Free Republic

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post often writes with a good deal of attitude, and his Tuesday column was no exception. In his report on Sarah Palin’s campaign speech in Clearwater, Florida, laced with mocking Palinisms (“darn right,” “betcha”), he wrote that “the self-identified pit bull has been unleashed, if not unhinged.” The “unhinging,” in Milbank’s assessment, came when Palin charged that Obama still has some explaining to do about his relationship with 1960s Weatherman bomber William Ayers. Milbank also wrote that Palin blamed Katie Couric for her “less-than-successful” CBS interview. Other newspapers reported a more light-hearted Palin response to...

The academic left is fond of buzzwords that sound harmless but function in a highly ideological way. Many schools of education and social work require students to have a good "disposition." In practice this means that conservatives need not apply, as highly publicized attempts to penalize right-wing students at Brooklyn College and Washington State University revealed. "Social justice" is an even more useful codeword. Who can oppose it? But some schools made the mistake of spelling out that it means advocacy for causes of the left, including support for gay marriage and adoption, also opposition to "institutional racism," heterosexism, classism...

In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice "from local to global level." This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn't long in coming. The Council on Social Work Education, the national accreditor of social work education programs, says candidates must fight "oppression," and sees American society as pervaded by the "global interconnections of oppression." Now aspiring social workers must commit themselves, usually in writing, to a...

Today, John Leo, Editor of MindingTheCampus.com, hosts Victor Davis Hanson to discuss his most recent article from the summer issue of City Journal, "Why Study War?". Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a City Journal Contributing Editor. * * * Leo: Welcome Dr. Hanson, your article "Why Study War?," strongly criticizes the academy for its increasing neglect of military history. How do you explain this neglect? Hanson: Mostly for three reasons. First, since the campus revolt against Vietnam, academia has associated war exclusively with amorality, forgetting, for example, that chattel slavery, Nazism,...

If anyone ever starts a museum of horrible explanations, the one-liner by Newsweek's Evan Thomas about his magazine's dubious reporting on the Duke non-rape case— "The narrative was right but the facts were wrong" —is destined to become a popular exhibit, right up there with "we had to destroy the village to save it." What Mr. Thomas seems to mean is that the newsroom view of the lacrosse players as privileged, sexist, and arrogant white male jocks was the correct angle on the story. It wasn't. According to Duke's female lacrosse team and other women on campus, the male players...

As the founder and sole member of the Sheldon Award Society, I am dedicated to identifying the worst college president of each academic year. So far the presidents or chancellors of Berkeley, Georgetown, DePaul, and countless other universities have copped the Sheldon. Somewhat mysteriously, none offered to resign. The award is a statuette that looks something like the Oscar, except the Oscar features a man with no face looking straight ahead, whereas the Sheldon shows a man with no spine looking the other way. The award is named for Sheldon "Water Buffalo" Hackney, the former president of the University of...

Robert Putnam’s sobering new diversity research scares its author. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties. Putnam’s study reveals that...

Yesterday, I published an essay indicating that the basic fabric of America is holding despite the efforts of the hate-America crowd to unravel it. I didn’t mean to say that we should all relax, or that the dangers weren’t still out there. The multiculturalists are still hard at work trying to destroy the concept of an American experience and an American culture – born and sustained by the melting pot.

Commencement weekend is hard to plan at the University of California, Los Angeles. The university now has so many separate identity-group graduations that scheduling them not to conflict with one another is a challenge. The women’s studies graduation and the Chicana/Chicano studies graduation are both set for 10 AM Saturday. The broader Hispanic graduation, “Raza,” is in near-conflict with the black graduation, which starts just an hour later. Planning was easier before a new crop of ethnic groups pushed for inclusion. Students of Asian heritage were once content with the Asian–Pacific Islanders ceremony. But now there are separate Filipino and...

