Free Republic

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post often writes with a good deal of attitude, and his Tuesday column was no exception. In his report on Sarah Palin’s campaign speech in Clearwater, Florida, laced with mocking Palinisms (“darn right,” “betcha”), he wrote that “the self-identified pit bull has been unleashed, if not unhinged.” The “unhinging,” in Milbank’s assessment, came when Palin charged that Obama still has some explaining to do about his relationship with 1960s Weatherman bomber William Ayers. Milbank also wrote that Palin blamed Katie Couric for her “less-than-successful” CBS interview. Other newspapers reported a more light-hearted Palin response to...

The academic left is fond of buzzwords that sound harmless but function in a highly ideological way. Many schools of education and social work require students to have a good "disposition." In practice this means that conservatives need not apply, as highly publicized attempts to penalize right-wing students at Brooklyn College and Washington State University revealed. "Social justice" is an even more useful codeword. Who can oppose it? But some schools made the mistake of spelling out that it means advocacy for causes of the left, including support for gay marriage and adoption, also opposition to "institutional racism," heterosexism, classism...

In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice "from local to global level." This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn't long in coming. The Council on Social Work Education, the national accreditor of social work education programs, says candidates must fight "oppression," and sees American society as pervaded by the "global interconnections of oppression." Now aspiring social workers must commit themselves, usually in writing, to a...

Today, John Leo, Editor of MindingTheCampus.com, hosts Victor Davis Hanson to discuss his most recent article from the summer issue of City Journal, "Why Study War?". Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a City Journal Contributing Editor. * * * Leo: Welcome Dr. Hanson, your article "Why Study War?," strongly criticizes the academy for its increasing neglect of military history. How do you explain this neglect? Hanson: Mostly for three reasons. First, since the campus revolt against Vietnam, academia has associated war exclusively with amorality, forgetting, for example, that chattel slavery, Nazism,...

If anyone ever starts a museum of horrible explanations, the one-liner by Newsweek's Evan Thomas about his magazine's dubious reporting on the Duke non-rape case— "The narrative was right but the facts were wrong" —is destined to become a popular exhibit, right up there with "we had to destroy the village to save it." What Mr. Thomas seems to mean is that the newsroom view of the lacrosse players as privileged, sexist, and arrogant white male jocks was the correct angle on the story. It wasn't. According to Duke's female lacrosse team and other women on campus, the male players...

As the founder and sole member of the Sheldon Award Society, I am dedicated to identifying the worst college president of each academic year. So far the presidents or chancellors of Berkeley, Georgetown, DePaul, and countless other universities have copped the Sheldon. Somewhat mysteriously, none offered to resign. The award is a statuette that looks something like the Oscar, except the Oscar features a man with no face looking straight ahead, whereas the Sheldon shows a man with no spine looking the other way. The award is named for Sheldon "Water Buffalo" Hackney, the former president of the University of...

Robert Putnam’s sobering new diversity research scares its author. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties. Putnam’s study reveals that...

Yesterday, I published an essay indicating that the basic fabric of America is holding despite the efforts of the hate-America crowd to unravel it. I didn’t mean to say that we should all relax, or that the dangers weren’t still out there. The multiculturalists are still hard at work trying to destroy the concept of an American experience and an American culture – born and sustained by the melting pot.

Commencement weekend is hard to plan at the University of California, Los Angeles. The university now has so many separate identity-group graduations that scheduling them not to conflict with one another is a challenge. The women’s studies graduation and the Chicana/Chicano studies graduation are both set for 10 AM Saturday. The broader Hispanic graduation, “Raza,” is in near-conflict with the black graduation, which starts just an hour later. Planning was easier before a new crop of ethnic groups pushed for inclusion. Students of Asian heritage were once content with the Asian–Pacific Islanders ceremony. But now there are separate Filipino and...

Newsrooms tend to follow a conventional story line on social issues. As the late commentator and editor Michael Kelly wrote, "most journalists learn to see the world through a set of standard templates into which they plug each day's events." The most obvious templates concern race — whites are oppressing blacks, gender — men are oppressing women, and class — the privileged are oppressing the poor. Since all three of these templates were in play during the Duke race case, how surprising is it that this triple high tide resulted in some of the worst journalism of the decade? Howard...

NEW YORK John Leo is ending his newspaper opinion column after 18 years. In a Sunday farewell piece, he wrote that "it's time to work on other projects, including a book." Leo began the column for U.S. News & World Report in Sept. 1988. He signed with Universal Press Syndicate three years later. "Now that I'm leaving, I should acknowledge that writing a column has to be one of the best jobs in the world," Leo wrote. "At a cost of only 750 words per week (with an occasional surcharge of sweating a bullet or two on deadline), you get...

