Free Republic

Today’s Washington Post endorsement of Democrat R. Creigh Deeds in the Virginia gubernatorial race is no surprise, given the Post’s determined and months-long effort to “macaca” Deeds’ opponent, Republican Bob McDonnell. But the editorial endorsement is a self-parody of liberal hyperbole and inconsistency. The Post again raises the strawman of McDonnell’s 1989 graduate dissertation, apparently cribbing from Ted Kennedy’s infamous denunciation of Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court. On July 1, 1987, within an hour of Bork’s nomination, Kennedy delivered a fiery speech saying, “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back alley...

The Obama-McChrystal Gapby Jed Babbin (more by this author) Posted 10/12/2009 ET What is the life of an American soldier worth?  President Obama apparently values it as little as he values defeating our enemies in Afghanistan. The gap between President Obama’s thinking on Afghanistan and that of his chosen commander there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has grown from a crevice to a canyon.  Unless President Obama is quickly brought to understand the need to defeat the Taliban decisively, he will make a decision on strategy and troop reinforcements that will be catastrophic to our national security. The contrast between the...

If Matt Latimer’s new book had been released a few weeks ago, the Tea Party marchers would have hoisted him onto their shoulders and carried him -- laughing and cheering -- all the way up Capitol Hill. Laughing, because Latimer’s new book,Speech-less: Tales of a White House Survivor, renews conservatives’ license to chuckle at ourselves. Cheering, because it lifts the burden of George W. Bush from our shoulders. There are only two kinds of people who won’t like this book. First are the liberal media who tied the Gordian knot that binds conservatism to Bush. As Byron York reported in...

Over ONE MILLION copies sold! #1 on the NYTimes Bestseller List for 17 weeks! Over one million copies in print!Buy it… read it… live it!“Conservatism is the antidote to tyranny precisely because its principles are the founding principles.” --Mark Levin in Liberty and TyrannyWelcome to “The Levin Lounge”… Step in and have a virtual FRink.Taking the country by storm, one radio station at a time – and kicking the BUTTS of the competition! Welcome all, to the most FUN LIVE THREAD on FreeRepublic.com! You can call Mark’s show: 1-877-381-3811

She knew from the beginning. According to a CIA document compiled by the Director of National Intelligence summarizing briefings to Congress on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on terrorist detainees, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca) knew from the very beginning that those techniques -- including waterboarding -- were being used on September 2, 2002. According to the memo the very first briefing listed is 9/4/02 with then Rep. Porter Goss & Pelosi. The summary of the briefing says: “Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that...

She knew from the beginning. According to a CIA memorandum summarizing briefings to Congress on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on terrorist detainees, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca) knew from the very beginning that those techniques -- including waterboarding -- were being used on September 2, 2002. According to the memo the very first briefing listed is 9/4/02 with then Rep. Porter Goss & Pelosi. The summary of the briefing says: “Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that had been employed.” This directly contradicts Pelosi’s...

As you may know, Jeb Bush made some comments recently that suggested that Republicans needed to stop being nostalgic about the past (ie, Ronald Reagan) and move forward. This teed off many conservatives, who believe that our party's failures are the direct result of ignoring everything that Reagan stood for. I couldn't agree more. Yet, Bush has had his defenders the past couple days, who say that he meant no such thing. Mike Devine is having none of this talk, and rips that idea to pieces. You can (and should) read it here. Jeb says of the 2008 campaign: "I...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has had a bad week. Caught between her own involvement in the CIA interrogations now condemned as torture and her party’s inquisitions, Pelosi floundered. Her fear and frustration have apparently given way to panic after word reached her of the CIA’s reaction to the damage she, President Obama and other Democrats have done to the spy agency in the last three months. Pelosi -- as I wrote earlier in the week -- was one of the few members of Congress briefed in detail on the harsh interrogation methods and who could have stopped them but didn’t....

