Free Republic

Paris – It's not news to stop anyone's press that if Old Europe could vote, John Kerry would win in a landslide. In one poll of French preference, the senator ran up 90 percent of the vote. Saddam Hussein didn't do much better than that in the bad old days in Baghdad. But all the reasons why aren't always obvious. The day after Sept. 11, the Paris newspaper Le Monde famously declared that "Today we are all Americans." That reads now like a dispatch from the War of 1812. Sit down for an espresso in a sidewalk café on the...

George W. Bush is not necessarily the wittiest man to campaign for president since Abraham Lincoln's dry wit drove his detractors to distraction, but he's capable of the occasional zinger. When John Kerry finally answered a crucial question posed by the president andsaid that, yes, he would have voted to go into Iraq to depose SaddamHussein even if he knew he wouldn't find a stockpile of weapons of massdestruction, the president replied with deadly deadpan: "I want to thank Senator Kerry for clearing that up," he said. "Although there are still 84 days left in the campaign."

Marlon Brando may have possessed the greatest talent of any American actor of the past 100 years, but for most of his career, he wasted that talent. Charley Malloy: Look, kid, I -- how much you weigh, son? When you weighed one hundred and sixty-eight pounds you were beautiful. You coulda been another Billy Conn, and that skunk we got you for a manager, he brought you along too fast. Terry Malloy: It wasn't him, Charley, it was you. Remember that night in the Garden you came down to my dressing room and you said, "Kid, this ain't your night....

Oy vay , as my bubby would say. A lot of Jews will vote Republican this year. Bubby's spinning in the great beyond. Most Jews vote Democratic, and they have for a long time. They have voted in huge majorities for Democratic nominees since FDR created the New Deal. Several Republican nominees since have only occasionally increased Jewish voting percentages. Dwight D. Eisenhower won 40 percent of the Jewish vote against Adlai Stevenson in 1956; Ronald Reagan won 39 percent against Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush won 35 percent against Michael Dukakis in 1988. He slipped to...

It's the juice, stupid. That is the admonition that Bill Clinton should have got from his editors at Alfred A. Knopf. And he would have done well to listen. The juice about what really went on with the dozens of unofficial women in his official life is what everyone, scribes and pharisees most of all, wanted. Mark Steyn, the deliciously acerbic columnist who writes from the wilds of New Hampshire, describes the ex-president as "a cheesy Vegas lounge act acknowledging the applause of the crowd before launching into his opening number, 'I Get a Kick Out of Me.' " Tina...

<p>Dick Morris is a weatherman. He predicts a perfect storm for Hurricane Hillary in 2008, when the political winds, stars and currents align themselves in Hillary Clinton's favor and she rides a huge wave back to the White House, this time as president.</p>

The remake of "The Stepford Wives," now playing at a theater near you, could have been a fascinating movie. Too bad, the new version is a dull-witted, ditzy, dated and campy version of the 1975 flick about men who set out to get total control over their mates. The new version should have depicted career women as the authors of the robots, assigned to replace the new generation of women who are turning their backs on work beyond the hearth. The career women have declared war on stay-at-home mommies with the vengeance that the Stepford husbands applied to stereotyping their...

We've had two weeks of nostalgia and patriotism, celebrating the World War II generation and mourning the death of Ronald Reagan. We've waved flags, embraced heroes and drawn tears in remembrance of things past, of good times and bad in another time and another country. We lifted voices in prayers of thanksgiving for the good fortune to live in a country that cherishes democracy. We honored those who sacrificed their lives for the freedom of the rest of us. But that was then. With spring surrendering to summer and as we move closer to another election campaign, we'll once more...

The glory of America is that there are many Americas, red and blue, North and South, conservative and liberal, secular and religious, and the strength of our great experiment is that we've found a pot big enough to melt it all down. We've actually made alchemy work. What makes alchemy work, of refining gold from baser metals, is the optimism that infuses the American spirit. The good news is that despite the nay-saying in media and in academe, the crucial optimism we've always counted on is alive and well. Two new public-opinion polls, for example, find that we still have...

The Washington Timeswww.washingtontimes.com Morning in AmericaBy Suzanne FieldsPublished June 7, 2004          The glory of America is that there are many Americas, red and blue, North and South, conservative and liberal, secular and religious, and the strength of our great experiment is that we've found a pot big enough to melt it all down. Ronald Reagan spoke for all those Americas.     The death of the 40th president follows, almost as if by design of a larger hand, two new public-opinion polls finding that the confidencewe have always held in our public institutions is intact, and that even when we're unhappy...

