Free Republic

This week is the Ukraine war’s first anniversary, but it feels like 10 years, not one. Ukraine “fatigue” is understandable. But let’s try to put the sensation of war fatigue in context. Vietnam came to be known in the 1960s as the television war, shown on the TV news every night. News programs then lasted a half-hour, with Vietnam usually just a segment. Still, the unsettling daily footage eroded public support for the war. Today, with all media on all the time, we are saturated with Ukraine’s war, as we are with mass murders, weather disasters or a train derailment....

It is a big advantage for Joe Biden that no one takes him seriously. He spent Labor Day continuing to express animosity toward “MAGA Republicans,” and one’s instinct is to write this off as Joe rousing his party’s base for the midterm elections. It’s much more than that. This isn’t just Joe or a blowhard Senate majority leader’s pro forma raking of the other side. No matter how feckless one thinks the occupant of the White House is, an American head of state has extraordinary powers to intimidate, investigate and, if desired, prosecute. The power of this office is incomparable....

Cynics smile before they say, "Perception is reality." What we see must be true because we see it! If we don't see it, then it cannot be real. Anyone who has ever used Photoshop knows that "seeing is believing" is false, just as misleading as expecting politicians to do what they promise. The mainstream (complicit) media are the worst offenders. They believe they control reality by determining what the public sees or doesn't see. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Daniel Henninger wrote that Democrats offer the public "alternative realities," AKA lies, as accurate and true. Mainstream media such...

Brett Kavanaugh is a casualty of an anything-goes political resistance. Consider the spectacle: Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court, the embodiment of a modern rule of law, is being decided in the Senate by the medieval practice of trial by ordeal, such as surviving immersion in fire or ice. Trial by ordeal was outlawed by the Lateran Council in 1215. Or worse, the standards of the mob in the Roman Colosseum, turning thumbs up or down on the combatants. Though unlike the Senate Democrats, the Roman mob at least had an open mind. Incidentally, the standard trope that...

I knew there was a reason  I still have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal; because when he is “on” Daniel Henninger’s Wonderland column is peerless. This week he was definitely on: Les Déplorables. Hillary Clinton’s comment that half of Donald Trump’s supporters are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic”—a heck of a lot of phobia for anyone to lug around all day—puts back in play what will be seen as one of the 2016 campaign’s defining forces: the revolt of the politically incorrect.They may not live at the level of Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables,” but it was only a...

Q. How do you know that Barack Obama's weakness poses a serious threat to the security of the free world? A. When a leading foreign policy voice of the Washington Post agrees with a leading foreign policy voice of the Wall Street Journal that such is the case. It happened on today's Morning Joe, when WaPo's highly-respected David Ignatius agreed with a WSJ op-ed by Daniel Henninger, "While Obama Fiddles," that darkly concludes: "past some point, the world's wildfires are going to consume the Obama legacy. And leave his successor a nightmare." Said Ignatius: "those are harsh words from the...

Obama meets with a flock of nervous bankers at the White House tomorrow to reassure them he understands their interests. Good luck. There has always been tension between the Democratic Party and the private sector. That tension is over. With its vote in the House of Representatives to punish corporate bonus payments, the national Democratic Party has disconnected itself entirely from the private sector. The public bear-baiting of AIG's Ed Liddy, and then passage of the bonus bill, gave the nation a good look at the modern Democratic Party freed of constraints. The current version of the party has largely...

The most basic explanation for why Barack Obama may win next Tuesday is that voters want economic deliverance. The standard fix for this in politics everywhere is to crowbar the old party out and patch in the other one. It is true as well that the historic nature of the nation's first African-American candidacy would play a big role. Push past the historic candidacy, however, and one sees something even larger at stake in this vote. One sees what Joe (The Plumber) Wurzelbacher saw. The real "change" being put to a vote for the American people in 2008 is not...

The abuse being heaped on Sarah Palin is such a cheap shot. The complaint against the Alaska governor, at its most basic, is that she doesn't qualify for admission to the national political fraternity. Boy, that's rich. Behold the shabby frat house that says it's above her pay grade. (snip) The stoning of Sarah Palin has exposed enough cultural fissures in American politics to occupy strategists full-time until 2012. We now see there is a left-to-right elite centered in New York, Washington, Hollywood and Silicon Valley who hand down judgments of the nation's mortals from their perch atop the Bell...

Some say Dick Cheney is toast. He's too hot to handle, throw him over the side if he won't drop himself into the waves. Don't look now, but that isn't water surrounding the Bush ship of state. It's gasoline. The issue titled "Dick Cheney" is just one of many embers. Have you ever noticed how on a scale of one to 10, every untoward event in the life of the Bush presidency goes straight to a 10? The Abu Ghraib photos? A 10 forever. Dick Cheney catching a hunting buddy with some birdshot? An instant 10. The Bush National Guard...

