Free Republic

The Conservative Party long ago decided that too much talk of the British way of life, like too much loud opposition to immigration, made them sound crypto-racist. That left the patriotism card for Labor to play. Indeed, as the Conservative Party has moved rapidly to the left, whole swathes of policy have been left open for Labor. Cameron is greener-than-thou, positively enthusiastic about public spending and skeptical of George W. Bush.

More important, though, the London bomb plot failed because open Western societies are more resilient than we sometimes think they are. One of the Piccadilly car bombs was discovered because an ambulance crew, responding to an unrelated call, saw smoke seeping from a car trunk and alerted the police. The other car was illegally parked, and London's super-vigilant, much-hated traffic wardens towed it to a parking lot, where someone noticed that it smelled of gasoline and alerted the police. That Britain has functional ambulance services and working traffic wardens, all of whom are civic-minded enough to call the police when...

Only two senators were in the room when Karen Hughes testified at her confirmation hearings. When it came time for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to vote on her nomination Tuesday, she was easily approved. And thus with no discussion and no debate, Hughes takes over the least noticed, least respected and possibly most important job in the State Department. Her formal title is undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. In plain English, her job is to fight anti-Americanism, promote American culture and above all to do intellectual battle with the ideology of radical Islam, a set...

So familiar are the numbers, and so often have we heard them analyzed, that the release of a new poll on international anti-Americanism last week caused barely a ripple. Once again the Pew Global Attitudes Project showed that most Frenchmen have a highly unfavorable view of the United States; that the Spanish prefer China to America; and that Canadian opinion of the United States has sunk dramatically. And once again the polls told only half of the story. After all, even the most damning polls always show that some percentage of even the most anti-American countries remains pro-American. According to...

After the dust has settled -- after the processions are over and the Masses have been said, after the new pope has accustomed himself to new apartments, new tasks, new vestments -- Benedict XVI will face an extraordinary list of problems, ranging from the bioethical to the geopolitical. But for this German pope, among his toughest tasks by far will be the battle for acceptance on the continent of his birth. It sounds paradoxical, given the European splendor in which the church has been cloaked for the past several weeks -- the scenes of Rome, St. Peter's Square, the Sistine...

Like many women of a certain age, I have a bad habit, first learned in the 1960s and '70s. Whenever I'm in a professional setting, I count the number of women in the room. These days there are occasions when I don't have enough fingers and toes to do the job. Which brings me to the present, and an ugly little spat that is roiling the waters of opinion journalism in the same way that Lawrence Summers's comments about the dearth of women in math and science rocketed through the academy. Op-ed pages, the accepted wisdom insists, don't carry enough...

This week I had planned to write a column about Sinn Fein, the political front organization for the Irish Republican Army, whose leaders have recently been linked to acts of murder and grand larceny. I chose the subject because I wrote often about the IRA while living in Britain in the 1990s, because I've worked as a reporter in Belfast, because it's timely -- tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day -- and because there might be lessons in the story for Hamas and Hezbollah, terrorist groups that may or may not be able to make the transition to democratic politics as...

Inside the Dark Applebaum’s Gulag. If our schools and universities cared about history, Anne Applebaum's magisterial work, would be required reading. Not because our children need to master the enormous body of detail concerning the infamous Soviet forced-labor system — made famous by Solzhenitsyn's works some 30 years ago — but because it is only by working their way through the chilling details, year by year and camp by camp, that they can begin to understand the horrors of Communism and the magnitude of our successful war against it. The first thing that needs to be said about this rare...