Free Republic

Not content to divide his party in his year-long effort to pass socialized health care, President Obama has spent the last ten days fomenting intra-party discord on the contentious issue of Middle East peace. The Obama administration hasn’t stopped berating Israel about the “settlements” issue since it came to power 14 months ago. I was glad to see pro-Israel Democrats bravely stand up to the administration’s attacks this week. But I fear the Obama administration’s over-reaction to what amounts to a municipal zoning decision is indicative of the growing anti-Semitism on the Left. The president’s heavy-handed approach to Israel is...

Filmmaker Jordan Allott’s documentary, “Oscar’s Cuba” paints a compelling portrait of Cuban dissident Oscar Elias Biscet, whom Armando Valladares, former Reagan administration Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission and himself a former political prisoner of the Castro dictatorship, cites as the most important living figure in the struggle for Cuban liberty. In 1998 Doctor Biscet dared to publish a report in which he interviewed many Cuban mothers who testified that their infants had been born alive and then killed by the regime. The totalitarian regime that controls Cuba views problematic pregnancies or unhealthy infants as a threat to...

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has obtained a copy of the text of a letter written by conservative leader Gary Bauer to President Obama, challenging the Obama administration’s recent rhetorical assault on Israel. Bauer is circulating the letter to other conservative leaders as signatories, and apparently is getting a strong response. Here’s the text of the letter: Dear Mr. President, In recent days your Administration has unleashed an unprecedented barrage of criticism at Israel, our most reliable ally in the Middle East. The ostensible reason for this assault was a municipal zoning decision permitting construction to continue on a housing division inside...

China verbally slapped us around yesterday – no White House response. Brazil told the United States they won’t support sanctions against Iran – not a word from Hillary Clinton and her State Department bureaucrats. Iran continued to march toward nukes and suggested last week that 9/11 was an “inside job” by the U.S. government. Not a word of protest from Obama, Biden or Clinton. This administration has no bile for anyone but Israel. The Washington Post reports today that Obama is making three demands on Israel before we will forgive the sin of building houses for its citizens. First, we...

Remember, last June, when President Obama told reporters that it was “not productive” for the U.S. to be “meddling” in the affairs of a certain Middle Eastern country? Obama’s diplomatic deference inaugurated six months of silence after Iran’s sham elections. By the time the White House got around to “strongly condemn[ing]” the bloody crackdown against protestors, the nascent “green revolution” was in retreat, and Iran’s maniacal president – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- was bragging about how close he was to developing nuclear weapons. Obama is showing he has far fewer reservations about meddling in the domestic affairs of another Middle Eastern...

WASHINGTON, March 15 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer on Monday condemned the Obama administration's continuous mishandling of the U.S.-Israeli relationship and for its "outrageous hostility toward the only reliable democratic friend we have in the Middle East." Bauer, an influential Christian conservative known for his work on behalf of Israel, had an itinerary very similar to Vice President Biden's last week. Bauer's itinerary included meeting with Israel's leadership, as he has many times before. He was in Israel as the current escalation in flawed U.S.-Israeli relations began with the announcement of a new building project in Jerusalem, Israel's...

I’ve spent the last week traveling across Israel as part of a delegation from Christians United for Israel (CUFI). I’ve had individual meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Ehud Barak, President Shimon Peres, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon and others. As always, it has been an eye opening experience. Vice President Joe Biden also spent the past few days in Israel, consorting with many of the same leaders I met with, visiting some of the same historic sites and perhaps walking many of the same streets in Jerusalem and elsewhere. But what he seems to have missed on...

American foreign policy needs to get religion. By that I do not mean that there ought to be a religious litmus test for those in the Departments of State, Defense and Homeland Security. Nor do I mean that our soldiers and diplomats should proselytize to the citizens of nations to which they are assigned. What I mean is that our foreign policy establishment needs to “get” religion—understand it better—if it is to succeed in achieving its mission to protect America and, as the State Department website puts it, “create a more secure, democratic and prosperous world for the benefit of...

Barack Obama came to the presidency promising to be America's first post-partisan president. It is, therefore, ironic that one of his signature achievements has been to roll back one of the great bipartisan triumphs of the last two decades. Under the guise of helping unemployed Americans in a tough economy, the Obama administration and its congressional allies are reversing the 1996 welfare reforms that have been lauded as an overwhelming success by Republicans and Democrats alike for lifting millions of Americans from poverty. Before welfare reform, under the federal assistance program called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the...

The Senate’s passage this week of a $15 billion “jobs” bill ratified President Obama’s oft-stated commitment to “jobs, jobs, jobs” as the focus of his party’s 2010 agenda. This despite the fact that the bulk of his time in office has been spent trying to take over large parts of the American economy, such as health care, rather than saving or creating jobs. And with many economists forecasting a sluggish economy through year’s end, it is understandable that Republicans are willing to allow Obama’s stated mantra to be the issue on which their electoral fortunes hinge. But the Republican critique...

