Free Republic

CHRONICLES EXTRA | EVENTS | HOME Wednesday, May 18, 2005 A Reputation in Tatters George W. Bush and his gang of neocon warmongers have destroyed America’s reputation. It is likely to stay destroyed, because at this point the only way to restore America’s reputation would be to impeach and convict President Bush for intentionally deceiving Congress and the American people in order to start a war of aggression against a country that posed no threat to the United States. America can redeem itself only by holding Bush accountable. As intent as Republicans were to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying...

May 14, 2005 Start a War, No Money Down! By MATT MILLER [Infomercial director: " 'The Republican Guide to Wartime Tax Cuts' ... Take One ... Action!"] ANNOUNCER: In the old days, war profiteering was a grueling round-the-clock job. You actually had to make something, like planes or guns, and then overcharge the government obscenely. Now, thanks to the Republicans, countless Americans are becoming "war profiteers" in their spare time - and you can, too. Riches once thought to be the exclusive preserve of a few unsavory arms merchants have been made available to thousands of successful Americans, many...

April 25, 2005 Issue Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative Party Crashing A paleo’s-eye view at the Star Trek convention of the American Right By Marcus Epstein After showing the federal security guards my driver’s license, I walked through the metal detector. Beep! Between my suit and overcoat, I must have had over a dozen pockets, and I didn’t feel like figuring out which one held my change, so they scanned my jacket and I walked through again. This time I made it without trouble, but there were still old ladies waiting for security guards to pass wands over them...

How much longer can American prestige survive the embarrassments inflicted by President Bush? Bush’s demand that Syria immediately withdraw its troops from Lebanon is a ricochet demand. If Lebanon cannot have free elections while under foreign military occupation, how, asks the rest of the world, does Iraq have free elections when it is under U.S. military occupation? Bush’s latest guffaw-evoking bluster is the work of desperation. Every explanation and justification Bush has given for his ill-fated invasion of Iraq has proven false. There were no weapons of mass destruction. No terrorist links to Osama bin Laden. No WMD programs. The...

Behind the Headlines by Justin Raimondo Antiwar.com November 9, 2001 POLITICS AND THE WAR GOP's conservative agenda smothered While conservatives are among the most insistent cheerleaders for the "new war," they may well turn out to be its biggest losers, at least here on the home front. Congresswoman Nita Lowey (D-NY) could hardly contain her glee the other night on Crossfire when she remarked that she felt sorry for the Republicans "because Tom Delay and Dick Armey are forcing their members to take some really tough votes." With George W. Bush's poll ratings up there in the stratosphere, you would ...

"I respect and admire the French, who have been a far greater nation than we shall ever be, that is, if greatness means anything loftier than money and bombs." – Thomas Fleming, "Hard Right," March 13, 2003 From the very beginning of the War on Terror, there has been dissent, and as the war has proceeded to Iraq, the dissent has grown more radical and more vociferous. Perhaps that was to be expected. But here is what never could have been: Some of the leading figures in this antiwar movement call themselves "conservatives." These conservatives are relatively few in number,...

I remember when friends would excitedly telephone to report that Rush Limbaugh or G. Gordon Liddy had just read one of my syndicated columns over the air. That was before I became a critic of the US invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration, and the neoconservative ideologues who have seized control of the US government. America has blundered into a needless and dangerous war, and fully half of the country's population is enthusiastic. Many Christians think that war in the Middle East signals "end times" and that they are about to be wafted up to heaven. Many patriots think that,...

I first became aware of something deeply askew on the antiwar right shortly after it came into being in the spring of 1999, as an intellectual protest movement against the U.S. war on Serbia. I myself was deeply opposed to the war, seeing President Clinton's initiation of the conflict—on March 24, 1999, one month and twelve days after his acquittal by the U.S. Senate—as utterly lacking in moral or legal justification, and as leading to the ruin of Kosovo. While the Kosovo war is not the subject of this article, a summary of it (or at least of my view...

The Antiwar Right Is Ready to Rumble NY TIMES http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/weekinreview/07kirk.html? ex=1100877650&ei=1&en=1003a79efbe25be2 November 7, 2004 The Antiwar Right Is Ready to Rumble By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK ROUND 8 p.m. Tuesday, a gloomy mood was settling over the dozen conservative stalwarts gathered with martinis and glasses of red wine in an office in Arlington, Va., to watch the returns. Early exit polls showed President Bush trailing, and Richard Viguerie, dean of conservative direct mail, thought he knew who was to blame: the neoconservatives, the group associated with making the case for the invasion of Iraq. "If he loses, they are going to...

Matt Drudge said he heard from the "grapevine" that Pat Buchanan will endorse Bush tomorrow.

