Free Republic

He’s just getting started. As he positions himself as Republican kingmaker in 2012, Rove is trying to make sense of a post-Bush party, one riven by ideological schisms and splintered into a dozen or more potential Republican nominees. To take back power and reestablish his dream of a permanent Republican majority (“Durable,” he now corrects. “I never said permanent”), Rove must carefully negotiate a new media world revolutionized by Sarah Palin and bring order to a restive party upended and realigned by tea- party populists, who view Rove as the elitist Machiavellian who once played them like a Stradivarius for...

We are just south of Christmas, and the nation's insiders -- self-proclaimed blue-bloods by birth and/or worldview -- have declared open season on Sarah Palin. Crazed left and sclerotic right have united in common purpose -- "hellbent," as Politico put it -- to rid this nation of the possibility of a presidency that would most assuredly end in "apocalyptic disaster" after which "the survivors will envy the dead" (or so says that fading leftist icon, The New Republic). Stop her now -- or we may end up with a normal American at the helm. Sarah Palin is just too dumb...

TLC and why Palin will never be president -- part 2 Last week I wrote a piece pegged to tonight's TLC pairing of Kate Gosselin and Sarah Palin on Palin's "Alaska" reality TV series. The core of my commentary was that Palin will never be president because she has sold herself too cheap to low-rent reality-TV venues like TLC, and now she is being perceived as another one of the channel's freak moms like Kate Gosselin or the women on the series "I Didn't Know I was Pregant." As the title so coyly suggests, that shows features women who gave...

In the promo fluff for its future flop, CNN calls Kathleen Parker a "conservative" commentator. So what's a "conservative" in CNN's book? Someone who, when accused of taking part in the media assassination of Sarah Palin, brags that she didn't merely take part—she "led it." Supposed conservative Kathleen Parker made her bizarre boast on this evening's Parker Spitzer. It came in the course of her interview of John Ziegler, creator of the documentary "Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted.” While denying she had been "duped" by Obama, Parker admitted that during the campaign she "bought into...

The night Christine O'Donnell won the GOP nomination for Senate in Delaware, party stalwart Karl Rove flipped out, and warned that she was a liar, of ill-character, and generally not the kind of person that the party should get behind. It only took an instant for other party leaders like Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin to flip out right back at him. But why did Rove take this tack? It's not because he's not into right-wingers

David Frum has finally jumped the shark. Some conservative/right-of-center folks may have been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt before but playing the race card is something that is universally despised by conservative and moderates. Frum pulls the race card from the bottom of the deck against Governor Palin's new ad: Here’s Sarah Palin’s new ad. Lots of images of the former governor speaking to adoring crowds, meeting admirers, encountering women and children.... Republicans normally work hard to ensure that their ads feature non-white faces, to present an image of welcome and inclusion. In Palin’s ad --...