Free Republic

It could be anywhere in Arkansas, anywhere in America. It's the kind of place that William Longs come from — young people drawn to defend the rest of us. We may scarcely think about them until we see those uniforms at an airport. Or until something like this happens, and it dawns on us that it is from such places that we get the best of our best, those who seem to have duty in their very bones.

John McCain has made a number of heroic contributions to American politics and life, but this law isn't one of them. How in the world did he ever wind up sponsoring this monstrosity? The only excuse I can come up with is that he got involved with bad company. Namely, the very epitome of liberal -- excuse me, progressive -- excess, Russ Feingold. Sen. Feingold's proposals regularly disappoint, but by now they no longer surprise. Justice Kennedy now has figured it out: The whole statute fails the constitutional test. It is an infringement on free speech -- an injury and...

For about as long as some of us can remember, there have been proposals around to junk the Electoral College and find some other way to elect a president of the United States. Whether a new system should be devised was a national debate question when I was in high school, and that was a long, long time ago. Yet for all the dissatisfaction with the Electoral College over the years, no one has been able to sell the American people on an alternative. The alternatives do change from time to time, and their very prolixity is another sign that...

--Dear Conservative, Yes, I know, these are times that try conservatives' souls. The sunshine soldiers left long ago, and we survivors are left to sit on the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of our favorite theories. I get a lot of calls from patients like you, still in mourning after the presidential election. Here is Dr. Greenberg's Rx for the political blues: Remember that the political pendulum swings back as surely as it did forth, this time after a long period when conservative ideas--and candidates--were in the ascendant. It's that old Hegelian three-step: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. In...

There was a small but revealing moment on the final night of the editorial writers' convention here in Little Rock not long ago. Our distinguished guest speaker of the liberal persuasion was waxing nostalgic for the heady time when the old Fairness Doctrine ruled the airwaves and all was right with the world of broadcast opinion. For in those days impartial government bureaucrats enforced the rule that, for every opinion voiced on radio and television, equal time had to be allotted to its opposite, and all was right with the world. It all sounds fair enough - like so many...

It happened at still another of those periodic post-mortems on the Arkansas Gazette. One of the mourners in attendance was complaining that today's Democrat-Gazette hadn't published enough positive news about Bill Clinton during his presidency. I noticed that the comment was enough to merit a strained smile from at least one member of the audience--Rex Nelson.     Rex is now on Governor Mike Huckabee's staff, but he was out in the newsroom at the start of the Clinton Years, when he was the Democrat-Gazette's political editor. Lest we forget, that was a time when the prospect of having a president ...

"I know who I am." - Mrs. Rose Castorini in "Moonstruck," explaining to the young jerk of a professor why she wasn't about to take him up on his offer of a warm bed. Before she delivered her maiden speech at a national nominating convention, preparatory to that same convention's nominating her for vice president of the United States, there was the strangest fluttering among the coveys of the always Angry Left. The wildest rumors were being spread about the lady governor from Alaska, and about her family. Just look at her hairdo. She's got to be some kind of...

Old dogs can learn new tricks after all. John McCain fooled us all, again. This time the old rascal went north to Alaska for his running mate. He got the whole o-so-savvy commentariat rummaging through the Internet trying to find out just who is this Sarah Palin. Is that Sarah with the "H" or without? Pay-lin? How ya spell that? Sweetheart, get me rewrite!One thing for sure: A McCain administration -- is that the first time I've used that term? Does that mean it's becoming possible? -- could certainly be trusted to keep national security secrets. At least to judge...

No wonder Barack Obama got such a tepid reception this week at the Veterans of Foreign Wars' convention. The better the United States does in Iraq, the worse he looks. If only his strategy had been followed. His presidential campaign would be sitting pretty at this point instead of struggling to maintain a once comfortable lead. Iraq would still be Issue No. 1 instead of the economy, and he would be making the most of it - instead of events in Iraq working to his political disadvantage. It's been a long McGovern summer for Sen. Obama as his lead in...

The Hon. Barack Obama hasn't yet reached Clintonesque levels of slickness, but this presidential campaign is still young and a whole summer of broken promises and general disenchantment with the Saint of Hyde Park has begun to set in. For all its smooth, Internetted aspects, the Obama campaign begins to develop overtones of George McGovern's crack-up in the summer of 1972. Sen. McGovern was the beneficiary that year of the Democrats' newly rigged nominating system, which remains much the same. This year it allowed Barack Obama to cinch his party's nomination even as his rival was sweeping the popular vote...

