Free Republic

“. . . this time the story has escaped the narrative guardrails and some real reckoning looms.” —Jeff Childers Unwittingly, that New York Times headline is a wondrous case of the self-solving mystery. You come here to understand the many social and political mysteries of the day. I will attempt to unravel this hairball.Most obviously, the suspect, now dead, in Wednesday’s Minneapolis school shooting was not a “her.” He was a him, a 23-year-old male, Robert Westman, who had been pretending to be a female for some years since undergoing puberty, with the encouragement of his parents and the cultural...

Liberalism isn’t doing so well lately. In fact I’d go so far as to say that liberalism is becoming downright pathological. The disease is progressive (in more ways than one). Precursors were visible as far back as 1964, and again in the 1980s. Yet this latest uspsurege has been building since 2000, and has never yet spread so widely or threateningly across the body politic. The chief symptom of liberal distress is an intense form of denial. Liberals now actually deny that conservatives exist. There are, of course, strange, cartoon-like images that liberals call conservative, yet these bear little resemblence...

Note: This is satire designed to show the ludicrous nature of the media coverage on the Ft. Hood issue. It is not designed to trivialize a terrible event but to make people understand better what happened and how the event is being dangerously distorted.] By Barry Rubin When John Wilkes Booth opened fire on President Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre in April 1865, the media was puzzled. “True, the actor was outspoken in his Confederate sympathies and viewed himself as a Southerner,” said someone who knew him, “but that was no reason he might want Lincoln to be dead.” The...

Telegraph reporter Stephanie Gutmann describes her reaction to Barack Obama’s appearance in Berlin: “After it was over I picked up the phone and called a friend back home. ‘It’s worse than we thought,’ I told him. ‘The guy’s actually crazy.’” Guttman was talking about candidate Obama’s agenda as he presented it that day, in which he promised to take on the terrorists in Afghanistan, take on the drug dealers, rebuild Afghanistan, eliminate the building nuclear threat, secure all loose nukes, decrease arsenals from another era, form a new global partnership that will end terror networks, redistribute wealth, save the planet,...