Free Republic

TEMECULA, Calif. -- As top Democrats address their national convention in Denver, they will propose "ending" Operation Iraqi Freedom, demand a speedy withdrawal of U.S. forces there, and insist that "Bush lied, and people died." What they will not do is apologize for their nearly universal failure in judgment regarding President Bush's spring 2007 Surge of 20,000 troops into Iraq. Widespread Democratic defeatism and lack of faith in our GIs' ability to win gouged a gap between their forecasts of doom yesterday and Iraq's far sunnier outlook today. With few exceptions, Democrats got this one dead wrong. "I am not...

NEW YORK — Painfully high vehicle- and jet-fuel prices are propelling popular demands for extracting the estimated 18 billion barrels of petroleum beneath America's coastal waters. After rescinding previous executive-branch objections, President Bush said July 14, "The only thing standing between the American people and these vast oil resources is action from the U.S. Congress." Capitol Hill Democrats claim offshore drilling poses unacceptable ecological risks. This is yet another overblown worry. Democrats and other environmental naysayers cite the 80,000 barrels that spilled six miles off of Santa Barbara, inundating beaches and aquatic life. This hydrocarbon Hindenburg haunts the memories of...

U.S. offshore oil drilling is not perfectly tidy. It's only 99.999 percent clean. Indeed, since 1980 -- as MMS figures indicate -- 101,997 barrels spilled from among the 11.855 billion barrels of American oil extracted offshore. This is a 0.001 percent pollution rate. While offshore drilling is not 100 percent spotless, this record should satisfy all but the terminally fastidious. Ironically, in terms of oil contamination, Mother Nature is 95 times dirtier than Man. Some 620,500 barrels of oil ooze organically from North America's ocean floors each year. Compare this to the average 6,555 barrels that oil companies have spilled...

Like a little girl whose Chief Executive Barbie is falling from her fingertips into the sea, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential ambitions are slipping tragically from her grasp. This may explain her increasingly unhinged behavior, which would be bad enough were she winning. To lose this way, however, is particularly pathetic. Consider her campaign’s reported peddling of a photo of Barack Obama in traditional Somali clothing. Emerging soon before Tuesday’s Texas and Ohio primaries, this was more than a zany picture of an exotically dressed pol, like that of Clinton herself touring Vietnam in a sloped hat. This 2006 photo, snapped...

I have written repeatedly on Willard Mitt Romney’s serial flip-flops. Mitt is the born-again supply-sider who today swears he never raised taxes, even though he increased taxes and fees $983 million as Massachusetts governor. He is 2008’s stalwart defender of traditional values and man-woman marriage who, in 2002, distributed a hot-pink flyer among Boston’s gay community that read: “Mitt and Kerry Wish You A Great Pride Weekend! All citizens deserve equal rights, regardless of their sexual preference.” (Kerry Healey was the GOP nominee for lieutenant governor.) Romney is the Second Amendment enthusiast who brags about being a life-member of the...

NEW YORK -- One of campaign 2008's mysteries is Mitt Romney's free ride from pro-lifers. His anti-abortion declarations are eloquent, as is everything the silver-tongued former Massachusetts governor utters. But once again his rhetoric is at war with his record. "Many, many years ago, I had a dear, close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion," Romney said while challenging Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy's 1994 re-election. Since then, Romney and his family decided "we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter." Romney...

A jet passenger remembers seeing Rudolph W. Giuliani on a Dallas-to-New York flight. Heading home after a March 2005 speech, Giuliani perused a volume of Elizabethan literature. Miles above Pennsylvania, a door-seal suddenly cracked. As the cabin depressurized, the pilot nose-dived from 38,000 feet to a safer 9,000. Oxygen masks swung above the heads of horrified travelers. What did Giuliani do? As another, visibly rattled traveler recalled: "He put his mask over his face, picked the book back up, and kept reading Shakespeare." ...

It's not quite torture, but it sure has been painful watching Senate Democrats tie Attorney General-designate Michael Mukasey into knots over waterboarding. Responding to their demands that he denounce this interrogation method that simulates drowning, Mr. Mukasey last Tuesday called it "repugnant to me." This left Judiciary Committee Democrats, including Illinois' Dick Durbin, unimpressed. "I can't support his nomination based on the letter he sent yesterday," Mr. Durbin said last Wednesday. "It was a real disappointment." Still it now seems Judge Mukasey's nomination will be approved today by the Judiciary Committee, given the announcement by some key Democratic senators that...

Romney is either a true, rock-ribbed conservative who played a Rockefeller Republican to get elected in Massachusetts, or he is a genuine, limousine liberal portraying a conservative to win the 2008 GOP nomination. This fine thespian has lost himself so thoroughly in both these roles that no one really knows where the performer ends and the characters begin. Studying Romney’s lines only muddles things. His present and past statements on abortion, gays, guns, taxes, and Ronald Reagan each conflict diametrically, like pairs of locomotives racing toward one another from opposite directions. Just listen to today’s Romney on abortion: “I am...

