Free Republic

Straight talk It's not anti-Americanism, it's anti-Republicanism Zafar Sobhan I don't often find myself in agreement with much that pop stars have to say about the state of the world, but British singer Elton John's words at a benefit concert last month hit the nail right on the head. Dennis Miller the one-time comedian from Saturday Night Live who has bizarrely chosen to reincarnate himself as the Bush administration's court jester had just finished one of his typical sets in which he denigrated liberals, Arabs, Muslims, and non-Americans in general. Before he sat down to perform, John remarked, "This night...

November 16, 2003FRANK RICHAngels, Reagan and AIDS in America onight is the night when Americans might have tuned into Part 1 of "The Reagans" on CBS. But the joke is on the whiners who forced the mini-series off the air. Just three weeks from tonight, HBO will present the first three-hour installment of Mike Nichols's film version of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," starring Al Pacino and Meryl Streep. (Part 2 is a week later.) This epic is, among other things, a searing indictment of how the Reagan administration's long silence stoked the plague of AIDS in the 1980's....

CBS dancing to Republican tune ANTONIA ZERBISIAS I'm thinking of having the above photo retaken in order to show the drywall embedded in my forehead. It's a wonder I stopped bashing my head long enough to eke out this column. It's been that kind of week. First, there was CBS's dumping of its sweeps period biopic The Reagans after a right wing-organized backlash, and then, at Thursday's Canadian Journalists For Free Expression awards dinner, I got into a surreal argument with a TV network foreign affairs producer who made the outrageous claim that the U.S. never lied about its motives...

...Take his deion of his fellow countrymen and their blind pursuit of the American Dream: "They are possibly the dumbest people on the planet... in thrall to conniving, thieving, smug pricks. "We Americans suffer from an enforced ignorance. We don't know about anything that's happening outside our country. Our stupidity is embarrassing. National Geographic produced a survey which showed that 60 per cent of 18-25 year olds don't know where Great Britain is on a map. And 92 per cent of us don't own a passport."

THE AWKWARD CONSCIENCE OF A NATION MICHAEL Moore sits in a Santa Cruz hotel room outlining his dream to parade a hand-cuffed George Bush before the world as a two-bit crook when word comes in that yet another American soldier has been killed in Iraq. The scatter-gun humour and throaty laughter fade as the grizzly bear in the baseball cap falls silent. Then in slow, deliberate tones, he spits out his anger: "So what do you tell his parents, hmm? What did he die for? To protect America? No. So what's the reason? What would Haliburton (the US oil giant...

HAVANA (AFP) - Noted US linguist and left-wing social critic Noam Chomsky said he was surprised at the failed US policy in Iraq, especially after such a relatively easy invasion. The 74-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor said it took "real talent" to botch things up as badly as the United States has in Iraq, especially in view of prostrate state the country was after years of UN sanctions. Speaking through an interpreter at the formal presentation of his book "Noam Chomsky en La Jornada," a compilation of articles published by the renowned US scholar in the Mexican newspaper La...

Scrutiny of the New York Times best-seller list discloses a new and important trend: Bush-hating has eclipsed Clinton-, Democrat- and liberal-elite-hating. There's Bill O'Reilly, liberal-hater in chief at Fox News, at the No. 2 slot; but Michael Moore's ''Dude, Where's My Country?'' sits on top of the greasy pole, while Al Franken's ''Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them)'' occupies the No. 3 spot. Molly Ivins's ''Bushwhacked'' is farther down, as is David Corn's ''Lies of George W. Bush,'' a register of alleged mendacity so relentless that it puts one in mind of Mary McCarthy's famous gibe at Lillian...

Rush, to Judgment It’s been a bad year for bully-boy conservatives. Time for them to taste their own bitter medicine. NEWSWEEK Oct. 20 — If you listen hard, you can hear the booming voice: Look, the Clinton liberals and feminazis won’t tell you, but here’s the problem with this big talk-show host who turns out to be a prescription-drug junkie. You have a guy who finally stops spinning and fesses up for his actions. Fine. He says he won’t play the victim. Good. He’s off to rehab. God bless. But what he and his apologists want you to forget is...

One pops pills. Another gambles. Another lets her mother die alone. Yet these are Bush's virtue-mongers It was America's "virtuous majority" (as they conceive themselves) who made George W Bush president. He keeps these core voters sweet by appointing aggressively virtuous subordinates - men whose sole claim to office, as Bill Maher puts it, is that they "read the Bible and f*ck their wives". (Maher, you'll remember, lost his talk show on the ABC network for saying that the 9/11 bombers, whatever else, were not "cowards"). What, Bush was asked, was the first thing he would do on taking over...

