Free Republic

OCT. 1, 2004: THE DEBATE Remarkably, it was the man with the big lead – President Bush – who took the debate’s biggest risk: His frank discussion of meeting with the wife of a slain soldier, PJ Johnson. To talk so candidly and personally about grief and loss is not something that presidents who have ordered men into battle have been accustomed to do. But Bush did it – and thus created what may have been the evening’s most memorable and moving moment. Sen. Kerry by contrast was as usual fatally cautious. He was indeed fluent and calm as everybody...

Matthew Klam’s NYT Magazine article on the blogosphere has triggered frenzied discussion in the blog world. Conservative blogs have complained that the piece is liberal propaganda that unfairly ignores conservative bloggers. Meanwhile, the left-wing blogs have counter-complained that the piece is establishment propaganda that outrageously belittles them! And just about everyone with a blogspot seems to be muttering, “Hey! Why didn’t they write about me?!” Disregard the heckling. The piece is riveting: vivid, remorseless, and deadly. Klam has that magic interviewer's gift for inducing his intended victims to place their lives in his hands. Yes, he dealt with left bloggers...

So all those left-wing kids taking media studies courses at college do seem actually to have learned something: The anti-Republican demonstraters who filed through Manhattan yesterday avoided disorder and violence to focus instead on creating powerful images for the evening news. Their message may be wrong-headed, but they did not step on it. And the same can be said for whoever it was that leaked the story of the investigation of the alleged leak of a Pentagon planning document to a pro-Israel lobbying group. What a triumph of press manipulation this story is! Somebody sold CBS News, NBC, and the...

The people who keep track of these things expect 2004 to be the first billion-dollar election in American history. Yet the single most effective ad campaign of the election cycle has thus far cost only about $500,000: the campaign launched at the beginning of this month by the new anti-Kerry group, Swiftboat Veterans for Truth. Within less than a week, polls found that half of all registered voters had heard about the Swiftboat vets' advertisements. Close to half, 44%, of all independent voters surveyed say they find the ads "credible." In the two weeks since the ads first aired, Kerry's...

The Ad That Worked By David Frum Posted: Tuesday, August 24, 2004 ARTICLES The National Post (Canada) Publication Date: August 24, 2004 The people who keep track of these things expect 2004 to be the first billion-dollar election in American history. Yet the single most effective ad campaign of the election cycle has thus far cost only about $500,000: the campaign launched at the beginning of this month by the new anti-Kerry group, Swiftboat Veterans for Truth. Within less than a week, polls found that half of all registered voters had heard about the Swiftboat vets' advertisements. Close to half,...

The people who keep track of these things expect 2004 to be the first billion-dollar election in American history. Yet the single most effective ad campaign of the election cycle has thus far cost only about $500,000: the campaign launched at the beginning of this month by the new anti-Kerry group, Swiftboat Veterans for Truth. Within less than a week, polls found that half of all registered voters had heard about the Swiftboat vets' advertisements. Close to half, 44%, of all independent voters surveyed say they find the ads "credible." In the two weeks since the ads first aired, Kerry's...

...Approaching the issue from the other side, then-Governor Bush handled the topic note-perfectly at Philadelphia in the summer of 2000: "Good people can disagree on this issue, but surely we can agree on ways to value life by promoting adoption, parental notification." How could a candidate Giuliani emulate George W. Bush's deftness from the opposite side? Maybe with a three point message similar to this: 1. "Members of our party hold many different views on abortion. Yet whether we call ourselves pro-life or pro-choice, we all know that abortion is a sadness, and we can all be glad that abortion...

AUG. 11, 2004: A BETTER CLASS OF CUSTOMER? So President Bush did go with Porter Goss for CIA, disregarding my advice to try John Lehman instead. Well, maybe it’s for the best – Goss brings certain advantages all his own to the table, including swift confirmability. And anyway, I’m beginning to think that maybe the weakest link in America’s intelligence system isn’t the spooks who generate the intelligence. The weakest link may be the users, the policymakers. But then, the users, the policymakers are ultimately elected. So maybe the problem is us. That’s the question that keeps hitting me...

So here we are in the midst of the most urgent and specific terror warning since 9/11 – and as it goes on, the FBI catches two leaders of a mosque in Albany trying to purchase a shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missile. We do not yet know what target the two would-be purchasers had in mind, but we do know that this kind of mosque-based violence and extremism is not exactly a freakishly rare event, to put it mildly. Yet here is the reaction to the arrest of the nation’s highest-profile Islamic advocacy group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations: "The government's allegations...

So the polls have arrived, and they report virtually no bounce at all for the Dems from last week’s convention. Indeed, among registered voters, Kerry actually dropped a point. Among all adults, the results after Kerry’s best week of the year stand at 50-46 according to Gallup. Kerry now has nowhere to go but down. The Dems are blaming low viewership for the weak result. Still, it could have been worse: If more people had tuned in, and actually seen John Kerry speak, the Dems might actually have lost ground. Pride Goeth ... Almost every report from Boston agrees that...

