Free Republic

The first book to take a critical look about Barack Obama is hitting the streets in 11 days. * * * * *Talk about presumptuous. Not content to wait for the verdict of the voters, Senator Barack Obama, who is not even the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party yet, has already directed his aides to begin making transition plans for the first 10 years (ha ha) of the Obama administration, Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic reports. Ambinder quotes an Obama campaign official as saying: "Barack is well aware of the complexity and the organizational challenge involved in the...

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- In Salman Rushdie's new novel, "The Enchantress of Florence," the exasperated Mughal emperor Akbar the Great agrees to let a mysterious Florentine adventurer, Mogor dell'Amore, finish a tale. But as the troublesome Mogor prepares to continue, Akbar says with a touch of venom: "A curse on all storytellers. And a pox on your children, too." It wasn't so long ago that the Indian-born author was a hunted man, placed under guard in an undisclosed location, because of an Islamic edict, or fatwa, against his life issued by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. All for telling a story --...

How an organic movement born in Berkeley exemplifies conservative values ALICE WATERS SEEMS at first like an unlikely conservative. A veteran of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement who once cooked a $25,000-a-seat fund-raising dinner for Bill Clinton, she eagerly compares her campaign for "edible schoolyards" - where children grow, prepare, and eat fresh produce - with John F. Kennedy's attempt to improve physical fitness through mandatory exercise. Her dream of organic, locally and sustainably produced food in every school cafeteria, class credit for lunch hour, and required gardening time and cooking classes is as utopian as they come. The name she...

If characters from "The Hills" were to emote about race, I imagine it would sound like B. Hussein Obama's autobiography, Has anybody read "Dreams From My Father." Inasmuch as the book reveals Obama to be a flabbergasting lunatic, I gather the answer is no. Obama is about to be our next president: You might want to take a peek. If only people had read "Mein Kampf" ... When his mother expresses concern about Obama's high school friend being busted for drugs, Obama says he patted his mother's hand and told her not to worry. This, too, prompted Obama to share...

THE brainy English teacher who became the central figure in the quiz-show scandals of the late 1950s has broken his silence. Charles Van Doren, 82, is finally telling his side of the story in a first-person account published in this week's New Yorker magazine, which came out yesterday. Van Doren - who lives in Connecticut with his wife of 50 years and still teaches college-level English (most recently at the University of Connecticut in Torrington) - said he decided to go public with his version of the "Twenty-One" quiz-show story for the sake of his grandchildren. The New Yorker story...

In their stunning follow-up to the classic bestseller, We Were Soldiers Once...and Young, Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and Joe Galloway return to Vietnam and reflect on how the war changed them, their men, their enemies, and both countries—often with surprising results. More than fifteen years since its original publication, the number one New York Times bestseller, We Were Soldiers Once...and Young is still required reading in all branches of the military. Now Moore and Galloway revisit their relationships with ten American veterans of the battle—men such as Sgt. Maj. Basil Plumley and helicopter pilot Bruce "Old Snake" Crandall—as well as...

Jerry Boykin had lost 15 pounds in the grueling Delta Force selection process, but he faced one more ordeal: a one-on-one interview with an overweight Army psychologist. “Could you spend several days alone in a sniper position with a homosexual?” the psychologist asked. Boykin had to think about that one. Finally, he replied, “If it was my mission, I could. But he’d better understand that I’m not like that.” The story is from the retired three-star general’s book “Never Surrender: A Soldier’s Journey to the Crossroads of Faith and Freedom.” The book’s release date is July 29. Boykin spent most...

My new book White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement places conservatism within the big picture of modern American history. The book traces the origins of modern conservatism to the 1920s. It explains why conservativism triumphed in the late twentieth century and why it is has fallen into disarray under the leadership of President George W. Bush. The review of my book in the New York Times by former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum shows that at least some diehard defenders of the Bush administration do not wish to enter into in a serious conversation about...

