Free Republic

You can understand Barack Obama’s frustration now that he finally put down his putter on Martha’s Vineyard and noticed that something was going on in Cairo. John Kerry bestirred himself, too, pronouncing the chaos in Cairo “dreadful.” That’s pretty strong language for a tea-sipper. There’s glum agreement everywhere that there’s no peace for Egypt in sight. The nations of the West, including Israel, must keep looking, but we fool only ourselves if we think there’s a magic elixir to encourage the lion to lie down with the lamb and not regard it only as dinner. In the days following Sept....

Barack Obama’s critics are loud enough and persistent enough, but maybe we’ve been baying at the wrong moon. It’s not the president’s ideology, his arrogance, his attention-deficit disorder, his endless deference to alien religious faith and his contempt for the faith of those close to home (or even his backswing) that’s what’s wrong with the man in charge of the government. It’s the sheer incompetence of the leader and his gang. This is the gang that can’t shoot straight, eager to stifle or soften the First, Second, Fourth and Fifth Amendments and ever ready to stumble abroad with timidity in...

We know this White House doesn’t think much of the Second Amendment, it has reservations about the First. When these amendments are pushed aside, the rest of us won’t have anything left. We’ll wonder how it happened. President Obama insists that nobody at the National Security Agency is listening to anybody’s telephone calls. That may be true. Not unless they have to listen, anyway. But “aggregated metadata,” collected and analyzed by computer technology, is more revealing than content. Two NSA whistleblowers, J. Kirk Wiebe and Billy Binney, told Megyn Kelly of Fox News how it works. When the government’s computers...

We’ve finally located the terminus of the slippery slope. It’s on a side street in Philadelphia, in a modest three-story red-brick building, where a painted sign advertises dental, family planning, family practice, gynecological and physical therapy services. This is under an illustration of two happy parents, swinging a small child between them. But there are no happy children within these walls. This is an abortion clinic made infamous by a doctor on trial for his life, charged with killing seven infants who survived abortions, and a woman who died during “the procedure.” The State of Pennsylvania wants to execute Dr....

Craig Karpel is a recovering addict. He says so himself. His addiction is to Barack Obama, and his recovery inspires him to write a book. He offers a 12-step program, patterned after the program that has rescued thousands of town drunks. He’s a confirmed Obamaholic, but he doesn’t blame the president. He absolves Mr. Obama of blame for the addiction to the messiah from the South Side of Chicago that turned so many healthy Americans into junkies. His book has created a bit of a buzz already. “My name is Craig K.,” he says in the opening line of “The...

There’s a tiny priest living in Rick Santorum’s trim, toned body, struggling to get out. The rogue priest escaped Sunday and said foolish things. The candidate most admired for plain speech made it plain and clear that he doesn’t believe in the wall between church and state and doesn’t think much of John F. Kennedy for saying he did. “I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” he told ABC News. “The idea that church can have no influence or involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives...

Something odd is going on. The Obama campaign boasts of a landslide in the making even as his polling lead slips a point or two, and there's anger bordering on rage when John McCain and Sarah Palin raise questions about Barack Obama's judgment in his unexplored past in Chicago. An investigation of ACORN, a cabal of "political activists" hired to register voters in the neighborhoods where few friends of John McCain abide has now spread to 10 states. Investigators discovered that the entire offensive line of the Dallas Cowboys had signed up to vote in Las Vegas, unless it turns...

If only the bumblers, blusterers and other bureaucrats in our "intelligence" services could make up their minds. The estimates of what we know about Iran and its nuclear ambitions, released this week just in time to undercut the U.N. sanctions meant to deter another Islamic bomb, underscores how little the bumblers know. These are the wiseheads who only four months ago were telling the president and Congress that Iran was hard at work developing their bomb. Now they want the president, Congress and the rest of us to believe that the Iranians actually stopped work, maybe, on their bomb four...

Nothing stirs the blood like talking about religion. That's why it's taboo to talk about it in casual social conversations. Better to ask the boss's wife whether she ever considered a face-lift. But Pope Benedict XVI is a man of firm conviction and blunt talk. Not for this pontiff the Vatican II tradition of warm and fuzzy, as the message of Vatican II, which put a friendly expression on the stern countenance of the church of Rome, has been widely interpreted in the circles of those addicted to warm and fuzzy. This week he authorized a statement of "clarification" of...

The Kennedy-Kyl immigration amnesty bill has a little something for everybody. But it isn't likely to be a gift that keeps on forgiving. The chicken-plucking, swimming-pool cleaning, potato-digging, housekeeping, diaper-changing and busboy industry gets the inexhaustible supply of cheap, easily abused immigrants it covets, and the politicians get a nigh-inexhaustible supply of exploitable new voters satisfied with a few tossed bones, promises and a bankrupt welfare state.

