Free Republic

WASHINGTON - A year ago, an activist group from the Seattle area gave Howard Dean (news - web sites) a thin, golden statue of a backbone. The Oscar-like award honored the former Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont governor for standing up against the Iraq (news - web sites) war and other Bush administration policies. Now, as Dean settles into his new role as head of the Democratic Party, that golden spine has come to represent, for many liberal Democrats, Dean's potential to develop a tougher, take-no-prisoners attitude among the party faithful. "There's no gut-check required for Dean. Dean just needs...

A mother of a dead soldier sat camped in Crawford, Texas. She wants President Bush to define the “noble cause” that he said her son died for. The initial reasons we were given for invading Iraq was because it hadn’t complied with UN weapons inspections and we needed to find and destroy Iraq’s WMDs – those pesky, still-unfound chemical and biological weapons that would do us harm. (Interesting though that we didn’t much care about them when they were being used against the Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq war or against the Kurds in northern Iraq.) As more and more...