Free Republic

In a line many on the right love to quote, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates accused Joe Biden of being “wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.” Gates isn’t wrong, though he, too, has been wrong on foreign policy questions, and has anyone who’s made enough tough decisions over that many decades (see Churchill, Winston).What conservatives omit is that Gates dedicates most of the passage to praising Biden’s character: Joe is simply impossible not to like. He’s down to earth, funny, profane, and humorously self-aware of his motormouth. Not too many meetings had...

One could almost feel the collective, international gasp at the breaking news of the death on Friday of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at the age of 87, from complications related to pancreatic cancer. Justice Ginsburg was first diagnosed in 2009, beating back for years a demonic malignancy that claims most lives in less than half that time. She was a warrior—a warrior for civil rights, for gender rights, for constitutional rights, to be sure. But in this moment of American history when democracy itself hangs by a thread, with a yawning crevasse of authoritarianism menacingly before us, perhaps...