Free Republic

“People who spend a lot of time in front of Fox News or MSNBC,” writes Kevin Williamson in National Review Online (NRO), “are not in the main what you’d call happy and well-adjusted people.” Williamson is one of the bright young writers of NR and NRO, presided over by Rich Lowry (or is it Richard now?) who have made National Review increasingly irrelevant to modern American conservatism. Williamson’s estimation of Fox News viewers resembles Hillary Clinton’s description of populist conservatives as “deplorables” and Barack Obama’s snide remark about those voters who cling to their religion and guns. Bill Buckley (who...

On Wednesday, Cockburn stopped by ‘Sovereignty or Submission: Restoring National Identity in the Spirit of Liberty’, hosted by conservative publications American Greatness and The New Criterion at a private club in Washington. Cockburn heard a wide-ranging discussion about nation states and governance, featuring Spectator columnists Daniel McCarthy and Roger Kimball, as well as the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson, the Heritage Foundation’s David Azerrad, American Greatness editor Chris Buskirk, National Review’s John O’Sullivan, and Hillsdale College and Claremont Institute fellow Michael Anton. Over lunch, Tucker Carlson delivered a keynote speech on what he has learned since Trump’s election. The Fox...

Being listed in fourth place for Time magazine's "Person of the Year," as Sarah Palin was for 2008, sounds a little like being awarded the Order of Purity (Fourth Class). But it testifies to something important. Though regularly pronounced sick, dying, dead, cremated and scattered at sea, Mrs. Palin is still amazingly around. She has survived more media assassination attempts than Fidel Castro has survived real ones (Cuban official figure: 638). In her case, one particular method of assassination is especially popular -- namely, the desperate assertion that, in addition to her other handicaps, she is "no Margaret Thatcher." Very...

Conservatism around the world seems to be suffering from some sort of nervous breakdown. This takes different forms in different countries as we would expect from a political disposition that stresses the local, the practical, and the traditional. Still, the breakdown seems to be more acute in the English-speaking world than in continental Europe and elsewhere. It also exhibits certain common features. Let me begin with an acute example: “mainstream” conservative parties in all countries for the last thirty years have shunned nationalist voters and the causes that arouse them from immigration to anti-supra-nationalism. This has resulted in the rise...

"Change" is the most protean of political slogans. Everyone claims to favour it - everyone, including all of America's presidential contenders - but it is really a string of empty boxes that the winners get to open and fill. New Hampshire stampede sets Obama up for second victory Iowa's caucus results began to fill the first two boxes with the new themes of post-Bush politics. In the first upset, Barack Obama overtook Hillary Clinton as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination with a decisive 38-29 per cent victory. He immediately interpreted "change" to mean that America had finally embraced...

Fifty years ago I was a schoolboy in a Liverpool suburb and a strong supporter of Everton like Rhys Jones. My parents were cautious and loving, but they had no qualms about letting me follow the team around the country. That a boy might be killed by a drive-by shooter as he was returning from his local soccer practice would have struck them as an episode in a Latin American coup rather than a possibility in their relatively tranquil lives. Not unreasonably. In 1955, the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer described this tranquillity in his book Exploring English Character: "When we think...

Frontpage Interview's guest today is John O'Sullivan, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former editor-in-chief of National Review, Policy Review, and the National Interest. He was a special advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at Downing Street from 1986 to1988 and he has held senior editorial positions at the London Times, the London Daily Telegraph, the National Post of Canada, the New York Post, and Irish Television and Radio. He has just published The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister.FP: John O'Sullivan, welcome to Frontpage Interview. O'Sullivan: Thanks for inviting me. I read you, so naturally...

Porous borders are partly a result, not just the cause, of failed immigration policy. It happened Wednesday of last week and it was nicely timed. One week later the U.S. Senate was scheduled to reconvene and to discuss an immigration bill. The bill proposes to amnesty most of the 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. and to admit millions more legally as guest workers. It is a controversial measure, strongly promoted by the White House and both party leaderships in the Senate but firmly opposed by most Republican congressmen, an overwhelming majority of Republican voters, and a large majority...

Generals, goes the cliché, are always fighting the last war. It is probably truer today that reporters are always reporting the last war. A Middle East war, in particular, has a familiar narrative: Israel is attacked by its Arab neighbors. It wins easily (sometimes after initial setbacks). It does so by overwhelming its weaker enemy with “disproportionate” firepower. And it then dominates the region for a decade. This recent war was very different. Some of the differences were so acute that even the BBC noticed. But the tone of much coverage was still that of Israel as Goliath versus Hezbollah...

Defeat This MonstrosityWhat Hill conservatives can do on immigration JOHN O’SULLIVAN Now that the U.S. Senate has made a strong argument for unicameral government by passing the “comprehensive” immigration monstrosity, attention turns to the House. It has already passed a sensible “enforcement only” bill. It should stand firm on that legislation, at most making it an “enforcement first” bill by promising to consider some of the Senate’s reasonable proposals in the next Congress, if any can be found. But the Bush-Democrat coalition has an almost mystical attachment to the Senate’s guest-worker and amnesty provisions. It will be faithful unto death...