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- then the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence -- was briefed on CIA interrogation techniques including waterboarding when they were begun in 2002. She was among the “Big Eight” present at the briefings -- the Senate and House leaders and chairmen and ranking members on both intelligence committees. Condemning the disclosure of the Justice Department legal opinions that detail the interrogation methods and the reasons they were legal at the time, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mi) wrote in the Wall Street Journal that, “It was not necessary to release details of the...

Mark Sanford doesn’t want his state to be tangled up in the strings attached to the money President Obama’s so-called “stimulus” bill is bringing to his state. His objections are grounded in conservative principle, so it’s natural that the Washington Post is attacking him. The problem -- as Sanford explained in my interview with him last week -- is that a large portion of the “stimulus” money requires increases in state payments such as unemployment benefits, and those increases have to continue even after the initial federal funding runs out. In state terms, this “annualizes” -- i.e., permanently grafts onto...

If President Obama achieves his agenda, his successor will not be president of the same nation Obama inherited. Like Madame Defarge in Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities”, Obama is a revolutionary, slowly knitting together his plans to change America into something it has never been, to overthrow our economic system and weaken our defenses. Monsieur Obama envisions a new America: a European welfare state, its government the overseer of every phase of domestic life, unwilling and unable to defend its allies and interests abroad. Let’s hear no more about “partisan warfare,” about how Republicans are the “party of ‘no’,”...

Obama’s Failing Leadershipby Jed Babbin (more by this author) Posted 02/23/2009 ET President Obama has invited Republican leaders to the White House today for an “economic summit.� But it won’t be a “summit� at all: Obama plans to lay out his ideas for huge tax increases, massive reductions in defense spending -- including in Iraq and possibly Afghanistan -- and won’t seek Republican input to change his agenda. Obama’s leadership failed its first two important tests, and is about to fail again. Last October, then running mate Joe Biden prophesied that Obama would be tested by a foreign crisis...

Contact: Gregg Jackson, www.greggjackson.com; John Haskins, 818-397-7714 MEDIA ADVISORY, Jan. 27 /Christian Newswire/ -- Radio host and bestselling author Gregg Jackson and a growing list of other conservative leaders, lawyers and activists are calling on Eagle Publishing to dismiss editor Jed Babbin and take immediate and decisive steps to restore the credibility of Human Events. Among the names widely known in social conservative and pro-life circles are Dr. Ted Baehr, President of Movieguide; Ambassador Alan Keyes, former Reagan appointee and presidential candidate; Dr. William Greene of RightMarch.com; Coach Dave Daubenmire, talk show host and author; and Brian Rohrbough, President of...

President Obama’s new executive orders on closing the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and limiting the permissible methods for interrogating terrorist detainees are the legal equivalent of a running back’s head fake: they mislead, and only the runner’s next move reveals his intent. So far, the White House's intentions aren't clear. One member who attended the pre-release White House briefing on the executive orders characterized the orders as confusing. On the closing of the Guantanamo Bay facility, he said the White House was more confused than the members being briefed.

Has ever a president begun his administration with more fanfare and anticipation? If you listen to the media, Obama’s inauguration is the crowning of the new Sun King. Parties abound and, according to one news report, the beautiful people prepping for the inaugural have caused a run on Botox in the Washington area. Obama’s economic stimulus apparently begins unofficially with his inaugural festivities today which will reportedly cost about $170 million. The Washington, DC party catering industry will surely survive. Barack Obama takes the oath of office with a soaring approval rating -- according to the RealClearPolitics average -- of...

Sen. John McCain (?-Ariz.), joining with liberal Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), issued a report last week on the abuse of terrorist detainees. The report accuses former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Defense Department General Counsel Jim Haynes, and David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, of causing the torture of terrorist detainees. But the report is a clumsy calumny, contradicting the factual conclusions of earlier, far more credible investigations. Predictably, it was enough for the New York Times to call for the appointment of a prosecutor to consider criminal charges against Rumsfeld and the others....

President Bush is now as bankrupt politically as GM is financially. He spent the last week lobbying Senate Republicans to bail out GM, Chrysler and Ford and succeeded only in alienating the people he needed most. Among the senators and Republican staff I spoke to, none agreed with the president and most resented the White House’s strong-arm tactics.

