Free Republic

Don't burn the flag; wash it. – Norman Thomas. In the debate about a proposed constitutional amendment proscribing desecration of the American flag, what tend to go undiscussed are the sentiments of the common man. The great song-and-dance man George M. Cohan nailed those sentiments famously: You're a grand old flag, you're a high flying flag, And forever in peace may you wave … . Since the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in the 1989 Texas v. Johnson case, we have heard arguments like this: The right of individuals to express themselves, even by burning the American flag, is enshrined in...

The nuclear option, Social Security, John Bolton; Paris Hilton selling hamburgers or something; "Deep Throat" starring — masquerading? — as Mark W. Felt. Those topics are consuming the news columns. But what about … Iraq? Let's review. • The pace of killing goes on — and not only for Americans trying to secure the place. During the past 18 months, comrade Zarqawi and other al-Qaeda sympathizers have been dispatching Iraqi civilians at the rate of 20 per day. • Zarqawi himself may have been wounded in the lung — one of the more hopeful indicators of a general pacification coming...

What are some truths about the filibuster, blameworthiness, and the nuclear option? Right now, in the blandest terms, the situation in the Senate seems to be this: Democrats have stymied votes on about a dozen Bush nominees to the ap- pellate courts -- stymied votes on some of those nominees for years, some indeed for so much of the President's first term that they withdrew their names from consideration. With the Republicans having re-elected President Bush and gained seats in both houses of Congress last November, the President has resubmitted the names of many of the stalled nominees. The Democrats...

Greek Foreign Minister Panayiotis Molyviatis wrote in these pages March 25, "A return to the pre-1999 status quo is no longer a realistic option. Kosovo must remain multiethnic." With all due respect, Mr. Molyviatis is way off base. "Remain multiethnic"? Multiethnicity in Kosovo died when President Clinton supported Osama bin Laden's Kosovo Liberation Army, an army of which The Washington Times' own Jerry Seper wrote in May 1999, "Some members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has financed its war effort through the sale of heroin, were trained in terrorist camps run by international fugitive Osama bin Laden."

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. - Franklin Roosevelt Doing things they say you can't is one of this life's most delicious aspects. "They"- the imperious "they" who would rule operative opinion everywhere - disparage the very notion of nincompoop George Bush and America leading a successful crusade on behalf of liberty and democracy across the globe. Yet it's happening. The too-often grim outcomes of terrorism in Iraq sometimes cloud the bigger picture of liberty on the march. Here's a post-9/11 catalogue, many of the entries quite recent: - Success in Afghanistan, and the first elections...

Dear Mr. MacKenzie: It sincerely pains me to have to do this, but after sixteen (16) years of subscribing to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, I [Mudboy Slim] HEREBY CANCEL MY SUBSCRIPTION!! Sure, I'll miss the Sports page and its wonderful coverage of my Redskins and my Wahoos, but the rampant LeftWing bias that has overcome this once-great newspaper is more than I can stomach!! It's not your Editorial Page, Ross, and I will continue to read your column on-line...however, Jeff Schapiro's anti-GOP, anti-Earley Bias during the past campaign was simply beyond my significant capacity to tolerate IGNORANCE!! So, Mr. MacKenzie, it ...

"What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?" – Robert Browning, A Toccata of Galuppi's. In this hour of "bests," some will tell you the last restaurant they went to is the absolute best — the ribs or the Caesar salad, the filet or the yummy breads or the obscene desserts with more goop than anywhere else. For others, it's their golf clubs or their car. For still others it's the last book they read — such as, in this case, Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons. The chichi critics have panned Charlotte for two...

Talk about your p.c. Talk about elitism and stereotypical behavior. Talk about what has happened — as Tom Wolfe does inter alia in his I am Charlotte Simmons — to the spirit of open inquiry in the most thin-aired realms of the American academy. The case of Larry Summers vs. the Harvard harridans has got it all. Six weeks ago Harvard's president Larry Summers — a former Secretary of the Treasury and not a conservative — gave a 7,000-word speech (president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/ nber.html) wherein he proposed "some questions asked and some attempts at provocation." The spirit of inquiry. At Harvard. What...

A random walk among issues currently in the news … . • Let's hear it for the UN. The place is rife with scandal involving not only SecGen Kofi Annan's son Kojo, but possibly Kofi himself. Plus these: (1) allegations of sexual harassment leading to the resignation of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees; (2) corruption in the UN-overseen oil-for-food program that evidently allowed Saddam Hussein to circumvent sanctions against Iraqi oil and enabled Saddam to siphon perhaps $12 billion for himself; and (3) charges of prostitution, pedophilia, and rape on the part of UN "peacekeeping" troops in Congo. No...

When things began to get really bad, a group called the Media Research Center (MRC) designated itself monitor of the leftism loping around in the mainstream press, primarily television. Most of the guilty insist they are mere mainstreamers, centrists ("nobody here but us moderates") — yet surely they know better. They betray themselves when they open their mouths. (Disclaimer: For several years I served on the MRC panel selecting the year's most egregious quotations, a role filled more recently — as in December — by a staff colleague.) So before 2005 tracks too far, herewith a sampler of 2004 remarks...