Newsrooms tend to follow a conventional story line on social issues. As the late commentator and editor Michael Kelly wrote, "most journalists learn to see the world through a set of standard templates into which they plug each day's events." The most obvious templates concern race — whites are oppressing blacks, gender — men are oppressing women, and class — the privileged are oppressing the poor. Since all three of these templates were in play during the Duke race case, how surprising is it that this triple high tide resulted in some of the worst journalism of the decade? Howard...

NEW YORK John Leo is ending his newspaper opinion column after 18 years. In a Sunday farewell piece, he wrote that "it's time to work on other projects, including a book." Leo began the column for U.S. News & World Report in Sept. 1988. He signed with Universal Press Syndicate three years later. "Now that I'm leaving, I should acknowledge that writing a column has to be one of the best jobs in the world," Leo wrote. "At a cost of only 750 words per week (with an occasional surcharge of sweating a bullet or two on deadline), you get...

Boys' problems in school need attentionhttp://www.townhall.com/columnists/JohnLeo/2006/07/03/boys_problems_in_school_need_attention http://tinyurl.com/sypap By John Leo Monday, July 3, 2006 How do you get your opinions on Page One of The Washington Post? Do you phone the editor and say, "Here's what I think ..." No. You type up your thoughts and label them a "report" or "study." Reports and studies are authoritative. So they have a shot at the front page, even if they lack report-like qualities such as fresh evidence and independent research. This has just happened to "The Truth About Boys and Girls," a few debunking thoughts about the education of boys by...

The governor of Maryland fired one of his appointees to the Washington Metro transit authority board for stating a negative opinion of homosexuality on a cable TV talk show. The board member, Robert Smith, had said: "Homosexual behavior, in my view, is deviant. I'm a Roman Catholic." The governor, Robert Ehrlich, said Smith's remarks were "highly inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable.""Insensitive" sounds like a fair comment. "Deviant" is a harsh word for expressing one's non-approval of homosexuality. The governor is on less firm ground with "inappropriate." Smith's comment certainly was apropos of the talk-show topic, gay marriage. He was explaining why...

One of the bloggers suggests that 2006 may be the year of the Lou Dobbs voter. The blogger, the Influence Peddler, is no fan. He considers Dobbs a demagogue, but he wonders whether voters are ready for a Dobbsian program of opposing illegal immigration, "throwing the bums out of Washington" and staying wary of international trade. On immigration, this suggestion may reflect a shift in public opinion after the May 1 marches, away from the belief that the pro-illegals lobby had decisively altered public opinion, toward the realization that the marches may have created a powerful backlash. Citing Arizona's new...

It's time for this column to announce its Sheldon Award, given annually to the university president who does the most to look the other way when free speech is under assault on campus. As all Sheldon fans know, the prize is a statuette that looks something like the Oscar, except that the Oscar shows a man with no face looking straight ahead, whereas the Sheldon shows a man with no spine looking the other way. The award is named for Sheldon Hackney, former president of the University of Pennsylvania and a modern legend in looking the other way.College presidents who...

Bush Was Right About Iraq's Quest For Uranium By John Leo In a surprising editorial, The Washington Post deviated from the conventional anti-Bush media position on two counts. It said President Bush was right to declassify parts of a National Intelligence Estimate to make clear why he thought Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons. And the editorial said ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson was wrong to think he had debunked Bush on the nuclear charge because Wilson's statements after visiting Niger actually "supported the conclusion that Iraq had sought uranium." In the orthodox narrative line, Wilson is the truth-teller and the Bush...

In his 1995 book "The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy," the late Christopher Lasch argued that America's political and cultural elites had opened up a gap between themselves and ordinary Americans. "Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America's destiny for better or worse," he wrote. They are increasingly detached from their fellow citizens and drawn to an international culture, Lasch said, or what we would today call a transnational culture. Consider the current immigration debate in this light. In the transnational view, patriotism, assimilation and...

