Free Republic

Nothing to fear—yet Gene Lyons Nobody should be surprised to see the nation’s esteemed celebrity news media align with FOX News against the White House, although even a cynical observer like me found the unanimity mildly shocking. Don’t they remember what journalism was supposed to be? Supposedly, the press regulates its own behavior. In reality, that’s been a joke for two decades. “Claiming the moral authority of a code of professional ethics it idealizes in the abstract but repudiates in practice,” I wrote in 2003, “today’s Washington press corps has grown as decadent and self-protective as any politician or interest...

My guess is that she really doesn't know what she wants, or who she really is. It's probably dangerous to admit to a moment of empathy. I'll either get disqualified from ever becoming being a Supreme Court justice or asked to turn in my press card. But after watching reruns of Gov. Sarah Palin's resignation from the governorship, after hearing every grammatically challenged sentence and inconsistent paragraph dissected by some talk show host, I started to (blush) feel her pain. There was the frozen smile, the vulnerability, the odd grab bag of unfiltered, unedited, unintelligible un-reasons scattered across the lawn....

The Final Frontier I dreamed that Spock saved our planet, The Daily Planet of journalism. Instead of swooping in to figure out the dimensionality and logarithms to rescue the world from red matter, as Spock does in J. J. Abrams’s dazzling new “Star Trek,” I imagined Spock rescuing read matter for the world. Newspapers are an “endangered species,” as John Kerry called us in a Senate hearing last week, just as the Vulcans are in the new prequel. I know Barack Spock likes newspapers. An aide told me during the campaign that Mr. Obama would get cranky if he didn’t...

<p>Mark Morford: Is Obama an enlightened being?</p> <p>Spiritual wise ones say: This sure ain't no ordinary politician. You buying it?</p> <p>I find I'm having this discussion, this weird little debate, more and more, with colleagues, with readers, with liberals and moderates and miserable, deeply depressed Republicans and spiritually amped persons of all shapes and stripes and I'm having it in particular with those who seem confused, angry, unsure, thoroughly nonplussed, as they all ask me the same thing: What the hell's the big deal about Obama?</p>

You think a $100K salary is a lot? $500K? Please. The truly wealthy scoff at your paltry breadcrumbs. Then it came to pass that I stumbled across this story from Forbes magazine, which is officially called "Forbes" but is actually called "Forbes oh my God we worship ruthless CEOs like shiny meth in the summertime," and among the glittering ads for luxury intergalactic travel and sleek private jets and $50K Rolexes and big phallic yachts and surreal 20-page ad inserts for Abu Dhabi megadevelopments, there was an article about the new home being built in Mumbai right now for Mukesh...

Who, pray who, is still sucked in by grotesque fast-food ads? Shouldn't there be a law? I admit scattershot naivete. I admit to a strain of blind optimism, a sort of sporadic myopia, a weirdly sanguine tunnel vision that makes me somehow think that we as a species and a culture and as a mad gaggle of individual human souls who are coupled with functioning hunks of semi-rational gray matter, we must, at least occasionally, be learning something, ever-so-slightly advancing our awareness of those things on this planet that want to harm us and sicken us and even kill us,...

How horrifying is it when Bush's unwinnable disaster becomes so dreary and forgettable? I think it was Keith Olbermann who said it first, who said yes wow that Virginia Tech shooting rampage was horrible and shocking and brutal and oh my God we lost a lot of really good, honest American kids and Something Should Be Done. And maybe let's start with the wide-eyed gun-rights maniacs and the conservative pseudo-cowboys and those twitchy Second Amendment paranoids who somehow still think that we all must cling to our nasty little Glocks 'cuz gosh, what might happen if our own government turns...

It's bad form to speak ill of the dead. Good thing this man's own vile words speak for themselves - You can eulogize. You can mourn and ponder and do a lengthy retrospective, a political analysis, a sociocultural examination of a career and a legacy and a rather remarkable life. When remembering the dead, the journalistic options are legion. But in the case of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, the grandfather of the fundamentalist religious right and the foremost champion of the creation of a brutally homophobic, mysogynistic Christian theocracy in America, perhaps it's better to let the man's most...

