Free Republic

Freud was supposed to be a wise man, but he could never answer the question "What do women want?" When he suggested that women who want the power and authority to be like men suffer "penis envy," he coined a modern myth. He didn't get it quite right, but the meaning behind his diagnosis became a driving force of modern feminism. (You could ask the women running for president.) A half-century after Freud, ambitious women saw their chance. With the pill, affirmative action, college education, and careers, they felt free not to marry. And today, they're marrying later and marrying...

Only yesterday the Democrats in the U.S. Senate were giddy with the idea that Judge Brett Kavanaugh had united the women of America, who would pressure their senators to do him in. But the campaign to confirm Kavanaugh for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court is beginning to look like ladies' day at the baseball park. Successfully casting Kavanaugh as Harvey Weinstein will be difficult. Eighteen of the 25 women who have served as Kavanaugh law clerks, who know the judge best, signed a letter (the other seven couldn't sign because of current or pending employment elsewhere) describing "uniformly...

Whoa. Stop the music. When Ethel Merman belted out "There's no business like show business" as Annie Oakley in "Annie Get Your Gun," a little girl could have been forgiven for believing it. On Broadway in 1946, the stars of showbiz, like the stars across the Milky Way, were protected by myths of glamour and mystery, and the studios could keep the bad stuff out of the newspapers. Naughty deeds went undiscovered and unlamented. "Annie Get Your Gun" posed other myths for women to live by. Annie took on her rival, a macho cowboy, and she let him know that...

'Tis the season to be merry, and we need a little merriment this season. This year, the passage of time between two holidays of the spirit, Hanukkah and Christmas, is short, focusing attention once more on the Judeo-Christian moorings of America. Every year we honor the ways Christians and Jews appeal to what they hold in common in exhortations. But like so much else in our high-tech, 24/7 media world, differences are magnified and politicized. Political overtones have always influenced how we celebrate our holidays, but not until now has so much attention been paid. President Donald Trump is...

While we're examining the accomplishments of Donald Trump's first hundred days -- putting his man on the U.S. Supreme Court is the biggie -- Hillary Clinton is getting the once-over (and the second and third) for all the reasons why she's not the first woman to preside over her first hundred days in the Oval Office. She never understood that "the fault, dear Hillary, is not in the stars, but in yourself." In "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign," the book Washington, D.C., is talking about, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes write a sweeping drama with lots of supporting actors...

The presidential candidates are scrambling in the wake of the Wisconsin primary to manipulate images of women, forcing them into caricatures of whatever stereotype works. Spouses are thrust into a limelight they haven't sought, and everybody's looking for gaffe, grit (true and otherwise) and glamour. Presidential styles have changed since George Washington escorted Martha Washington, with great fanfare, on a barge from New Jersey to New York City, the temporary U.S. capital. This was the beginning of an American tradition of presidents' wives participating both formally and informally in presidential rituals and ceremonies. Martha Washington was never expected to campaign....

While the Donald tries to overcome his reputation as an over-the-top television entertainer so he might support his ambition to become president, Hillary Clinton is running for comedienne-in-chief. She went on "Saturday Night Live" to trade her high seriousness for laughs. Neither candidate will seal the deal the way they're trying to do it. The Donald, who's used to dishing it out, exposes a thin skin when mocked by other candidates, and his shifting numbers suggest that the jump from reality TV to the White House, even in the age of the outsider, is not an easy one. "The Trump...

When Hillary Clinton first ran for president eight years ago, she learned what Mike Tyson meant when he said, "Everyone has a plan 'til they get punched in the mouth." Her campaign collapsed under Barack Obama's relentless pounding. Lawrence Freedman, who was foreign policy adviser to Tony Blair when he was the British prime minister, opened his 750-page examination of the best-laid strategies, "Strategy: A History," with Mike Tyson's advice. Hillary and all the presidential candidates should pay attention. It could be instructive. Mr. Freedman demonstrates how a study of strategy is crucial for everyone who succeeds on the field...

A widely distributed political cartoon by Ranan Lurie, published after the massacre of four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris, depicts a tiny shrub above ground, and just below the surface, supporting the plant, is a web of thick twisted roots spread in the design of the swastika. These Nazi roots are more than a cartoonist's imagination, carefully tended by the anti-Semites of France, exposed when the French rounded up their Jews, men, women and children, and shipped them to the death camps of World War II. If the cartoonist had dug deeper, he could have drawn the roots...

Let's face it. Anthony Weiner is the comic relief we've been seeking: sexualized politics without a moral message. Salacious texting, a parody of sensual touching, doesn't depend on the meaning of "is" or "was." Vice in virtual reality is sexuality-lite, superficial fantasy, timorous titillation, shadows in the shallows of the Internet. Bill Clinton's affair with Monica has become so yesteryear. The former president is an aging adulterer from an earlier time. He broke ground in getting a public pass on his behavior, but he doesn't want Huma and Anthony to sweep Hill and Bill into a satirical performance they can't...

