Free Republic

Today, June 14, 2005, the date of Marie Cocco's article on "the Kerry smear," is the 38th anniversary of the day my husband, Kevin McManus, of Babylon, Long Island, was shot down over Hanoi and then imprisoned for six years. During those six years, then-Lt. John Kerry, USN, served his near-four-month combat tour in South Vietnam with other Swiftees, nearly all of whom served for at least a year (many for longer than that); and returned to the United States where in early 1970 still-Lt. Kerry (now USNR), having run unsuccessfully for Congress in the Massachusetts Fourth District, decided he'd...

It's not a beach book. Too long, too heavy - and yet, not heavy enough. I've finally finished Bill Clinton's autobiography just in time for the lure of summer's lighter fare. Still, I find myself curiously longing for more Bill Clinton. Or at least, the best Bill Clinton. The best Clinton is the one who emerged on the national scene in 1992 not as a celebrity but as a soothsayer. A political figure who understood what America and Americans were really going through, who thought about it and developed a framework for how to deal with it. Before Clinton, the...

It is not coincidental that Howard Dean's reversal of fortune began not long after he won Al Gore's endorsement. The two share a Nixonian inclination toward political self-destruction. Gore never figured out, during the 2000 presidential campaign, whether he should run with or against Bill Clinton. The nation was enjoying unprecedented prosperity. The voters had, by and large, recoiled at the Republican effort to remove Clinton from office for his sexual peccadilloes. Yet Gore never wore comfortably the mantle of heir to the Oval Office. He treated the country to a series of public metamorphoses. First, he went through his...

She did not make the journey from object of curiosity to subject of esteem all by herself. Hillary Rodham Clinton seems to have brought the country along with her. The annual Gallup poll that asks Americans to name the man and woman living anywhere in the world whom they most admire has again produced predictable winners. The man is, hands down, President George W. Bush. The woman is, hands down, Hillary. The woman Americans most love to express opinions about has been lodged at or near the top of the "most-admired" list since her husband ran for president in 1992....

The capture of Saddam Hussein marks a great day - if. If the former dictator sheds light on the mystery of the missing weapons of mass destruction. If he proves - by leading us to these armaments - that the American president did not deceive his own country about the alleged stockpiles of horrific weapons, taking the United States into a war of choice and an occupation of chilling uncertainty and blood. If Saddam Hussein instead says little, or confirms what international arms experts have come increasingly to believe - that Iraq's unconventional weapons programs were crippled after the first...

I became acquainted with the peculiar co-dependency between politicians and cameras when I covered my first presidential campaign. The candidate one day abruptly changed plans. Instead of a press conference set against what was supposed to be a picture-perfect backdrop, Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis would instead meet reporters at a hotel for a briefing allowing pads and pencils only. The TV crews revolted. Some refused to attend. "As far as I'm concerned, if it didn't happen on camera, it didn't happen," an NBC man groused. But what if it happened on camera, and still wasn't really real? What if the...