Free Republic

The migrant caravan is like something out of a future, apocalyptic dystopia—or, to go back in time, perhaps an image from Exodus—where thousands of men, women, and children trudge a thousand miles under the hot tropical sun across hot tarmac and dirt roads, hoping to land on America’s doorstep, in search of opportunities not to be found in the failed, crumpled, venal, socialist states from which they hail.What is President Trump to do? Welcome them all in, as one interpretation of Pope Francis’s recent exhortations seems to imply? Turn them back? If so, how? Persuasion? Water cannons? Trump has...

Memorial Day in my corner of New Hampshire is always the same. A clutch of veterans from the Second World War to the Gulf march round the common, followed by the town band, and the scouts, and the fifth-graders. The band plays "Anchors Aweigh," "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," "God Bless America" and, in an alarming nod to modernity, Ray Stevens' "Everything Is Beautiful (In Its Own Way)" (Billboard No. 1, May 1970). One of the town's selectmen gives a short speech, so do a couple of representatives from state organizations, and then the fifth-graders recite the Gettsyburg Address and...