The controversy over gay adoptions in Massachusetts is an issue that can be framed two ways. In the conventional liberal narrative, this is a simple issue of bias: The Catholic Church must not be allowed to deny gay couples the right to adopt children. The other frame, generally absent from discussions so far, raises this question: Under what conditions can the state force churches and religious agencies to violate their own principles? This question has come up again and again, as pressure on churches to accept dominant, secular norms has increased. This pressure includes laws requiring Catholic institutions to provide...

Like many news junkies, I’ve noticed that stories putting Muslims in a bad light tend to be sketchy and underreported. A minor example is the comment - “the greatest terrorists in the world occupy the White House”--by the head Muslim chaplain of New York City’s prisons. In Manhattan, remarks like that are nearly as conventional as talk about the weather, so the controversy was fairly small. It might have been larger if the media had shown any interest in other points the imam made. For instance that Muslim prisoners are being tortured in Manhattan, and that Muslims must be “hard...

Mickey Kaus at Kausfiles.com says that the gay-cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain has the same marketing strategy as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Both, he says, have been hyped as blue-state movies that are reaching and changing minds in the cities of red America. He calls this the "Heartland Breakout Meme”. ("Meme" refers to a cultural copying unit that hops from brain to brain without much thought or any at all). What Kaus means is that the mainstream media keep reinforcing ideas liberals want to believe, whether they are true or not. But the alleged breakout of Fahrenheit appears to be myth,...

Liberals wage many battles, but have you heard which one is the major struggle now? Brace yourselves; it’s the campaign “against the established media and it’s bizarre relationship with the right-wing and the truth.” That’s from the Daily Kos, a popular liberal blog. No, it’s not a satire. Just when conservatives thought they were getting somewhere against the entrenched liberalism of the newsroom culture, it turns out that the newsroom has been reactionary all along; the real lonely insurgents fighting for media balance and truth are liberals. The mind reels. Some on the left-Eric Alterman, for one-acknowledge that journalists tend...

Of course Oprah took the side of veracity-challenged author James Frey, author of “A Million Little Pieces. She is in the feelings business, and you don’t succeed in her line of work by favoring facts over deeply felt but untrue stories. The tears that she and her staffers shed while reading Frey’s largely concocted tale of crime and addiction made the book important to her. When Frey appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live, Oprah made things worse by phoning in to say, “the underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me.” Apparently this meant that she...

Consider the narrative line for Samuel Alito's life. It's perfect. He comes from a white ethnic community that valued family, tradition, patriotism and the Democratic Party. By the time he arrived at Princeton, an outsider in a high-status student body where Catholics were still rare, the cultural revolution was under way and the most strident of the '60s people were acting like swine (“very privileged people behaving irresponsibly,” as he politely put it). He found their values alien. As columnist David Brooks wrote last week in the New York Times: “The liberals had 'Question Authority' bumper stickers; the ethnics had...

Michael Barone and John Leo, two writers I greatly admire , noticed as I did the contempt the Democratic elite displayed for Judge Alito, who, it seemed to me, is the very sort of person who until the 1960’s represented the party’s base. Barone notes that divide is most evident at our most intellectually corrupt institutions—the universities. He thus, confirms the disconnect Judge Alito felt when he traveled the 12 miles from home to Princeton : Our universities today have become our most intellectually corrupt institutions. University administrators must lie and deny that they use racial quotas and preferences in...

Media Still Overplaying Race Card in Katrina Analysis By John Leo Did New Orleans blacks die at a higher rate than whites in the wake of Hurricane Katrina? On the evidence so far, the answer is no. Of the 1,100 bodies recovered in Louisiana after Katrina, 836 were found in New Orleans, and the state has released data on 568 of those that were judged to be storm-related. As of last week, blacks, who were 67.2 percent of the pre-storm population of New Orleans, account for 50.9 percent of the city victims so far identified by race. It was New...

Syndicated Columnist Korea's Kim Jong-Il has to work a bit on his aphorism skills. People no longer bother much to create new aphorisms, adages and memorable sayings. But when they do, this column boldly moves to collect them. "An aphorism is a one-line novel," said Ukrainian author and aphorism fanatic Leonid Sukhorukov. Here are some more recent extra-short novels: "The plural of anecdote is not data," said Frank Kotsonis. "A journey of a thousand miles starts with an airline ticket. Unless you're crazy," observed aphorist Chad Carter. "We campaign in poetry; we govern in prose," said President Jed Bartlet of...

