Free Republic

A couple of Sundays back I mentioned in a column on our uncivil political discourse that I would be leaving The Oregonian after the election. Some readers believed it was my final column and probably have wondered how they can miss me if I never leave. Today's column is my last. I'm leaving. I promise. It is an odd thing to walk away from a job you once so longed to have. I wanted to a follow in the line of H.L. Mencken, Red Smith, Murray Kempton, G.K. Chesterton and Malcolm Muggeridge. I wanted to be what St. Augustine once...

Sunday, June 03, 2007 Here's what we know happened on Northwest Flight 327 back on June 29, 2004: Thirteen Middle Eastern men -- 12 from Syria, one a permanent U.S. resident from Lebanon -- had one-way tickets for the weekday nonstop from Detroit to Los Angeles. The men, a musical group and their U.S. promoter, took seats all over the plane. Takeoff was delayed when one man with a limp refused to move from an emergency row, pretending he did not understand English. In flight, one or two of the men walked the aisle, seeming to count passengers. One rushed...

Sunday, February 25, 2007I yield to no man in my devotion to multitasking or my aversion to government poking its nanny-state snout into my business, OK? So if I could do something to keep the butt-inski state out of my life, I'd be right there -- especially if I could accomplish another task or two at the same time. But this conservative favors the proposed ban now before the Legislature on using cell phones while driving. I have come to understand the wisdom in Petrula Betsis' definition of multitasking: "screwing up a lot of things all at once." Silly me,...

F irst, the good news: Calls for an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah went nowhere at Wednesday's confab of global leaders in Rome. The misguided diplomacy of moral equivalence and just-stop-the-killing appeasement failed. Thanks to the United States and Great Britain, Israel won't be acting in the teeth of a united global community as it continues to fight the war on terrorism in the Israeli-Lebanese theater. It has more time to declaw Hezbollah -- and thus create the conditions for future diplomacy and maybe real peace. In addition to leaving much of Hezbollah's infrastructure in place across southern Lebanon,...

Y es, Israel's response to the Hezbollah and Hamas provocations is disproportionate. So what? Wouldn't any Israeli response be disproportionate, given both the asymmetric nature of the terror war and the Jewish state's military might? And just what would a proportionate Israeli response look like? How is a sovereign state supposed to react when terrorist groups enter its territory and kill and kidnap its soldiers? How is a nation supposed to react when a terrorist organization that controls a neighboring state's territory fires rockets randomly into its population centers? Would more United Nations resolutions give much comfort, since U.N. Security...

A t opinion-writers school, right after you learn "all money is fungible," "now comes the hard part" and "(INSERT NAME OF LATEST WAR) has become another Vietnam -- a quagmire," you're ready to tackle the lesson of Watergate: "It's not the crime; it's the cover-up." It grows more tempting every day to say just that about The New York Times' decision to publicize the U.S. government's top-secret program to track suspected terrorists' financial transactions. Except for one thing: A disclosure like this in wartime is the crime. New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller's defense of the disclosure is only...

Dear Bill Keller: Remember me? We met in the elevator here at The Oregonian recently. Your decision to expose a secret program to track terrorist funding got me to thinking I had better write and apologize. I don't think I was sufficiently deferential on our brief ride together. I treated you like the executive editor of The New York Times who used to work for The Oregonian. I had no idea I was riding with the man who decides what classified programs will be made public during a war on terror. I had no idea the American people had elected...