Free Republic

With Vladimir Putin’s dispatch of Russian troops into Crimea, our war hawks are breathing fire. Russophobia is rampant and the op-ed pages are ablaze here. Barack Obama should tune them out and reflect on how Cold War presidents dealt with far graver clashes with Moscow. When Red Army tank divisions crushed the Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956, killing 50,000, Eisenhower did not lift a finger. When Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall, JFK went to Berlin and gave a speech. When Warsaw Pact troops crushed the Prague Spring in 1968, LBJ did nothing. When, Moscow ordered Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski to smash...

For two millennia, the birth of Christ has been seen as the greatest event in world history. The moment Jesus was born in a stable in Bethlehem, God became man, and eternal salvation became possible. This date has been the separation point of mankind's time on earth, with B.C. designating the era before Christ, and A.D., anno domino, in the Year of the Lord, the years after. And how stands Christianity today? "Christianity is in danger off being wiped out in its biblical heartlands," says the British think tank Civitas. In Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Ethiopia and Nigeria, Christians face persecution...

John Hope Franklin, the famed black historian at Duke University, once told the incoming freshmen, "The new America in the 21st century will be primarily non-white, a place George Washington would not recognize." In his June 1998 commencement address at Portland State, President Clinton affirmed it: "In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in the United States." The graduates cheered. The Census Bureau has now fixed at 2041 the year when whites become a minority in a country where the Founding Fathers had restricted citizenship to "free white persons" of "good moral character." With...

With a Democratic president’s approval ratings on decline and a loud right-wing opposition, many pundits are harking back to the Clinton days when then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich signed a Contract with America that got Republicans a 60-seat gain in Congress. Pat Buchanan joins them, but only to bash the Contract as “one of the most overrated things in politics.”

On Good Friday, John Demjanjuk, 89 and gravely ill, was ordered deported to Germany to stand trial as an accessory to the murder of 29,000 Jews -- at Sobibor camp in Poland. Sound familiar? It should. It is a re-enactment of the 1986 extradition of John Demjanjuk to Israel to be tried for the murder of 870,000 Jews -- at Treblinka camp in Poland. How many men in the history of this country have been so relentlessly pursued and remorselessly persecuted? The ordeal of this American Dreyfus began 30 years ago. In 1979, the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) at...

PJB: Bailouts Without End by Patrick J. Buchanan - October 13, 1997 The IMF has become the 911 number immediately called in times of trouble by such champions of free markets as Citicorp and Goldman, Sachs. With all that IMF money, the Thailands and Mexicos are spared the consequences of their fiscal incompetence, and Wall Street’s heavy hitters are spared the consequences of their stupid investments. The global economy is a rigged game, rigged so Third World politicians, rich investors and global corporations win — and U.S. taxpayers and workers lose…

That’s right; Pat Buchanan, who is a frequent guest on both Fox News and MSNBC, appeared recently on an infamous “white nationalist” radio show to promote his revisionist World War II book

Yugoslavia is gone, forever. The country that emerged from World War I and Versailles as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, land of the South Slavs, has passed into history. Sunday's vote in Montenegro, a tiny land of fewer people than the Washington, D.C., this writer grew up in, voted Sunday to secede from Belgrade, establish a nation and seek entry into the European Union. In 1991, Macedonia peacefully seceded. Slovenia and Croatia fought their way out, and Bosnia broke free after a war marked by the massacre at Srbenica and NATO intervention. Bosnia is itself subdivided into...

The neoconservatives who dreamed up the Bush Doctrine -- promoting "democracy" would be the U.S. mission in the Middle East -- may be about to hold yet another "Seconds Thoughts" conference. Certainly, Israel must be having second thoughts on the folly of having yielded to U.S. pressure and allowed Hamas to participate in elections. For Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and employs suicide-bomb attacks on civilians, has just won a sweeping political and moral victory in Palestine. Freedom and democracy are on the march, says President Bush. Perhaps. But there is no doubt Islamism is on...

"What is it with the Bush family and debates," asks the former conservative congressman from Florida now attempting to join the liberal elite on BSNBC. Interviewing Al Franken and yukking it up now.

In a few weeks, George Bush will travel to Omaha Beach for the 60th anniversary of D-Day. The image of the American soldier of that "Greatest Generation" is of a selfless and heroic liberator of Europe. It is the image of the soldier we cherish, the ideal we honor with the new memorial on the Mall. Unfortunately, the image of the American soldier the world has seen this week is that of the jailers of Abu Ghraib humiliating hooded and naked Iraqi prisoners of war in their cellblock. Though this was degraded conduct, it does not compare in evil to...

After the blowing up of the Maine in Havana harbor in 1898, McKinley issued a call for 25,000 volunteers to liberate Cuba from Spain. A million responded. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the lines at recruiting stations went around the block. This war is different. It is a war the president and Secretary Powell said they did not want to fight, but must, if Iraq refused to disarm. Thus, on the eve of war, the mood here seemed less one of war enthusiasm than of resignation, and a grim resolve to get it over with. The war debate has...

In many Catholic colleges of yesterday, students had to take 24 course hours of philosophy as a condition of graduation. At the core of the philosophy curriculum was Natural Law, and at the heart of Natural Law was the idea that men, through reason, could come to know how to lead a moral life. Not only could one reason to the existence of God, one could discern His laws for men. And those laws, once discovered, would be found consistent with Catholic teaching and moral doctrine. In Saturday's Washington Post is an illustration of the truth. For in the tragic...