What is it with the national Democrats? What of their behavior? Where is their moderation, their bipartisanship? Think about it. In the recent presidential election John Kerry offered little beyond vacillation and defeatism — few alternatives that were positive, credible, coherent, or new. The election was fundamentally about character and ideas. He lost. But not necessarily in his own mind: On "Meet the Press" last week he said: "I lost … to an incumbent President by a closer margin than an incumbent President has ever won re-election before." But: "I won the popular vote in the battleground states by 2...

Perhaps four words — resolve, courage, sacrifice, and extraordinary — best define the outcome of the elections in Iraq. The resolve of President Bush and the people of the United States, the courage and sacrifice of pri- marily the American military and the Iraqi people (as well as the post-Saddam Iraqi leadership), and the extraordinary electoral results. In the run-up to the election, many among the doubters and naysayers practically cheered for failure. They were all negativism, cynicism, and gloom. Remember? From all the predictable sectors the Old Media (which somewhere along the way redefined the terrorists as "insurgents"), Old...

One reads the report on CBS and the bogus memos — all 224 pages of it, supported by about 500 pages of exhibits — with a gathering sense of dismay. It is not a snow job. CBS promised findings "in weeks, not months" about allegations it had aired bogus memos suggesting disobedience by George Bush in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972-73. Four months and half-a-million dollars later we have a report by two eminences (a former Attorney General and a former head of the Associated Press) that amounts to the devastation of Dan Rather and CBS. The report...

For lo, the days are hastening on … . And so they are. But in the mad dash toward Christmas let us not forget the star, or what Christmas is supposed to be all about: the realm beyond evil and the merely material. Some — mostly Marxists and lunatic libertarians — tell us the material world is all there is, that economics explains everything, that even Christmas comes at a cost. Yet as Chesterton noted in his Everlasting Man: "The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy [that...

For lo, the days are hastening on . . . And so they are. But in the mad dash toward Christmas let us not forget the star, or what Christmas is supposed to be all about: the realm beyond evil and the merely material. [snip] Ours is not the first generation to battle materialism, particularly in annual Christmastime skirmishes. [snip]More recently we have had the likes of Yasser, Saddam, Osama, and Zarqawi. So the evil we confront today is the same old same old, albeit in updated form. But only now does a chorus rise to admonish against judgmentalism, to...

Herewith some key policy recommendations for the second Bush administration now forming up - with emphasis on a biggie. . . . Among others, the new administration should do these things: - Complete the mission in Iraq and move to a strategy of coalition troops in key locations as ultimate backups while stable, unified democracy takes root there. - Track all illegal aliens (including terrorists) in the United States, and move to temporary-worker cards for legals. -Crack the legislative code on the liberal Democratic lock stymieing so many administration nominees to the federal bench. - Infuse the environmental "problem" with...

Election-related quotes… . • Former (Bush I) White House Counsel Boyden Gray, on John Kerry's concession: "It was absolutely the right thing to do, because it headed off a long nightmare of litigation, which could have cast a pall on the election, whoever was confirmed as the winner. And it would have embarrassed this country at a time when the United States is trying to spread democracy abroad." • Retired General Norman Schwarzkopf, livid about Kerry campaign phone calls telling voters he endorsed Kerry: "[Kerry's] attempt to make up for [his] deficiencies [such as opposing the Reagan defense build-up and...

To an undiscerning and/or unsuspecting segment of the electorate, John Kerry emerged from the debates with his facade of moderation intact. Partly that is a consequence of a practiced politician who shuns the liberal label the way a cat rejects a branding. And partly it is a consequence of protection by a mainline press broadly sympathetic to Kerry as "one of us." To see the shamelessness of it all regarding the operative double standards applied to Kerry's statements, votes, and behavior, imagine if he went by another name. If John Kerry's name were, for instance, Teddy Kennedy… . Beyond Massachusetts,...

October 11 editions of Military Times publications (Navy Times, Army Times, Marine Corps Times, Air Force Times) carried an astounding story not likely to get much coverage in the establishment press. Staff writer Gordon Trowbridge wrote as follows: -snip- Finally, the Military Times survey may be telling Kerry and the Democrats that a hefty military majority sees through the careful veneer of moderation to the deeply ingrained leftism that drives him. Kerry has been hostile to the military probably since Yale — certainly so since he returned from Vietnam, led peacenik demonstrations, decried the American military as reeking with war...

Dick Cheney's solidity and steadiness mark him as the Bushie the left most loves to hate. There he was in Cleveland in the vice-presidential debate — the big dog against the ankle-biter, the reliable Lab showing the way to the undisciplined yapper who won't stay off the furniture. John Edwards made millions as a plaintiff's lawyer suing physicians for medical malpractice. A year ago he was introduced to 75 top trial lawyers in "The Inner Circle" by the group's president Ned Good this way: "John Edwards is one of us. First and foremost, he's a trial lawyer who just happens...