Free Republic

A military parade may soon look less like a VE-Day parade down Times Square and more like a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans, unless liberals in leadership stop using the U.S. military as a social engineering experiment. Let us not forget the same president who confused "corps" with "corpses" and exchanged a traitor for terrorists, also promised to fundamentally transform America. What we didn't know is that transformation would begin with the U.S. military, the protector of our nation and our values. The wussification of our military is in full swing, thanks to all the empty suit "yes-men" clad...

Way back when, the closest thing to a "smoking ban" had to do with the age at which you could legally buy cigarettes. I think it was 12 or 13. After that, about half the teenage population seemed to be lighting up at least once an hour. At Morgan Park High School, where I spent four years in the 1960s, there was a white line on the sidewalk a block away from the school building. That marked the point where the high school determined kids could smoke. It didn't stop the hard-core smokers who really needed to feed their habit...

PC HYMNS? I personally love all the great old Protestant hymns that I grew up with -- despite my now being an unbeliever. So I felt that the cartoon below (backup here) really hit home: Maybe I am a sentimental old fool but, as a tribute to the wonderful original, I am going to reprint the whole of it below. You can hear one rendition of the music here. If certain unhappy souls in Paris at the moment had grown up with this hymn, the world would be a better place: Amazing grace! How sweet the sound That saved a...

In 1988, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, president of the Modern Language Association, authoritatively stated (as something too obvious to require any evidence) that classic literature was always irrelevant to underprivileged people who were not classically educated. It was, she asserted, an undeniable "fact that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare do not figure significantly in the personal economies of these people, do not perform individual or social functions that gratify their interests, do not have value for them." One should not be too hard on Professor Smith. She was merely echoing what was, at the time, standard academic opinion: that the Western classics...

Administration blasts Diamondback cartoon By Jason Flanagan Senior staff writer University officials, student leaders and a U.S. congressman blasted The Diamondback yesterday for publishing an editorial cartoon about the death of American pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie, calling the cartoon tasteless and the newspaper an embarrassment to the university. Officials were outraged by the March 18 editorial cartoon, which depicted Corrie, who was killed Sunday in Gaza after a bulldozer ran her over, as showing "stupidity" for protecting a "gang of terrorists." Their opinions reflect most of the approximately 2,000 e-mails and hundreds of phone calls The Diamondback received in the...