Free Republic

Dear Sen. Tim Scott: Sadly, it is no longer much of a surprise when an official of your party says some racially offensive thing. From calling Barack Obama “uppity” and “boy,” to decrying an imaginary “war on whites,” to declaring the world’s Black and brown nations “s---hole countries,” racial offense has become the Republican brand, as much an identifier of the GOP as elephants in straw hats.

America desperately wanted this book. America desperately needed it, too. That’s why “Fire and Fury,” by journalist Michael Wolff, which purported to be a fly-on-the-wall, inside view of life in the Trump White House, shot to Number One on Amazon.com last week after Donald Trump’s lawyers tried to suppress it. It’s why bookstores had to back order. Unfortunately, Wolff did not deliver the book he promised. Granted, “Fire and Fury” is juicy as a summer peach, filled with gossipy takedowns of pretty much every boldface name in Trump Land. Anthony Scaramucci emerges as “a shameless self promoter,” Kellyanne Conway, as...

I am not normal. This, I learned from a news story 35 years ago. The details have faded with the passage of time, but the gist of it remains clear. Some expert had crunched a bunch of numbers in search of the “average” human being, the planetary norm, and found that she was an 8-year-old Japanese girl, living in Tokyo. I don’t fit that profile; I’m willing to bet you don’t, either. So as a matter of statistical fact, I’m not “normal” and neither are you. I went to church with Bruce Jenner. Here's what Caitlyn Jenner taught me about...

In a moment, I will say something you've probably never read in an opinion column. Last week, you see, I wrote about Sarah Palin's attempt to ban books when she was a small-town mayor. In the process, I noted that "we all have questions" for Palin. Among them: "Does she really take the parable of Adam and Eve as literal truth?" Which unleashed a flood of e-mails from people angry that I had demoted the Christian creation story to the status of parable and suggested by implication that anyone who believes it is, as one reader put it, a "fool."...