Free Republic

Delayed by Hurricane Isabel, here is the long-awaited Q&A with Laura Ingraham, host of the Laura Ingraham Show and now the author of Shut Up and Sing: How Elites From Hollywood, Politics, and the UN Are Subverting America. I can't pretend to be objective about Laura: She is not only one of my favorite radio hosts, but one of my favorite people: Fearless, inventive, funny, shrewd, and kind-hearted. Her Labrador Retriever also happens to be the uncle of my Labrador Retriever - yes, Washington is that small a small town. I can't pretend to keep up with Laura either. Her...

David Frum's DiarySEP. 16, 2003: WESLEY WHO? I don’t guarantee that this story is true, but it is said that when Jack Warner learned that Ronald Reagan was running for governor of California, he exploded, “No, no, no, all wrong - Jimmy Stewart for governor of California, Ronald Reagan for the governor’s best friend!” Likewise, Wesley Clark for President of the United States is all wrong. Democrats think they can inoculate themselves from the charge of being weak on national security by hiring a general to express their weakness for them. It’s an old antiwar fantasy. Back in the...

President Bush’s request for $87 billion for reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan has convinced a lot of people who hated his tax cut that they really, really hate his tax cut. Here for example is Steve Mufson of the Washington Post in yesterday’s “Outlook” section: “[T]he request, which could push the federal budget deficit to more than $500 billion during the next fiscal year, should make people stop and wonder whether President Bush's 2001 and 2002 tax cuts significantly compromised America's ability to respond vigorously to problems at home and abroad in the future.” Really? The U.S. government spends some...

It will be many years yet before the digits "9,1,1" revert to being merely a date. For so long as the youngest child who was conscious that day walks the earth, 9/11 will summon up the most painful and passionate memories of national life. For those of us who have supported President Bush and the war on terror, today can serve as a time for stock-taking. Has this president lived up to our high expectations in those early days? Do the decisions made then still look right? Is the war still on track? Many voices in the media urge a...

SEP. 12, 2003: WAR AND PEACE Here’s a question: Why is there still a Palestinian Authority? The Authority was created by the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace deal: The deal provided that the Palestinians would abjure violence and in return the Israelis would withdraw in stages from the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinians never honored their end of the deal. Arafat experimented with violence repeatedly through the 1990s; then, in September 2000, he abrogated his commitments altogether and launched the current terror war. Why did Arafat choose war three years ago? We may never know the real answer to that question:...

Chetwynd’s Bush In preparation for the 9/11 commemorations tomorrow, I watched last night Lionel Chetwynd’s excellent “Showtime” docudrama, “DC 9/11.” I don’t know how others will respond, but for me it very authentically revived memories of one of the most terrible days in my life – and not only because a character based on me makes a cameo appearance in the film. Chetwynd gets details impressively right, down to the exact lamps in the Oval Office. He has found actors who look spookily like the characters they play, including President Bush himself. An d the crux of his story is...

A man is standing on the platform of the Darien, Conn., train station, reading a newspaper. An elderly woman joins him. She glances at him appraisingly, and then approaches to ask a question. “Excuse me mister, I am sorry to intrude, but I have to ask — Are you Jewish? The man is startled, but good-naturedly answers, “No, Ma’am, I’m not.” “Oh,” says the woman in a crestfallen tone. A pause. “Are You quite sure you’re not Jewish?” “Yes, quite sure.” Another pause. “Maybe half-Jewish?” “Madam,” says the man with growing irritation. “I assure you: I have the greatest admiration...

The manuscript of the book I'm co-authoring with Richard Perle is now at the publisher--the kids are back at school--the vacation (such as it was!) is over. Now back to work. It's been a news-rich summer, and there's a lot to catch up on. Where to start? How about with Tucker Carlson's new book about his adventures in cable news, Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites. A galley showed up in my in-box earlier this summer, as I was racing to finish my book, and in moments of exhaustion or frustration I'd read snatches of it for amusement and relaxation. And is...

Entropy Squared & Connie Wilkins Free Dominion August 26, 2003 David Frum to speak at Free Dominion’s 2004 Awards Banquet Today we finalized arrangements to have David Frum appear as our featured speaker at the 2004 Free Dominion Principled Conservatism Awards Banquet to be held – again - at Tudor Hall in Ottawa, Ontario. We have chosen February 18, 2004 for this year’s banquet because it is the evening before the Canadian Alliance Convention in Ottawa so it will serve as the social and political kick-off of the weekend for conventioners. David Frum - Presidential Speechwriter, Journalist, Author Dubbed "one...

