Free Republic

I want to open today's speech with a story that begins on a sunny morning, when thousands of Americans were murdered in a surprise attack -- and our nation was propelled into a conflict that would take us to every corner of the globe. The enemy who attacked us despises freedom, and harbors resentment at the slights he believes America and Western nations have inflicted on his people. He fights to establish his rule over an entire region. And over time, he turns to a strategy of suicide attacks destined to create so much carnage that the American people will...

Try explaining to a college student that Tet was an American military victory. You’ll provoke not a counterargument—let alone an assent—but a blank stare: Who or what was Tet? Doing interviews about the recent hit movie 300, I encountered similar bewilderment from listeners and hosts. Not only did most of them not know who the 300 were or what Thermopylae was; they seemed clueless about the Persian Wars altogether. It’s no surprise that civilian Americans tend to lack a basic understanding of military matters. Even when I was a graduate student, 30-some years ago, military history—understood broadly as the investigation...

When I asked Karl Rove this week to summarize his approach to politics, he quoted from memory a 167-year-old letter by Abraham Lincoln to his Whig campaign committee: "Keep a constant watch on the doubtful voters, and from time to time have them talked to by those in whom they have the most confidence." Rove's innovation was to bring this peer-to-peer politics to a continental scale. Microtargeting and intensive turnout efforts improbably elected a Republican challenger in a time of Democratic prosperity. "In election after election," Rove observes, "we were applying Lincoln's letter." In several years as a colleague, I...

Bottom Line: Harry Potter may be fictional, but there are important truths in his life . . . at least through book six! I will let you know if I change my mind at the end of book seven . . . but so far there are five important themes in He Who Must Wear Round Glasses life . . . beyond the fact that inventing such a character and marketing him well will get you a castle of your own! First, magic cannot solve real problems. For most moderns technology is magical . . . . allowing them to...

Now that the immigration bill has finally died its slow and much-deserved death, it's an appropriate time to consider what lessons can be learned and what the episode portends for a Republican Party in disarray. Above all, the defeat of the Senate's immigration bill-a de facto amnesty for illegal immigrants that did virtually nothing to address the threats to our national security that our porous borders have created-was a victory for average Americans over the Washington, D.C. establishment. The details of the bill's collapse are telling. Between Tuesday and Thursday of last week, 14 senators changed their minds and voted...

Five Hundred Years Since Columbus: Lessons of the Church's History by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J. Our reflections so far on Christopher Columbus have concentrated on his Catholic discovery of America. Our stress has been on the providential role that Columbus played in initiating the most fruitful conversion to Catholic Christianity since apostolic times. Too much has happened since 1492 and no two evaluations will be the same. However, there are certain aspects of our Catholic history since Columbus that are too obvious to be missed. They are also too important not to learn from the past how God wants...

By Rabbi Ari Sytner I had never seen so many fire trucks in one place. It was Erev Shabbos the eve of the Sabbath, but this Friday was unlike like any other. Instead of running around town in preparation for Shabbos, I stopped my normal routine and found myself standing solemnly with the crowd of onlookers lining the sidewalks of Charleston, South Carolina. We watched silently as several hundred fire trucks from cities and counties across the country passed before us. This somber procession would escort the nine heroic fallen Charleston firefighters who earlier that week had died in the...

The country is at a crossroads, a different kind of place from where we've been before. The special interests seem more reactionary and entrenched than ever, the bureaucracies much larger. We need to marshal the courage to change, and we need to understand what needs changing. Two books guide my thoughts these days. One is " Testimony: France in the Twenty-First Century," by the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. The second is American: " The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression," by Amity Shlaes. Together they form a map for the crossroads. Start with the will to...

MOSCOW -- Russia may have turned its back on Vladimir Lenin's revolutionary ideology, but Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez on Thursday told Russians they should revere and revive the ideas of the Soviet Union's founder. ''We should remember Vladimir Lenin and come back to his ideas, especially when it comes to anti-imperialism,'' Chávez told the audience at the opening of a Moscow cultural center named for the South American revolutionary hero Simon Bolivar. The rhetoric was vintage Chávez -- mainly aimed at portraying Venezuela as a bastion of defiance of the United States. Chávez's comments emphasized Venezuela's solidarity with the Kremlin...

Lessons. The most enduring memories I have of my father are the lessons he taught me. He taught me little things. Like how to tie my shoes when I was four. Or the time when I was around five, and he noticed that when I washed my hands, it was a matter of splashing them with a little cold water, then moving on. He showed me how to adjust the water temperature and scrub thoroughly with soap. Then there was the time when I was about ten when he saw that I handled money by crunching bills in my pocket....

