Free Republic

November 04, 2009, 0:00 a.m. True Conservatives Just Want a TurnConservatives have had to put up with a lot of moderation and ideological flexibility. By Jonah Goldberg If there’s one thing liberal pundits are experts on these days, it’s the sorry state of conservatism. The airwaves and op-ed pages brim with more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger lamentations on the GOP’s failure to get with President Obama’s program, the party’s inevitable demographic demise, and its thralldom to the demonic deities of the Right — Limbaugh, Beck, Palin.   Such sages as the New York Times’s Sam Tanenhaus and Frank Rich insist that the Right is...

Things seem to be looking up for conservatives. Books like Mark Levin’s “Liberty and Tyranny” and Michelle Malkin’s “Culture of Corruption”, are also wildly popular. Glenn Beck and his colleagues at Fox are mopping up the competition. Sarah Palin has had a monstrous, unprecedented reception for her unpublished memoirs. Even usually tone-deaf, main stream Republicans seem able to say “no” occasionally to the liberal governing machine. But most uplifting is the birth of a grass roots conservative populism, an aggressive, fearless, public energy against big government unlike anything any of us on the right has ever seen. I am reminded...

Facts about Sarah Palin by Dewie Whetsell, Alaskan Fisherman The last 45 of my 66 years I've spent in a commercial fishing town in Alaska. I understand Alaska politics but never understood national politics well until this last year. Here's the breaking point: Neither side of the Palin controversy gets it. It's not about persona, style, rhetoric, it's about doing things. Even Palin supporters never mention the things that I'm about to mention here. 1 - Democrats forget when Palin was the Darling of the Democrats, because as soon as Palin took the Governor's office away from a fellow Republican...

DISSENT IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF PATRIOTI- . . . No, wait, that bumper sticker expired January 20. Under the stimulus bill, there’s a new $1.3 trillion bills-for-bumpers program whereby, if you peel off old slogans now recognized as environmentally harmful (“QUESTION AUTHORITY”), you can trade them in for a new “CELEBRATE CONFORMITY” sticker, complete with a holographic image of President Obama that never takes his eyes off you. “The right-wing extremist Republican base is back!” warns the Democratic National Committee. These right-wing extremists have been given their marching orders by their masters: They’ve been directed to show up at...

David Limbaugh, Lt. Col. Oliver North, Lt. Col. Steve Russell, Dr. Ergun Caner, Donald Wildmon and Jonathan Krohn will be speaking next week in Cumming, Georgia. Come to see them if you are nearby.

NRSC: Fail I and most RedState readers tend to be the practical sort. In a state like Delaware where conservatives cannot get elected statewide, I have no problem with the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) endorsing a candidate like Mike Castle, though I could not personally support him. In Illinois, a state with a wholly dysfunctional Republican Party, Mark Kirk represents a compelling, popular candidate who, though I disagree with him on a number of issues, would be a good Senator. The NRSC endorsement makes sense. As much as I loathed Arlen Specter, I could see the NRSC rationale behind...

Watch Zo's My Right Wingin Woman.

Michael Steele, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee wants the GOP to reach out to candidates who support gay marriage and are pro-choice. Steele told Fox's Chris Wallace that it was "important" to reach out to those voters. WALLACE: You are one of the co-founders of something called the Republican Leadership Council which supports candidates who favor abortion and gay rights. STEELE: Yes. (watch video) WALLACE: Does the GOP needs to do a better job of reaching out to people who hold those views? STEELE: I think -- I think that's an important opportunity for us, absolutely. Within...

Republicans are making a huge mistake by turning away from the principle of small government. Is it time for conservatives to give up our fight against Big Government? Some people think so. Mike Huckabee, the Baptist preacher and former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate, complained in May to the Huffington Post that the greatest threat to the GOP is "this new brand of libertarianism" that says "look, we want to cut taxes and eliminate government." That, Huckabee said, is "not an American message. It doesn't fly. People aren't going to buy that, because that's not the way we are as...

Responding to a recent document released by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) that attempted to clarify the denomination's stance on debated issues, conservative Presbyterian leaders say the arguments are irrelevant. "We think there is an unfortunate but clear distinction between what is on paper and what is the working theology of the denomination," said the Rev. Dr. D. Dean Weaver, senior pastor of Memorial Park Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh and co-moderator of the New Wineskins Association of Churches – a network of dissident Presbyterians. PC(USA)'s stated clerk, the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, and General Assembly Council executive director, Linda Valentine, addressed a...