BARACK OBAMA looked as if he needed a smoke and he needed it bad. Everyone knows you're not supposed to make two big changes at once. But Michelle Obama's price for letting her husband run was that he quit. So there he was, trying to meet the deep, inexhaustible needs of both Iowa activists and the global press behemoth on his first swing across the state, while giving up cigarettes. He was a tad testy. Traipsing around desolate stretches of snowy — and extremely white — Iowa to go into living rooms and high school gyms and take questions like...

The Defiant Ones came striding from the Pentagon yesterday, the troika of warriors marching abreast in their dark suits and power ties.W, Rummy and Dick Cheney were so full of quick draw confidence that they might have been sauntering down the main drag of Deadwood.Far from being run out of town, the defense czar has been on a victory lap in Baghdad, Mosul and Washington. Yesterday's tribute had full military honors, a color guard, a 19 gun salute, and Old Guard performance in Revolutionary War costumes, & John Phillip Souza music. Even Joyce Rumsfeld got a Distinguished Public Service Medal...

Maureen Dowd: Good gracious - It's the truth Staff Report Article Launched:12/06/2006 10:16:33 PM PST FIRST, JUNIOR TOOK over the house with big plans to remodel it and make it the envy of the neighborhood. But then he played with matches and set the house on fire. So now he's frantically trying to stop the flames from torching the whole block. The Bush administration has gone from a breathless plan to change the Middle East to a breathless plan to preserve it, from democracy promotion to conflagration avoidance. That was the cold shower offered Tuesday by Robert Gates, the former...

After 9/11, Americans had responded to bellicosity, drawn to the image, as old as the Western frontier myth, of the strong father protecting the home from invaders. The macho poses and tough talk of the cowboy president were undercut when he seemed flaccid in the face of the vicious Katrina. Even former members of the administration conceded they were tired of the muscle-bound style, longing for a more maternal approach to the globe. ?We were exporting our anger and our fear, hatred for what had happened,? said former Deputy SoS Richard Armitage. He said America needed ?to turn another face...

THINGS have become so dire for the Republicans that now even Bush is distancing himself from Bush. The president is cutting and running from the president. In a momentous event at the White House on Monday, Tony Snow made a major announcement about an important new strategy for Iraq. The president will no longer stay the course on the rallying cry "stay the course." A presidency built on message discipline (Message: "Stay the course") is trying to salvage itself with some last-minute un-messaging. Of course, the administration has never really said what "the course" is, so it was never really...

"...How will we ever persuade him to give up his modeling gigs in Men’s Vogue, Marie Claire, Vanity Fair and Washington Life? How can we lure the lanky young senator from Illinois out of the glossy celebrity pages and back to gritty substance, away from Annie Leibovitz’s camera and back to Abraham Lincoln’s tradition? He may not want to come back, now that he has mastered that J.F.K. casual glamour pose in shirt sleeves and tie, suit jacket slung over his shoulder, elegant wife and pretty children accessorizing. The Washington Post’s fashion reporter, Robin Givhan, analyzed the Men’s Vogue spread,...

As I said during my most recent radio spot, "listening to my arguments rarely involves having to have bail money ready." Think about it...." Whether it's gather all-the-facts ignorant students to engage in street protests while their protester-professors are usually curiously absent, liberals use kids to perpetuate their causes, just daring the authorities to do their jobs. If the kids get busted, it's considered a necessary evil, as more kids come along to fill any voids. Thus we now have (again) Cindy Sheehan in her latest quest for attention and relevance -- goading kids who've fully digested the anti-war diatribe...

Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesSenator Hillary Rodham Clinton and supporters marched at the Avenue of the Americas and Greenwich Avenue. In the wake of spandex-clad drag queens, a slew of feather headdresses and a float themed "Carnival in Rio," Jo-Ann Shain and Mary Jo Kennedy did not stand out among the gay and proud parading yesterday afternoon down Fifth Avenue. In contrast to the sequins and go-go boots donned by some marchers at the annual gay pride parade, they wore cotton T-shirts, gray slacks and walking shoes. But along with 45 other couples, Ms. Shain and Ms. Kennedy,...