In most lines of work, a person does his credibility real damage by denying the obvious and asserting the manifestly untrue. Yet in the book world, there can be very large rewards for a writer who boldly turns reality on its head. With “White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement,” Allan J. Lichtman apparently hopes to claim some of those rewards for himself. Lichtman’s thesis is embedded in his title: American conservatism should be seen as an ideology devoted above all to advancing “an antipluralistic ideal of America as a unified, white Protestant nation.” This breathtaking argument...

I’m only one black American among millions, and I’m no authority on black people, nor do I speak for black people. But I can provide insight.Back in 2004, Republicans were trying to appeal to black voters. Newt Gingrich and the rest wanted to secure at least 25 percent of the “black vote.� Dream on! I poured a bucket of water over their piddling flame. Won’t work, I said. I explained my reasoning in “Why Courting the Black Vote Won’t Work,� which was published in the Washington Times.Unlike some black conservatives and Republicans I know, I don’t think the party should...

I was privilaged to review Obama: The Man Behind The Mask by Andy Martin, who "generally recognized as the founding father of the anti-Obama research and commentary movement on the Internet. You may also remember that Andy urged Hillary to TAKE IT TO THE CONVENTION! She did not heed his advice. While the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune were asleep at the wheel, Andy Martin was letting the world know "Who Barry O is," but "just the facts" as Detective Friday says. Andy tells you why until Lynn SWEET caught Obama's scent that "Tony's guy" got a pass for...

In a blockbuster New York news conference Monday, July 14th, Andy Martin asks: "Why has Barack Obama been lying for decades about the 'marriage' of his parents when he knew full well he was lying? There was no marriage. How can anyone vote for Obama for president when Obama is so cowardly he can't tell the truth to the American people?" Andy Martin's book and writing begin to impact the presidential campaign. ~snip~ Legendary Chicago Internet columnist and Obama author Andy Martin will hold a New York news conference Monday, July 14th to drop the first of several bombs on...

Andy Martin's worldwide bestseller goes to press as Obama campaign trembles. ANDY MARTIN Executive Editor ContrarianCommentary.com 'Factually Correct, Not Politically Correct' AMERICA'S #1 POLITICAL BLOG OF THE 2008 CAMPAIGN FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: ATTENTION DAYBOOK/ASSIGNMENT EDITORS ANNOUNCEMENT OF CHICAGO NEWS CONFERENCE JULY 10, 2008 OBAMA BOOK GOES ON THE PRESSES CHICAGO COLUMNIST ANDY MARTIN ANNOUNCES HIS NEW BOOK, OBAMA: THE MAN BEHIND THE MASK, HAS STARTED PRINTING (CHICAGO)(July 11, 2008) Legendary Chicago Internet columnist and muckraker Andy Martin will hold a news conference Thursday, July 10th to announce that his new book on Senator Barack Obama is on the presses. Based...

Religion – including Christianity and Judaism – is "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children." At least that's according to the No. 1 New York Times bestseller "God is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything" by journalist Christopher Hitchens. In the news business, we often cite a nation's current top-selling books – for example, the popularity of anti-Semitic titles in Arab countries – as evidence of the mindset of the people. Well, in the United States of America right now, some of the...

I'm finishing up Buchanan's book and am looking for people who have read it who: 1) Argue in detail with any of his points. 2) Recommend essays from experts who challenge some of Buchanan's contentions. Just going on what I read in the book, what he says makes sense.

As a Los Angeles county prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi batted a thousand in murder cases: 21 trials, 21 convictions, including the Charles Manson case in 1971. As an author, Mr. Bugliosi has written three No. 1 best sellers and won three Edgar Allan Poe awards, the top honor for crime writers. More than 30 years ago he co-wrote the best seller “Helter Skelter,” about the Manson case. So Mr. Bugliosi could be forgiven for perhaps thinking that a new book would generate considerable interest, among reviewers and on the broadcast talk-show circuit. But if he thought that, he would have been...

