Free Republic

As with G.W. Bush before him, much time is spent arguing about Barack Obama’s character. Does he mean well and just not govern well, or is it something else? What can be missed during this debate, however, is that most damage is done in the name of doing good. Consider, for instance, a Muslim parent teaching his child to engage in violent jihad. Like any parent, he almost surely wants his child healthy and successful. Like any wise parent, though, he also may believe that if he had to choose between his child being healthy and successful, and being good,...

When actor and director Mel Gibson was asked some years ago about certain difficulties he had when making his film The Passion of the Christ, he registered a countenance of unease and said (I'm paraphrasing), "Something doesn't want this to happen." Being just a couple of seconds of his interview, it was perhaps hardly noticed by many. But it might have made the ears of people of faith, particularly Christians, perk up. And they would have known precisely to what he was alluding. Of course, any talk of spirits not confined to the local liquor store is now often considered...

Living near the coast in the Northeast, I see the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy firsthand. Many have been without power for days; there are long lines at gas stations; some supermarket shelves are bare; and, more to the point here, some in vulnerable areas lost their homes. And because the storm is such a horrible, high-profile disaster, government aid to rebuild is in the offing. But should it be? This question may seem heartless. And, don't worry, you won't hear a politician asking it anytime soon, as doing so might very well cost him the next election. But political...

If you want to know what Barack Obama and his fellow travelers have planned for us, you need look only at what their cutting-edge cousins have already implemented overseas. For example, hate-speech laws have long been used in Europe and other parts of the “Western” world to punish people for criticizing Islam and homosexuality. Now feminists are tightening the noose on freedom further with laws prohibiting “sexist” speech. Writes Phyllis Schlafly at The Moral Liberal: England, [and] 18 other nations including Germany and France signed an absurd United Nations treaty about Women that requires them to pass new laws making...

While many points have been made about this campaign's contraception controversy, there's one that I haven't yet heard anyone mention. Why do we accept contraception as a women's issue? After all, there is a prophylactic designed for use by men, and insurance policies would have covered it no more than they would female birth control. Even more significantly, contraception is unnecessary unless there's the possibility of conception, something impossible without the participation of a man. In other words, contraception is always used by both sexes.

While watching television Friday evening, I was shocked to see my state’s junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, in a campaign ad. After all, this is New York and she’s a Democrat, which translates into anonymity for her opponent and her enjoyment of about an 87 point lead in the polls (okay, I lied; it’s only 43), and air time in NY’s market is pricey. Perhaps, I thought, she just wanted a tax write-off or vanity compelled her to put her face on TV. Then again, maybe she just wanted to see how many elements of propaganda could fit into a 30-second...

When Barack Obama called Mitt Romney a bull******* in a Rolling Stone interview recently, it was reminiscent of something involving a man who truly fits that description. What I’m referring to has to do with the 1990s, an intern, and America’s increasingly interned morality. After Bill Clinton said that he didn’t consider Monica Lewinsky’s services to be sex as he “understood it,” many observers pointed out that his lawyering of lasciviousness was influencing the young. “Hey, even the president, a Rhodes Scholar, says it isn’t sex!” It’s what you call trickle-down decadence. And now what Clinton did for intimate relations,...

...Is it just me, or is this problem that “arises every election” one where malfunctioning machines always seem to err in favor of Democrats? Other questions are raised. How many people voted for Romney in Bur-Mil Park and didn’t even notice their votes were switched? How many of Al Gore’s other slightly less charming relatives occupy polling stations around America? And can they be numerous enough so that the election can be “corrected” in favor of Hope and Change the Vote? This is why I never liked the idea of electronic voting machines. Sure, after the stolen 2000 election (from...

Calling someone a liar is a serious accusation. This is why, aside from the unwritten contract allowing for mutual prevarication, politicians are so reluctant to do it. And not just anyone is a liar. Legend has it that our first president said, "I cannot tell a lie," but, being only human, G.W. no doubt could and certainly did, at some point. A liar, however, is someone who lives and breathes the lie; someone who specializes in the art of artifice; someone to whom lying is his first recourse, not his last. Such a man is Barack Obama. In four years,...

Propelled by impressive debate performances, Mitt Romney has surged in the polls. Gallup had the GOP nominee leading by as many as seven points recently, and likely women voters, who once favored Barack Obama by double digits, now lean toward the president by only one percent in the swing states. Even more significantly, Romney has finally taken the lead in the Real Clear Politics electoral-college estimate, 206 to 201. And it’s plain to me what all this means for November 6. Barack Obama will likely win re-election. As someone who thinks the president is the kind of man who lights...

