Free Republic

In a war, as Secretary Rumsfeld says, stuff happens. Things go wrong, sometimes a lot goes wrong, on occasion everything goes wrong. Then you have a fiasco (the title of the best book about Iraq, written by Thomas E. Ricks). Military history is filled with fiasco stories -- the French army at Agincourt or the Union army at Fredericksburg. A more recent fiasco was Operation Market Garden in the autumn of 1944, a scheme cooked up by British Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery. The Germans, driven out of France, were falling back behind the Siegfried line. Montgomery desperately wanted to win...

The only thing more remarkable than the massive number of people who participated in Monday's immigrant rights march here was how quickly and quietly they dispersed upon finally arriving at Grant Park. It was as if they just melted into the background from which they had emerged that morning, seamlessly returning to the shadow society that they have been forced to create for themselves in the absence of sensible immigration laws. As I watched them slip away, I could only conclude that a lot of them had to get back to work the late shift -- that being the special...