"Rewish," or "al Rawshana," is a colloquial Arab term that means "hip" and also "distracted or confused," according to Allegra Stratton's "Muhajababes," a lively (and rewish) exploration of youth culture in several Middle Eastern nations. One of the many people Stratton interviewed for her book -- a bike-glove-wearing female member of a dance troupe that inexplicably describes itself as "an R&B band" -- told Stratton that the region's booming under-25 demographic is being made ever more rewish by their exposure to two seemingly opposed forces: racy pop music videos full of gyrating, pulchritudinous singers like Haifa Wehbe and what Stratton...

The U.S. failed to recognize the significance of the radical Islamists. The timing is right for a major new history of America's engagement with the contemporary Middle East. Admittedly, key archival documentation remains under lock and key and will be inaccessible for a long time to come, both in the United States and elsewhere. But enough material is available, in the form of declassified documents, memoirs, oral histories and journalistic treatments, to begin to piece together the story of how we came to our current predicament. Enter Sir Lawrence Freedman, a specialist on nuclear strategy and the Cold War and...

The importance of Kingmakers for a wide American audience emerges slowly. At first, the book appears to be a quaint reminiscence of eccentric and often familiar British colonials of the early 20th century, strutting across Middle Eastern deserts in pith helmets, instructing the benighted native tribesmen about the fundamentals of governing. But as this beautifully written and researched book proceeds, it becomes abundantly clear that these skilled English soldier-diplomats are the progenitors of (and in some cases, role models for) the current crop of American diplomats and soldiers on the same turf. The issues that this country is now debating...

The headline on the conservative blog, Townhall, stormed: “Book to Smear First Lady’s Sex Life.” Radar magazine proclaimed: “On the gossip front, the novel doesn’t disappoint,” adding that its steamy and lurid scenes were “sure to send the White House into a fury.” MSNBC.com called the sex scenes “too graphic to reprint.” The cover of this fantasy version of Laura Bush’s life, “American Wife,” is alluring, a woman’s shapely figure in a white gown, with white opera gloves and a diamond ring. The author is not Anonymous, or Eponymous or Pseudonymous, yet there is the air of a “Primary Colors”...

Two True Crime book reviews here. One is a very personal, almost painful review. For it was this Blogger who originally was scheduled to write the story of the very troubled Lisa Montgomery, a woman who cold-bloodedly killed a young mother and ripped her unborn baby from her body. A very handsome and talented M.William Phelps wrote the story instead, with a minimum of help from me. I did, however, know a few members of Lisa Montgomery’s family and this gave me an insight into how Phelps wrote the book, the skewed points of view within the book’s covers and...

There are no pleasant, constructive or even likeable human beings in this gigantic book, written by an American Leftwing atheistic Yiddishist, living, significantly, in Berkeley, California. There is no vigorous and lively State of Israel in Chabon's imaginary world; there is no thriving American Jewry in the most prosperous and tolerant country on earth; the world of Christian Americans and other religions barely appears, and then only as cardboard cutouts. Instead, the novel is set in an imagined Pale of Yiddish Settlement, Jozef Stalin's "solution" for the Jews in the early Soviet Union. Instead of Siberia, the Jews are transplanted...

http://obambi.wordpress.com/2008/06/...hood-religion/ OBAMA AUTHOR ANDY MARTIN ACCUSES BARACK OBAMA OF “SMEARING THE TRUTH” ABOUT OBAMA’S CHILDHOOD RELIGION Legendary Chicago Internet columnist and Obama author Andy Martin will hold a New York news conference Monday, June 16th to charge that Barack Obama is “smearing the truth” about Obama’s childhood religion. Martin will challenge Obama to sue Martin for defamation. Martin’s book, Obama: The Man Behind the Mask, is now in pre-publication sales and goes to the printer June 18th. See http://orangestatepress.com. Martin is universally credited with first exposing Obama’s Muslim heritage in 2004. Andy has been attacked as the mastermind of a...

What would Theodor Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, make of today’s Israel? He would find not one Jewish state but a multiplicity, Bernard Avishai suggests. First, Israel the international actor, a member of the United Nations, signatory to peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan. Then the Zionist state-within-a-state. It predates Israel’s independence in 1948, but lives on in the Jewish Agency, which deals with Jewish immigration, and in the Jewish National Fund, which owns substantial amounts of land in the name of the Jewish people. Avishai also mentions the Haredi communities, an Orthodox quasi state with its publicly...