When all the fanatical Christians disappear, will traffic finally improve? Wait, did I miss it? Did it happen three days ago, on 6-6-06, a.k.a. Tea Time with the Beast, a.k.a. the Great Day of Reckoning, a.k.a. the National Day of Slayer, all the world crashing down in a heap of hissing steam and belching smoke and balmy gusty breezes sometime around noon just after lunch but not before rush hour and hitting right around siesta? I might have been napping. Did the Apocalypse finally hit? Did the deep wish of roughly a half-billion zealous believers come to pass and were...

No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree? Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV...

Think sex and drugs destroy America? Try naive chastity. Oh, and "Purity Balls" There are these things. These unholy events called "Purity Balls" and you should probably fall to your knees right this minute and thank a merciful and lubricious and happily polyamorous God that you do not know what they are and that you have access right this minute to vast quantities of wine to deflect their nasty karmic arrows because, you know, oh my God. But hey, free country. Purity Balls. No, not some sort of newfangled spherical chastity device to be inserted using vacuum tubes and pulleys,...

It's a shockingly eco-friendly plan from the world's most toxic retailer. Did hell just freeze over? Sometimes you just have to let the possibility breathe. Sometimes you just have to allow that something grand and good and healthy might actually be born from the bowels of the dank and ravenous megacorporate world, like flowers from a dung heap, like vodka from old potatoes, even if it comes right alongside the nastiest, most abusive federal environmental policy you will see in your lifetime. Take Wal-Mart, the most famously offensive, town-destroying, junk-purveying, labor-abusing, sweatshop-supporting, American-job-killing, soul-numbing, seizure-inducing, hope-curdling retailer in the known...

Short answer: Of course you do. Longer answer: Wait, a what? Are you serious? Where? It is a time of great wonder and sporadic hope and hot liquid sighs masquerading as just another day in your life. It is a time of vital physical awakening and innovative technological excellence resulting in unprecedented levels . . .

Bush's cinematic war on terror Gene Lyons Why do Republican-oriented pundits spend so much energy lashing out at Hollywood for its sins? Professional jealousy. Partly because so many Americans imagine the world beyond Wal-Mart as a movie set, the Bush administration does its best work in the realm of illusion. I was reminded of this when a Kansas student recently asked President Bush what he, "as a rancher," thought of "Brokeback Mountain." On cue, Cowboy W said he hadn't seen it and would rather discuss "ranching." The TV networks ate it up. Never mind that it was sheer fakery. Bush...

Yes, I know you were drunk. Must've been. Either drunk or on serious meds and/or you just didn't give much of a damn about anything anyway because you're just one of those people, one of those types who comes lurching around the city like a chunk of numbed pain in your big-ass mid-'80s burgundy car with the white top and chrome bumpers -- an old Cadillac? Monte Carlo? -- early last Sunday morning to wreak casual havoc. Is that about right? Do you remember any of it? Here is what I'm guessing: probably not. Let me tell you what happened,...

No, the WNBA doesn't count. What about the NFL? The NBA? What about the big, macho men?You know they're out there. The gay pro male athletes, grunting and sweating and spitting and running and crashing and hurling, right now, acting all manly and tough and rugged and heroic on the field or on the court. And they're signing autographs and getting themselves all beloved by largely homophobic 'Murkin men and swooning 'Murkin boys and even handfuls of women as they jam the secret of their sexuality way, way down and go on raking in their millions, leading their lives...

Arkansas mom gives birth to a whole freakin' baseball team. How deeply should you cringe? Who are you to judge? Who are you to say that the more than slightly creepy 39-year-old woman from Arkansas who just gave birth to her 16th child yes that's right 16 kids and try not to cringe in phantom vaginal pain when you say it, who are you to say Michelle Duggar is not more than a little unhinged and sad and lost? And furthermore, who are you to suggest that her equally troubling husband -- whose name is, of course, Jim Bob...

