Free Republic

Billboards now seen in at least 10 key states show a prancing French poodle, its fur fancily clipped for show, wearing a pink ribbon and a blue Kerry-for-president sweater. The text says: "That dog don't hunt." And: "For 20 years John Kerry has voted against sportsmen's rights." As Election Day approaches, the National Rifle Association is clearing its throat, ready to roar. By now, most of the persuading has been done and attention is turning to mobilization — getting intense constituencies to the polls. Few are more intense than the NRA. If New England is Red Sox Nation, the NRA...

If by the dawn's early light of Nov. 3 George W. Bush stands victorious, seven of 10 presidential elections will have been won by Southern Californians and Texans, all Republicans. The other three were won by Democrats -- a Georgian and an Arkansan. This rise of the Sun Belt is both a cause and a consequence of conservatism's rise, which began in 1964 with, paradoxically, the landslide loss of the second post-Civil War major-party presidential nominee from that region -- Arizona's Barry Goldwater, four years after the first, Richard Nixon. His campaign was the first stirring of a mass movement:...

Thursday, September 9, 2004; Page A27 After two testosterone-charged conventions, try to remember that three years ago there was much talk about the "feminization" of politics. The change since Sept. 11 explains the bind John Kerry is in and why he, more than George W. Bush, is hostage to events. The idea, current then, that "the end of history" had arrived was partly a response to a sense that mankind's elemental economic problem -- mastering growth -- had been solved. Henceforth the tone of politics, even for conservatives of the "compassionate" stripe, would mimic the "caring professions." Everyone would be...

PITTSBURGH—Re-ordained in Manhattan, George W. Bush headed for his 34th presidential visit to Pennsylvania. Tony Podesta dourly says Bush cabinet members are so thick on the Pennsylvania ground, "He could have a quorum for a cabinet meeting here." Podesta's job is to see that Bush's courtship of this state becomes, like Quasimodo's ardor for Esmeralda, a famous episode of unrequited love.

August 6, 2004 -- MR. Kerry, in your conven tion speech you threw caution to the wind and endorsed what you called "one of the oldest Commandments: 'Honor thy father and thy mother.' " Oldest? Were they not all published together? Here are some other questions: You invoke the Commandment to explain why you "will not cut" Social Security benefits. Does that include raising the retirement age, which Congress set at 65 in 1935, when the life expectancy of an American male was 62? Regarding military action, your platform says "We will never wait for a green light from abroad...

When John Kerry speaks tonight, he may promise, again, to cut corporate taxes and increase the size of the military by 40,000 persons. Both ideas are sensible -- and tactical. They are supposed to blunt Republican charges that he stands on one side of a vast ideological chasm separating the parties. Democrats make similar, and similarly silly, charges about this election as the hinge on which American and world history will turn. What is strange about politics today is not just that it is so passionate -- particularly on the part of Democrats unhinged by their loathing of George W....

Kerry's message to Nevadans — essentially, "I feel your hypothetical pain" — testifies to his readiness to do whatever it takes to win. As does his vow last week that, if elected, he would renegotiate the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). He would try to force signatory nations (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and, soon, the Dominican Republic) to adopt labor and environmental standards more pleasing to him... Time was, Kerry was a free trader. Now he favors "fair trade," as defined by his labor allies. But he still is a critic of what he and likeminded...

WASHINGTON — Oil produced the modern world — its ways of work, warfare and recreation — and soon, we are told, the end of cheap oil will produce abrupt, wrenching changes in the way we live. Changes, certainly, but not convulsions, because the modern world responds to price signals...

Ronald Reagan, unlike all but 10 or so Presidents, was a world figure whose career will interest historians for centuries, and centuries hence his greatness will be, and should be, measured primarily by what happened in Europe, as a glorious echo of his presidency, in the three years after he left the White House. What happened was the largest peaceful revolution in history, resulting in history's largest emancipation of people from tyranny—a tyranny that had deadened life for hundreds of millions of people from the middle of Germany to the easternmost of Russia's 11 time zones. However, Reagan will also...

Kerry Drops A Good Idea Kerry, too, said there was 'too much' money in politics. That was before he discovered that he could raise $89 million in 80 days. By George F. Will Newsweek June 7 issue - Briefly last week, political hygienists, who strive to perfume the world with campaign-finance reforms, suffered the vapors. Like Victorian maidens scandalized by a glimpse of a loose woman's ankle, they sprawled prostrate on a divan, crinolines askew, faces chalky from shock. Why? Because John Kerry had a sensible idea, briefly. He considered not accepting—formally, in so many words—his party's nomination at its...

