Free Republic

Seven years ago, Andrew Sullivan and I conducted a fierce debate in Slate about same-sex marriage. Along the way, I hazarded this prediction: "Andrew, three years after we permit gay marriage, it will be illegal for schools to send home printed forms with one blank for the mother's name and one blank for the father's." Did I say three years? In Canada, it's taken barely one. In the province of Ontario, the words "wife," "husband," "widow," and "widower" are now all to be stricken from the law. The words "mother" and "father" cannot be far behind. Ontario's action is a...

“Does America really want a strong Europe?” In the week leading up to President Bush's European tour, this question was asked again and again by the continent's journalists and diplomats — and Americans answered: "Yes, yes, of course we do." But one of the important lessons of the trans-Atlantic traumas since 9/11 is that while Europeans and Americans can easily agree that "Europe" should be "strong," they do not so easily agree on what they mean by "Europe" or by "strength." To Europeans, "strengthening Europe" tends to mean vesting more powers in the central European Union (EU) bureaucracy in Brussels....

"I respect and admire the French, who have been a far greater nation than we shall ever be, that is, if greatness means anything loftier than money and bombs." – Thomas Fleming, "Hard Right," March 13, 2003 From the very beginning of the War on Terror, there has been dissent, and as the war has proceeded to Iraq, the dissent has grown more radical and more vociferous. Perhaps that was to be expected. But here is what never could have been: Some of the leading figures in this antiwar movement call themselves "conservatives." These conservatives are relatively few in number,...

Double or nothing: that was the theme of the president’s dazzling speech. Bold, bold, bold – bold on social security reform, bold on controlling the growth of government, bold on legal and tax reform, bold in daring to mention nuclear energy, bold on social issues including marriage, bold on judges, and bold on foreign policy and the war on terror. Minutes before the beginning of the speech, new National Security Adviser Steve Hadley announced that he had promoted Elliot Abrams as one of his deputies – Abrams being one of the administration’s strongest and most consistent advocates of American strength...

Over lunch at a Washington think-tank some time ago, a high-ranking German official told the room about his country's determination to win a seat on the United Nations Security Council. The reaction? From the Americans present, indifference verging on boredom. For the Europeans, though, it was as if the official had dropped a concrete block on their toes. It was a fascinating moment of culture clash that demonstrates some ominous truths about American-European relations. The first truth is the traditionalism of American policy elites. Even when the evidence is thrust into American faces, it is hard for them to accept...

David Frum explains four dangers he sees the Bush Administration running into: mutiny by different agencies that supposed to be subordinate; personnel choices that do not check for principles and beliefs to coincide with the President's; communications problems when the administration does not take enough time to explain and educate the public in its position (don't expect MSM to do it for them), and a lack of policy coordination between parts of the administration. David Frum is definitely a Bush supporter and this is a very much needed feedback that the administration doesn't get from the opposition that is capable...

-snip- The story is going around Washington that Senate Foreign Relations chairman Richard Lugar handed Condoleezza Rice a list of names of “neocons” he wanted blacklisted from the Department of State — and that Rice assented. If the story is true, you can see how it might signal unscrupulous present and former CIA officials to go even further — even to the extent of jeopardizing secret missions. In the first term, administration policymakers again and again failed to agree on a coherent policy, failed to explain that policy to the public, and failed to impose it on the bureaucracy. Disunity...

Two young men join the communist party in the 1930s. Years pass. They grow up, lose their illusions, leave the party and rejoin normal American life. More years pass. They achieve some intellectual renown, are offered teaching posts at major universities and settle into comfortable middle age. Then the 1960s hit, and one of the two old communists suddenly veers leftward again. Over dinner one evening, the reinvigorated leftie harangues his former comrade about Marx, Engels, Lenin and all the rest of the dusty antique crew. The comrade replies: "Phil, your answers are so old that I've forgotten the questions."...

The helicopters are taking off and landing now in the tsunami-shattered villages and towns. The sick are being taken for treatment. Clean water is being delivered. Food is arriving. Soon the work of reconstruction will begin. The countries doing this good work have politely agreed to acknowledge the "coordinating" role of the United Nations. But it is hard to see how precisely the rescue work would be affected if the UN's officials all stayed in New York - or indeed if the UN did not exist at all. The UN describes its role in South Asia as one of "assessment"...

I don't know whether the rumor of Paul Wolfowitz's departure from the Pentagon is valid, but this story does have the ring of at least a partial truth. Combined with the news that Condoleezza Rice passed over John Bolton in favor of Robert Zoellick for her deputy at the State Department, the foreign policy appointments of the Bush second term should raise a lot of eyebrows among administration supporters. Start with a very practical and urgent matter: the Iranian bomb. At his Dec. 21 press conference, President Bush said a very surprising thing about Iran. "We're relying upon others, because...

