Free Republic

The election campaign made it official. These are the Disunited States. There is "Red" America: conservative, Republican, religious. And there is "Blue" America: liberal, Democratic, secular. Everybody's message from the election results is that Red America won, and Blue America must change or die. It's a terrible exaggeration, of course. People have different mixes of values, and states have different mixes of people. Just for example, more than 50 million, or 44 percent, of the 115 million citizens who voted for either George W. Bush or John Kerry on Tuesday live in states that went for the other guy. These...

The Wrong Man at the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time Kerry doesn’t understand the war. The failed American approach to Islamic militancy in the 1990s can succinctly be summed up in one sentence: We didn't understand we were at war. We didn't understand for a simple reason: We didn't listen to our enemies. They told us time and again that they considered themselves at war with us. They were not nuanced about it. They did not send Delphic clues, or simply leave it for us to deduce from several monstrous attacks. No, the jihadists coupled the deeds with words....

When I eulogized my son, Nick, I said that he was my teacher and my hero. He was the kindest, gentlest man I know — no, the kindest, gentlest human being I know or have ever known. Did you know that he quit the Boy Scouts of America because they wanted to teach him to fire a handgun? Nick, too, poured into me the strength I needed and still need to tell the world about him. People ask me why I focus on putting the blame for my son's tragic and atrocious end on the Bush administration. They ask: "Don't...

Germans are America’s big ethnic secret. No people and no culture has contributed more to what the United States is and is becoming. In the nation’s ethnic tangle, no root runs deeper than German America. As a scattered community only fitfully conscious of its own existence, none has more successfully pursued wealth, power and intellectual influence. And as a philosophical force in US politics — a whole political mindset — none has greater potency. Germany as a European state may have lost her way, the German language may struggle to keep its world grip, but the German spirit is alive...