The most liberal U.S. Senator, Barack Obama of Illinois, won a huge victory yesterday over John McCain. It wasn’t over until 11 pm when Obama went over the minimum 270 electoral votes by winning California, but the early results -- Pennsylvania going for Obama at 8:30 pm EST and Ohio an hour later -- were really all that Obama needed to win to make it impossible for McCain to eke out a narrow victory. Pennsylvania -- along with Florida, Ohio, and Virginia were crucial to McCain’s chances. No Republican ever won the White House without winning Ohio, and John McCain...

Black Dog Republicans by Jed Babbin 10/23/2008 Print This We’ve always had Yellow Dog Democrats from the South and some of Pelosi's puppies say they're Blue Dog Democrats. But now we have Black Dog Republicans. Their constant companions are depression and melancholy, the moods that often descended on Winston Churchill. He labeled them his “black dog.” There are two reasons the Black Dog Republicans fell prey to a depression equal to Churchill's. First is the constant chatter of the media, the Republican elite, and the Cassandra Republicans who are just as sure that John McCain will lose the election as...

Oopsby Jed Babbin (more by this author) Posted 10/13/2008 ET Panic on Wall Street -- and in every foreign financial market -- was supposed to be calmed by the Bush/Paulson $700 billion bailout of the financial industry.  Confidence among investors and bankers would be restored, we were told, if only this huge chunk of our free market were nationalized.   That was two weeks ago, and over the principled objections we and many House conservatives (and a few in the Senate) posed, the bailout passed.   Secretary Paulson appointed a gent fortuitously named Kashkari to restore the credit market, though...

Barack Obama bumped into something hard on Saturday night. The nuanced naif of Illinois preceded -- in Paris Hilton’s wonderful snark -- the “wrinkly white-haired dude” in Pastor Rick Warren’s civility summit and came up very short. You can judge how well McCain did by the minimalist coverage in the media. The highlights reported here were virtually ignored in the Sunday papers. McCain has never been better. His self deprecation, his humor, and his life story turned the back-to-back interviews into a conclusive demonstration that he is ready for the presidency and Obama isn’t. Continued -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sponsored Links: Amazing Japanese...

Barack Obama bumped into something hard on Saturday night. The nuanced naif of Illinois preceded -- in Paris Hilton’s wonderful snark -- the “wrinkly white-haired dude” in Pastor Rick Warren’s civility summit and came up very short. You can judge how well McCain did by the minimalist coverage in the media. The highlights reported here were virtually ignored in the Sunday papers. McCain has never been better. His self deprecation, his humor, and his life story turned the back-to-back interviews into a conclusive demonstration that he is ready for the presidency and Obama isn’t. McCain was energized, comfortable and quietly...

On Today’s Show... If you have the means, please donate: Center for Health Transformation (Attn:The Tony Snow Family Trust) 1425 K Street, NW, Suite 450, Washington, DC 20005 Jed Babbin, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for President George H. W. Bush and editor of Human Events, filled in Thursday while Rush attended Tony Snow's funeral. » Visit Jed Babbin's Stack of Stuff at RushLimbaugh.com, and Jed's Latest Columns» Note: HumanEvents.com will be honoring Rush the week of July 28th. Check it out!Senate Minority Leader, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) joined Jed Babbin to discuss the Gas Price Reduction Act of 2008,...

Today and on Friday, Rush will not be seated in the prestigious Attila-the-Hun chair at the Limbaugh Institute of Advanced Conservative Studies. He will be away from the golden EIB microphone to attend the funeral of the late, great Tony Snow. Jed Babbin, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for George H. W. Bush and editor of Human Events (which publishes Pat Buchanan's nonsense), will host today. Mark Davis will host on Friday.