Apparently, it wasn't just "invade Iraq and Afghanistan in my name." A special report: Scene: White House private residence, night, not long ago. President Bush present in his most favoritest guns 'n' bunnies PJs. Laura asleep, knocked out by a combination of too much Good Housekeeping and excessive hair-spray fumes. Suddenly, a burst of black smoke. A deep, resonant voice speaks: "Psst! George! God here, taking a break from supervising the well-being of eight billion troubled souls along with infinite galaxies of unimaginable vastness to speak with you directly one more time because, well, you're special, aren't you, George? Yes...

Leather, techno, sex & war: more only-in-SF juice to make you proud. Take that, uptight neocons. It was the moment when we walked by a jam-packed S.F. City Hall and realized it was open to host a VIP techno dance party, while immediately outside its gilded doors upward of 50,000 revelers wandered and shimmied and flaunted their costumes and drank nasty Red Bull cocktails in the huge Civic Center plaza for the third annual Love Parade, everyone baring flesh and shaking their groove thangs to any one of 200 world-class (well, some of them) DJs spinning their wares on over...

At last, one scientist BushCo will definitely -- albeit resentfully -- listen to. Sometimes. So now we know. This is what it takes. This is how far the nation has to crumble and this is how many people have to die and this is how many tens of billions it has to cost and this is how far his dirt-low poll numbers have to fall before Bush will finally come out and say he agrees with one of those godforsaken gul-dang book-learned scientist types. You know the ones. Those informed and well-educated data-crunchers he normally despises like a kid hates...

Can you hear that? That low scraping moan, that painful scream, that compressed hissing wail like the sound of an angry alligator caught in a vise? Why, it's the GOP, and they're screaming, "No, no it can't be, oh my God, please no, this damnable Katrina thing is just an unstoppable PR disaster for us!" After all (they wail), who woulda thought dissing all those poor black people and letting so many of them die in filth and misery in the Superdome while our pampered CEO president enjoyed yet another vacation would cause such an ugly backlash, such harsh criticism...

I understand that politicians are wont to put cronies and cupcakes on the payroll. I just wish they'd stop putting them on the Homeland Security payroll. Can't they stick their pals who failed at business in the Small Business Administration and their tomatoes over at the Oilseeds and Rice Bureau of the Ag Department? At least Bill Clinton knew not to stash his sweeties in jobs concerned with keeping the nation safe. Gennifer Flowers said that Mr. Clinton got her a $17,500 job in Arkansas in the state unemployment agency, though she was ranked ninth out of 11 applicants tested....

Stop criticizing! The rich man's CEO president is executing his job requirements perfectly. Everyone is slamming poor Dubya. Everyone is saying, oh my God, he's more inept than we ever imagined, he has no idea what's really going on, he's oblivious and in denialand he pretty much let all those poor black people die in filth and misery, and he basically ignored the massive Katrina disaster for days before finally being pressured into cutting his umpteenth vacation short and actually taking action. This is what they're saying. Kanye West was right, Bush doesn't care about black people, or the poor,...

[snip] What Hillary has going for her is exhaustion. Exhaustion kicks in with any party in power for eight years, let alone one that tricked the country into war. And at some point, voters may be too exhausted to resist Hillary's relentless ambition any longer. But by hanging back and trimming her positions, by keeping her powder dry until a more politically advantageous time, she may miss the moment when Americans are looking for someone to emerge from her cowering party to articulate their anger about Iraq or their fear about a Supreme Court that will scale back women's rights...

W vactationed so hard in Texas he got bushed. He needed a vacation from his vacation.So he headed West yesterday to get away from his Western getaway--and the mushrooming Crawford Woodstock--to spend a couple of days at the Tamarack Resort in the rural Idaho mountians. 'I'm kind of hanging loose as they say,' he told reporters. W. didn't go alone of course. Just as he took his beloved feather pillow on the road duing his 2000 campaign, now he takes his beloved bike.An Air Force One steward tenderly unloaded W.'s $3,000.00 Trek fuel mountain bike when he landed in Boise.I...

