Free Republic

He wasn’t the “great communicator” in the sack. Actress Piper Laurie describes Ronald Reagan -- who played her dad in a movie and then bedded the 18-year-old virgin off the set -- as an insensitive “show-off” in bed in her new memoir, “Learning to Live Out Loud.” Laurie played the teenage daughter of the future president, then 39, in the 1950 film “Louisa.” At the time, Reagan was no longer married to actress Jane Wyman and had not yet started dating Wife No. 2, the former Nancy Davis, when he started flirting with the ingenue, insisting she call him “Ronnie.”...

When I was in Saudi Arabia, I had tea and sweets with a group of educated and sophisticated young professional women. I asked why they were not more upset about living in a country where women’s rights were strangled, an inbred and autocratic state more like an archaic men’s club than a modern nation. They told me, somewhat defensively, that the kingdom was moving at its own pace, glacial as that seemed to outsiders. How could such spirited women, smart and successful on every other level, acquiesce in their own subordination? I was puzzling over that one when it hit...

I read with ashen resignation that Maureen Dowd, the professional spinster of the New York Times, will soon birth a book, no doubt parthogenetically, called Are Men Necessary? The problem apparently is that men have not found Maureen necessary. Hell hath…. Clearly there is something wrong with men. I weary of the self-absorbed clucking of aging poultry. Why is Maureen hermetically single? For starters, she is not just now your classic hot ticket. She’s not just over the hill, but into the mountains, to Grandmother’s house we go. She probably gets more daily maintenance than a 747, but she still...

Maureen Dowd is a name known to many men due to her status as one of the most prominent male bashers of our day. Indeed, with a recently released book entitled, Are Men Necessary?, she should no longer be dismissed as an annoying flibbertigibbet. While her silly rhymes and nicknames give her writing an undeniable airheadedness, her gargantuan audience and tenacious obsession with men make her a formidable adversary. Furthermore, as much as I would like to hold otherwise, I don’t think her views are that disparate from those of other older single women. Dowd was once a well-known reporter...

Poor Karl Rove. He spends close to two years meticulously staging photo ops and carefully crafting sound bites to create the image of President Bush as a take-charge, man-the-controls, land-the-jet-on-the-deck-of-the-aircraft carrier, "Bring 'em on" kind of leader. But now the latest revelations about the Misstatement of the Union fiasco are threatening to bring back the old notion of W as a bumbling, detached figurehead-in-chief. And it's the president's own people who are painting this unflattering portrait. Take George Tenet: While robotically impaling himself on his sword, the CIA director took great pains to point out that he thought so little...