Too Big, Too Heavy by Jed Babbin, Human Events Posted: 03/24/2008 The mission of the US Air Force is to fly and to fight. Everyone in the Air Force’s job falls into one of three categories: to do the flying and fighting, to command those who do, or to support them. Part of supporting the warriors is to buy the best aircraft to accomplish the mission at lowest risk. Which is why the Air Force’s decision to buy urgently-needed tanker aircraft from the Northrop Grumman – EADS consortium must be reversed. That decision -- announced on February 29 -- could...

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s petition to Congress demanding the removal of government obstacles to increasing our energy supplies is gathering momentum by the minute, while the Democrats’ do-nothing Congress wants to raise fuel prices. Actually, labeling Congress a bunch of “do-nothings” is almost right, but not quite. They’re doing their best to create more obstacles to growing our energy supply. And while the price of energy is already unreasonably high, they’re working hard on a liberal agenda that will raise the prices consumers pay for gasoline, diesel fuel, natural gas and home heating oil. With the summer upon us (and...

President Bush’s implied attack on Barack Obama -- comparing those who would negotiate with terrorists and radicals to pre-World War II appeasers -- is being written off as mere heated political rhetoric. That is happening because the president, as is his wont, expressed a correct judgment in incomplete and thus incorrect terms. Speaking to the Israeli Knesset on May 15, the president said: Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks...

Barack Obama did something important yesterday. He proved that a neophyte politician can learn enough on the job to be a credible presidential candidate.  But what he still lacks is the power and stature to heal his divided party. In a Fox News Sunday interview with Chris Wallace, Obama appeared poised, charming and reasonable.  Wallace pressed him gently on a number of issues: taxes, the effect of his race on his competitiveness, and the war, among others.  Gone were the flutters and flusters of the ABC Pennsylvania primary debate, the abrupt reactions in the post-Ohio press conference.  You can’t credit...

Petraeus Warns Iraq Progress is Tenuous, Reversible.by Jed Babbin Posted 03/06/2008 ET Updated 03/07/2008 ET Citing the reduction in violence in most areas of Iraq in the past six to eight months, a confident but cautious Gen. David Petraeus told me Thursday that the progress in Iraq is both tenuous and reversible. Gen. Petraeus spoke to me earlier today in an exclusive interview that will be broadcast in part today and in part Monday on the Michael Reagan radio show. Asked about al-Queda’s presence in Iraq, and reports that the terrorist group was trying to regain its foothold in Iraq,...

Citing the reduction in violence in most areas of Iraq in the past six to eight months, a confident but cautious Gen. David Petraeus told me Thursday that the progress in Iraq is both tenuous and reversible. Gen. Petraeus spoke to me earlier today in an exclusive interview that will be broadcast in part today and in part Monday on the Michael Reagan radio show. Asked about al-Queda’s presence in Iraq, and reports that the terrorist group was trying to regain its foothold in Iraq, Petraeus said that al-Queda has not yet been defeated or removed from Iraq, and that...

Middle east updates!

   Hillary Rodham Custer? by Jed Babbin Posted: 02/13/2008 No, Virginia, you weren’t Hillary Rodham Custer’s last stand.  But standing as Barack Obama’s sixth-in-a-row primary or caucus victory, Hillary’s loss in Virginia is a clear setback.  The later results in DC and Maryland confirmed a Chesapeake Bay trifecta for Obama that split Clinton’s most reliable voting blocks right down the middle. Clinton isn’t done, at least yet. Her all-out campaigns in Texas and Ohio between now and their March 4 primaries will determine whether Obama can score a TKO against the Clinton machine, and the Clintons won’t go quietly.  After...

What could be wrong with a presidential candidate who is a longtime Republican senator from a conservative state, a certified war hero with a great smile and a wisecracking sense of humor? Nothing at all, except the last time one ran against a Clinton, he ended up filming Viagra commercials while Bill was rehearsing his inaugural address. The media have created the fiction that Sen. John McCain, alone among the Republican candidates, can beat Hillary or Obama this fall. This is a fiction because only a conservative can unite the Republican Party this year and win. Call him “maverick”, call...

