Free Republic

The standard being used to criticize Luke Rosiak and the conservative outlets that amplified his story could take down pretty much any piece of investigative reporting.Contrarian writers are attacking conservative media with a giant straw man, claiming right-of-center outlets gave misleading treatment to the story of a horrifying rape in Loudoun County Public Schools. It’s true that conservative media is a small, scrappy bunch of outlets with comparatively limited resources—especially for the kind of investigative journalism Luke Rosiak did in this case—so I entered the debate with a pretty open mind.The story holds up just fine. It’s the critics who...

Sarah Palin's announcement of her resignation as governor of Alaska may be the end of her political career or, as some speculate, the real beginning. What seems clear is that Palin is not conservatism's new hope but its dead end. In recent days, this has been amply confirmed by the arguments of Palin defenders, focused less on her presumed merits than on her presumed injuries at her enemies' hands.Thus, Ross Douthat, the new conservative voice at the New York Times, hails Palin as Everywoman—living proof you can aspire to the White House without an Ivy League degree—and deplores her abuse...

The latest in the academic follies comes from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where the administration has cleared the way for an instructor to teach his belief that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were plotted by the US government to create an excuse for war... Kevin Barrett, an instructor at the University of Wisconsin and the head of something called the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth, thinks otherwise. On the group's website, he claims there is "compelling evidence" that the attacks were planned by the United States. This fall, Barrett is...

March 23, 2004 Something Rotten In Europe The appearance of appeasement in Spain Cathy Young Maybe it was just a coincidence that the March 11 train bombings in Madrid came exactly 2 1/2 years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.—and, for an added frisson, exactly 911 days after 9/11. Maybe it was a deliberate, harrowing message to the West. Even without this eerie detail, the images of death and destruction in Spain were bound to evoke echoes of America's Sept. 11. For many Americans, though, the solidarity quickly turned to bafflement and even...

As we grapple with the problems and perils of the 21st century, the great debates of the 20th have not gone away. Some of the most contentious questions have to do with the history of Communism, whose unholy ghost continues to haunt us more than a decade after the demise of the Soviet Union. Was Communism as evil as Nazism? Did the Western left collude in its evil? These issues are powerfully confronted by the British novelist Martin Amis in his new book Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. Koba was a nickname for Stalin, and the...