Sound off Connecticut with Jim Vicevich 10am until Rush Jim Vicevich hosts "Sound off Connecticut" every weekday morning and although he tends to lean to the right "Sound off Connecticut" welcomes and encourages viewpoints from every side. So call in and voice your opinion. This is your chance to "sound off." http://www.wtic.com/pages/13975.php Jim Vicevich Jim Vicevich hosts "Sound off Connecticut" every weekday morning. Republitarian by nature (see Larry Elder, KABC), Jim has more than 20 years experience in broadcast television. With 6 Emmy nominations and 3 Telly Awards, Jim has worked most recently as business and financial reporter for NBC30...

Senate sources confirm for me that Mel Martinez was the famous “Senator Anonymous” from three weeks ago. Martinez, not wanting him name used, told the Politico “I don’t think we have learned much from the election in terms of what people want to see.” This senator said the Republicans needed someone who could “speak from the center” and wanted it known that “Sarah Palin is not the voice of [the Republican] party.”

Return to the Wilderness By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. AND SO THE LAMENTABLE November 4 presidential election is entombed in history… and in keeping with the benevolent wishes of the mainstream moron media the American conservative movement once again enters the wilderness. In the wilderness, all we shall have to comfort us is the L.L. Bean catalogue. As you might have noted, we have distributed several versions of the renowned Bean catalogue on your tables. My personal favorite is the fishing catalogue. Regnery prefers the hunting catalogue. Pleszczynski is waiting for his very own Polish-language edition. I urge you all...

At the recent Republican Governors Conference in Florida, one superstar (Sarah Palin of Alaska) was center stage, while another (Arnold Schwarzenkennedy of Caleefornia) was conspicuous by his absence. Fresh off her rollercoaster ride as the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee, Governor Palin gave a speech that was simultaneously humorous and serious, confident yet self-deprecating. Unshackled from the nitwits who ran the disorganized John McCain for President Campaign, she was relaxed and back in her element. She spoke of the states as a proving ground for the future leadership of the nation, and of the governors as the alternative to Washington's...

As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit. Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D. I'm bathing in holy water as I type. To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh. Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth -- as long as we're setting ourselves free -- is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among...

You know, I had a co-worker today tell me that Obama is a conservative. No, really. As crazy as it may sound, it makes total sense that he would come to that conclusion. This is the conclusion that many other progressives will come to. It is very clear to me that a primary goal of the progressive movement is to utterly destroy the conservative party and they will do it by virtue of abrogating its nomenclature for themselves. "No no no," they will say, "WE are the centrist and the TRUE conservative party. They, those Bush extremists, are the evil...

Let's ROLL!

Last week, Tony Blankley published and Rush Limbaugh publicized what may prove one of the most important articles of 2008. I don't mean that the article was good - very much the contrary. But bad work can be even more important than good, if enough people can be got to believe it. --snip-- If I understand it correctly, the Blankley/Rush argument goes like this: 1) Reagan-style conservatism remains wildly popular with the American people. It was the "blueprint" for winning landslides between 1980 and 1994, and it remains the blueprint today. 2) Yet for some unaccountable mysterious reason, politicians are...

Why the Republicans Must Lose Nothing short of defeat will put the GOP back on its limited government track I grew up in a particularly conservative part of the already conservative state of Indiana. I voted for Bob Dole in 1996 and George Bush in 2000, generally because—though I'm not a conservative (I'm a libertarian)—I'd always thought the GOP was the party of limited government. By 2002, I was less sure of that. And by 2004, I was so fed up with the party that I did what I thought I'd never do—vote for an unabashed leftist for president. Since...

If the election were held today, Barack Obama would be the new President of the United States of America. The latest Real Clear Politics average of national polls shows Obama ahead of McCain by nearly seven percentage points. It looks like the Democrats are going to have control of both the White House and Congress for the next four years. And, mark it down, if there is a Democrat sweep, conservative Republicans will get the blame. The fact of the matter is, however, that President Bush and the Republicans who dominated Congress during most of his administration governed as anything...

When you buy a Lottery ticket, do you buy the "Cash Option" or go for the 20 equal payments from the Lottery over 20 years? At first, I called this my Conservative test. But then I realized that true conservatives probably wouldn't buy a lottery ticket. Now I call it the self-reliance versus government test. The question is a good one to use to help undecided voters and men and women that you believe would vote Republican if they thought the issues through. Compare the payout on Lottery winnings with Social Security, Medicare, and government health insurance. It's amazing and...

The selection of Sarah Palin as Republican vice-presidential candidate has revealed a serious chasm in conservatism, a chasm separating conservative elites – opinion leaders, pundits, spokesmen -- from the vast population of center-right Americans they purport to represent. If this is the choice of the conservative base, one said “Then we need a new base.� (We’ll leave names out of this for the moment, lest this deteriorate into an “I never liked him anyway� discussion. The problem is systemic, and not limited to a few individuals.) “It’s over,� another insisted of Palin’s candidacy (the later “explanation� for this remark was,...