On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to take up the appeal lodged by environmental groups that focused on a two-mile stretch of border fence in the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area near Naco, Ariz. The fence, which has been built since the petition was filed, is a vital part of the Bush administration’s drive to secure the border between the United States and Mexico. The Supreme Court’s decision is a welcome and needed victory in the war against illegal immigration and efforts to preserve the unique character that is America. The environmentalists based part of their challenge on claims...

THE SOVIET AMBASSADOR The Making of the Radical Behind Perestroika By Christopher Shulgan McClelland & Stewart, 359 pages, $34.99 Christopher Shulgan has done an excellent job in documenting Yakovlev's career in the Soviet government and describing his exceptional role in the events that caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. But he skirts over one of the most significant episodes of Yakovlev's life - his chairmanship, beginning in 1988, of the Commission to Rehabilitate Victims of Political Repression. While he went to great efforts in disclosing the crimes of Lenin and Stalin, Yakovlev stopped short of looking into the repressions...

The near simultaneous publication of historian Sean Wilentz book “Age of Reagan” and the publication of activist / reporter Rick Pearlstein’s “Nixonland”, previously praised on these pages, has caused a dust-up over who most personified and ultimately transformed the modern conservative age which played out on the New Republic website. Although I am neither historian nor an unbiased reporter, I was a participant in the Nixon realignment which ultimately begat the Reagan revolution. ..... The change in Richard Nixon comes with Goldwater’s sweeping nomination and what Nixon then understands can be salvaged, even nurtured,in the ashes of Barry’s defeat. “You...

You don't have to agree with everything in this monumental account of politics in the 1960s and 1970s to find Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland" (Scribner, 896 pages, $37.50) interesting and even engrossing. The book is a masterful retelling of the turbulent period between the crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and the equally stunning loss by George McGovern to Richard Nixon in 1972. Mr. Perlstein's use of the elections of 1964 and 1972 as ideological goalposts may be arbitrary, but it is easy to see why he selected them. Could two such different countries really be...

Rick Perlstein, an unabashed man of the left, first attracted wide notice seven years ago with the release of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, his engagingly written and fair-minded study of the rise of the American conservative movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Last month brought the much-awaited publication of the second volume of Perlstein’s projected trilogy on American conservatism. Nixonland (Scribner), as should be obvious from the title, focuses on American politics from the mid-1960’s to the early 1970’s, a time and an era dominated by Richard Nixon. The Monitor asked Perlstein...

Among the many dark tidings for American conservatism, there is one genuine bright spot. Over the past five years, a group of young and unpredictable rightward-leaning writers has emerged on the scene. These writers came of age as official conservatism slipped into decrepitude. Most of them were dismayed by what the Republican Party had become under Tom DeLay and seemed put off by the shock-jock rhetorical style of Ann Coulter. As a result, most have the conviction — which was rare in earlier generations — that something is fundamentally wrong with the right, and it needs to be fixed. Moreover,...

Bookshelf: With access to routine data, the government could have identified and connected all 19 of the 9/11 terrorists. Law and the Long War By Benjamin Wittes (Penguin Press, 305 pages, $25.95) By granting the right of habeas corpus to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the Supreme Court recently knocked down the handiwork of both the executive branch and Congress. Meanwhile, the House passed a new surveillance bill last week, after years of bitter debate and temporary fixes. And yet who knows what the Supreme Court will say after the bill becomes law? Clearly we are still grappling with the basic...

Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist of the highest narrative and analytical gifts, is baffled by the West’s almost demented indifference and folly towards Afghanistan and his own country. The stakes are huge. If either state fails, as is highly plausible, global stability will be rocked. The United Nations, Nato, the European Union and, of course, America will see their purposes and credibility set at naught. Yet, as Rashid writes: “The international community’s lukewarm commitment to Afghanistan after 9/11 has been matched only by its incompetence, incoherence and conflicting strategies — all led by the United States.” Meanwhile, in Pakistan, Washington’s...