This time it's a duly certified, establishment-vetted, card-carrying member of the Mainstream Media who's been caught, tried and convicted by the always watchful PC Police. This time it was no Howard Stern or Don Imus, or even a football coach lettin' 'er rip at a press conference. This time it was NBC's own, always respectable if not downright pedestrian Andrea Mitchell, aka Mrs. Alan Greenspan. Goodness. What did she do? It seems the lady went and referred to an area of southwestern Virginia as "redneck, sort of bordering-on-Appalachia country." Ooh-wee!The linguistically delicate of southwestern Virginia are still squealing. These easily...

In the event you haven't noticed, it's a presidential election year. You can tell by the ever-growing flurry of conspiracy theories - not just delicious new ones like Barack Obama's being some kind of Manchurian Candidate for Jihad Inc., but old ones that, even if they've grown stale and wormy by now, can be pulled off the shelf and re-issued as a brand-new congressional report. Like the 170-page piece of work just out of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The precarious burden of this report is that the evil crew in the White House systematically exaggerated the threat that Saddam Hussein's...

Barack Obama chose St. Paul, Minn., to stage his victory or at least near-victory rally Tuesday night. It was a good way to stick a thumb in John McCain's eye, since the Republicans have chosen to hold their national convention at the same arena. Yet he overlooked the historical connotations of that site. Beautiful downtown St. Paul is where Walter Mondale delivered his concession speech after one of the most lopsided defeats in the history of American presidential elections - Ronald Reagan's 49-state sweep in 1984.

The day's news continues to deliver a bountiful crop of theories, explanations, analyses, opinions and observations that I don't for a minute believe. For example: Raising the tax on capital gains is going to produce more capital. But when you tax something, aren't you bound to make it less, not more, plentiful? This brilliant idea is as sound as putting a "windfall profits" tax on the oil industry and expecting it to produce more oil. Didn't we try this with the Carter administration at the tag end of the 1970s? The results were as disappointing as much of the rest...

Ever notice how Barack Obama handles a question from a real person, as opposed to one of us annoying media types? Even a question that challenges his position? It's a thing of beauty. Watch him at one of his forums. He listens patiently, nods his head sympathetically, and seems to share his questioner's point of view. He identifies. He then begins his answer by restating the question, often enough in more persuasive form than the original. He doesn't so much entertain a question as improve it. Only after he has established a bond between himself and his critic does he...

There are some names in the obituary columns that say more than the voices of the living. Such is the name of Dith Pran, who died in New Brunswick, N.J., March 30 at age 65. He was the Cambodian photographer who somehow survived the collection of killing fields that his country became after the Americans abandoned it. And who somehow made his way to the United States to tell the world about it. Millions of his countrymen lost their lives after the Khmer Rouge swept into Phnom Penh and began rounding up unreliable types — i.e., just about anyone who...

It happens. Or rather it didn't happen. How many of us can remember an event, often full of emotional overtones, that didn't happen? It's a common enough experience to have a name: false memory. Just how that false memory forms and is reinforced over the years can be left to the psychologists to explain in detail. Maybe first we exaggerate what happened, then elaborate the imagined memory with each retelling, especially to ourselves. And before we know it, we've fully incorporated the event into our dramatic life story. Our ever-absorbent psyches could put any ordinary screenplay to shame. Maybe that's...

First came the woman in mourning, eager to do the right thing even before first light. Could she have slept at all? Did she toss and turn through the night, after the empty sabbath that had made a mockery of all she once believed? For it was all over now, as she must have known even as she set out weeping. All hope was lost, all belief shattered. Death had won once more. In place of faith, all she could do was go through the motions, forget and go on. Isn't that what they always tell mourners? Such is the...

American history is so remarkably continuous, like American institutions, that sometimes it’s scarcely necessary to consult the history books to find out what some past political cause was like. We need only observe a current one. Consider Ron Paul. The man is this year’s perfect historical artifact. He’s running for president in 2008, but he could have stepped right out of 1888, or 1898, when populism was all the rage, literally. It was Mary Ellen Lease, one of the great populist fire-eaters of the time, who urged restive Kansas farmers to raise less corn and more hell. The populist impulse...

History is up to its old tricks again. The radical agitator of one generation becomes the conservative icon of another. Martin Luther King Jr. meets the very definition of an American conservative, that is, someone dedicated to preserving the gains of a liberal revolution. Even when he was leading the civil rights movement, what appeal could have been more conservative or more American than his now classic speech before the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963? "I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is...