George W. Bush's grandfather helped finance the Nazi Party. Karl Rove's grandfather allegedly helped run the Nazi Party, and helped build the Birkenau Death Camp. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Austrian father volunteered for the infamous Nazi SA and became a ranking officer. Together, they have destabilized California and are on the brink of bringing it a new Reich. With the Schwarzenegger candidacy they have laid siege to America's largest state, lining it up for the 2004 election. The Bush family ties to the Nazi party are well known. In their 1994 Secret War Against the Jews, Mark Aarons and John Loftus use...

"It's easy for people to say that if they shoot up on heroin the only people they're hurting are themselves. But that's not true. ... Drug abusers destroy their families ... If we legalize these vices, we erode the societal support for prohibitions against crimes such as murder. The erosion of the moral fabric of society is a gradual, insidious process." -- Rush Limbaugh, The Way Things Ought to Be, pp 53-54. As I sifted through hundreds of comments from Rush Limbaugh fans over the last week, some interesting trends emerged. About 50 percent just wanted to call me names....

<p>All right, so a couple "major" polls show the famous thick-necked slab of Austrian meat wielding a dangerous Conan-like lead over quivering not-as-bad-as-you-think Gray Davis.</p> <p>And Schwarzenegger's bouncing around like a Hummer on meth, inflicting that weird maniacal grin and massive blocklike head all over the unsuspecting media, as pretty much the entire population of even slightly aware and intelligent people in California and in fact all over the nation go, oh holy Christ, please dear God no.</p>

<p>THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.</p> <p>Rush Limbaugh's week went from bad to worse today. His name has surfaced in a drug investigation in Florida. According to law enforcement sources, he allegedly bought large amounts of prescription painkillers illegally. This after he quit under pressure as host of ESPN's Sunday NFL countdown for his racially charged remarks.</p>

  Hubris is costing Bush plenty Monday, September 29, 2003There's a common denominator flaw in President George W. Bush's conduct of both foreign and domestic policy. It's arrogance -- and it goes a long way in explaining his troubles today in both spheres.From the very outset it was manifest in his conduct of foreign policy. His decision in his first days in office to unilaterally abrogate the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Russia [Uhhh, that was with the Soviet Union John, a country that no longer exists] and to kiss-off the Kyoto agreement on atmospheric pollution [Um, didn't Congress have...

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president . . . right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Teddy Roosevelt, 1918 Ever have one of those foreign military adventures when your own foot becomes a better target than the enemy? If the tough-guy act is wearing thin, you can always whine. Faced with well-deserved criticism of their adventure in Iraq, Bush administration officials have started to point fingers -- blaming, variously, the French, the United Nations, al-Qaida, Syria and Saddam Hussein. (Who knew Saddam might...

Bands Rock Against Bush Concerts and tours to raise awareness about 2004 election Sonic Youth, the Donnas, the Liars, the Locust and Erase Errata are among the groups who have pledged their support for Bands Against Bush, a self-explanatory new artistic collective dedicated to lending its support to the "struggle against a world of perpetual fear and violence bolstered by the Bush administration." BAB has set up more than twenty regional chapters in the U.S. and abroad, with a directory of groups willing to participate in various events to raise voter awareness. Among the events planned is an October 11th...

hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I'm tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too. I hate the inequitable way he has come to his economic and political achievements and his utter lack of humility (disguised behind transparently false modesty) at having done so. His favorite answer to the question of nepotism--"I inherited half my father's friends and all his enemies"--conveys the laughable implication that his birth bestowed more disadvantage than...

Franken's book bravely presents the truth by Deborah Locke, Editorial Writer, St. Paul Pioneer PressAt least two sections of Al Franken's book ought to grab the attention of people from Minnesota. In "Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them -- A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," Franken recounts the Paul Wellstone memorial. The chapter is a good example of the way right-wing pundits aided by their media outlets will distort the facts to the American people. A more chilling theme throughout the book is the way mainstream media organizations buy into the lies and report them as...

September 11 is often said to be the defining moment in the Bush presidency, even of modern history. How strange, therefore, that Bush's behavior that morning--along with that of his Administration--is almost never examined in any detail. This is all the more incredible when one considers the fact that 9/11 is among the most exhaustively chronicled days in human history and Bush among its most heavily covered individuals. No less odd has been the media's willingness to let the many inconsistencies in White House stories pass unexamined. They seem content instead to let Showtime tell the story, Leni Riefenstahl-style. That...

Under the heavily ironic heading "Behind Every Choice is a Story," Planned Parenthood is advertising an artwork and poster contest "celebrating 30 years of choice." Serrin Foster, with Feminists for Life, is concerned about the images in the minds of women who have suffered through an abortion. "And I think what they're going to miss are the untold stories of women who've had abortions and all the millions of young men and young women who aren't with us this year," Foster said. "The thoughts that they're going to have on the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade imagining the children...