The wretched excess of the "Save Tookie" campaign By John Leo AP Rapper Snoop Dogg during a rally for death-row inmate Stanley "Tookie" Williams last month. "Tookie" Williams, put to death by lethal injection last week in California, was a "legend" who underwent "a meaningful martyrdom that sent a lasting message to the world," according to old-time leftist Tom Hayden, formerly Mr. Jane Fonda. "Meaningful martyrdom"? What can Hayden be talking about? Martyrs die for a cause. Williams died for executing four unarmed people during two 1979 robberies, shooting a woman in the face, and laughing uncontrollably at the gurgling...

Martyrdom? By John Leo Dec 19, 2005 “Tookie” Williams, put to death by lethal injection last week in California, was a “legend” who underwent “a meaningful martyrdom that sent a lasting message to the world,” according to old-time leftist Tom Hayden, formerly Mr. Jane Fonda.” Meaningful martyrdom”? What can Hayden be talking about? Martyrs die for a cause. Williams died for executing four unarmed people during two 1979 robberies, shooting a woman in the face, and laughing uncontrollably at the gurgling sounds a male victim made as he died in agony. Opposing the death penalty, of course, means speaking out...

A Christmas quiz:The "winter program" at Ridgeway Elementary School in Dodgeville, Wis., changed the lyrics of the Christmas carol "Silent Night" to the more inclusive "Cold in the Night." ("Cold in the night, no one in sight, winter winds whirl and bite.") After this success, the program's next step will obviously be:(a) Changing "O Holy Night" to "Uh-oh! Wholly night!" a song about a lunar eclipse.(b) Singing "O Little Town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania."(c) A song celebrating the comeback of the American auto industry, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Ford."(d) A ditty about hoping for...

A Christmas quiz: The "winter program" at Ridgeway Elementary School in Dodgeville, Wis., changed the lyrics of the Christmas carol "Silent Night" to the more inclusive "Cold in the Night." ("Cold in the night, no one in sight, winter winds whirl and bite.") After this success, the program's next step will obviously be: (a) Changing "O Holy Night" to "Uh-oh! Wholly night!" a song about a lunar eclipse. (b) Singing "O Little Town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania." (c) A song celebrating the comeback of the American auto industry, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Ford." (d)...

In a burst of anti-war triumphalism, Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post wrote last week that President Bush and the Bushies have run out of “elitists whom they can demonize.” Hmm. That is a problem. Where will we find the punching bags of tomorrow? Wait! I have it. How about the elite news media? Will they do? Meyerson celebrated Cindy Sheehan “whose down the line dovishness is more than offset by her standing as the mother of,” etc. etc. Actually, Sheehan was more or less a summer-long anti-Bush media construct, kept aloft by withholding the news that she regards “insurgents”...

In a burst of anti-war triumphalism, Harold Meyerson of The Washington Post wrote last week that President Bush and the Bushies have run out of "elitists whom they can demonize." Hmmm. That is a problem. Where will we find the punching bags of tomorrow? Wait! I have it. How about the elite news media? Will they do? Meyerson celebrated Cindy Sheehan, "whose down-the-line dovishness is more than offset by her standing as the mother of," etc., etc. Actually, Sheehan was more or less a summer-long anti-Bush media construct, kept aloft by withholding the news that she regards "insurgents" in Iraq...

Folks, we’re talking here with Terry Carville-Begala, the famed political strategist. How goes the fight to trash Bush’s Supreme Court nominee, Sam Alito? Well, it’s just plain hard work, Geraldo. He’s a normal Re publican pick, just as Breyer and Ginsburg were normal Democratic picks. But when we get through with him, he’ll look like Caligula. How will you do that? Well, we can’t say he’ll have women forced into back-alley abortions, as Teddy did to Bork. That’s considered crude today. Our model is what Chuck Schumer did to Charles Pickering. The judge had a segregationist past, then turned around...