The good news is that we were supposed to all be dead by now, done in by SARS, AIDS or bird flu. The bad news is, now we can be cooked medium-rare by global warming. Or not. The jury on global warming is still out -- the jurors are snowbound -- and this seriously frustrates the folks who imagined they had the jury well rigged. (Al Gore comes to mind.) Global warming has become the catechism of a new-age religion, with Mr. Gore as its topmost prelate, entitled to cassock, miter, incense and hot holy water. Anyone who dissents risks...

Destroying a president is not much of a strategy to win a war, but it's all the Democrats have. The churls of the left don't seem to care whether their country wins the war, the important thing is to "keep hate alive." If hate worked in '06, maybe it will work again in '08, when the stakes will be considerably higher. Sometimes it's not only hate, but a bit of schadenfreude, too, taking pleasure in the woes of the enemy. "Partisan pleasure in George Bush's pain dates to the anguish of the contested 2000 election loss," observes Daniel Henninger in...

The rap on George W. Bush is that he can't make a rousing speech like Winston Churchill, and indeed he can't. But who can? Not Hillary, not "the husband of," not John McCain or Rudy Giuliani, or even Barack Obama, worthies all. Churchill marshaled the language and sent it off to World War II. He was sui generis, one of a kind, an orator who played rhetoric like Babe Ruth hit home runs and Brooks Robinson played third base. But Churchill, the electrifier of frightened audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, had an advantage that neither George W. nor...

You don't have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to understand the First Amendment guarantee of free speech is fundamental to everything we are -- and to regard anyone who tries an end run around it as someone who deserves a bracing smackdown. Presidents of both parties are sometimes tempted to try an end run or a shortcut because the Constitution can get in the way of the easiest way to enforce the law. The ruling yesterday by a federal judge in Detroit that the government's wiretapping without a warrant is unconstitutional and must be stopped at once should have been...

If you're looking for a fight in a dark and dangerous neighborhood, you can usually find one. If you pick on the wrong man, you deserve the bloody nose, cracked teeth or broken jaw. The Arabs who torment Israel ought to have learned by now that they're no match for the Jews, who don't really want to fight but are pretty good at it, anyway. Ganging up hasn't shortened the odds, either. The Arab coalition of the zealots and not always courageous was defeated in 1948, again in 1967 and still again in 1973. The Israelis make quick work of...

A conscientious newspaper editor should never enter a popularity contest, and must keep in mind that a lot of people would string him up to the nearest hanging tree if they thought they could get by with it. It goes with the territory.

Seeking the fixers, but they R us By Wesley Pruden THE WASHINGTON TIMES Published April 28, 2006 Nobody knows more about gas production than a senator, but there's a difference in "gasbaggery" and "refining gasoline." Nothing illustrates the difference more eloquently than the panic of the politicians over the price of a gallon of gasoline.     A vice president of Exxon Mobil was so miserable at lunch the other day that he could barely deal with his swordfish steak, so great was the cloud of gloom and fog of melancholia hovering over our table. "Today's news is bad enough," he said...

The outside world as measured inside the Beltway is suddenly upside down. Howard Dean is talking tough about the hell on the border, Nancy Pelosi is talking tough about the hell inside China, and John Kerry is talking tough about national security. Once upon a time nobody would imagine the Democrats know what they're talking about. But the president's approval rating sinks every time a pollster shoves a thermometer into an embarrassing place in the body politic, and now the not-so-Grand Old Party is trailing the Democrats by 10 points in generic congressional polling. The elections are only seven months...

Sometimes an editor is tempted to assign the religion reporter to cover war, revolution and other hostile gunplay and sectarian sword fighting. Like this week, for example. In Afghanistan, liberated from the Islamist brutality of the Taliban by an army of mostly Christians and Jews, the new government of men inspired by "the religion of peace" has threatened to kill for the heinous crime of becoming a Christian. In Iraq, a dramatic rescue of "peacemakers" saved three goo-goo do-gooders from beheading, or worse, and all the thanks the soldiers who put their lives on the line got was breathtaking ingratitude...

George W. Bush is about to fritter away his party's last advantage. What Republicans have had going for them is that they aren't Democrats. Over the past few days we've seen the men at the top of the Grumpy Old Party drifting toward something that looks suspiciously like an Old Boys' Party. When he hears applause only from Jimmy Carter, who gave away the Panama Canal (now controlled by the Chinese), and Bill Clinton, his newly adopted little brother, George W. should be looking for the panic button. Once they're no longer regarded as the toughest party on national security...