Faced with either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama as their national opponent, Republicans cannot risk disunity in the fall campaign. Whoever is the Republicans nominate must be able to both unify and energize the core constituencies of their party. When South Carolinians go to the polls tomorrow, their choice is between several men who cannot unify the party and one who probably can. Fred Thompson’s ability to unify conservatives around their core principles should be much on South Carolinians’ minds. As should the record of the other contenders. ... Among the serious contenders in South Carolina is Fred Thompson. Is...

The Dirty Trick Season by Jed Babbin (more by this author) Posted 01/07/2008 ET What happened to Fred Thompson on the day of the Iowa caucus was a political dirty trick worthy of the great tricksters of the Nixon era. The rumor that Thompson would drop out after Iowa and endorse John McCain, reported by The Politico -- picked up quickly in so many print and broadcast media -- was untrue as I wrote last week. Political rumors flood our eyes, ears and e-mails every day. What qualified this as a dirty trick were the falsity and the timing. Rumored...

Under assault by Muslims and multiculturalists, free speech and freedom of the press are dead in Britain. The same sorts of people who killed them in Britain are killing them in Canada. They and their allies are using the British and Canadian courts and tribunals to bury our First Amendment rights in America. Muslims -- individually and in pressure groups -- are using British libel laws and Canadian “human rights” laws to limit what is said about Islam, terrorists and the people in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere who are funding groups such as al-Queda. The cases of Rachel Ehrenfeld and...

Conservative radio host and political pundit, Jed Babbin, did a great job of smacking the Associated Press around in an editorial in Human Events, today. Calling the AP "one of the most politically activist media outlets" out there and pointing out that the wire service is often "caught Hillary-handed," Babbin does a great job of handing the AP its hat. And Babbin warns that every candidate "who exudes a whiff of conservatism" will see the APs guns leveled upon them. To prove his case, Babbin uses the example of how the AP is doing it's level best to destroy the...

Congressional Democrats anxious to force a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq are frustrated by their inability to muster a veto-proof majority for legislation that would establish a firm date for retreat. But what they cannot do directly they are now working hard to do indirectly. According to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Incirlik Air Base near Adana, Turkey is the transshipment point for about 70% of all air cargo (including 33% of the fuel) going to supply US forces in Iraq. Included are about 95% of the new “MRAP” -- mine-resistant, ambush-protected -- vehicles designed to save the lives of...

Unless the Republican candidates prepare for what’s coming, the winner of their debate tomorrow will be Hillary Clinton. To prevent that result, the candidates have to do what Republicans’ campaign consultants have always prevented: they need to take on the media itself. This debate -- important most to Fred Thompson who is making his first appearance -- will soon be forgotten in the tsunami of campaign interviews, speeches and rubber chicken dinners these gents are trying to surf. Unless. There are two “unlesses” waiting tomorrow: unless the candidates allow moderator Chris Matthews to manhandle them, and unless they seize the...

In a December 9, 2004 e-mail to supporters, MoveOn.org leaders Eli Pariser and Justin Ruben wrote, "In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the Party doesn't need corporate cash to be competitive. Now it's our Party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back." The September 10 full-page MoveOn.org ad in the New York Times -- and the Dems’ reaction to it -- apparently proved the point. Appearing on the first day of Gen. David Petraeus’ congressional testimony, the...

"I wonder if Missourians -- or any Americans -- really appreciate how important Bond’s work really is. Before the FISA amendments he shepherded through in August became law, we had missed (according to one intelligence community source) roughly six months of intelligence data on communications by terrorists to people in the United States. Which meant we had been blind for about that amount of time."

If Usama bin Laden has a sense of humor – or maybe if his #2 guy, Ayman al-Zawahiri does -- the two must be laughing as hard as you or I do when we see a rerun of “Blazing Saddles.” The spectacle of the US Congress refusing to deal with the crisis in intelligence gathering necessitating amendment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act must tickle their funny bones like their favorite hostage-beheading video. Since April, the Democrats who control the US Senate have been sitting around like Mel Brooks’ oversexed and under-competent Governor LePetomaine, demanding harrumps from each other and...