Let's start with the one thing we know for sure about the Bush administration's program to listen to al Qaeda's phone calls into and out of the United States: It's dead. After all the publicity of the past two weeks, does anyone think that the boys working on plans for Boston Harbor, the Golden Gate Bridge or Chicago's Loop are still chatting by phone? If the purpose of the public exposure was to pull the plug on the pre-emptive surveillance program, mission accomplished. Be safe, Times Square. At the least, al Qaeda's operatives in Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Hamburg and the...

A very long time ago, before what we would call modern civilization, people ravaged by the sea, as in South Asia on Christmas day, blamed it on the gods. The god of the sea, their poets might write, had lifted the water with his hands to rage at some mortal slight, and shaken it, like a quilt across a bed. But these are not ancient times, and the anger of unseen deities is not available as explanation or cold comfort. We know for a fact that these deaths in South Asia were caused by the violent movement of tectonic plates...

"American influence" is the greatest white whale of the 21st century. We see where a curator at France's Pompidou Center says his museum is opening a branch in Hong Kong, because "U.S. culture is too strong" there, and "we need to have a presence in Asia to counterbalance the American influence." With the Pompidou Center? "American influence" is the great white whale of the 21st century, and Jacques Chirac is the Ahab chasing her with a three-masted schooner. Along for the ride is a crew that includes Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Vladimir Putin, North Korea's Kim Jong-Il, Kofi Annan, the Saudi...

It is often said that the only sure winner in American politics is the media. Amid GOP victory parties or the ruined dreams of the Kerry candidacy, the one constant is that the media marches on. Maybe not this time. Big Media lost big. But it was more than a loss. It was an abdication of authority. Large media institutions, such as CBS or the New York Times, have been regarded as nothing if not authoritative. In the Information Age, authority is a priceless franchise. But it is this franchise that Big Media, incredibly, has just thrown away. It did...

"And you tell me over, and over, and over again my friend Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction." --Vietnam War Protest Song, 1965 How did the 2004 election map of the United States come to look like a color-field painting by Barnett Newman? In fact, if you adjust the map's colors for votes by county (as at the Web sites for CNN and USA Today), even the blue states turn mostly red. Pennsylvania is blue, but between blue Philadelphia and Pittsburgh every county in the state is red. California, except for the coastline, is almost entirely...

That bloody carnage at a grade school in Beslan, Russia, last week made one thing clear: Now we are all living in 9/11 World. 9/11 World, defined by Islamic bombs that are designed to blow to pieces the bodies of civilians where they reside, work or go to school, now rings the world from New York to Moscow, Madrid to Jakarta, Jerusalem, Rome, Nepal and Fallujah. The rubble of New York looks like the rubble of Beslan. This is 9/11 World, where tears flow constantly for the bleeding and burial of innocents. Three Septembers ago in America, children buried their...

A series of odd, but possibly interconnected phenomena happened in the past two weeks. Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," a hyper-virulent anti-Bush documentary, won the top prize at the Cannes film festival in France. Al Gore gave a hyper-virulent anti-Bush speech, sponsored by Moveon.org, which is supported by George Soros, who believes George Bush's policies are ruining the world. And over Memorial Day weekend, the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" opened, in which tornadoes rip through Los Angeles, New York City is destroyed in a flood and the Earth's Northern Hemisphere is destroyed by snow and ice high as the Statue...

The photograph below was taken at Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps base 38 miles north of San Diego. It shows Col. Robert Knapp and Spirit of America's Jim Hake in front of the television equipment that was bought with contributions from readers of this newspaper and others. It will be in the air tomorrow, bound for Al Anbar province in Iraq. There, Marines from the First Expeditionary Force will help Iraqis restore seven local TV stations. This is a remarkable story of can-do. I think it is also the story of a nation willing to do more than it has...

<p>Perhaps every generation of Christian Americans needs its own movie version of the Passion. And maybe this one needs it more than most.</p> <p>Many of Europe's smartest people decided they no longer needed their version of the Christian tradition and let it slip, alas before their unlovely experience with the 20th century. But before that and the immediacy of cinema, Europe created magnificent, painted interpretations of Christ's passion, and these works were often meant to reinforce faith.</p>

<p>We've been tough on the Kerry candidacy the past few weeks, and so with only 31 weeks left to mix it up, perhaps this is the moment to have some sympathy.</p> <p>Mr. Kerry has been running non-stop for the presidency for nearly a year and arguably as far back as 1966. With the nomination finally in his mitts, he and his wife get on a plane, not for the umpteenth Joe's Diner photo-op in one of Iowa's 99 hallowed counties (Winneshiek! Morona! Pottawattamie!) but instead to sneak off to their renovated 16th century Scottish barn in Sun Valley for a week's relief on the snowboarding slopes, and what does he get -- a week of grief.</p>