No issue, not one, threatens to do more damage to the Republican coalition than immigration. There's no issue where the beliefs and interests of the party rank-and-file diverge more radically from the beliefs and interests of the party's leaders. Immigration for Republicans in 2005 is what crime was for Democrats in 1965 or abortion in 1975: a vulnerable point at which a strong-minded opponent could drive a wedge that would shatter the GOP.President Bush won reelection because he won 10 million more votes in 2004 than he did in 2000. Who were these people? According to Ruy Teixeira--a shrewd Democratic...

Gay marriage legislation will probably be introduced in Canada today, a final culmination of a debate that has been marked along the way by a remarkable disdain for democratic opinion. Gay marriage has not triumphed in Canada because Canadians are more liberal on the issue than Americans, although they are, slightly. Gay marriage has triumphed because Canadian politics is much less subject to popular control than US politics. All Canadian judges above the level of police magistrate, including judges on the mis-named provincial courts, are appointed by the prime minister at his sole whim: there are no judicial hearings, no...

The Washington Post’s always imaginative White House correspondent Dana Milbank and its dour front-page caption writers would have you believe that President Bush’s Canadian visit occurred in an atmosphere of tight-lipped circumspection. “During his two-day visit to Canada,” the caption writer opined, “Bush outlined a second-term foreign policy that would make international cooperation his administration’s top priority, but the president made clear that such cooperation must occur on his terms.” Meanwhile, I spent yesterday afternoon fielding calls from Canadians and especially Canadian journalists by no means friendly to the president who just could not stop enthusing about the wit, charm,...

George Bush's event planners have learned something from history. When Ronald Reagan spoke to Parliament in 1987, he was interrupted by heckling from the NDP benches led by Svend Robinson. That was almost two decades ago, but the lesson has been absorbed: A presidential visit offers irresistible temptation to the small but noisy narcissist-leftist faction on the upper back benches. Robinson has had to make an abrupt exit from politics recently, but there are quite a number of Ottawa pols eager to take his place in somebody else's spotlight. The Bush planners must have figured: Why give these jerks a...

Two weeks ago, the National Post and I were served with a notice of libel by the Canadian branch of the Council on American Islamic Relations, or CAIR. The Post and I are not alone. Over the past year, CAIR's Canadian and U.S. branches have served similar libel notices on half a dozen other individuals and organizations in the United States and Canada. Each case has its own particular facts, yet they are linked by a common theme: That we defendants have accused CAIR (in the words of the notice served on me) of being "an unscrupulous, Islamist, extremist sympathetic...

Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror, by Anonymous (Brassey's, 352 pp., $27.50) This is an alarming book, but not in the way its author intended. It delivers an urgent danger signal — not about al-Qaeda, but about intelligence services staffed with analysts who think the way the author of this book thinks. This latest attack on the Bush administration's war policies was written anonymously by Michael Scheuer, a veteran CIA analyst who headed the Agency's bin Laden unit in the late 1990s. His assessment of the War on Terror is grimly pessimistic: Everything the U.S....

Colin Powell's resignation as Secretary of State was one of those surprises that should have come as no surprise at all. Foreign-policy Washington has been gossiping for a week now about the new consulting firm Powell and his top aide and best friend Richard Armitage will soon be launching. Two mornings after Election Day a story went round town that Powell had gathered his assistant secretaries of state together to wrap up any project on which they wanted his help no later than the end of January. But who needed gossip? Anybody with a library card could have foretold that...

My column in last week's National Post: I am not going to waste time and space on an endorsement column. I am sure you already know who I am supporting in the 2004 U.S. presidential election and why. Instead, let me offer something more useful: a sober assessment of what a Kerry victory would mean and what consequences it might have. If John Kerry wins the presidency on Nov. 2, Champagne corks will be popping all over Europe. Radio and television broadcasters worldwide will assure their audiences that the United States has repented and given up its aggressive, provocative ways....

Kerry made the gaffe of a lifetime in his answer to Bob Schieffer’s last question. “Well I guess all three of us are lucky men who married up.” The second those words passed his lips, his face flushed and his face twisted into a self-horrified grimace. One thing I’ve learned from these debates: John Kerry is poised and well-spoken – but he’s not very mentally nimble. Over three debates, the president made a number of mistakes, some of them potentially very damaging. Yet Kerry almost never pounced on them, and when he did do so, his remarks were very obviously...

There's a lot to worry about in this modern world of ours: terrorism, environmental catastrophe, the possibility that a giant meteorite might smack into Earth, knocking us forever into the freezing void of space. So let me as a public service suggest one item you can safely remove from your list: that record-breaking U.S. current-account deficit--of which the trade deficit is the best known component--that has business writers from here to Shanghai hitting their exclamation keys. The business pages are filled with scary figures: The United States is spending US$1.8-billion more per day than it earns! The deficit is twice...