I am heartened by newly elected French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s thoughts on immigration reform in his country and for the first time in decades, I think perhaps the French might be more than cheese-eating surrender monkeys. We might be able to learn some lessons from them yet.

Who should be in charge of your child’s education -- you or some strangers in Washington, D.C.? It’s a question worth pondering as Congress prepares to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. As readers of my book, Home Invasion, are aware, I’m a big advocate of what I call “parent-directed education.” We’ve done it all with our three teenagers: private school, public school, homeschool and even a combination of all three. Whatever form it takes, though, parental wisdom should take precedence. And decisions about how a school is run should be as “local” as possible. NCLB fundamentally undermines...

SOCIALIST CANDIDIATE Segolene Royale should have won the French presidential election and become the first woman president of France. She did not. There may be hope for Republicans and a warning for Democrats in this outcome. The center-right had held the French presidency for 12 years. The incumbent president was tired and unpopular. In a normal year the outcome would have been obvious. The opposition left should have won. Two things stopped the left: an idea and the man who believed in it. The idea was that France needed profound, fundamental change and that the left was actually the party...

It is time for some strong medicine for American conservatives and it does not get any stronger than this: if Republicans are going to have any chance of victory in 2008, they need to learn a thing or two from the French. That's right. The French. For Republicans in Washington, the election of Nicolas Sarkozy is significant not because he is a conservative but because he was a part of a deeply unpopular incumbent government. For those who are willing to learn, Mr. Sarkozy's win shows that it is possible to produce a decisive national decision in favour of more...

WASHINGTON, June 12, 2007 – Lessons of the Cold War are important, because the same hatred that led to millions of people’s deaths during the 20th century is still at work today in the world, President Bush said today as the dedication of the new Victims of Communism memorial here. Bush lauded the new memorial in the U.S. capital as a lasting tribute to an estimated 100 million innocent men, women and children whose lives were cut short by imperial communism. They include innocent Ukrainians starved to death during Josef Stalin’s great famine, Russians killed in his purges, and...

Despite the massive show of force authorities displayed last week when they seized the West Lebanon property of convicted tax evaders Edward and Elaine Brown, the avoidance of confrontation with the couple at their Plainfield home suggests law enforcement agencies have learned from mistakes made during earlier federal standoffs at Waco and Ruby Ridge, an expert who tracks militia and radical right-wing movements said. U.S. marshals in New Hampshire appear to be pursuing tactics similar to those used in Montana in 1996, when federal agents successfully negotiated the peaceful surrender of the Montana Freeman after an 81-day standoff, said Mark...

Peter Rodman, one of the architects of our  military and political policy in Iraq and William Shawcross, liberal hawk now branded traitor by the left for his support of the Iraq War, have written what I believe to be an extremely important op-ed in the New York Times on why walking away in defeat from Iraq would be an unmitigated disaster:"SOME opponents of the Iraq war are toying with the idea of American defeat. A number of them are simply predicting it, while others advocate measures that would make it more likely. Lending intellectual respectability to all this is an argument...

U.S. Army Pfc. Lauren Hebrank, a medic with 710th Brigade Support Battalion, Task Force Spartan, administers medical care to an Afghan girl at the Korengal Outpost. Hebrank and another female soldier provided medical coverage to infantrymen and residents. U.S. Army courtesy photo Female Army Medics Take Lessons of Forward Mission to Heart Task Force Spartan soldiers care for Afghanistan residents, combat wounds By Combined Joint Task Force-82 Public Affairs Army News Service   JALALABAD AIRFIELD, Afghanistan, April 5, 2007 — Compassion on the front lines of battle is a concept that few infantrymen or artillerymen consider in the heat...

CONCORD, N.H. - Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that her unsuccessful health care reform effort in 1993 makes her more effective on the issue now as she seeks the presidency. "I know there's a big difference between setting a goal and being able to get all the players at the table to agree to it and get it enacted," she said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "I think I know what not to do as well as having picked up some very important experience in the last 14 years about how to proceed." This week,...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6, 2006 -- Sixty-five years ago tomorrow, the United States endured an attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, that for the next 60 years -- until Sept. 11, 2001 -- stood as the most devastating enemy attack on U.S. soil. Like the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor has been called a defining moment in U.S. history. It caught the country by surprise, rallied its people against their attackers and thrust the nation into a long, difficult war against tyranny. On the 65th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks, they present more parallels,...