Free Republic

In what other country can a movement like the Tea Party , radicalize a major party and steer it to the brink of an historic electoral upheaval? Next Tuesday, a uniquely deranged political party is going to take over the most powerful country on earth. The key word here is “unique.” The Republican Party in 2010 is the only major political party in the Western world, the only one shooting for national leadership, that has been supercharged by crackpots with crackpot ideas – i.e. Tea Partiers, the generic name for America’s xenophobic, libertarian, right-wing Christian conspiracy freaks. There are lunatic...

Ordinarily, we Israelis tell ourselves that we are morally superior to the Palestinians because they're terrorists and we're not, they deliberately target civilians and we don't. After this last war in Gaza, though, we can't really tell that to ourselves because it's not very convincing. After all, Hamas only killed three civilians with rockets during the war, while we killed several hundred Gazan civilians with all sorts of hi-tech weapons. Hamas did very little property damage here, while we destroyed thousands upon thousands of Gazan homes and civic buildings. So the argument that the Palestinians fight civilians and we don't...

I wouldn't have joined last weekend's demonstration in Tel Aviv against Israel's war in Lebanon, because I think this war was forced on us. If Hizbullah had been allowed to kidnap two IDF soldiers and kill eight others without being made to pay a wholly "disproportionate" price, if the IDF had settled for a tit-for-tat response, then Hizbullah would feel free to attack again anytime, and the security and well-being of northern Israel would be at Hassan Nasrallah's mercy. But if Israel is still fighting in Lebanon after another week, then I'm going to be looking for an antiwar protest...

Right-wingers have been telling me for years that I'm na ve about the Arabs – that they'll never make peace with Israel, that their hatred for Jews is in their culture, their history, their religion, their blood. You can't trust them, give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile, blah blah blah. Now, in the last couple of years, a lot of these same right-wingers tell me that not only can we make peace with the Arabs, but that the Arab countries, as well as the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, can become democratic. And if I...

In America, the neoconservatives are happy (or "delighted," to use one of their words): Bush is going to Mars. Not himself, of course – that, for neocons, would be cause for alarm, or give them pause. No, NASA's manned space flight program is going to Mars. First it's going to populate a base on the moon, then send astronauts to Mars – that's the idea, according to the White House. A "grand plan," a "vision worthy of America," wrote Adam Keiper in The National Review. The Weekly Standard website reran an old "On to Mars" cover essay by Charles Krauthammer....