Boys' problems in school need attentionhttp://www.townhall.com/columnists/JohnLeo/2006/07/03/boys_problems_in_school_need_attention http://tinyurl.com/sypap By John Leo Monday, July 3, 2006 How do you get your opinions on Page One of The Washington Post? Do you phone the editor and say, "Here's what I think ..." No. You type up your thoughts and label them a "report" or "study." Reports and studies are authoritative. So they have a shot at the front page, even if they lack report-like qualities such as fresh evidence and independent research. This has just happened to "The Truth About Boys and Girls," a few debunking thoughts about the education of boys by...

The governor of Maryland fired one of his appointees to the Washington Metro transit authority board for stating a negative opinion of homosexuality on a cable TV talk show. The board member, Robert Smith, had said: "Homosexual behavior, in my view, is deviant. I'm a Roman Catholic." The governor, Robert Ehrlich, said Smith's remarks were "highly inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable.""Insensitive" sounds like a fair comment. "Deviant" is a harsh word for expressing one's non-approval of homosexuality. The governor is on less firm ground with "inappropriate." Smith's comment certainly was apropos of the talk-show topic, gay marriage. He was explaining why...

One of the bloggers suggests that 2006 may be the year of the Lou Dobbs voter. The blogger, the Influence Peddler, is no fan. He considers Dobbs a demagogue, but he wonders whether voters are ready for a Dobbsian program of opposing illegal immigration, "throwing the bums out of Washington" and staying wary of international trade. On immigration, this suggestion may reflect a shift in public opinion after the May 1 marches, away from the belief that the pro-illegals lobby had decisively altered public opinion, toward the realization that the marches may have created a powerful backlash. Citing Arizona's new...

It's time for this column to announce its Sheldon Award, given annually to the university president who does the most to look the other way when free speech is under assault on campus. As all Sheldon fans know, the prize is a statuette that looks something like the Oscar, except that the Oscar shows a man with no face looking straight ahead, whereas the Sheldon shows a man with no spine looking the other way. The award is named for Sheldon Hackney, former president of the University of Pennsylvania and a modern legend in looking the other way.College presidents who...

Bush Was Right About Iraq's Quest For Uranium By John Leo In a surprising editorial, The Washington Post deviated from the conventional anti-Bush media position on two counts. It said President Bush was right to declassify parts of a National Intelligence Estimate to make clear why he thought Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons. And the editorial said ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson was wrong to think he had debunked Bush on the nuclear charge because Wilson's statements after visiting Niger actually "supported the conclusion that Iraq had sought uranium." In the orthodox narrative line, Wilson is the truth-teller and the Bush...

In his 1995 book "The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy," the late Christopher Lasch argued that America's political and cultural elites had opened up a gap between themselves and ordinary Americans. "Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America's destiny for better or worse," he wrote. They are increasingly detached from their fellow citizens and drawn to an international culture, Lasch said, or what we would today call a transnational culture. Consider the current immigration debate in this light. In the transnational view, patriotism, assimilation and...

The controversy over gay adoptions in Massachusetts is an issue that can be framed two ways. In the conventional liberal narrative, this is a simple issue of bias: The Catholic Church must not be allowed to deny gay couples the right to adopt children. The other frame, generally absent from discussions so far, raises this question: Under what conditions can the state force churches and religious agencies to violate their own principles? This question has come up again and again, as pressure on churches to accept dominant, secular norms has increased. This pressure includes laws requiring Catholic institutions to provide...

Like many news junkies, I’ve noticed that stories putting Muslims in a bad light tend to be sketchy and underreported. A minor example is the comment - “the greatest terrorists in the world occupy the White House”--by the head Muslim chaplain of New York City’s prisons. In Manhattan, remarks like that are nearly as conventional as talk about the weather, so the controversy was fairly small. It might have been larger if the media had shown any interest in other points the imam made. For instance that Muslim prisoners are being tortured in Manhattan, and that Muslims must be “hard...

Mickey Kaus at Kausfiles.com says that the gay-cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain has the same marketing strategy as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Both, he says, have been hyped as blue-state movies that are reaching and changing minds in the cities of red America. He calls this the "Heartland Breakout Meme”. ("Meme" refers to a cultural copying unit that hops from brain to brain without much thought or any at all). What Kaus means is that the mainstream media keep reinforcing ideas liberals want to believe, whether they are true or not. But the alleged breakout of Fahrenheit appears to be myth,...