Several years ago my husband borrowed a Shania Twain CD from the library. When my then 5-year-old daughter saw me roll my eyes at the barely dressed singer's provocative poses on the liner notes, she was smitten. She played the CD over and over, tossing her hair and wiggling her hips in imitation of those photos, oblivious to the innuendo but aware that she was doing something daring and rebellious. What, I thought, am I going to do when she's 13? Reading The Lolita Effect five years later, I wonder why that episode even stands out in my memory. To...

The same publisher that distributed the 2004 best-seller that took aim at John Kerry’s Vietnam service is planning a summer release of what’s scheduled to be the first critical book on Barack Obama. Conservative journalist David Freddoso’s “The Case Against Barack Obama” will offer “a comprehensive, factual look at Obama,” according to Regnery Publishing president and publisher Marjory Ross. But the book’s subtitle makes clear its perspective: “The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate.” Ross contends that the mainstream media has offered insufficient scrutiny of Obama and likens the goal of Freddoso’s book to that of...

Europe, the Mother Continent of Western Man, is today aging and dying, unable to sustain the birth rates needed to keep her alive, or to resist conquest by an immigrant invasion from the Third World. What happened to the nations that only a century ago ruled the world? In “Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World,” published today, this writer will argue that it was colossal blunders of British statesmen, Winston Churchill foremost among them, that turned two European wars into world wars that may yet prove the mortal wounds...

Richard Just at the New Republic magazine is not impressed with Virginia senator Jim Webb as a running mate for Barack Obama. Webb is fundamentally illiberal, he writes, a misogynist and an ethnic nationalist and "something of an apologist for the Confederacy." So why do lots of liberals like Webb, Just asks. "In the years since he left the Republican party, Webb has found his way to certain policy stands that liberals correctly find attractive. He was right about Iraq, and, on economics, he is right to criticise the disparity between rich and poor." Just can't figure out how a...

We must hold our leaders accountable for the facts on happiness and refuse to take it lightly when politicians abridge the values of faith, work, family, charity, and freedom. -- Arthur C. Brooks

There is a feature of my seminars on U.S. Middle East policy at Princeton that I call "déjà vu all over again" -- with apologies to Yogi Berra. I ask students to assess the bungled efforts and missed opportunities of generations of U.S. diplomats and seek in them lessons for the future. They examine the hubris that drove the U.S. government to engineer the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddeq's democratically elected government in Iran. This traumatic episode was conveniently forgotten by 1979, when National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski encouraged Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to use force against the opposition, ignoring...

So asks Newsweek's cover, which features a full-length photo of the prime minister his people voted the greatest Briton of them all. Quite a tribute, when one realizes Churchill's career coincides with the collapse of the British empire and the fall of his nation from world pre-eminence to third-rate power. That the Newsweek cover was sparked by my book "Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War" seems apparent, as one of the three essays, by Christopher Hitchens, was a scathing review. Though in places complimentary, Hitchens charmingly concludes: This book "stinks." Understandable. No Brit can easily concede my central thesis: The...

The Party of Defeat, and Self-Defeat   By David HorowitzFrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, June 20, 2008 David Horowitz delivered the following speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center retreat in Santa Barbara, which was held at the Four Seasons Resort May 30-June 1. -- The Editors.Evan Sayet:  It's good to see a crowd like this, as usual.  It's great that we, as conservatives, are gathering to talk about the things that are important to us and all the way across the country, the leftists are gathering to talk about what's important to them.  It's called the premiere of Sex and...

In my most recent column, I introduced you to "Beyond Opinion," a Christian apologetics book, edited by Ravi Zacharias, that offers suggestions on how to approach the skeptic, depending on the skeptic's background or reasons for doubt or non-belief. Before leaving the subject, let me give you a stronger flavor of this interesting apologetics method and this fascinating book. Ravi tells us an effective apologetic "pays very close attention not just to the question but to the questioner. That, in turn, leads to the relevance of the answer." He cites Jesus' walk on the Emmaus road as an instructive example....