The Democratic Party arrived in Boston emotionally united and intellectually divided. Democrats are united in their rage against and disdain for President Bush, but they are radically divided in their beliefs and loyalties. Today's Democratic Party is the party of America's poorest people and of its very richest. (Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, George Soros and Donald Trump are all for Kerry. So is almost all of Hollywood and most of Wall Street. Kerry will probably win at least eight of the 12 richest zip codes in America. The four per cent of voters who described themselves to pollsters in 2000...

Two great questions overhang the Democratic convention: Will the party succeed in stifling its rage and paranoia? And will the media report it if the party fails? It’s a rule of modern political journalism: Republican conventions are always horrible, Democratic conventions always delightful. Either the Republicans are producing Nuremberg-style festivals of hate (as Houston 1992 was dubbed) or else they are cynically concealing their true colors (the top story line in San Diego in 1996 and Philadelphia in 2000). Democrats by contrast can count on favorable coverage so long as they can avoid th outright rioting of Chicago 1968. Still,...

Together, John Kerry and John Edwards possess family fortunes totaling probably in the vicinity of $1 billion. If elected, John Kerry would be the richest president in American history, richer even than his hero John F. Kennedy. And unlike other rich men to seek the presidency — Ross Perot, Herbert Hoover, and so on — Kerry is the very opposite of a self-made man: He came by his money by marrying a woman who inherited it from her husband who in turn inherited it from his great-grandfather. Yet the Kerry-Edwards campaign is audaciously presenting itself as a crusade against unearned...

ArchiveE-mail AuthorSend to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version JUL. 6, 2004: HUNTINGTON'S AMERICA So I did indeed include a reading of Who Are We in my Fourth of July observances, and yes I certainly do see why the book has stirred up so much fuss. Huntington has delivered an alarming and in many ways convincing warning of current US immigration policies, which he accuses of corroding American national identity. He warns above all that today’s fashionable chatter about “multiculturalism” is becoming an enabling device for something much more dangerous: “biculturalism,” a future division of the country...

Is it Waterloo for the forces of perpetual war for perpetual democracy? All is not quiet on the Western front for advocates of the War in Iraq—and of all the further wars and occupations that will be needed to realize their vision of a democratic and cowed Middle East. Consecutive front-page stories in last Thursday's and Friday's Los Angeles Times limn the tragic tale of these men of greatness, now laid low by their own hubris: Thursday's story was headlined "A Tough Time for Neocons", Friday's "Going to War Not Worth It, More Voters Say." The war advocates' worst fear,...

'Power, Terror, Peace, and War': 2.5 Cheers for George Bush [NYT book review] By DAVID FRUM Published: June 13, 2004 WALTER RUSSELL MEAD is the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow in United States foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Despite the crushing respectability of that title, Mead has earned a deserved reputation as one of the country's liveliest thinkers about America's role in the world. And in [his new book:] ''Power, Terror, Peace, and War,'' his originality has led him dangerously -- but gratifyingly -- away from respectability. Mead says, ''A mix of incredulity, outrage, shock, anger and...

Ronald Reagan loved to tell jokes and he especially loved to tell jokes about his old age. In his 1984 debate against former senator, former vice-president Walter Mondale, Mr. Reagan answered a question about his own fitness for office with a mock-pious outburst: "I will not exploit for political advantage my opponent's youth and inexperience!" If there is a Heaven, Mr. Reagan is probably already vexing his old hero Harry Truman by boasting of surpassing the latter's longevity: Mr. Reagan died Saturday at his home in Bel-Air, Calif., aged 93. Few American presidents have been as consistently underestimated as Ronald...

Read, if you haven’t already, Barbara Lerner’s important piece in last week’s NRO. Lerner is indispensable to understanding the string of troubles that have hit the US in Iraq over the past few days, from the stalemate in Fallujah to the photos of abused Iraqi prisoners that have so badly damaged America’s image in the Arab and Muslim world. At bottom, the US government seems paralyzed between two contradictory approaches to the reconstruction of the country. Approach number one is advocated by the US State Department, the British Foreign Office, much of the uniformed military – and most of the...

After 24 hours, it’s agreed that the biggest news to emerge from Bob Woodward’s book is the allegation that the Saudis promised to manipulate the price of oil to help President Bush’s re-election. John Kerry had this to say yesterday in Florida: “If what Bob Woodward reports is true — that gas supplies and prices in America are tied to the American election, then tied to a secret White House deal — that is outrageous and unacceptable.” But is it true? Ask yourself this: Who could have been Woodward’s source for this claim? Only one person: the canny Prince Bandar,...

I do think it was rather petulant of Richard Clarke to complain on “Meet the Press” that the administration is out to “destroy” him. Clarke hurls a series of terrible accusations at the administration and its senior staff – and is then outraged when they reply that Clarke is wrong? Or when they point out that what he says today contradicts what he has said in the past? Or that he might possibly have other motives than those he acknowledges? Or when they note that he seems strangely tolerant of far worse mistakes by the previous administration? Clarke argues that...