Free Republic

As any professional debater will tell you, framing the terms of the debate is more than half the battle. We saw a good example of that in the Republican reaction to Democratic Rep. John Murtha's call for withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. If the choice is between “cutting and running,” which connotes cowardice and weakness, or “staying the course,” which connotes strength and manliness, then of course we will stay the course. Trouble is, that is not the choice offered by Murtha's suggested resolution. Murtha, a battle-scarred ex-Marine, argues that the American military has done all it can be...

Americans should realize that if they vote for President Bush's re-election, they are really voting for the architects of war – Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of that cabal of neoconservative ideologues and their corporate backers. I have sadly come to the conclusion that President Bush is merely a frontman, an empty suit, who is manipulated by the people in his administration. Bush has the most dangerously simplistic view of the world of any president in my memory.

Books keep pouring off the presses on the subject of why George W. Bush should not be re-elected. I got four in my mailbox recently. Bush might be the biggest boon to book publishing since Harry Potter. The most serious of the four books is The Bubble of American Supremacy, by George Soros. The most superficial is Bush Must Go, by TV personality Bill Press. The most left-wing is The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America, by Eric Alterman and Mark Green. It is also the most tedious. My God, but progressive writers do need a sense of...

Americans should realize that if they vote for President Bush's re-election, they are really voting for the architects of war – Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of that cabal of neoconservative ideologues and their corporate backers. I have sadly come to the conclusion that President Bush is merely a frontman, an empty suit, who is manipulated by the people in his administration. Bush has the most dangerously simplistic view of the world of any president in my memory. It's no wonder the president avoids press conferences like the plague. Take away his cue cards and he...

It's ironic that at a time when the whole world is disgusted by pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused by thugs and sluts in American uniforms, an American doctor in Germany reports that Thomas Hamill was reasonably well-treated by his Iraqi kidnappers. A bullet wound received at the time of Hamill's capture had been treated surgically, the wound was cleaned on a daily basis, and Hamill had been given antibiotics, the doctor said. Hamill said that while he was moved frequently, he was not beaten or mistreated after his capture. The significance of the contrasting treatment of prisoners by Iraqi...

> > by Charley Reese > > If you step back a moment and think about it, you will realize that you are > constantly being propagandized to approve of war - not just the wars in > Afghanistan and Iraq, but war generically. > > We should resist. War is killing, maiming and disfiguring human beings. It > is so disgusting and horrible in reality that even the most "realistic" > Hollywood movie sanitizes it. The news media sanitize it. The government > sanitizes war because it doesn't want you to see the coffins. Most of all, > it...

Are You Going To Get Mad? It is now about as clear as it's going to get that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Secretary of State Colin Powell even contradicted himself (in his U.N. speech) by admitting recently that there is no evidence of any link between Saddam and al-Qaida. Prior to the Iraq War, the Bush administration asserted as fact that Saddam had huge quantities of chemical and biological weapons and was actively pursuing nuclear weapons. Administration members ridiculed people who expressed any doubts. Today, after spending millions of dollars looking for the weapons, they haven't...