THE PREZ & IRAQ: NO SMALL TASK By GEORGE F. WILL May 26, 2004 -- "The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place." — James Madison, Federalist 51 --snip--- Iraq needs less violence and more politics. The former probably requires more of a U.S. presence, the latter requires less. If there is a way to reconcile these imperatives, and there may not be, it is by a Madisonian connection: A government supported by sufficient Iraqi factions must feel a life-or-death stake in the success of the U.S. war — and such it shall...

Mr. George F. Will has written a column on Secretary Rumsfeld that is thoughtful, elegantly constructed, historically allusive — and wrong. While not quite being willing to spit it out, he leads his readers — and presumably his prime targeted reader, Mr. Rumsfeld himself — to the precipice, with the pregnant implication that Mr. Rumsfeld should jump. Noble resignation is the theme of Mr. Will's column. At this moment, that is as bad advice as an honorable person can give a public official. Mr. Rumsfeld should keep his bottom firmly in his secretarial chair, not for his own sake but...

Michael Barone, America's foremost political analyst, wonders why America produces so many incompetent 18-year-olds but remarkably competent 30-year-olds. The answer is in his new book, "Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation's Future." It illuminates the two sensibilities that sustain today's party rivalry.

WHAT TO DO IN IRAQ?: W'S CARELESS TALK ... George F. Will May 4, 2004 -- OH? Who? Appearing Friday in the Rose Garden with Canada's prime minister, President Bush was answering a reporter's question about Canada's role in Iraq when suddenly he swerved into this extraneous thought: "There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins...

So," Lincoln supposedly said to the White House visitor, "you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war." Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," published in 1852, quickly sold 300,000 copies -- equivalent to 3 million today -- and remains the only book to become an American history-shaping political event. When the dust settles from the eight days that shook the world of Washington -- spanning Richard Clarke's appearance two Sundays ago on "60 Minutes" to his appearance last Sunday on "Meet the Press" -- no one will say of his "Against All Enemies" what Longfellow...

Anti-globalization is the intellectual's Louis Vuitton luggage—a luxury for those living in societies with large social surpluses .... Bob Kerrey, then Senator from Nebraska, sought the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination by advocating protectionism. In one ad, he stood by a hockey net, a trade goalie vigilant to block sinister imports. Voters were unimpressed because, Kerrey insouciantly says now, "they knew I was lying."

Washington -- MEASURED by the immediacy and importance of their political effect, the train bombs in Madrid were the most efficient explosions in the history of terrorism. Detonated 74 hours before polls opened in a national election, the reverberations toppled a U.S. ally. Seven decades ago, Spain became a cockpit for the 20th century's contending totalitarianisms -- fascism and communism. Its 1936-39 civil war, a witches' brew of political and religious passions, was exceptionally savage, even for a civil war. Last Thursday, this century's passions exploded in Spain. Perhaps Sunday's election, which removed the leadership that took Spain into the...

<p>WASHINGTON -- Some critics of President Bush's policy regarding elementary and secondary education have an alternative. It is: Let's leave lots of children behind. The No Child Left Behind Act was passed overwhelmingly by the House (381-41) and Senate (87-10), but now liberals see that NCLB expresses essentials of Bush's conservatism. Democratic presidential candidates have denounced it as a "federal intrusion" in state and local affairs -- everyone knows how much liberals dislike such intrusions. Howard Dean, that perfect indicator of liberal passions, seemed to think that if tests reveal that many schools are failing their children, then drastic changes must be made to the ... tests.</p>

It used to be said that anti-Catholicism was the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals. Today anti-Semitism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals. Not all intellectuals, of course. And the seepage of this ancient poison into the intelligentsia -- always so militantly modern -- is much more pronounced in Europe than here. But as anti-Semitism migrates across the political spectrum from right to left, it infects the intelligentsia, which has leaned left for two centuries. Here the term intellectual is used loosely, to denote not only people who think about ideas -- about thinking -- but also people who think they do.

Two years ago President Bush, who had called it unconstitutional, signed the McCain-Feingold bill -- furtively, at 8 a.m. in the Oval Office. The law expanded government restrictions on political speech, ostensibly to combat corruption or the "appearance" thereof. Bush probably signed it partly because the White House, thinking corruptly or appearing to do so, saw reelection advantage in this fiddling with the First Amendment. And partly because the nation's newspaper editorial writers were nearly unanimous in praise of McCain-Feingold. The editorialists' advocacy of McCain-Feingold could appear corrupt: The bill increases the political influence of unregulated newspaper editorializing relative to...