Free Republic

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the American Left’s effort to transform the January 8 Tucson massacre from a tragic attack into an indictment of the American Right is how easily their charges crumbled. Had the so-called “Paper of Record,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other politicians and pundits let Americans mourn this tragic atrocity over last weekend, enough facts about alleged gunman Jared Lee Loughner might have emerged to dissuade hyperventilating liberals from climbing so far out onto the thin branch that swiftly snapped right under them. “We don’t have proof yet that this was political,” writer Paul...

This fiasco disgusts Americans. A February 1 Rasmussen survey discovered that only 16 percent of likely voters want terrorists to enjoy the same legal rights as U.S. citizens, while 74 percent disagree. Meanwhile, HumanEvents.com (which often posts my columns) has gathered 126,665 signatures on its online petition demanding KSM and company’s ejection from civilian court. “These proceedings will make the O. J. Simpson trial look like a traffic-court hearing,” says Marc Thiessen, author of Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack , a new bestseller on the Obama administration’s soft-on-terror...

Imagine that your two best friends are British and Canadian tobacco addicts. The Brit battles lung cancer. The Canadian endures emphysema and wheezes as he walks around with clanging oxygen canisters. You probably would not think: "Maybe I should pick up smoking." The fact that America is even considering government medicine is equally wacky. The state guides health care for our two closest allies: Great Britain and Canada. Like us, these are prosperous, industrial, Anglophone democracies. Nevertheless, compared to America, they suffer higher death rates for diseases, their patients experience severe pain, and they ration medical services. Look what you're...

Some people just cannot wait for dog killer Michael Vick to return to professional football. The only thing this inter-species sadist deserves is universal derision. Let’s recap exactly why this former Atlanta Falcons quarterback pleaded guilty to running a dog-fighting ring, earning him 18 months in federal prison and house arrest until July 20. Vick helped kill eight dogs and injure dozens of others. According to his federal court filings, “Vick agrees and stipulates that these dogs all died as a result of the collective efforts of [co-defendants Purnell] Peace, [Quanis] Phillips and himself, Vick.” Other legal papers detail Vick’s...

SAN FRANCISCO — So-called “global warming” has shrunk from problem to punch line. And now, leftists are laughing, too. It’s hard not to chuckle at the idea of Earth boiling in a carbon cauldron when the news won’t cooperate: — Nearly four inches of snow blanketed the United Arab Emirates’ Jebel Jais region for just the second time in recorded history Jan. 24. The local dialect has no word for snowfall. — Dutchmen on ice skates sped past windmills as canals in Holland froze in mid-January for the first time since 1997. — January saw northern Minnesota’s temperatures plunge to...

With ACORN facing vote-fraud investigations in at least 13 states, it is no surprise that Barack Obama wants to distance himself from this band of scandal-plagued community organizers. However, the degree to which Obama’s campaign has concealed his links to ACORN raises troubling questions about Obama’s candor and forthrightness. The Obama campaign’s Fight The Smears website tries to “stay up to date on right-wing smears.” It now asserts “ACORN never hired Obama as a trainer, organizer, or any type of employee.” As ABC News’ Jake Tapper noticed, this new language updates an earlier claim that proved untrue: “Barack was never...

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There's no avoiding this conclusion: The federal government's breathtaking economic interventionism has turned America into a democratic-socialist state. The fact that these drastic incursions are happening under an allegedly conservative administration leaves this right-winger oscillating between head-spinning disbelief and exhausted disenchantment. The $200 billion federal bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has given Washington control of some $5 trillion in home-mortgage debt. Roughly half of Americans now live, essentially, in public housing. The nationalization of American Insurance Group puts Uncle Sam in charge of 80 percent of the nation's largest insurance company. Cost: $85 billion. To finance this takeover,...

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...