"A lot of Reagan conservatives are threatening to cut off their noses to spite their faces. They think that because President Bush hasn't done every single thing they want, or has done some things they didn't want, they should punish him by staying home on Election Day or voting for some third party candidate who hasn't got a chance to win in November. It should be obvious to them that they will therefore help elect the Kerry-Edwards team that will do nothing they want and everything they don't. Somehow this idiocy seems to make sense to them -- dump a...

Americans should realize that if they vote for President Bush's re-election, they are really voting for the architects of war – Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of that cabal of neoconservative ideologues and their corporate backers. I have sadly come to the conclusion that President Bush is merely a frontman, an empty suit, who is manipulated by the people in his administration. Bush has the most dangerously simplistic view of the world of any president in my memory.

Where The Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency. By Patrick J. Buchanan. 264 pp. Thomas Dunne Books/ St. Martin's Press. $24.95. Underneath the pugnacious hide of Patrick J. Buchanan beats a heart of pure nostalgia. He longs to return to the high-tariff reign of William McKinley, mourns the passing of such budget-slashing icons as Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater and dedicates his new book to Ronald Reagan, who, he says, ''never took precipitate or rash action'' abroad. Buchanan's reverence for late, great conservatives is unbounded by epoch or nationality. He even praises...

WASHINGTON - One of the staunchest opponents of the war in Iraq (news - web sites) will be making noise inside the Republican National Convention. Rep. Jimmy Duncan of Tennessee will join other conservative Republicans at Madison Square Garden in New York, calling for four more years and preparing to campaign in his conservative Knoxville district on behalf of President Bush (news - web sites). Yet Duncan was one of six House Republicans who voted against authorizing Bush to go to war in Iraq and one of just five who opposed funding military operations there. Others among his Republican colleagues...

David Frum tells us that "[w]ar is a great clarifier" because it "forces people to choose sides." It certainly does. For example, it forced us to team up with Joe Stalin in 1941. War forced the U.S. to side with Saddam Hussein in the 1980s and the Saudi royal family in the 1990s. Let's not forget that great clarifying moment when the Cold War forced us to fund Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. In the same way, our war against Iraq created political alliances domestically that may have been unnatural, and which now may be falling apart. Specifically, some moderate-to-liberal...

Patrick Buchanan, the conservative commentator whose Republican primary challenge and divisive convention speech weakened the first President Bush's campaign for re-election in 1992, is publishing a book excoriating the second President Bush over the invasion of Iraq, just in time to grab a share of the limelight at another Republican convention. In Where the Right Went Wrong, released late last week, Buchanan calls the invasion of Iraq "the greatest strategic blunder in 40 years, a mistake more costly than Vietnam. If prudence is the mark of a conservative, Mr. Bush has ceased to be a conservative," Buchanan wrote. The release...

Daryl Renschler said he's going to do something he has not done since 1976 - vote for the Democratic candidate for president. In the era of Watergate and Vietnam, the lifelong Republican gave his support to Jimmy Carter. Today, nearly three decades later, Renschler finds himself again mistrusting the government and hating what he contends has become a quagmire of a war. Come November, he'll vote for John Kerry. "We were misled during the Vietnam War ... and they're misleading us now," said Renschler. "Normally, a war unites a country. This one split it. "I don't know what we're doing...

June 17, 2004 -- JOINING the ranks of Bush-bashing books is one from a most unlikely source. The Thomas Dunne imprint of St. Martin's Press has agreed to pay around $500,000 to Pat Buchanan for an anti-Dubya book to be called "Where the Right Went Wrong." The proto-conservative will blast the Bush Administration for behaviors both domestic and foreign. He is particularly scornful of the U.S. foreign policy that has "ignited a war of civilizations" with the Islamic world. Publishing insiders say Buchanan's thoughts on the 43rd president are surprisingly out of character. "They could put Michael Moore on the...

Fallujah: High Tide of Empire? by Pat Buchanan At Versailles, 1919, Lloyd George, having seized oil-rich Iraq for the empire, offered Woodrow Wilson mandates over Armenia and Constantinople. “When you cease to be President we will make you Grand Turk,” laughed Clemenceau. As there were “no oil fields there,” writes historian Thomas Bailey, “it was assumed that rich Uncle Sam would play the role of Good Samaritan.” Though unamused, Wilson accepted the mandates. Fortunately, Harding won in 1920 and reneged on the deal. Lloyd George and Churchill were left to face the Turks all by their imperial selves. Had we...

<p>'I HAVE GIVEN it as my decided opinion that no nation had a right to intermeddle in the internal concerns of another; that everyone has a right to form and adopt whatever government they liked best to live under themselves," said George Washington, the first U.S. president. Well, most Iraqis did not like living under the brutal dictatorship of that sadistic goofball Saddam Hussein. But they don't seem to lean toward our Western idea of "democracy" either.</p>