with the National Humanities Medal. I was fortunate enough during my short career as a Middle East observer to get to know two of the honorees, Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis. Fouad was my houseguest when he first arrived in DC from Princeton back in late '79, early 1980. He was reading the famous Raj trilogy and Freud and a number of other books not directly related to the Middle East. We actually were going to invest in a couple...