Newt Gingrich is a fat target for everyone. So easy to hit. He makes the others in the race jump up, down and sometimes leap sideways, like it or not. He shakes things up. He forces voters to look differently at things they thought they already understood, lulled by habit rather than thought. That may not be the ultimate role for a leader of the Western world, but for now he's the pause that refreshes. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his relationship to the Jews. When he said the Palestinians are "an invented people," he was speaking not...

God will not be mocked, as the Scriptures tell us, but the pundits and politicians keep trying. Rick Perry is bringing out both the believers and the scoffers. This is a phenomenon that seems to happen with the presidential cycles. Jimmy Carter was born again, Barack Obama was once the messiah, and his followers -- millions of them -- thought he could walk on water. Now not even Michelle is sure he could walk to Alexandria without getting wet to the knees. All that is gone with the wind and Irene's rain. Perry, who has turned the Republican primary race...

Conservatives have a new celebrity spokesman-writer-thinker-philosopher. David Mamet, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, movie director and sometime essayist, has come out of the closet. No longer, he declares, is he a "brain-dead liberal." Now he's a wide-awake conservative. Some time after arriving in Hollywood, of all places, and at age 60, he engaged in a conversation with his Republican rabbi (where did he find one?), who gave him the books of conservative writers, such as Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Milton Friedman and Paul Johnson. He had a dramatic political conversion. Mamet re-evaluated his own heroes, starting with the playwright Bertolt...

Rep. Michele Bachmann, founder of the Tea Party caucus in the new Congress, gave more than a response to President Obama‘s State of the Union speech Tuesday night. She gave us a look at the new political woman in Washington. Some of the old Republican bulls looked as if they were suffering a bad bout of indigestion. She’s treading on old toes. She acquitted herself with poise and power, and that’s what’s scary to the party establishment. When Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann got together during the midterm election campaigns, they were dismissed by certain politicians and pundits as “Thelma...

"True Grit" is a tale whose time had come and gone. It's the good fortune of a new generation that its time has come again. The novel by Charles Portis, which sold only about 25,000 copies between 2007 and 2009, has been bought by 10,000 new readers since the new version of the movie opened this month. In an age when twittering conversation is limited to 140 characters, where children become chubby couch potatoes changing channels with a remote control or playing war games moving fantasy soldiers around on a screen, Mattie Ross is an authentic heroine -- lean, mean,...

We're going to seduce them with our square footage, and our discounts, and our deep armchairs, and our cappuccino. They're going hate us at the beginning. ... But we'll get 'em in the end because we're going to sell them cheap books and legal addictive stimulants. We'll just put up a big sign: "Coming soon: a FoxBooks superstore and the end of civilization as you know it. Such were the sentiments of the 1998 movie comedy "You've Got Mail," spoken by Joe Fox (portrayed by Tom Hanks) articulating the strategy of a big chain bookstore. FoxBooks was a fictional representation...

Scott Brown arrives in Washington driving his famous truck, and he looks like a million dollars -- Jimmy Stewart playing Mr. Smith. President Obama polishes his State of the Union Address and suddenly he's looking discounted to more like a few thousand dollars. The two events are not unrelated. The president will speak to the joint session of Congress next week as his approval ratings have fallen from a high of 70 percent a year ago to less than 50 percent, proving once more that in politics nothing recedes like success. At this time last year, Obama was President Possibility,...

The Academy Awards have expanded the number of best picture nominations to 10, and the buzz on Planet Earth is all about "Avatar." Conservatives are enraged at the movie's anti-American, anti-military, pro-primitive themes, but they should understand that most spectators won't care what the movie has to say. They'll just enjoy the 3-D spectacle, fun in spite of politics. Adults ought to see it with a teenager. It's an expensive ticket that will be appreciated, and you can shape the discussion afterward. watched it with a precocious 14-year-old who has managed to escape the politically correct didacticism of education today....

When my mother was in her late 80s, I took her to a lawyer's office one sunny day to sign her "living will." We read over the questions and her answers, and she signed on the dotted line. She was pleased with the decisions that she had made weeks before. We went shopping afterward, and she bought an antique watch that caught my eye in a shop window. This was an appropriate gift, she joked, because she had named me to be in charge of her "lifetime." If the time should come that a doctor asks whether to prolong her...

Barack Obama was a rock star on the campaign trail and his aura went undimmed in his first few months of office. But then he began taking too many curtain calls. The applause subsided, but he kept coming back to center stage to try harder to wow us. He forgot what every star must learn, that you've got to know when to get off that center stage. If you don't have anything new to say, shut up. This applies even to presidents. He's reaching for applause lines with the same ol' same ol'. So his poll numbers begin to shrink....