Trusting Ahmadinejad by: Bethany Stotts, July 23, 2007 Jed Babbin, editor for Human Events and former Undersecretary of Defense under George H. W. Bush, recently criticized the mainstream media for their unwillingness to highlight the growing threat of authoritarian leaders abroad. He argues that U.S. reporters “aren’t doing their job” by covering the entire story because “it’s homework. Nobody likes to do homework. You have to go out and exert yourself to find this stuff, to find accurate translations, mostly because most of these things were never meant for your eyes or ears.” While this revealing information is “sometimes hard...

Who supports Congress? Who are the people who comprise the 14% of Americans that still have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the Democratic Congress? Last month, Gallup reported that Congressional job approval was at 14%, “…the lowest in Gallup’s history of this measure and the lowest of any of the 16 institutions tested…” Last week, a Zogby poll said that Congress was still languishing at that incredibly low approval rating (14% said they were "excellent" or "good;" 83% said they were "fair" or "poor.") They’re doing even worse than the Republicans were just before being...

Follow the Yellow Streak Road by Jed Babbin Posted 07/13/2007 ET Betty Williams, who received the Nobel Peace Prize for helping start peace talks in Northern Ireland, said the other day, “"Right now, I could kill George Bush." Though the New York Times isn’t suffering that bad a case of Bush Derangement Syndrome, its July 8 editorial said: “President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans’ demands for an end to this war. They say withdrawing will create bloodshed and chaos and encourage terrorists. Actually, all of that has already happened -- the...

Almost as upsetting as the fact that the United States is engaged in a long-term global war against radical Islamists is that a shocking percentage of people seem predisposed against grasping it. To the perennially oblivious, we are in a war of choice in Iraq, which, among other "elective" actions, is stoking extremism and provoking retaliatory action against us. If we will just cease and desist these actions and otherwise alter those policies giving rise to grievances among radical Muslims, their rage will subside and they'll quit targeting us for extinction. Those afflicted with this line of thinking not only...

~~~snip~~~ BC: Mr. Babbin, what is the central theme of In the Words of Our Enemies? Jed Babbin: The reason I wrote this book is to create a hawkish diplomacy. If that sounds like an oxymoron, it shouldn't. Churchill said of World War II that no war could more easily have been prevented by prompt action. Using the words of people such as Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez, and others I'm trying to get people to pay attention to potential enemies abroad and do what is necessary to either avoid war altogether or position America to win. BC: Isn't the acknowledgment...

From what he's said about it, former CIA director George Tenet’s memoir sounds like a country song minus the good music. His "Sixty Minutes" interview made me think of that sorrowful line in one of Toby Keith’s songs: “Yeah, I wish somehow I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.” Tenet’s book -- “At the Center of the Storm” -- says that the CIA predicted in August 2002 that anarchy would result in Iraq from an American invasion to topple Saddam. And Tenet apparently paints Vice President Cheney as the principal villain, intent on war with Iraq even before...

The hyperliberal New York Times is as reliable as Old Faithful. Like the geyser, the Times spews forth energetically, and daily. But unlike it, the Gray Lady's emissions are consistently noxious, polluting the political environment with the most irresponsible liberal nostrums. For years, I have been pointing out the confluence of Times' editorials and subsequent action by congressional liberals whose minds are barren of ideas. Sunday’s editorial, “The Must-Do List” provides guidance for the Democrats who lack the courage to try to stop funding for the war but still want to score soundbites on the evening news. The most heartfelt...

Banish the Ghosts of 1970 by Jed Babbin (more by this author) Posted 02/20/2007 ET We knew it then. And we know it now. Those who served in the military in the final years of the Vietnam War knew that war was being won, could be won, and would be won if only the politicians would let the soldier do his job. Even those, such as myself, who had never served in combat often thought of that defeat so unjustified, so undeserved, so deadly to so many. The ghosts of the 1970s were exorcised, we thought, by the Reagan Era...