Free Republic

John O’Neill commanded the same Swift boat during the Vietnam War that John Kerry did. One of 254 Swift boat veterans who holds a negative view of the Democratic presidential candidate, O’Neill is co-author of the current best-seller Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry (Regnery Publishing). To learn more about this group of highly-decorated veterans, visit SwiftVets.com. John O’Neill is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. He earned a Juris Doctorate degree from the University of Texas Law School. He was law clerk in 1974 for Justice William Rehnquist at the...

To Your Health.... By Lowell Ponte FrontPageMagazine.com | May 21, 2003 PONTEFICATIONS WHILE PRESIDENTIAL POLITICIANS OFFER VARIOUS PLANS to improve American healthcare, it is already changing – and not in all ways for the better, as my wife Ellen painfully learned. Knowing what she experienced and learned might save your or a loved one’s life. Nine months ago Ellen had surgery, but the feelings of sickness and pressure this procedure was supposed to remedy never went away. A few weeks ago I rushed her to the emergency room of that same hospital, where doctors were unable to transfuse her with...

EACH MID-MARCH THE BUZZARDS RETURN to Hinckley, Ohio, and radical Leftists return to the streets for their militant spring offensive to protest, spread propaganda and seduce new prey. In this election year, the Left has redoubled its efforts to mobilize anti-war protests as a way to help their Democratic comrades defeat incumbent President George W. Bush. This Saturday, March 20, anti-American marches and rallies were scheduled for dozens of cities in 50 countries around the world, and in the U.S. from Manhattan to Los Angeles. (In picking this date for antiwar protest, did they notice that the month of March...

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAS A BIG PROBLEM named Susan Lindauer, but you would never know this from the reporting by America’s dominant Left-leaning news media. Last Thursday Ms. Lindauer, 41, was arrested in her suburban Washington, D.C. home and charged with “prohibited financial transactions” from, acting as “an unregistered agent of,” and “conspiring” to act as a spy, both before and after the incursion a year ago, for Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS). Known in Arabic as the Mukhabbarat, the IIS has reportedly been involved in terrorist operations, intimidating and killing Iraqi defectors and dissidents, and according to Anwar...

MARTHA STEWART, CONVICTED LAST WEEK on all four counts against her – not for insider trading, but for her lies attempting to cover up behavior that likely would have been punished with only a fine and slap on the wrist – has much to teach us about Clinton-era America. Packing her tennis rackets and suntan lotion for a Club Fed stay that could last from 12 months to 20 years, this 62-year-old domesticity diva who turned Obsessive Compulsive fussiness into a billion dollar business leaves as her legacy a nation of higher aesthetics but lower moral standards. How should we...

WHO OWNS 9-11?  AND WHO OWNS HISTORY in general, the right to evoke the past and use pieces of it in creating the present? The first television campaign ad for President George W. Bush came under partisan attack in the Leftist media because it included a few solemn, dignified frames of devastation from the World Trade Center, destroyed by terrorists on September 11, 2001. Among the attacking voices were fat-cat Fire Fighters Union bosses feasting on caviar in ritzy Bal Harbour, Florida, who have endorsed Democratic presidential candidate-apparent Senator John Kerry (D.-Mass.) but for no specified reason accused President Bush...

WHERE SHOULD WE DEPLOY THE 40,000 NEW TROOPS that, after months of making anti-war statements, Democratic frontrunner Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts last Friday suddenly said he would send overseas if elected President? This is only the latest of several recent jerky lurches to the right – that is, towards the center – by this veteran politician whose voting record, the National Journal found, is the most liberal, the farthest Left of all 100 U.S. Senators. During Sunday’s Democratic debate, Senator Kerry seemed almost frantic as he scrambled to avoid answering a New York Times reporter’s question: “Are you...

Science WarsBy Lowell PonteFrontPageMagazine.com | February 27, 2004 AMERICA IS TODAY FIGHTING TWO WARS, NOT ONE.  In addition to the war on terrorism, we are locked in a civil war over the nature and future of our society. As the Chinese military philosopher Sun-tzu spelled out 23 centuries ago in his classic The Art of War, such warfare is not confined to a distant battlefield. It is all-encompassing and pervades every aspect of our lives. It is fought in the classroom, with teachers subtly taking sides in what they teach. It is fought through the bias of reporters, actors, singers,...

“DARTH NADER” IS WHAT FELLOW LEFTISTS now call their onetime comrade and hero. Their love turned to hate in 2000, when their once-upon-a-time Jedi Knight won 97,488 Florida votes as the Green Party’s candidate, costing Democratic Party nominee Al Gore the presidency by 537 votes. And this week Ralph Nader returned to enter the presidential lists as an Independent candidate in 2004. Will Nader again split the Leftist vote and re-elect President George W. Bush? A Fox-Opinion Dynamics Poll less than a week ago found that the President and his most likely challenger, Senator John F. Kerry (D.-Mass.), were...

Haiti: Victim of Clinton's Old Black MagicBy Lowell PonteFrontPageMagazine.com | February 20, 2004 ONCE AGAIN HAITIAN PRESIDENT JOHN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE may be ousted by his citizens, who began a new rebellion against his tyrannical rule on February 5. After Aristide was removed by a military coup in 1991, President Bill Clinton in 1994 sent 20,000 U.S. troops to Haiti to restore to power this former Roman Catholic Priest and advocate for Leftist Liberation Theology who once called Cuban Marxist dictator Fidel Castro his “greatest personal hero.”  “There is frankly no enthusiasm” for sending armed U.S. troops to secure Aristide’s presidency again,...