The intersex wage-gap question asked at the last presidential debate once again thrust the issue of equal pay for women into the headlines. And since Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are both vying for women — who vote in greater numbers than men do — both campaigns have been saying all the “right” things. Obama has touted his signing of the Lily Ledbetter Act, while the Republicans have pointed out that not only does the liberal network MSNBC pay its female employees less, so does, ironically, the Obama administration (by the way, Obama did the same in his office when...

You might think that with all the recent focus on media bias in debate moderation, Candy Crowley would have minded her p's and q's in last night's presidential debate. But clearly, she doesn't even know the ABC's of her job. Her most obvious transgression was chiming in and contradicting Mitt Romney's assertion that Barack Obama did not label the Benghazi attack an act of terror when he spoke in the Rose Garden on Sept. 12. Crowley's unwarranted meddling was significant. The apparent lies surrounding the Libya tragedy are a huge scandal for Obama, and, with the mainstream media's failure to...

Do we have a misanthrope as president? According to a former aide to Barack Obama, Neera Tanden, the answer may be yes. Her comments were made when discussing the relationship between Obama and Bill Clinton and were reported by New York magazine, which wrote: “People say the reason Obama wouldn’t call Clinton is because he doesn’t like him,” observes Tanden. “The truth is, Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people. My analogy is that it’s like becoming Bill Gates without liking computers.” I must...

When Joe Biden was asked about abortion in the vice-presidential debate last Thursday, he replied with what, in part, has become boilerplate. "I accept my church's position on abortion..." he said. "Life begins at conception; that's the church's judgment. I accept it in my personal life; I just refuse to impose that on others, unlike my friend here, the congressman [Paul Ryan]." The personally-opposed, no-values-imposed (PONVI) argument is nothing new. For instance, consider the following version of a typical pro-abortion appeal: If each person will only agree to mind his own business, and leave his neighbors alone, there will be...

One of the most important qualities in a leader — in fact, in anyone who must manage, and negotiate with, people — is having a feel for man’s nature. This brings us to what has not yet been explored about Joe Biden’s bizarre behavior at last night’s vice-presidential debate: what it tells us about his grasp of reality. For the record, it’s clear to me that Biden’s overtly obnoxious, condescending manner was the result of an act. But the vice president is a phony from way back. In 1988, it was discovered that he plagiarized a speech by British Labor...

There is this idea among many that we can get past apparent differences by concluding they don’t exist. This is reflected in the now common belief that racial distinctions are mere “social constructs.” In non-egghead terms, that means race is actually imaginary. This idea isn’t just espoused by liberals, but has become so mainstream that even many conservatives echo it. For example, just yesterday American Thinker writer Gregory Oatis asked if we could dispense with this “‘race’ nonsense, once and for all” and then explained, “Categorizing humanity by ‘race’ as has been happening for all these centuries is simply not...

According to a recent study, religion is dying in America. And it’s a trend that has grave implications for our politics, culture, and the fate of our civilization. Ben Fearnow of CBS News reports on the story, writing: ...The study also posits some theories for this burgeoning irreligiosity, which, writes Fearnow, “run the gamut from a backlash against the entanglement of religion and politics to a global relationship between economic development and secularization.” Now, I don’t know if that “gamut” includes the obvious, but these two theories miss the mark. Question: Do we wonder why Pakistan is spawning jihadists when...

When the great philosopher G.K. Chesterton said, “Let all the babies be born. Then let us drown those we do not like,” he wasn’t advocating infanticide but was just making a point. Unfortunately, though, we’re getting closer to a time when people would take his words literally. An example of this is a judge’s decision in Canada that a woman who strangled her newborn baby shouldn’t be incarcerated because Canadians’ failure to criminalize abortion indicates that they “sympathize” with the mother. ...So Justice Veit’s decision seems to make no sense whatsoever; that is, unless you look beyond the facts of...

Watching the debate on Wednesday, I truly can't imagine Barack Obama having come off as the more likeable candidate. Continuously glancing downwards, perhaps looking for inspiration (I glance upwards, myself), and often displaying an angry countenance, he seemed stiff, detached, and petulant. In contrast, Mitt Romney appeared energetic, nimble-minded, affable, engaged, and engaging. It was the Mind vs. the Unkind. ...Well, what we like is determined by emotion or taste, which generally has little acquaintance with reason. A person may like tobacco more than vegetables or chocolate more than exercise, but few would call them wiser choices. In the same...

Hey, just blame it on Bush. The consensus on the presidential debate last night is that Barack Obama could resurrect the Choom Gang and star in a remake of Dazed and Confused. Conservative pundits are all aflutter with praise and liberals are all on Twitter with groans. Andrew Sullivan wrote, “Obama looked tired, even bored; he kept looking down; he had no crisp statements of passion or argument; he wasn't there.” A very upset Michael Moore tweeted, “This is what happens when u pick John Kerry as your debate coach.” And million-dollar-donor Bill Maher chimed in, “Obama made a lot...