THE FOUNDATION: THE PRESS

“We are, heart and soul, friends to the freedom of the press. It is however, the prostituted companion of liberty… It corrupts, it deceives, it inflames. It strips virtue of her honors, and lends to faction its wildfire and its poisoned arms… It is a precious pest, and a necessary mischief, and there would be no liberty without it.” —Fisher Ames

GOVERNMENT

“At first the liberal Democrats were coy about reports that they wanted to impose government control on talk radio. When it was reported that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton had discussed the matter with Sen. Barbara Boxer, both denied it. That is characteristic. They lied to the public. Now the Democrats admit to this assault on the First Amendment. There was no point in continuing to lie when it was time to take action against the Rush Limbaughs of this world…Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin [said], ‘It’s time to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine. I have this old-fashioned attitude that when Americans hear both sides of the story, they’re in a better position to make a decision.’ Well, at least he admits that he is old-fashioned. Unfortunately for him, history really has moved on. The so-called Fairness Doctrine, used for years to keep diversity off the airways, was instituted when all we had in the communications system was radio and fledgling television. Perhaps in those days it was admissible to believe that there were only two sides to a ‘story,’ as Durbin puts it. Today there are many sides to stories, and no government body is equipped to judge what should be on the broadcast media and what is too marginal. In other words, it ought not to be left to government to decide what the sides are in a debate. That is anathema to free debate.” —Emmett Tyrrell

THE GIPPER

“The framers of the First Amendment, confident that public debate would be freer and healthier without the kind of interference represented by the ‘fairness doctrine,’ chose to forbid such regulations in the clearest terms: ‘Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.’… History has shown that the dangers of an overly timid or biased press cannot be averted through bureaucratic regulation, but only through the freedom and competition that the First Amendment sought to guarantee. [The ‘fairness doctrine’] simply cannot be reconciled with the freedom of speech and the press secured by our Constitution. It is, in my judgment, unconstitutional. Well-intentioned as [the ‘fairness doctrine’] may be, it would be inconsistent with the First Amendment and with the American tradition of independent journalism.” —Ronald Reagan

INSIGHT

“Some day, in years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now, in these quiet weeks. Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long continued process.” —Phillips Brooks

FAMILY

“[W]riter Leslie Bennetts charges that women who step-back from working are taking an extreme economic risk… Yet if off-ramping is the dangerous ‘high-stakes gamble’ Bennetts and her supporters claim, why are so many smart, rational women laying their money and their futures on the table? Perhaps because even a cursory look at hard data (rather than the collection of sad stories Bennetts has put forth) indicates that, statistically, there is very little to fear from making motherhood a career choice… According to work-first feminists, the scariest bogeyman looming over women who stay home is divorce. Men leave their wives high and dry all the time, she insists. In fact, they don’t. Women initiate about two-thirds of divorces… The statistics are also favorable for stay-at-home mothers in general. During the 90s, stay-at-home wives were 40 percent less likely to get divorced than their working counterparts. A 2004 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family revealed that couples have a much greater chance of splitting when the husband and wife earn equal incomes than when one partner is the primary breadwinner. When the higher-earning partner does leave, it is most often the wife… Taken all together, this makes the average middleclass husband seem about as much of a financial risk as a blue-chip stock.” —Megan Basham

CULTURE

“Bulls don’t praise cows, let alone their Creator. Explaining the phenomenon of praise is a real challenge for the Darwinian; it doesn’t appear to confer any particular advantage in that ruthless struggle for survival we’re always hearing about. I can understand why atheists think religion does a lot of evil, because sometimes it surely does. But they never explain why man wastes so much time and energy in activities they insist are pointless and have no biological utility. If we found all the cattle in the pasture dancing and mooing in unison, wouldn’t we be curious about why they were behaving in this extraordinary fashion? I suppose killing your own children makes some sort of sense from an atheistic and Darwinian point of view. If survival is a ruthless competition, your kids are your competitors, right? No wonder Darwin’s legions are in favor of this ‘choice’.” —Joseph Sobran

LIBERTY

“Today, whole classes of people get their jollies and puff themselves up by denigrating and denouncing American society. Such people are a major influence in our media, in our educational system and among all sorts of vocal activists. Nothing illustrates their power to distort reality like the way they seize upon slavery to denounce American society. Slavery was cancerous but does anybody regard cancer in the United States as an evil peculiar to American society? It is a worldwide affliction and so was slavery. Both the enslavers and the enslaved have included people on every inhabited continent—people of every race, color, and creed. More Europeans were enslaved and taken to North Africa by Barbary Coast pirates alone than there were African slaves taken to the United States and to the colonies from which it was formed. Yet throughout our educational system, our media, and in politics, slavery is incessantly presented as if it were something peculiar to black and white Americans. What was peculiar about the United States was that it was the first country in which slavery was under attack from the moment the country was created. What was peculiar about Western civilization was that it was the first civilization to destroy slavery, not only within its own countries but in other countries around the world as well. Reality has been stood on its head so that a relative handful of people can feel puffed up or gain notoriety and power. Whatever they gain, the rest of us have everything to lose.” —Thomas Sowell

OPINION IN BRIEF

“Anybody who watched presidential spokesman Tony Snow face a pack of snarling White House press corps correspondents following President Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence will understand the meaning of the word hypocrisy… Then there was Mrs. Hillary Clinton, who had the gall to issue a statement saying, ‘Today’s decision is yet another example that this Administration simply considers itself above the law. This case arose from the Administration’s politicization of national security intelligence and its efforts to punish those who spoke out against its policies. Four years into the Iraq war, Americans are still living with the consequences of this White House’s efforts to quell dissent. This commutation sends the clear signal that in this Administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice.’ Said Tony Snow: ‘I don’t know what Arkansan is for chutzpah, but this is a gigantic case of it.’ Here, after all, is the wife of a president who all but peddled pardons to an assortment of felons and miscreants including one malodorous fugitive from justice who had renounced his American citizenship. Doesn’t this woman recall that on her husband’s last day in the White House he signed 140 pardons and several commutations?” —Michael Reagan