All in the family    JOHN LEO Why a strong, intact home life is the biggest single factor in raising good, successful kids. It took the media a while to acknowledge that most of Katrina's victims were black. Apparently, it will take longer to mention that most of the victims were women and children. I noticed three commentators who brought up the delicate subject of the mostly missing males — George Will, Gary Bauer, and Thomas Bray, a columnist for the Detroit News. Will noted that 76 percent of births to Louisiana's African-Americans are to unmarried women, and probably more...

Affluent, well-educated liberals were in -- a "new elite," as The Washington Post termed it. Party regulars, officeholders and blue-collar Democrats were out. New York, a union state, had only three union members as delegates, though it had at least nine members of the gay liberation movement. No farmer was a member of the Iowa delegation. Only 30 of the 255 Democratic members of Congress were selected as delegates. A full 39 percent of delegates had attended graduate school. Over a third of the white delegates were classified as secularists, compared with 5 percent of the general population. The reformers...

The "tiny cross" people at the American Civil Liberties Union are at it again. They are the folks with extra-keen eyes who search the seals of towns and counties for miniature crosses that they like to trumpet as grave threats to separation of church and state. This time around, they are leaning on the village of Tijeras, N.M., whose seal contains a conquistador's helmet and sword, a scroll, a desert plant, a fairly large religious symbol (the Native American zia) and a small Christian cross. Tiny cross inspectors are not permitted to fret about large non-Christian religious symbols, only undersized...

The "tiny cross" people at the American Civil Liberties Union are at it again. These are the folks with extra-keen eyes and powerful magnifying glasses who examine the official seals of towns and counties, looking for miniature crosses that ACLU lawyers like to trumpet as grave threats to separation of church and state. This time around, the folks with the magnifying glasses are leaning on the village of Tijeras, N.M., whose seal contains a conquistador's helmet and sword, a scroll, a desert plant, a fairly large religious symbol (the Native American zia) and a quite small Christian cross. "Tiny cross"...

10/24/05 By John Leo Class(room) Warriors The cultural left has a new tool for enforcing political conformity in schools of education. It is called dispositions theory, and it was set forth five years ago by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education: Future teachers should be judged by their "knowledge, skills, and dispositions." What are "dispositions"? NCATE's prose made clear that they are the beliefs and attitudes that guide a teacher toward a moral stance. That sounds harmless enough, but it opened a door to reject teaching candidates on the basis of thoughts and beliefs. In 2002, NCATE said...

The "tiny cross" people at the American Civil Liberties Union are at it again. These are the folks with extra-keen eyes and powerful magnifying glasses who examine the official seals of towns and counties, looking for miniature crosses that ACLU lawyers like to trumpet as grave threats to separation of church and state. This time around, the folks with the magnifying glasses are leaning on the village of Tijeras, N.M., whose seal contains a conquistador's helmet and sword, a scroll, a desert plant, a fairly large religious symbol (the Native American zia) and a quite small Christian cross. "Tiny cross"...

he cultural left has a new tool for enforcing political conformity in schools of education. It is called dispositions theory, and it was set forth five years ago by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education: Future teachers should be judged by their "knowledge, skills, and dispositions."

Thanks to a long report in the new Orleans Times-Picayune, we now know that most of the incredible tales of savagery in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina were simply made up by panicky residents and passed along by the media. On September 2, a CNN report cited an unidentified police officer who said he saw bodies riddled with bullet holes and one man with the top of his head completely shot off. Another unnamed officer, a sergeant, said he had to pass by the bodies of other police officers who had drowned doing their job. So far as we know,...