The Bishops’ Borders - A question of principles and practicalities JOHN O’SULLIVAN Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles recently proposed that Catholics begin the Lenten season by fasting and praying to defeat a bill just passed by the House of Representatives to tighten up the enforcement of immigration control and border security. It sounded like a new sort of progressive penance for recalcitrant pre-Vatican II Catholics — but the cardinal was apparently in earnest. He warned his archdiocese that “hysterical” anti-immigrant sentiment was sweeping the nation, argued that the House bill was tantamount to “punishing people who help immigrants,” suggested...

Patriots for Themselves By John O'Sullivan Published 1/6/2006 12:04:44 AM A Throne in Brussels: Britain, the Saxe-Coburgs and the Belgianization of Europe by Paul Belien (Imprint Academic, 384 pages, $49) IN THE LAST FEW YEARS Belgian politicians have passed a law empowering them to arrest anyone for crimes committed anywhere, threatened to put Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, under its provisions, generously amended the legislation slightly when Donald Rumsfeld said that NATO would have to move from Brussels if it remained on the books, and in general thrown about the weight of a much larger nation. Exactly how did the...

Several Democrats Monday, including the reliable Sen. Edward Kennedy, seemed on the verge of making an even worse tactical error. They suggested that Alito's respect for executive branch prerogatives would make him too ready to approve wiretapping and other surveillance of terrorists. That shows a deep misreading of U.S. opinion. Not only do most polls show that a small plurality of Americans favors wiretapping as a tool against terrorism, but even those against do not consider it a wildly extreme position. When the Democrats campaign against Alito on those grounds, they reinforce the public view of themselves as weak on...

Murtha's got it wrong: We're winning in Iraq December 27, 2005 BY JOHN O'SULLIVAN Five weeks ago a wave of hysteria swept through Washington. Suddenly the Washington establishment became convinced that the war in Iraq was lost. This conviction was sparked off by the speech of Rep. John Murtha, a crusty former Marine usually described as a conservative Democrat, who declared that U.S. policy in Iraq was "a flawed policy wrapped in an illusion" and called for "immediate redeployment" of U.S. troops. The speech was like a match on a bonfire. Murtha was the lead story in newspapers and on...

A top secret map for a 1979 Warsaw Pact war game -- titled "Seven Days to the River Rhine" -- was released at a press conference that marked the opening of the Poland's heretofore secret communist-era military intelligence files. It was chilling. The map showed large red mushroom clouds along a line from the Danish border through Germany and Belgium to the French border. They blotted out such cities as Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, Antwerp and Brussels. Massive SS-20 missiles were being planted in Eastern Europe and aimed at Western cities. (The red mushroom clouds show their destinations.) "Peace rallies" throughout...

Last Friday in Warsaw the world saw for the first time exactly how the Soviet Union intended to fight a nuclear war in Europe. A top secret map for a 1979 Warsaw Pact war game — entitled “Seven Days to the River Rhine” — was published at a press conference that marked the opening up of the Poland's hitherto secret military intelligence files from the communist era. It was a chilling experience. The map showed large red mushroom clouds along a line going from the Danish border down through Germany and Belgium to the French border. They blotted out such...

PRAGUE, Czech Republic -- Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright and anti-communist dissident who went directly from jail to the leadership of his country in the 1989 Velvet Revolution, has kept himself busy since retiring from the presidency. For several years he has been the host of an annual conference, Forum 2000, which brings together a diverse set of public figures to debate international issues. Because Havel is one of that endangered species, the pro-American European, he invites a genuinely diverse group of debaters. Because of his vast prestige his invitations are very rarely refused. Hence the former director of the...

In less than a month's time -- Sept. 16 and 17 -- the world's great and good will be gathering at the United Nations in Manhattan for what is officially called the High Level Plenary Meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. This meeting, attended by the heads of government of most countries, including the major powers, has become a regular event in recent years, but one of ceremonial importance rather than of substance. This year it will be very significant indeed. For the plenary session will almost certainly pass an obscure document, now circulating in draft form among U.N. delegations,...

President Bush's broadcast tonight on the Iraq war will almost certainly prove to be a major turning point in his presidency. Either it will be the first of a line of broadcasts that track a gradual collapse in the will of the American people to win the war. Or it will be the broadcast that persuades the American people to fight the war to a finish in the realistic spirit that no war can be won without casualties and setbacks. In embarking on this persuasion, the president cannot afford false optimism. If people are persuaded by a well-argued case that...

London; Prague; Budapest – Central and Eastern Europe is a good vantage point from which to judge President Bush's recent visit to Moscow for the anniversary of VE Day — and the resulting debate over Yalta and the value of his democracy project. After all, Prague and Warsaw were the flashpoints that prepared and ignited World War II. Britain and France declared war on Germany in September 1939 because the German army had crossed the Polish borders the Allies had guaranteed six months earlier (in response to Hitler's seizure of the rump of Czechoslovakia). Poland was one of the four...