Naming Tony Snow press secretary is President Bush's most promising decision since Hurricane Katrina winded him nearly seven months ago. The president should let the veteran commentator craft and disseminate the administration's message in clever and concrete ways, as the capable Snow can do. Snow approaches his position with something outgoing press secretary Scott McClellan lacks: the ability to communicate. McClellan, surely a nice man who loves his country and his family, looks pained and frightened at his briefings. Sniffing blood in the water, reporters chomp into him like sharks devouring a walrus. This leaves McClellan with little to do...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version April 10, 2006, 7:27 a.m. Connections Papers reveal Iraq-al Qaeda ties — again. With conservative congressional majorities at risk in next November's midterm election, President Bush repeatedly should remind everyone that a key reason Coalition troops invaded Iraq was to padlock Saddam Hussein's Wal-Mart for terrorists. Pressured by congressmen and journalists, the administration finally has started releasing intelligence documents captured in Baghdad. These papers confirm what The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, Wall Street Journal editorialists, and I have demonstrated for years: Saddam Hussein indeed was entwined with terrorists in general...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version January 13, 2006, 8:11 a.m. The Butcher with the Terror Ties The evidence mounts. Drip, drip, drip. Drop by drop, isolated news stories and emerging documents are eroding the popular myth that Saddam Hussein had no connections to Islamofascist terrorists. These revelations undermine war critics’ efforts to whitewash Baghdad’s ancien regime — such as when Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid declared: “There was [sic] no terrorists in Iraq.” Likewise, Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) describes a “nonexistent relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.” Reid, Levin, and others who dismiss...

MEDIA magnate Rupert Murdoch has picked Paul Carlucci as publisher of The New York Post, to replace his son Lachlan Murdoch, who resigned from the company, the paper announced today. Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation (nws.ASX:Quote,News, which publishes NEWS.com.au,had briefly taken the reins of his beloved Post before deciding to give Carlucci, a 58-year-old New Yorker, a veteran at the daily, a chance at its helm. "Paul is without peer in the consumer advertising and marketing industry," Mr Murdoch said. "He has a background in newspapers and has run the preeminent consumer advertising and promotional business...

"It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive." This blood-curdling news came from self-described social-justice advocate Randall Robinson, former chief of TransAfrica, an architect of the anti-apartheid sanctions movement, and author of The Debt — What America Owes to Blacks, an impassioned plea for slavery reparations. Writing for Arianna Huffington’s webpage, huffingtonpost.com, last Friday, September 2, Robinson continued: Four days after the storm, thousands of blacks in New Orleans are dying like dogs. No-one has come to help them. I am a sixty-four year old African-American. New Orleans marks the end of...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version August 24, 2005, 8:16 a.m. Al Qaeda Coming Through! We have a special interest in who is coming into our country illegally. Two Democratic governors, New Mexico's Bill Richardson and Arizona's Janet Napolitano, have sounded the claxons over the bedlam on America's border with Mexico. On August 12, Richardson (who happens to be of Mexican ancestry) declared a state of emergency in four of his state's border counties. Three days later, Napolitano followed, placing four of Arizona's frontier counties in emergency status. Beyond the usual complaints about illegal aliens straining...

http://www.husseinandterror.com/ Saddam Hussein's Philanthropy of Terror by Deroy Murdock Media Fellow Hoover Institution at Stanford University Adapted from a September 22, 2004 presentation at the Hoover Institution   Introduction   Saddam Hussein, after being captured by  U.S. forces in Iraq on December 13, 2003 Here he is, the man they called “The Butcher of Baghdad,” Mr. Saddam Hussein, shortly after U.S. soldiers pulled him from his so-called spider hole in Iraq. How bewildered he must have felt. Not so long before, he was sitting pretty.     Hussein, while still in power Here he was in his glory days, perhaps...

Let's hope Honduras is awash in American agents. Al Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi reportedly has dispatched Islamo-fascist murderers to penetrate the U.S. via Tegucigalpa, where bribe-hungry authorities allegedly sell passports to smooth passage through Mexico to the human highway known as the U.S.-Mexican border. But American officials better eye the northern frontier, too. Canadians seem rather relaxed about some who inhabit the land nestled between Alaska and the Lower 48. While most Canadians are as friendly as Labrador retrievers, that attitude is not universal. "I'm not afraid of dying, and killing doesn't frighten me," Algerian-born Canadian Fateh Kamel said on...

Immigration Daily is pleased to bring to our readers a pro-immigration op-ed by Rupert Murdoch. Mr. Murdoch is the head of News Corp, one of the largest media companies in the world, involved in the production and distribution of newspapers, films, television, satellite, and cable tv. We commend Mr. Murdoch for taking the time to write and express his pro-immigration views (we encourage other successful immigrants to follow his lead). Some excerpts: "In my book, anyone who comes here and gives an honest day's work for an honest day's pay is not only putting himself closer to the American Dream,...

  More evidence we’re in a world war By DEROY MURDOCK   AS the War on Terror continues, it is vital to remind ourselves how truly horrific an enemy civilization confronts. In militant Islam, America and its allies face a breathtakingly evil foe. In recent weeks, this Coalition of the Wicked has reconfirmed its barbarism. In Fallujah, for instance, U.S. soldiers discovered up to 20 blood-stained homes in which innocent hostages were detained and killed, often on videotape. Terror master Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s headquarters included computer and audio-visual gear to disseminate al-Qaida’s hateful missives and real-life snuff films. Roughly half...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version November 29, 2004, 8:32 a.m. Pills Don't Grow on TreesWhere diseases are cured and pains are healed. West Point, Pa. — Politicians of yore promised voters "a chicken in every pot." Today's pols pledge "cheap drugs in every medicine chest." This, oddly enough, has become a largely bipartisan prescription. Democrats and Republicans alike propose reimportation of Canadian pharmaceuticals, faster approval of generic drugs, and other policies designed to reduce medication prices. The mounting financial and legal woes at Merck only will fuel calls to "get...