Scandalous   By David Frum Posted: Monday, July 28, 2003 ARTICLES National Review   Publication Date: August 11, 2003 Everybody seems to agree that the suicide of Dr. David Kelly, the British defense analyst, is a prelude to a scandal--but nobody can quite seem to decide whose scandal it is. The Blair government's? The BBC's? That of Kelly himself? For an American audience, the scandal is especially hard to understand, because it originated in a British media culture that is unlike anything that exists on this continent. There's no American equivalent of the BBC, which created the scandal. The BBC...

That was a fine press conference Bush did yesterday, but after these performances I am always left wondering: Why bother? The questions the journalists ask are always intended to try to put the president in a corner and force him to yield up a titillating sound-bite. That happens almost never – presidents are too canny and cunning to get trapped in this way, so the only sound bites they produce are those they have memorized in advance. Some press pundits wax nostalgic for Franklin Roosevelt’s weekly press conferences. But those conferences were off the record and unphotographed: From the point...

Unpatriotic ConservativesA war against America. David Frum March 19, 2003 9:30 a.m. EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the April 7, 2003, issue of National Review. "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 rom 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...

On the ground floor of the White House is the Map Room, so-called because it was here that Franklin Roosevelt used to get his briefings on the progress of World War II. Over the mantel is the last map FDR saw before his death. It shows American, British, and Soviet troops racing toward Berlin. It also shows a frightening concentration of German forces in the Nazis’ last redoubt, the mountains of Bavaria. We now know of course that this last redoubt did not exist. American intelligence had been deceived. And it’s possible that policymakers also deceived themselves. Roosevelt, for reasons...

Fellow NR contributor Victor Davis Hanson has written an extremely interesting book … no wait, stop, what other kind of book does he write? …. OK, another extremely interesting book – this time on the subject of immigration and what it is doing to his beloved California, where the Hansons have farmed for five generations. Much of what it is doing is harmful: It has put on the road drivers who cannot handle their machines and do not carry insurance – with deadly effect on California’s streets. It has brought new kinds of crime and once-extinguished diseases to California’s small...

The North Goes South By David Frum Posted: Monday, June 30, 2003 ARTICLES National Review Publication Date: July 14, 2003 Here's what didn't happen when the Canadian government announced that it would comply with the orders of a high (but not supreme) court and write gay marriage into the law of the land. There were no protests from the country's religious leaders: only mild expressions of concern. There were no angry editorials in any of the country's major newspapers. The leader of the conservative Canadian Alliance party had no comment, and most of the country's other conservative leaders likewise kept...

JUN. 15, 2003: FABULISTS Maureen Blair Maureen Dowd seems to have learned nothing from the Jayson Blair fiasco. No, that’s not quite right. She does seem to have learned one thing from the paper of record’s plagiarist of record. Fresh from the scandal of being caught abusing ellipses to twist President Bush’s words, she is now using other people’s work to pad out a column when the deadline clock is tolling. Yesterday, Dowd wrote one of her trademark gaseous columns about popular culture turning its back on the accomplishments of feminism, etc., etc. As the column trudged wearily to its...

Maureen Dowd seems to have learned nothing from the Jayson Blair fiasco. No, that’s not quite right. She does seem to have learned one thing from the paper of record’s plagiarist of record. Fresh from the scandal of being caught abusing ellipses to twist President Bush’s words, she is now using other people’s work to pad out a column when the deadline clock is tolling.Yesterday, Dowd wrote one of her trademark gaseous columns about popular culture turning its back on the accomplishments of feminism, etc., etc.As the column trudged wearily to its end, there unexpectedly appeared an unusual thought, vividly...

Sunday was of course H-Hour, H-Day across America. My wife was invited onto CNN’s “Late Edition” to discuss the Hillary book. I will not soon forget the look that passed over her face when Wolf Blitzer asked her, “Do you believe President Clinton when he said that it was sporadic and of short duration?” Our friend Mark Steyn would have heartily agreed, “Yes, Wolf, I’m sure it was of very short duration.” But Steyn writes for the British press, where you can say things like that …. That Hillary Show Part II On the same program, Margaret Carlson explained why...

I tend not to take much of an interest in the neo-Confederate abuse of Abraham Lincoln: If anything in American life counts as a settled question, it is surely the Civil War. And yet the neo-Confederates do go on squawking and squawking — and every once in a while they do say something worth noting. Here for instance are a couple of sentences from Thomas DiLorenzo's latest diatribe against Abraham Lincoln: "The Declaration [of Independence] announces that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and that whenever governments become destructive of the peoples’ natural rights it...

It is a very strange fact that the bloodiest terror attack of the past two weeks is the one that has received the least attention. While 28 innocents were killed in the Casablanca bombing and 34 in Riyadh, and a total of 12 Israelis in the five most recent attacks in Israel, 60 were killed by a single truck bomb in Chechnya on May 12. The casualty toll may yet rise higher as the injured succumb to their wounds and post-Soviet medical care. What are we to think of the Chechen terror-bombers? The Russians are very clear about what they...