Free Republic

In assessing the motives and actions of Vladimir Putin, Hillary Clinton compared them to Adolf Hitler’s. Almost always a mistake. After 12 years in power, Hitler was dead, having slaughtered millions and conquered Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. And Putin? After 13 years in power, and facing a crisis in Ukraine, he directed his soldiers in the Crimea to take control of the small peninsula where Russia has berthed its Black Sea fleet since Napoleon. To the Wall Street Journal this is a “blitzkrieg.” But as of now, this is a less bloody affair than Andrew Jackson’s acquisition...

Pat Buchanan wants to put hundreds of thousands of 'diversicrats' out of work. Scores of thousands of bureaucrats – academic, corporate, government – are on watch, overseeing our economy, patrolling our society, monitoring our behavior.

“There is no education in the second kick of a mule,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. With some such thought in mind, Speaker John Boehner strode to the floor of the House to offer a “clean” debt ceiling bill and relied on Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats to pass it. They did. “Surrender” and “betrayal,” are among the epithets coming the Speaker’s way.Yet Boehner was holding a losing hand. Had he added a GOP wish-list bill to the debt ceiling, Harry Reid’s Senate would have rejected it. President Obama would have denounced it as putting at risk the full faith and...

“He ended one war and kept us out of any other,” is the tribute paid President Eisenhower. Ike ended the Korean conflict in 1953, refused to intervene to save the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and, rather than back the British-French-Israeli invasion, ordered them all out of Egypt in 1956. Ending America's longest wars may prove to be Barack Obama’s legacy. For, while ending wars without victory may not garner from the historians’ the accolade of “great” or “near great,” it is sometimes the duty of a president who has inherited a war the nation no longer wishes...

By their heroes shall you know them. In his eulogy, President Obama put Nelson Mandela in the company of three other heroes: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Abraham Lincoln. What did these men have in common? Three were assassinated, and all four are icons of resistance to white rule over peoples of color. Lincoln waged the bloodiest war in American history that ended slavery. Gandhi advanced the end of British rule in India. King led the civil rights struggle that buried Jim Crow. Mandela was the leader of the revolution that overthrew apartheid. Obama's heroes testify to his...

Had there been no Dallas, there would been no Camelot. There would have been no John F. Kennedy as brilliant statesman cut off in his prime, had it not been for those riveting days from Dealey Plaza to Arlington and the lighting of the Eternal Flame. Along with the unsleeping labors of an idolatrous press and the propagandists who control America's popular culture, those four days created and sustained the Kennedy Myth. But, over 50 years, the effect has begun to wear off. The New York Times reports that in the ranking of presidents, Kennedy has fallen further and faster...

Editor's Choice The ‘We Can’t Win’ Wimps Caucus By: Patrick J. Buchanan10/18/2013 09:54 AMRESIZE: AAA Print “We told you you would lose!” wail the Beltway bundlers of the Republican establishment.“We told you you would lose!” moan neoconservative columnists from their privileged perches on the op-ed pages of the Beltway press.“Look at what Ted Cruz and this Tea Party people did to us,” wails the GOP establishment. “Look what has happened to our brand.” And 2014 was looking wonderful.What a basket of wimps.While the political and communications strategy of the fight to defund Obama seems not to have been thought through,...

Wednesday, John Kerry told the Senate not to worry about the cost of an American war on Syria. The Saudis and Gulf Arabs, cash-fat on the $110-a-barrel oil they sell U.S. consumers, will pick up the tab for the Tomahawk missiles. Has it come to this – U.S. soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen as the mercenaries of sheikhs, sultans and emirs, Hessians of the New World Order, hired out to do the big-time killing for Saudi and Sunni royals? Yesterday, too, came a stunning report in the Washington Post. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has joined...

Syndicated columnist Pat Buchanan made a statement Friday guaranteed to make liberal media members' heads spin. During a discussion about Affirmative Action on PBS's McLaughlin Group, Buchanan said, "Whites are the only group that you can discriminate against legally in America now" (video follows with transcript and commentary): (VIDEO-AT-LINK)JOHN MCLAUGHLIN, HOST: Are you saying college admissions should be based on diversity? ELEANOR CLIFT, NEWSWEEK/DAILY BEAST: Yeah, I mean, I think lots of factors go into diversity. I think race can be one of them, and I think the Supreme Court so far agrees with that. MCLAUGHLIN: 67 percent opposed it,...

"They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Ben Franklin is much quoted in today's debate on the trade-off between freedom and security, as we learn about the National Security Agency's easy access to our phone records and emails. Yet we Americans have often sacrificed liberty for safety. In World War II, Korea and Vietnam, we conscripted millions of men and sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths fighting against Italians, Germans, Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese. The greater antagonist of liberty is not the quest for security, but our insatiable...