MSNBC DIED THIS WEEK, but few have yet noticed. Third among cable news networks, this joint venture begun in July 1996 by Microsoft and General Electric, owner of NBC, has lagged far behind rival Fox News Channel and CNN in viewers. But it has offered an alternative source of viewpoints, ranging from “Hardball” hosted by veteran Democrat Chris Matthews to “Scarborough County” hosted by former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough from the conservative Florida panhandle.“It was time for a change, to bring a new perspective to the channel,” an NBC executive this week reportedly told the New York Times. This...

<p>Who would 1971 anti-war activist John F. Kerry vote for if time-warped to the polls this November? Other issues aside, would he cast his ballot for the 2004 John F. Kerry running as a Vietnam War hero bedecked with medals he once pretended to throw away?</p>

Dem-Iraq-racyBy Lowell PonteFrontPageMagazine.com | February 13, 2004 THE GARDEN OF EDEN MAY HAVE BEEN IN IRAQ or close nearby, some scholars believe. The rivers Hiddekel and Perath that Genesis describes as splitting from one river flowing out of Eden might be the Tigris and Euphrates, and the patriarch Abraham came from “Ur in the Chaldees.” Utopians long have fantasized about restoring Eden – on a terraformed Mars by importing no serpents, or by transforming the politics and economics of this ancient land “between the rivers,” as Alexander the Great’s Greek word “Mesopotamia” means.As a newly-liberated Iraq is remade, we should...

THE NAUSEATING STENCH OF HUMAN BLOOD filled the eight-year-old’s nostrils as he awakened. Much of that blood was his own, covering the bottom of the bathtub where Joshua Ryen had crawled to hide from the dark-skinned man who slashed his throat and left him for dead. The terrified screams that had awakened him earlier that June 4th night in his family’s home were now replaced by deathly stillness. His father Douglas, 41, and ten-year-old sister Jessica and her 11-year-old friend Christopher Hughes had been killed by murderous attacks with a hatchet, buck knife and icepick. His sister Jessica’s body...

Satire: Thee I WedBy Lowell PonteFrontPageMagazine.com | February 6, 2004 VALENTINE’S DAY, 2014.  WHO COULD HAVE GUESSED how much would change during the decade following the February 2004 Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling that the state constitution required equal standing for same-sex marriage?But the crucial question continues to raise its head: when the ancient one-man-one-woman definition of marriage is declared obsolete, at what point sliding down the slippery slope can any new definition of marriage be established?The American Civil Liberties Union spent many months in Salt Lake City courtrooms arguing that polygamy ought to be legal, not because the ACLU loved apostate...

FAIR COMMENT; Pg. 50 Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts has a long political career, distinguished by his willingness to go further left in politics and lower for money than most other American politicians would dream of going. He has been largely unnoticed outside the liberal Northeast and the approving pages of leftist magazines and newspapers. But now, with Kerry the victor in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, it's time for America to wake up and smell the Kerry. Who is this gaunt and haunted, French-looking apparition nicknamed "Ichabod" by his preppy classmates? And what could America...

Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts has a long political career, distinguished by his willingness to go further left in politics and lower for money than most other American politicians would dream of going. He has been largely unnoticed outside the liberal Northeast and the approving pages of leftist magazines and newspapers. But now, with Kerry the victor in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, it's time for America to wake up and smell the Kerry. Who is this gaunt and haunted, French-looking apparition nicknamed "Ichabod" by his preppy classmates? And what could America expect from a John...

“STEALING THE SHOW” IS A TACTIC now used not just in show business, but also in sports, culture, commerce and politics.  The weapon most often used to do this is shock. The aftermath is often disorientation, distortion and a degraded society. On Sunday, for example, singer Michael Jackson’s sister Janet stole the biggest show in sports, with the biggest riveted male audience – the Superbowl – with a halftime show that featured white singer Justin Timberlake simulating rape by tearing off her clothing to reveal a bare breast. For any who missed it, Matt Drudge enterprisingly provided a closeup...

PONTEFICATIONS“AN AMERICA THAT BELONGS NOT TO THE PRIVILEGED, not to the few, but to all Americans.” That was what the winner of the New Hampshire Primary promised Tuesday night in his victory speech. But, paradoxically, if Senator John Kerry becomes the Democratic nominee and is elected this November, the White House for the next four or eight years will belong to a man born to enormous wealth and privilege. Kerry as a boy was raised and educated mostly in Europe. He fluently speaks, and thinks in, French. He preferred to marry wealthy women of foreign orientation. He believes that...

WILL COMMUNIST VIETNAM BE AMONG THE BIGGEST behind-the-scenes bankrollers of the Democratic National Convention this July 26-29 in Boston?  It already has been, via a de facto intermediary, thanks to the Massachusetts boy and friend of Hanoi now likely to be nominated there as the Democrats’ presidential standard-bearer.Senator John F. Kerry has a long political career, distinguished by his willingness to go farther Left in politics and lower for money than most other American politicians would dream of going.  He has been largely unnoticed outside the liberal Northeast and the approving pages of leftist magazines and newspapers. But now, with...