Free Republic

"What a kerfuffle! Half a dozen talk-radio hosts whose major talent is that, like hairdressers, they can talk all day long to one client after another as they snip, have decided that the presumptive Republican nominee does not hew sufficiently close to their gospel. "As anyone who has listened to them knows, the depth of their thought is truly Oprah-like."

When nations in decline are assaulted from without, even if gently or only rhetorically, they often lose not only the will to defend but the capacity to do so sensibly. They turn upon themselves in fits of self-destruction marked by truncated, simplistic and merely assertive disputation. Illegal immigration, an external pressure, brings forth arguments of this type.

September 11 was not so much a discrete event as part of a continuum. It was the result of broad strategic failures that, preceding it by decades, continue to this day and are likely to continue on. It is as if the country has lost, as exemplified by the Left now out of power, a great deal of the will to self-preservation, and, as exemplified by the Right now in charge, not a little of its capacity for self-defense. Our politics and policies have somehow been parceled out to opportunists like Michael Moore -- purveyor of conspiracy theories and hatreds,...

As Americans pick a president, one key criterion is how the war on terror is going. Is President Bush correct in his positive view or Senator Kerry in his negative one?This same debate, interestingly, is also taking place within conservative circles, where analysts sharing the same basic outlook - that Americans are fighting for their very existence - come to dramatically different conclusions. Consider the contrasting views of two important voices on the right, Mark Helprin and Tod Lindberg.Mr. Helprin, author of such powerful novels as A Soldier of the Great War and Winter's Tale, writes a despairing analysis in...

From the hijackings and massacres of the '60s and '70s through the close of the Cold War and the decade of locust years that followed, the United States did virtually nothing to fight terrorism. No match for the perils of a Soviet-American nuclear exchange or a conventional war in Europe, and hardly a distraction from either the proxy wars in the Third World with their casualties in the millions, or the years of the "Peace Dividend" with their enrichments by the trillion, terrorism was something that merely had to be managed. Though the acts of terror themselves were lurid and...

Three years after September 11, where do we stand? Out of fear and confusion we have hesitated to name the enemy. We proceed as if we are fighting disparate criminals united by coincidence, rather than the vanguard of militant Islam, united by ideology, sentiment, doctrine, and practice, its partisans drawn from Morocco to the Philippines, Chechnya to the Sudan, a vast swath of the earth that, in regard to the elemental beliefs that fuel jihad, is as homogeneous as Denmark. Too timid to admit to a clash of civilizations even as it occurs, we failed to declare the war, thus...

When Marco Polo entered Xanadu, the capital of the Great Khan, he crossed ring after ring of outer city, each more splendid and interesting than the one that had come before. He was used to greatness of scale, having traveled to the limits of the ordered world and then twice as far into the unknown, where no European had ever set foot, over the Hindu Kush and beyond the Pamir, and through the immense empty deserts of Central Asia. And yet after passing through the world's most ethereal regions he was impressed above all by Xanadu, a city of seemingly...

The Democrats are guilty of ideological confusion and the Republicans of disdain for reflection. Though America has condemned the cruelties of Abu Ghraib, they remain nonetheless a symbol of the inescapable fact that the war has been run incompetently, with an apparently deliberate contempt for history, strategy, and thought, and with too little regard for the American soldier, whose mounting casualties seem to have no effect on the boastfulness of the civilian leadership. Before the war's inception, and even after September 11, the Bush administration, having promised to correct its predecessor's depredations of the military, failed to do so. The...