The Parent Trap By John Leo Oct 2, 2005 Columnist, U.S. News & World Report David and Tonia Parker of Lexington, Mass., saw a red flag when their son came home from kindergarten last January with a “diversity book bag” that included Who’s in a Family, a book promoting acceptance of gay marriage. The Parkers thought it was their right, as parents, to decide when and how to introduce their son to the issue of homosexuality. The Parkers believed the public school, Estabrook, is right to be teaching tolerance of gays but wrong in raising the subject in kindergarten and...

David and Tonia Parker of Lexington, Mass., saw a red flag when their son came home from kindergarten last January with a "diversity book bag" that included Who ' s in a Family, a book promoting acceptance of gay marriage. The Parkers thought it was their right, as parents, to decide when and how to introduce their son to the issue of homosexuality. The Parkers believed the public school, Estabrook, is right to be teaching tolerance of gays but wrong in raising the subject in kindergarten and then indoctrinating 5-year-olds on gay marriage. Tonia Parker says gay parents are allowed...

It took the media a while to acknowledge that most of Katrina's victims were black. Apparently, it will take longer to mention that most of the victims were women and children. I noticed three commentators who brought up the delicate subject of the mostly missing males--George Will, Gary Bauer, and Thomas Bray, a columnist for the Detroit News. Will noted that 76 percent of births to Louisiana's African-Americans are to unmarried women, and probably more than 80 percent in New Orleans, since that is the usual estimate in other inner cities. Will wrote: "That translates into a large and constantly...

A letter to the editor of the Oregonian, in Portland, Ore., said of Katrina: "I am deeply disturbed and angered by the number of reports claiming racism has something to do with the delay in the relief effort. These claims are unsubstantiated and a complete lie. To even suggest that our government would allow people to die simply because of the color of their skin is despicable. ... In a time of national crisis, another media-driven race war is the last thing this country needs."

A letter to the editor of the Oregonian, in Portland, said of Katrina: "I am deeply disturbed and angered by the number of reports claiming racism has something to do with the delay in the relief effort. These claims are unsubstantiated and a complete lie. To even suggest that our government would allow people to die simply because of the color of their skin is despicable.... In a time of national crisis, another media-driven race war is the last thing this country needs." Amen to that. The usual racemongers played their usual role. Jesse Jackson said the scene in New...

I thought news coverage of Katrina was exceptionally good under difficult circumstances. The sight of TV reporters conducting snarling interviews with incompetent officials was more ambiguous. “The Rebellion of the Talking Heads” was the headline on Jack Shafer’s good media column on Slate. The officials fully earned the snarls, but TV reporters aren’t hired to be the voice of an outraged nation. Interviews with stonewalling politicians should be done the way Brian Williams did them on NBC, by showing the officials up with polite and persistent questions they wouldn’t or couldn’t answer. “I don’t think the formula for the press...

Rafael Palmeiro, the Baltimore Orioles star, told Congress that he had absolutely, positively never used steroids, but then he failed a urine test. So last week, he repeated his never-ever statement but inserted a new word: He never intentionally used them. He said: "I am sure you will ask how I tested positively for a banned substance. As I look back, I don't have a specific answer to give. I wasn't able to explain how the banned substance entered my body."

In the wake of the London bombings, New York City is now searching the bags of subway riders. This is provoking the usual cluster of perverse reactions. Someone on Air America, the liberal talk radio network, suggested that riders carry many bags to confuse and irritate the cops. Mayor Bloomberg has ordered that the searches be entirely random, to avoid singling out any one ethnic or religious group. So if someone fits the suicide bomber profile - young Muslim male, short hair, recently shaved beard or mustache, smelling of flower water (a preparation for entering paradise) - the police must...

Isn't it awful, a friend said at dinner the other night, that 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the U.S. invasion? When I asked where the statistic came from, he said maybe it was 8,000, but definitely somewhere between 8,000 and 100,000. That's a pretty broad spread, so I decided to do some checking. The 100,000 estimate is from a survey of Iraqi households conducted last year by a team of scholars from Johns Hopkins University and published in a British medical journal, the Lancet. As luck would have it, the team was anti-war, and the study was released just...