FOR THE RECORD

“An editorial in The New York Observer, often called the paper of the liberal elite, described Mr. Clinton as ‘an untrustworthy lowlife who used people for his own purposes and then discarded them. How could they have been fooled so badly?’…[M]illions of Americans, including political hacks, media toadies, and grass-roots dupes, were unflinchingly loyal to Clinton throughout a scandal-drenched eight years, during which it was credibly charged or proven that he: seduced a 21-year-old White House intern, groped a visitor in the Oval Office, paid his way out of a pants-dropping charge, was credibly accused of rape, organized a White House hit team to assassinate the reputation of his accusers; took money from Chinese communist donors; entertained known criminals, drug dealers and arms smugglers at private White House gatherings; hid subpoenaed documents in the living quarters of the White House; rented out the Lincoln bedroom; sold seats on Air Force One; violated the War Powers Act; bombed an aspirin factory in Sudan; never uttered a word of regret for the 19 innocent babies and children who were burned to death at Waco; used the IRS and the FBI to attack political enemies; used taxpayer-paid lawyers and aides to defend himself against charges of sexual misconduct; lied under oath; lied when not under oath; shredded documents; suborned perjury; tampered with witnesses and obstructed justice… I remain hopeful that in time, the legacy of the Clinton presidency will be that its classic wretchedness awakened the American people from a soul-numbing, moral stupor.” —Linda Bowles

RE: THE LEFT

“Felons are usually Democrats… ‘According to academic studies,’ [author John] Lott says, ‘from 1972 to 1996, on average, 80 percent of felons would have voted Democratic. An overwhelming 93 percent ostensibly would have voted for Bill Clinton in 1996.’… Lott compares the voting patterns of felons and nonfelons, controlling for race, age, education level, religious habits, employment, age and country of residence. Wholly apart from all these factors, felons were still more likely to vote Democratic. Indeed, in the 2004 election, Lott says, felons in Washington state ‘voted exclusively for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.’ With so many felons being Democrats, the party might want to think about changing its mascot from a donkey to a jailbird.” —Ann Coulter

POLITICAL FUTURES

“I suspect the president’s decision to stand up for fiscal responsibility by threatening to reject appropriation bills he considers too extravagant has something to do with the fact that his party no longer controls Congress… The Democrats say Bush’s new interest in controlling spending is just a pose, that the amount of money involved is trivial. But for a president who has surpassed Lyndon Johnson in discretionary spending, who championed a huge expansion of Medicare, and who has vetoed only two bills in six-and-a-half years, even pretending to care about fiscal restraint is an improvement.” —Jacob Sullum

SELECT READER COMMENTS

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“Excellent collection of essays, but this one caught my attention the most: ’We should stay in Iraq—for decades’. I feel in convincing others, we must use the example of WWII. When someone says ‘Get the troops out!’ I agree: Germany and Japan were defeated over 60 years ago, why do we need all those troops there? Send them to Iraq where they’re needed! The point is, it takes troops to win a war, and it takes presence to stabilize after a war.” —Charleston, South Carolina

“Whom are we fighting? ‘Unlike terrorism, Islam is an ideology bent on territorial expansion and political domination. These traits, along with iron-fisted socioeconomic controls, are the essential characteristics of fascism.’ AMEN! The more I learn about Islam, and the longer I live in a neighborhood with many Muslims, the more I see how true this is. We need to wake up and understand—terror is only a tactic, radical Islam is the problem.” —Brooklyn, New York

“Just wanted to pass on an enthusiastic affirmation of the new-look header! It looks very sharp and clean and evokes a great spirit of pride in our heritage. Great job, I love it! Thanks for setting such a high standard of excellence in everything you do!” —Kingston Springs, Tennessee

THE LAST WORD

“On the eve of Independence Day, the people of this great republic declared their independence from the United States Senate under the stirring battle-cry, ‘No legislation without explanation!’ The geniuses who’d cooked up the ‘comprehensive’ immigration bill’s ‘grand bargain’ behind the scenes in the pork-filled rooms had originally planned to ram it through in 48 hours before Memorial Day. And, right to the end, the bipartisan Emirs-for-life of Incumbistan gave the strong impression they regarded it as an affront to be required by the impertinent whippersnappers of the citizenry to address the actual content of the legislation… Time and again, the remote insulated emirs were offered the opportunity to rise above their condescension and declined to do so. Sen. John McCain, R- Maverickistan, confidently asserted that he’d worked hard on this bill and knew it better than all these no-account nonentities riled up about it and then had to have it explained to him—by bloggers on a conference call—that he’d misunderstood a key provision of his own legislation: There was no requirement for illegal immigrants to pay back taxes. Their amnesty would come tax-free. Blustering senators who claimed to have drafted this thing had to be told what was in it by critics who’d actually taken the trouble to look at it. Immigration isn’t going away: Human capital is the great issue facing all advanced societies. But it’s unbecoming for a mature democracy to discuss a critical matter in such a fraudulent way.” —Mark Steyn

Veritas vos Liberabit—Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus, et Fidelis! Mark Alexander, Publisher, for The Patriot’s editors and staff. (Please pray for our Armed Forces standing in harm’s way around the world, and for their families—especially families of those fallen Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, who have died in defense of American liberty while prosecuting the war with Jihadistan.)