Free Republic

Hard-Headed Idealist The man who drafted the Bill of Rights later helped Thomas Jefferson conduct a back-channel propaganda war.. Yes, George Washington was the father of our country, but who fathered its politics? Certainly not Washington, who detested the very notion of partisanship and did his best to govern as First Magistrate, above the interests of "faction." His successor, the honest but hyper-irascible John Adams, was temperamentally incapable of cold political calculation, one reason that he was so vulnerable to attack during his single presidential term. Thomas Jefferson, who cultivated an above-the-fray, nonpolitical persona, had a keen private appreciation of...

Najaf and Falluja are the open sores on the body of Iraq. Najaf is the base of radical Shiites, Falluja of former Baathists; one is the hotbed of aspiring tyrants, the other of unemployed tyrants. Tyranny on its way up or down is a volatile state, and we have the task, unlovely and unloved, of dealing with it. The news poses the questions: What do Iraqis want? What, prudently, can we do about it? Michael Moore thinks highly of the Iraqis in arms, since he has compared them to the Minutemen (“They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers...

The trip to the war zone had, perhaps inevitably, the trappings of a stunt, played for photo ops and political advantage. But there was also real substance to it, and a commitment to see the job done. "We were attacked in New York by forces of a failed state," said Senator Hillary Clinton on her Thanksgiving visit to Afghanistan. "We can’t ever forget that, and we can’t ever let it happen again." She criticized various Bush administration policies, as is natural in an ambitious leader of the opposition party. Yet, while some of the suggestions made by her and Senator...

A new ritual has come to the Letters page of The New York Times. Once or twice a week there appears a unit of half a dozen letters responding to the last column by David Brooks. Most of them are from people in high-principled, high-income states—Oregon or Vermont. At least one is from an associate professor at the University of South Central Iowa. All the letters ask the same question: Wu-wu-why did God let Mr. Wigglenose die? They don’t use just those words, though they use the tone. What they actually say is: Ha-ha-how can I be reading this in...

The Lawrence decision has come and gone, and it is now legal in Texas to commit homosexual sodomy—not because the electorate that twice bestowed the governorship on George W. Bush decided this was enlightened social policy, but because the Supreme Court found that the Constitution would have it so. When will gay marriage come to us, by this or some other route? The two sides are already patrolling the no-fly zone of intellectual discourse, spying on each other’s positions and bombing select targets. So far, most of the war of words has been devoted to the effects that gay marriage...

I was having lunch with an earnest socialist who is right as rain on the terror war. He takes the Third World very seriously—seriously enough to study the arguments that its denizens make and to conclude that, when they take the form of Islamo-fascism, they are monstrous: the latest mutation of the totalitarian death cult, after Communism and Nazism. He is glad that the Taliban and Saddam are no more, and he sees more struggle ahead. Yet he is irked with George W. Bush, and yearns for Bill Clinton. Mr. Bush sent Special Forces and the Marines to Afghanistan; Mr....

The powers of the presidency have changed almost beyond recognition since the infancy of the office, when foreign relations were handled by a dozen clerks and diplomats, the armed forces consisted of several thousand soldiers and sailors, and the President himself took months-long summer vacations from the yellow-fever-ravaged capital of Philadelphia or Washington, D.C. One pattern of presidential decision-making was established early on, however. The process is determined not by the office but by who holds it. The first President, George Washington, a veteran officer and a lifelong performer, led from the front; his decisions, clear and direct, were announced—if...

The historian and journalist Richard Brookhiser weighs in on George W. Bush—his management style, his mean streak, his religiosity, and his recovery from alcoholism When George W. Bush took office in January 2001, amidst controversy over the election that had put him there, it was generally assumed that his presidency would not be an especially memorable one. After all, the picture of Bush that had emerged from the preceding campaign was not impressive. Many saw him as a privileged, none-too-bright underachiever with a shaky command of both national and international affairs. It quickly became clear, however, that Bush would...