Free Republic

You don't need a fortune cookie to learn that China isn't playing straight with the rest of the world. The men in Beijing may be taking some of their clues from the most important page of Mao Tse-tung's Little Red Book: "Every Communist must grasp the truth, 'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.'" We've been lulled into thinking the Chinese brand of "free markets" will move that country toward democracy. Maybe someday, eventually, it will. But free markets must be accompanied by personal freedoms and representative government, and that isn't happening. In fact, there are disturbing...

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said Saturday the Al-Jazeera television network promoted terrorism by airing beheadings and other attacks. "If anyone here lived in the Middle East and watched a network like Al-Jazeera day after day after day, even if you were an American you would begin to believe that America was bad," Rumsfeld told an Asian defense conference. "Quite honestly, I do not get up in the morning and think that America is what's wrong with the world. The people that are going on television, chopping off people's heads is what's wrong with the world. "And television networks...

Thirty years ago Saigon fell. I was a company commander in the 2 nd Battalion, 508 th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 82 nd Airborne Division. When our Vietnam veterans cursed the war, I remembered one of the greatest speeches I ever heard - the day the Vietnam peace was announced to my Winter Ranger class in ’73. The senior Ranger Sergeant cursed everything about the Vietnam War and everyone involved, friend or foe, in a poetic rant of imaginative, sincere, foul-mouthed hatred. He swore most passionately about the waste of his buddies’ lives. He blamed everyone and everything he knew to...