It was a perfect Washington evening, warm with just a hint of the summer to come, a tiny crescent of a moon climbing into the eastern sky to replace the sun sinking behind a grove of elms. The Washington Monument pointing toward the clouds reminded the men, women and children out for a stroll that in America, troubled though we are in the midst of a war that many are reluctant to acknowledge as war, the sky is still the only limit to the nation's aspirations. Across the Mall, the Lincoln Memorial loomed with elegant gravitas, testifying that the government...

<p>We weep for Nick Berg as we wept for Daniel Pearl, and for all men and women who sacrifice their lives for standing up for freedom amidst the cruelty of war.</p> <p>Mr. Berg did not choose to be a hero, but his death is a painful and expensive reminder of the nature of the war we fight. We're at war against cowardswho murderfor thejoyof killing "infidels" in a demented interpretation of Islam. We're at war against hate-crazed zealots who take innocent lives as testimony to a cheap imagination of manhood.</p>

There's a new religion in the world, and it's growing among young, old, men, women, black, white, red, yellow and pink, and the rituals of the faith are fun, fun, fun. America-bashing, writes John Parker in the Asia Times, "has ascended from its former status as the preoccupation of a relative handful of Jurassic Marxists, professional victims, Third World whiners, and Islamo-fascist troglodytes to the level of a major new global religion." America-bashing is addictive, born of power envy and nurtured by power lust among the weak, the cowardly and craven. That's bad enough, but the consequences are even worse....

The quest for homosexual marriage is a quest for convention and conformity over viva la difference. Homosexuals, as a group, have always been distinguished by their attitudes of superiority over bourgeois culture. Gays applaud outrageous behavior and scorn the straight culture as populated by narrow-minded bigots limited by lack of style and imprisoned by moral platitudes. In post-modern society, homosexuals laugh at themselves, secure in the cohesion of secret libidinous codes of conduct. Their stars are the creative leaders in theater, art, poetry, high fashion and haute cuisine. Freed of the constraints of marriage, they're free to explore guiltless pleasures...

TAKING AIM AT THE ARMS SUPPLIERS IN THE CULTURE WARSuzanne Fields March 8, 2004 You could almost think that Rosie O'Donnell is an angry heterosexual on a selfless mission. That photograph of her kissing her new "wife" inflicted more damage on the same-sex marriage movement than a dozen sermons. In-your-face exhibitionism doesn't sell well in the cheap seats. The effects of Rosie's wet kiss was just one straw in a freshening wind. Culture critics focus on the divisions - right vs. left, conservative vs. liberal, the faithful vs. secularists, red states vs. blue - but common decency, common sense and...

<p>The liberal revival of the Vietnam War in this election year is an exercise in nostalgia. For the baby boomers who played through those days of rage, it's like "they're playing our song." It's a revival of the energy of idealism in the service of revolution, "us against them" in the sensual pleasures ofprotest.TheSouthof Faulkner's telling is right, after all: The past is not dead, the past is not even past.</p>

In this season of the Democratic primaries, everything is perceived in dichotomies of red and blue. We're reminded that the electorate is evenly divided, that ideology is rampant and that the voter sees the issues in negatives and positives. Polls suggest that George W. Bush will get a large majority of the white male vote and John Kerry will get a majority of the female vote. Conservatives are supposed to appeal to the NASCAR dad, the hard-drinking, hard-living workingman in the stands at the Daytona 500. Democrats will get the vote of the softer, socially conscious liberal ladies. "Democrats trolling...

The biggest difference between Sen. John Kerry and President Bush is not what they did during the Vietnam War but what they've done during the War in Iraq. Mr. Kerry voted for going to war in Iraq based on what he knew when he knew it, just like the president. Later, when he felt the windsin the Democratic Party shifting, he voted against appropriating the money to support the American troops dispatched to liberate Iraq from the forces of hell. As a critic of the president's war policy, he joins a pantheon of posturers who thrive on second guesses. But...

'Til death do us party Suzanne Fields (archive) February 12, 2004 Cupid's working overtime this Valentine's Day, and he's getting a little help from his friends, including George W. Bush. The president has asked Congress for more than $1 billion to promote, stabilize and strengthen marriage, especially for low-income Americans. But it's the culture that needs help. We could probably learn a thing or two from Amelia Limpert, age 100, who was married for 82 years. Her husband died the other day at 102. They broke off their engagement three times. But one day in 1921 they jumped into George's...

Only six decades ago, the world gasped in horror at the grim handiwork of man's inhumanity to man with the liberation of Auschwitz. Every January 27 since, several European countries, including Sweden, Denmark, England, Italy and Germany, have called up memories of death and destruction to remember. With tears and public discussion of the cruelty reckoned as unique, they try to understand something that cannot be understood. For most of these 60 years, the civilized world took consolation in the certain belief that "never again." The representatives of the European nations gathered once more to mark Jan. 27, but this...