Free Republic

Do conservative women look for different qualities of masculinity in men than liberal women do? Is sex appeal not so much in the eye, but in a point of view? Do young Republicans and young Democrats have different ideas about "hooking up" (which is what young people call pairing off).Like everything else in the soft science of psychology, it depends on the interpretation you read. Data can be dada. My favorite survey of the season was made by the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative woman's organization that contends with radical feminism with long red nails, good looks, educated smarts...

WOODS HOLE, Mass. - August, not April, is the cruelest month. The days are still long, but with the impatient intensity of the waning summer of boundless sky, yellow sun and white sand, foaming edges of ocean. There's the first hint of melancholy. The children sense it as they pass the drugstore and supermarket shelves of back-to-school supplies, and no matter how playful and colorful the displays, the evidence is irrefutable. Summer's in retreat. But summer isn't what it used to be, anyway, such is the power of nostalgia, even in an idyll like Woods Hole, with the diffident sophistication...

<p>The Ugly American, like the wicked witch, is dying and almost gone, a fading memory of the Cold War. He was a caricature mostly of European snobbery, the uncultured tourist in a Hawaiian shirt, smoking a cheap cigar, speaking English in exclamation points, demanding directions to the Mona Lisa, the bullfight or Big Ben.</p>

<p>The "new" anti-Semitism is as virulent as ever, but it's often easy for Americans — Christian and Jew alike — not to notice.</p> <p>Christians and Jews get along here. Evangelical Christians have become some of the best friends Jews have, and, for their part, most Jews are not as suspicious of Evangelical motives as they once were. Since the anti-Semites abroad regard America as the great Satan and Israel the little Satan, we all feel equal-opportunity hate.</p>

Just when you think the politically correct clowns on the campus can't get any more ridiculous, they shoot another live white man out of a canon. Steve Hinkle is an undergraduate at California Polytechnic University. He has been found guilty in the campus kangaroo court of posting a flier on a student bulletin board offending the sensibilities of a small group of students so intellectually fragile they belong in a day-care center. The flier invited one and all to a speech by Mason Weaver, a black man, author of a book called "It's OK To Leave the Plantation," comparing black...

I'm good enough. I'm smart enough, and doggonit, people like me." That was Al Gore, in mock (or maybe not so mock) therapy on "Saturday Night Live" with a 12-step guru played by comedian Al Franken. Who knew then that his recaptured confidence would one day make him a network television chief wannabe. He's trying to round up rich Democrats to establish a cable television network that Time magazine describes as a "liberal alternative" to conservative talk, radio and television. Doggonit, if people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, why won't they like Al? One wag suggests Al could save...

When a successful (single) career woman pokes fun at women with babies in strollers, you know she's either feeling unsure of the choices she's made or she's down to her last idea for a Father's Day column. Maureen Dowd, femme fatalist for the New York Times, may be feeling a little woozy after the sturm and drang at her newspaper. Maybe we should cut her a little slack. But knocking motherhood? She describes women who have left careers to be full-time mothers as "Stepford wives" addicted to spending their days at Starbucks. She hates it that they actually enjoy "gabbing...

<p>Conservatives are winning the argument. Anybody who watches the Democratic candidates for president can see and hear the donkeys braying, usually at each other, and reacting, not acting. Like it or not, the creative ideas in foreign policy and on the domestic front are coming from the right.</p>

How young conservatives got their groove Young conservatives achieved prominence on campuses across the nation by zooming in under the radar. Now they've even made the cover of the New York Times magazine, the bastion of politically correct liberalism. The Times limited its focus to one campus, Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., and that's too bad. The politically correct armies of Mailer-lite are in retreat in a lot of other places as well. Tenured liberal professors who have dominated campus politics since the 1970s haven't been knocked off their pedestals - not yet - but moss is spreading at their...

The conservative ladies do GothamSuzanne Fields (archive) May 19, 2003 | Print | SendNot so long ago, the New York editors and publishers of books regarded the "conservative woman" as an oxymoron. They shared the sensibility of radical feminists who once called Kay Bailey Hutchinson, the Republican senator from Texas, "a female impersonator." Women writers and women readers were liberal or they didn't exist.A decade ago, I wrote a book proposal with the title, "Women Without Men," examining the sad effects of feminism, among them that radical feminism had deprived a lot of women of men. A senior male editor...