There are thousands of authors that would sell their souls for a positive 500-word New York Times review of their book. No doubt that many of these authors have groundbreaking books on important issues. Putting those aside, last Sunday the Times featured a children’s book that blatantly copies the classic Goodnight Moon. Its purpose is bashing the Bush Administration, natch. The Times’ Joanne Kaufman writes: The cover of Goodnight Bush looks almost exactly like Goodnight Moon — green and orange, with an image of a window and fireplace — and uses a similar rhyme scheme. But there the thematic similarities...

Back at the height of her surreal U.S. Senate campaign, we were thrilled at Katherine Harris' talk about writing a juicy tell-all book. Just think of all the wonderfully unpleasant things she might have to say about the Bushes, the Democrats, the reporters and the campaign professionals she was sure to cast as her persecutors. Alas, the former Republican congresswoman's book never appeared (kinda like the $10-million of her own money she promised to spend on her campaign against Bill Nelson). But fans of political gossip may get a consolation prize: a juicy tell-all book by her former campaign manager,...

As a former skeptic, I have a particular interest in Christian apologetics: the defense of the Christian faith. I've read and recommended many excellent books on the subject but want to call your special attention to one I've most recently read because of the uniqueness of its approach and content. "Beyond Opinion: Living the Faith We Defend" is a compilation of essays by renowned Christian apologists compiled and edited by my friend and Christian philosopher and apologist, Ravi Zacharias, that together "suggest a new vision for Christian apologetics in this century." I love apologetics because it helped me overcome certain...

The conservative Evangelical biographer of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay has moved on to a new subject: Barack Obama. And his new book, due out this summer, may lend credibility to Senator Obama's bid to win Evangelical Christian voters away from the Republican Party. The forthcoming volume from Stephen Mansfield, whose sympathetic "The Faith of George W. Bush" spent 15 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 2004, is titled "The Faith of Barack Obama." Its tone ranges from gently critical to gushing, and the author defends Obama-and even his controversial former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright-from...

The conservative Evangelical biographer of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay has moved on to a new subject: Barack Obama. And his new book, due out this summer, may lend credibility to Senator Obama's bid to win Evangelical Christian voters away from the Republican Party. The forthcoming volume from Stephen Mansfield, whose sympathetic "The Faith of George W. Bush" spent 15 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 2004, is titled "The Faith of Barack Obama." Its tone ranges from gently critical to gushing, and the author defends Obama-and even his controversial former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright-from...

"In dealing with Mr. Buchanan, one must accept at the beginning two caveats. First, as is his style, he will always resort to ad hominem attacks in lieu of an argument." "[I} was appalled by his absence of logic..."

Late one evening in March, I sat in Haandi, a Pakistani restaurant on Lexington Avenue, and watched the swearing in of the new Prime Minister of Pakistan, Yousaf Raza Gillani. Gillani is a loyalist of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), which since its founding in 1967 has been led by the Bhutto clan. The general election in February was held seven weeks after the PPP's chair, Benazir Bhutto, was killed by a bomb blast and a bullet to the head at an election rally in Rawalpindi, and in an acrid climate of grief, anger and bewilderment, the PPP ended up...

For centuries, the great city of Smyrna was a European foothold on the Anatolian coast. The British Levantine Company had had a factory there since 1667, trading in raisins and carpets, and even then the place was renowned for its lively social life. Francesco Lupazzoli, the priapic Venetian consul, lived on a diet of fruit, bread and water and a few slices of unseasoned meat, yet survived until the age of 114, and fathered 126 children on his five wives and innumerable Smyrniot mistresses. By the end of the 19th century, Smyrna had grown into one of the largest, richest...

Is there any one shared principle or assumption on which our political consensus rests, any value judgment on which we are all essentially agreed? Apart from abstractions such as a general belief in democracy, one would probably get the widest measure of agreement for the proposition that the second world war was a "good war" and one well worth fighting. And if we possess one indelible image of political immorality and cowardice, it is surely the dismal tap-tap-tap of Neville Chamberlain's umbrella as he turned from signing the Czechs away to Adolf Hitler at Munich. He hoped by this humiliation...