In which Mark Morford survives his high school reunion, still unmarried and childless. It's like that feeling you get when you smack your head into a brick wall and your skull reverberates and your vision momentarily blurs and you have a painful but somehow still nicely appealing flash of insight into Something Very Important, something you think you should know, something that can only be illuminated via cocktails and bloody prime rib and conversing with old flames. This is the high school reunion. It is the most curious thing. You attend one and you are calmly slammed up against the...

Richard Nixon once gave me a lesson in the politics of war. Howell Raines, then the Washington bureau chief for The Times, took some reporters to meet Mr. Nixon right before the 1992 New Hampshire primary. The deposed president had requested that Howell bring along only reporters who were too young to have covered Watergate, so we tried to express an excess of Juvenalia spirit. Before the first vote of '92 was cast, Mr. Nixon laid out, state by state, how Bill Clinton, who was not even a sure bet for the Democratic nomination at that point, was going to...

She writes two columns a week for the most prestigious newspaper in America, heckling the powerful with her trademark sarcasm while making witty allusions to movies and pop culture. It's a dream job for a journalist. But New York Times political columnist Maureen Dowd, on leave since early May to finish her second book, sounds a little burned out. "It [writing the column] is so stressful that I don't miss it at all," she said Wednesday by telephone from Washington. "For me, the hard thing is the psychological pressure of being original. I find that almost impossible. "You have to...

NEW YORK, May 25 /PRNewswire/ -- Maureen Dowd, following the success of her acclaimed New York Times bestselling book, Bushworld, has turned her lapidary prose and wicked wit to a topic even more incendiary than presidential politics: sexual politics. Dowd's new book, ARE MEN NECESSARY? When Sexes Collide, will be published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on November 8th, 2005. The New York Times columnist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for saucy and incisive commentary about the roundelay of Bill, Monica, Hillary and Ken Starr, digs into the Y and X files, exploring the mysteries and muddles of sexual...

I've seen just about every werewolf, Dracula and mermaid movie ever made, I have a Medusa magnet on my refrigerator, and the Sphinx of Greek mythology is a role model for her lethal brand of mystery. President George W. Bush's experiments in Afghanistan and Iraq created his own chimeras, by injecting feudal and tribal societies with the cells of democracy, and blending warring factions and sects. Some of the forces unleashed are promising; others are frightening. In a chilling classified report to Congress last week, General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, conceded that Iraq and Afghanistan operations have...

A common complaint is that revelations from the Gomery inquiry have brought the operation of the federal government effectively to a halt. One front that Ottawa seems to keep doggedly moving ahead on — regrettably — is our military integration with the U.S. Indeed, while the Gomery issue built to a crescendo last week, hardly any attention was paid to the release of a defence policy review that signalled Ottawa's intention to make the Canadian military more part of the U.S. war machine — a change that would likely offend most Canadians if they were aware of it. Of course,...

Many argue that communism will never be possible because of "human nature". The essence of this false argument is the belief that a communist society would consist of an all-powerful central government that would tell everybody what to do--and would therefore undermine the creative initiative of individuals and the search for happiness. • This argument is based on two false assumptions: (1) It assumes that a communist society will look like the former Soviet Union, or the current China, North Korea, etc (ie: corrupt police states with a feudal-style ruling class) (2) It assumes that people will only work in...

Men are always telling me not to generalize about them. But a startling new study shows that science is backing me up here.Research published last week in the journal 'Nature' reveals that women are genetically more complex than scientists ever imagined, while men remain the simple creatures they appear.'Alas,' said one of the authors of the study, the Duke University genome expert Huntington Willard, 'genetically speaking, if you've met one man, you've met them all.''We are, I hate to say it, predictable. You can't say that about women. Men and women are father apart than we ever knew.'It's not Mars...

When I need to work up my nerve to write a tough column, I try to think of myself as Emma Peel in a black leather catsuit, giving a kung fu kick to any diabolical mastermind who merits it. I try not to visualize myself as one of the witches in "Macbeth," sitting off to the side over a double, double toil and trouble, bubbling cauldron, muttering about what is fair or foul in the hurly burly of the royal court. There's an intense debate going on now about why newspapers have so few female columnists. Out of what will...