Barack Obama was elected on November 4th 2008 and inaugurated on January 20th 2009, but his presidency really began on February 20th, 2009. That was the day CNBC reporter Rick Santelli unleashed a tirade against the Obama administration’s housing bailout. The Santelli Rant helped give rise to the Tea Party protests and the town hall pushback against socialized medicine. And it was the first inkling of what has come to define the Obama presidency—outrage. Outrage is nothing new in politics, but it has reached new heights in the age of Obama. Outrage is often built on justifiable and deeply felt...

President Bush was both loved and loathed for his resoluteness of purpose. But his successor has taken that trait to an entirely new level, to the point that he's become obstinate in the face of a clear reality. President Obama, his lieutenants and media allies claim that prevailing public anger is rooted in frustration over a Washington that's "getting nothing done." They are wrong. Most of the outrage is the result of a Washington that's doing too much to push policies that have always failed. Sure there are some areas in which the president has failed to act. Despite Candidate...

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama was baffled by Rick Warren's question about when, in the candidate's view, a baby gets human rights. Obama's stammering response ended with his instantly-famous line that the question was "above my pay grade." Obama seems to have embraced a similar approach to human rights abroad. From Iran's democracy protestors to Cuba's political prisoners and China's human rights advocates, the American president's "open-hand" foreign policy has been defined by conspicuous silence about human rights. President Obama's reticence on human rights contrasts sharply with the rhetoric of a candidate who made human rights a focal point...

The Department of Homeland Security has a clear, if difficult, mission. It includes securing 7,500 miles of border and 9,500 miles of shoreline, and protecting 300 million Americans from the threats posed by a bold and determined jihadist enemy. But its greatest menace is a former stay at home mother of 11 and grandmother of eight from Brookfield, Wisconsin. Or so it would seem. Peggy Hamill, state director of Pro-Life Wisconsin, is among a group of pro-life activists upon whom a DHS “threat assessment” was performed last year. The assessment targeted the free speech rights of peaceful pro-life activists in...

The most striking aspect of the Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad controversy is that critics of CBS’s decision to run the commercial seem unable to decide exactly why they are so offended. Some are upset that the ad was sponsored by Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, scourge of cultural liberals. Others are calling it a breach of the so-called separation of politics and Super Bowl. NOW condemned the as-yet-unseen ad as “extraordinarily offensive and demeaning” and “hate masquerading as love.” The Feminist Majority Foundation launched a campaign to get the “anti-choice super bowl ad removed.” But if the...

Immigration reform may seem a distant priority for a ruling party that’s made the increasingly elusive goals of job creation and health care reform its primary focus in 2010. Nevertheless, President Barack Obama and top congressional Democrats have signaled that, as Obama said in his State of the Union address, “fixing our broken immigration system” remains at the top of their legislative To Do list before the midterm elections. But Democrats push immigration reform legislation, which would include amnesty for illegal residents, at their own peril. With employment persisting at 10 percent, addressing immigration risks reviving the grass-roots backlashes that...

Participating in interviews before the State of the Union address, I tried not to sound skeptical in expressing hope that the president would somehow re-connect with Americans seething after a year that has left the homeland less secure, the jobs market less buoyant and our politics more deeply partisan. But if I did convey skepticism, it turned out to be well-founded. Barack Obama failed miserably to reconnect with the country. He briefly acknowledged “political setbacks,” “some of them…deserved.” But Obama’s concluding exclamations -- “We don't quit! I don't quit!” -- only underscored his failure to understand that a liberal policy...

How debased has America’s discussion of race become? Liberal and media elites salivate over the opportunity to ascribe racism to things that have nothing to do with race -- from President Obama’s dwindling poll numbers to the Tea Party protests to popular opposition to Obamacare. And when Republicans utter what is perceived to be a racially insensitive remark, the response is swift and severe. They are fired, forced to resign or slandered as a closet racist until they lose an election. But that doesn’t mean Republicans should stop talking about race. They should continue to highlight the glaring double standard...

I am a little baffled as to why political commentators have been slamming President Obama for his supposedly sluggish response to the botched Christmas Day terrorist attack. After all, press reports stated that just minutes after the drama unfolded, Obama “left an Oahu golf course abruptly” -- mid-round! -- and that his “motorcade raced back to the [president’s vacation] house in a dramatic fashion” so that he could attend to the crisis. What more could you ask for from a Commander-in-Chief? Oops! Those reports do not describe the president’s reaction to learning about what was almost the worst terrorist attack...

Backlash: a strong or violent reaction, as to some social or political change. It has been more than a month since U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly murdered 14 people and wounded 30 others at Fort Hood military base in Texas. And while we were led to believe that the rampage by Hasan, who is Muslim, would provoke a strong and violent reaction against Arab and Muslim Americans, a backlash has been conspicuous only by its absence. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of each of the dozen attacks by Muslim Americans since 9-11, the conversation has been dominated...