On Nov. 3, 1969, Richard Nixon, his presidency about to be broken by massive antiwar demonstrations, called on “the great silent majority” to stand by him for peace with honor in Vietnam. They did. Within days Nixon’s approval surged to 68 percent. The ferocious Republican partisan of the 1950s had won over millions of Democrats. Why? Because sons and brothers of those Democrats were doing much of the fighting in Vietnam. If Nixon was standing by them, they would stand by him. In 1972 Nixon would win 49 states. Ronald Reagan, backed by his “Reagan Democrats,” would win 44- and...

Barack Obama has just taken his first baby steps into a war in Syria that may define and destroy his presidency. Thursday, while he was ringing in Gay Pride Month with LGBT revelers, a staffer, Ben Rhodes, informed the White House press that U.S. weapons will be going to the Syrian rebels. For two years Obama has stayed out of this sectarian-civil war that has consumed 90,000 lives. Why is he going in now? The White House claims it now has proof Bashar Assad used sarin gas to kill 100-150 people, thus crossing a “red line” Obama had set down...

“I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people,” said Edmund Burke of the rebellious Americans. The same holds true of Islam, the majority faith of 49 nations from Morocco to Indonesia, a religion that 1.6 billion people profess. Yet, some assertions appear true. Islam is growing in militancy and intolerance, evolving again into a fighting faith, and spreading not only through proselytizing, but violence. How to justify the charge of intolerance? The Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas. The Sufi shrines of Timbuktu were blown up by Ansar Dine. In Saudi Arabia, Iran...

Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says the “Gang of Eight” immigration reform bill will, if passed, threaten national security and destroy the Republican Party’s ability to compete on a national level. Buchanan, author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” told radio host Laura Ingraham on Monday that passing a “blanket pardon” of illegal immigrants would be “an act of madness,” particularly in the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks in Boston. “It’s been one week since something like 178 to 180 Americans — three of them murdered — but 178 injured, maimed and wounded by two individuals...

Attacks from abroad -- Pearl Harbor, 9/11 -- have united us. Yet domestic atrocities lately seem only to deepen our divisions. The bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City was seized upon to savage government critics like Rush Limbaugh. After the murder of six innocents, including a 9-year-old girl, and the wounding of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and a dozen others in Tucson, Ariz., by a certifiable lunatic, Sarah Palin was charged with moral complicity. The slaughter of 20 first-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., put the National Rifle Association in the media cross hairs. With the...

“Not until I went to the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” So wrote Alexis de Tocqueville. Yet, judged by the standards of those old “pulpits aflame with righteousness,” is America still a good country?

Last Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul rose on the Senate floor to declare a filibuster and pledge he would not sit down until either he could speak no longer or got an answer to his question about Barack Obama's war powers. Does the president, Paul demanded to know, in the absence of an imminent threat, have the right to order U.S. citizens killed by drone strike on U.S. soil? By the time he sat down, 13 hours later, Paul had advanced to the front rank of candidates for 2016, and established himself as a foreign policy leader whose views must be...

America’s front-page fight over gun rights versus gun prohibition could be tumbling foolishly toward a revolution, if one were to believe respected long time conservative commentator and one-time presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. His remarks may be either cautionary or cockamamie; you be the judge. With so much talk right now about gun control and outright bans, and resistance growing by the hour as could be seen by the reported rush on Oregon gun permits, one might think the nation is rushing toward "Arms-ageddon." Buchanan, speaking on “The McLaughlin Group” over the weekend, suggested rather forcefully that if gun prohibitionists don’t...

PAT BUCHANAN: There are three million ArmaLite rifles -- those Bushmaster types -- out there right now, and people are buying them like hotcakes. Every gun show, the sales are up enormously. Forty-one percent, they were up in December -- for last December -- which was a record year. John, what is common though, Eleanor [Clift] is correct, the push is going to come on three things: grandfather in the assault weapons that are here now; to try to outlaw assault weapons, outlaw magazines that carry more than 11 or 12 bullets; and also background checks at gun shows.

Were the average Republican asked for a succinct statement of his views on taxation, he or she might respond thus: “U.S. tax rates are too high for the world we must compete in. The tax burden — federal, state, local, together — is too heavy. We need to cut tax rates to free up our private and productive sector and pull this economy out of the ditch.”This core conviction holds the party together.Yet today the leadership is about to abandon this conviction to sign on to higher tax rates or revenues, while the economy is nearing stall speed. Yet, two...