February 24, 2005OP-ED COLUMNISTSwifties Slime Again By MAUREEN DOWD ASHINGTON Instead of trying to destroy AARP, Republicans should be signing up the seniors' lobby to find Osama. AARP's super-relentless intelligence network is certainly better than that doddering C.I.A's. Osama has to have turned 50, and AARP somehow knows where everyone who has turned 50 lives. But no. The same Republicans who used to love AARP when it helped them pass the president's prescription drug plan now hate AARP because it is against the president's plan to privatize Social Security. "They are the boulder in the middle of the highway...

WASHINGTON There are many angles for romance. In the movie "Silk Stockings," Fred Astaire uses geography. He croons to the leggy Soviet apparatchik Cyd Charisse that he loves "the east, west, north, and the south of you." In "My Little Chickadee," Mae West rolls her hips and eyes and goes with arithmetic. "A man has $100 and you leave him with $2," she lectures a class of schoolchildren. "That's subtraction." Advertisement Physics, of course. As an old boyfriend used to say: "It's all electromagnetic." And then there's my favorite: the alphabetical approach. I once had a crush on a guy...

In Iraq, as Yogi Berra would say, the future ain't what it used to be. Now that the election's over, our leaders think it's safe to experiment with a little candor. President Bush finally acknowledged that the Iraqis can't hack it as far as securing their own country, which means, of course, that America has no exit strategy for its troops, who will soon number 150,000. News organizations led with the story, even though the president was only saying something that everybody has known to be true for a year. The White House's Iraqi policy has gone from a total...

WASHINGTON Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, has been pilloried for suggesting that women may be biologically unsuited to succeed at mathematics. He may have a point. Just look at Condoleezza Rice. She's clearly a well-educated, intelligent woman, versed in Brahms and the Bolsheviks, who has just been rewarded for her loyalty with the most plum assignment in the second Bush cabinet. Yet her math skills are woefully inadequate. She can't do simple equations. She doesn't even know that X times zero equals zero. If you multiply 1,370 dead soldiers times zero weapons of mass destruction, that equals zero...

WASHINGTON By the time House Republicans were finished with him, Bill Clinton must have thought of a thong as a torture device.For the Bush administration, it actually is.A former American Army sergeant who worked as an Arabic interpreter at Gitmo has written a book pulling back the veil on the astounding ways female interrogators used a toxic combination of sex and religion to try to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Cuba. It's not merely disgusting. It's beyond belief.The Bush administration never worries about anything. But these missionaries and zealous protectors of values should be worried about...

I'm herewith resigning as a member of the liberal media elite. I'm joining up with the conservative media elite. They get paid better. First comes news that Armstrong Williams got nearly a quarter of a million from the Education Department to plug No Child Left Behind. The families of soldiers killed in Iraq get a paltry $12,000. But good publicity? Priceless.

I have a good friend who believes, gloomily, bitterly, resignedly, that not only are we in for four more years of painful and cheerless BushCo-branded tyranny and misprision and aww-shucks dumb-guy shtick, but also that we are actually at the beginning of a long, brutal, fear-based Republican juggernaut that will last a good 16 more years, at least. Because this is how long it will take for the current horrific conservative cycle to play itself out, and this would resemble a more typical and historically proven 20-year pendulum swing, in this case one toward neoconservative right-wing hate and homophobia and...

Bogus presidents, unwinnable wars, and humiliating foreign policy, rabid homophobia, misogny, pseudo Christian agendas that seek to maul the keleidoscopic nature of the national spirit, these are issues and events we can access, things the media can report, that people can discuss with something resembling articluation.Unless you're House Majority Leader Tom Delay, a charred and black little nub of a human who stood up at the White House Prayer Breakfast last week and read a passage from the Bible that would seem to blame the tsunami's victims for their own unspeakable fate, given how the majority of them were Muslim...