<p>When George H.W. Bush chose Dan Quayle as his running mate in 1988, one of the persuasive considerations of the Republican strategists was that the senator's good looks would appeal to the ladies. Dan Quayle was cute.</p> <p>The vice president himself noted later, that the praise was not only faint but dumb and condescending. Dan Quayle's "good looks" were out of sync with the times and he became the administration's dumb blonde. The boyish, milk-fed frat guy from the Middle West lacked the masculine gravitas that baby boomers, both men and women, craved.</p>

<p>When George H.W. Bush chose Dan Quayle as his running mate in 1988, one of the persuasive considerations of the Republican strategists was that the senator's good looks would appeal to the ladies. Dan Quayle was cute.</p> <p>The vice president himself noted later, that the praise was not only faint but dumb and condescending. Dan Quayle's "good looks" were out of sync with the times and he became the administration's dumb blonde. The boyish, milk-fed frat guy from the Middle West lacked the masculine gravitas that baby boomers, both men and women, craved.</p>

Norman Mailer, down for the count Suzanne Fields May 15, 2003 When George H.W. Bush chose Dan Quayle as his running mate in 1988, one of the persuasive considerations of the Republican strategists was that the senator’s good looks would appeal to the ladies. Dan Quayle was cute. The vice president himself noted later that the praise was not only faint but dumb and condescending. Dan Quayle’s “good looks” were out of sync with the times and he became the administration’s dumb blonde. The boyish, milk-fed frat guy from the Middle West lacked the masculine gravitas that baby boomers, both...

<p>The culture wars have entered a new phase and the feds have the big guns. They've put the politically correct educationists on the run, overwhelming them with intellectual firepower, campaigning to restore the teaching of civics and American history to the nation's schools.</p>

Politics is all about polarities. Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal, right vs. left, hard thinking vs. soft thinking. The labels are pervasive, but the ground frequently shifts, requiring a new prefix to freshen up the label. The word neocon, for example (short for neoconservative), was born of such a shifting of the ground. Coined in the 1970s, the label stuck to Democrats who had watched the Scoop Jackson anti-Communist wing of the Democratic party evaporate before their very eyes. They saw the War on Poverty become a losing battle. On the domestic front, they observed the death of morality...

Politics is all about polarities. Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal, right vs. left, hard thinking vs. soft thinking. The labels are pervasive, but the ground frequently shifts, requiring a new prefix to freshen up the label. The word neocon, for example (short for neoconservative), was born of such a shifting of the ground. Coined in the 1970s, the label stuck to Democrats who had watched the Scoop Jackson anti-Communist wing of the Democratic party evaporate before their very eyes. They saw the War on Poverty become a losing battle. On the domestic front, they observed the death of morality...

If Iraq's National Museum had not been looted, the conspiracy theorists - the antiwar, anti-Bush commentators and protestors - would have had to invent the story. Instead, they merely invented the story of how it happened. Here are some of the interpretations racing across the Internet from loony to loony. George W. Bush is a cultural dunce, who wouldn't know a 5,000 year-old Warka Vase from a Mexican flower pot from Wal-Mart. He didn't care about the artifacts. (It's not like they're Rembrandts or Leonardos or even Elvises on velvet, he said to himself.) Besides, his cronies who are rich...

<p>If thieves hadn't looted Iraq's National Museum, the conspiracy theorists — the anti-war, anti-Bush pundits and protesters — would have had to invent the story. Instead, they merely invented the story of how it happened.</p> <p>Here are some of the interpretations racing across the Internet, from looney to loonier. George W. Bush is a cultural dunce who wouldn't know a 5,000-year-old Warka vase from a Mexican flower pot at Wal-Mart. He didn't care about the artifacts. (It's not like they're Rembrandts or Leonardos or even Elvises on velvet, George W. said to himself.) Besides, his cronies, who are rich collectors, now get a chance to buy the real stuff on the open black market: They can bid on that cuneiform accounting table (1980 B.C.) when it turns up for auction at Christie's. The Web site of the World Socialists describes "the politics of plunder" as a preface to stealing the oil wells.</p>

I believe that the greatest truth that's available to the world about what's going on is found in the pictures that come from the front lines where the war is being fought. I believe that every step we remove ourselves from the fact of the picture, we become less precise in our description of what's happening." - General Tommy Franks in an interview on Fox News Sunday General Franks talks with pride of his soldiers and Marines whose duty at the front speaks eloquently in the words and images on the front pages and on the television screens. No doubt,...

A British satire on the Internet introduces a pig named "Sad Ham Hoofsein' in a mock episode of Sesame Street. Sad Ham comes to a sad end, roasting on a spit. "The Count," a "real-life" Sesame Street character who shows kids how to count, becomes a weapons inspector who shouts as he searches: "One! One weapon of mass destruction! Ah ha ha ha! Two! Two weapons of mass destruction!" Big Bird represents America the Good and Oscar the Grouch plays a symbolic role as a whining Democrat. Sad Ham, the recycled Count and the others are the brainchildren of "The...