July 25, 2008, 0:00 p.m. In the HeightsA recent musical set in Washington Heights is a rare voice for conservative views. By Monica Mullin Barack Obama is not the only one singing a hopeful tune these days. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical In the Heights — an exuberant paean to life in a New York City barrio — is overflowing with hope. A hope refreshingly based on essentially conservative values. What a far cry from Paul Simon’s ill-fated 1997 musical The Capeman, the play Ben Brantley of the New York Times once compared to “watching a mortally wounded animal.� Also set...

John McCain is clearly the preferable option for conservative voters come November. Although liberal in his views toward immigration, government intrusion in free speech, environmental issues, campaign finance reform, health care, education mandates, and a host of other issues that run contrary to conservative orthodoxy, McCain is solid on two (alas, two) vital issues that make the difference; spending and judges. From the frustration of eight years of a Republican Administration that began with so much hope and promise it pains one to say it, but there it is. Against the prospects of a President Obama, McCain wins. A victim...

The Dumb Blond: To US Citizens Who Hate the Greatest Country

It's all but settled. John McCain will be the Republican Party nominee for president in 2008. That has caused much anguish among many conservatives who knew Ronald Reagan - who was a friend of theirs. And Senator, you're no Ronald Reagan, or words to that effect. Nevertheless, conservative realists recognize that despite all the chinks in the right side of his armor, John McCain still is far more conservative than either Hillary or B.O. But when President Bush declared that John McCain was a "true conservative" this week - which was kinda like Joan Crawford declaring that Britney Spears was...

Now that Mitt Romney has stepped aside in the GOP presidential race, many conservatives are trying to figure out where to go from here. John McCain will be the Republican presidential nominee. Conservatives are dispirited because on many issues they don't consider him one of them. And it's true -- he is a moderate who considered leaving the GOP in 2001 ... he did think about joining John Kerry's ticket in 2004 ... and he did side with liberals over conservatives on everything from immigration to closing Gitmo. But we have no time to be dejected and have to keep...

The prospect of John McCain as Republican nominee is inspiring sometimes angry resistance from millions of conservative stalwarts. Ann Coulter's famous support for Hillary Clinton  threatens to spark a wave of conservative "suicide voters"  if the Arizona Senator gets the nomination. Other Republicans, variously called insiders, party pros, elitists and worse, blithely assure us the alienated base will come around in the end and vote for McCain and the GOP ticket, particularly if Hillary Clinton is the alternative. Assuming McCain gets the nomination, I am not so sure. It could go either way. Anger at McCain Anger has been a...

This is my idea, and I am trying to get a read on what you think people would do and its effect...

This speech is a verbatim transcript of "The Speech" given as a portion of a pre-recorded, nationwide televised program sponsored by Goldwater-Miller on behalf of Barry Goldwater, Republican candidate for the presidency whom Ronald Reagan actively supported. Thank you very much. Thank you and good evening. The sponsor has been identified, but unlike most television programs, the performer hasn't been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks. I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I...

Mr. McCain stepped up his attempts to court the Republican right, scoring a number of high-profile endorsements this week. Yesterday, he received the support of billionaire Steve Forbes as well as former Solicitor General Theodore Olson. Mr. Olson, who served as assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration, represented President Bush in the Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore. The picture was a bit mixed earlier in the week when Mr. McCain got near-simultaneous endorsements from moderates California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former New York Mayor and rival Rudy Giuliani, causing some consternation among party conservatives. Some prominent pundits, including...

John Fund takes a look at the problematic relationship between John McCain and conservatives in his party, and focuses on one of the hot-button issues: judicial nominations. He doesn't give activists much hope on this front, quoting McCain as supportive of John Roberts' nomination but rejecting Samuel Alito as a model for future nominations. Why? Alito didn't hide his conservative nature well enough: Nothing would improve Mr. McCain's standing with conservatives more than a forthright restatement of his previously stated view that "one of our greatest problems in America today is justices that legislate from the bench." Mr. McCain bruised...

In an introduction to his standout lecture series on existentialism Professor Robert C. Solomon summarizes and defines existentialism as follows: ”The message of existentialism, unlike that of many more obscure and academic philosophical movements, is about as simple as can be. It is that every one of us, as an individual, is responsible—responsible for what we do, responsible for who we are, responsible for the way we face and deal with the world, responsible, ultimately, for the way the world is. It is, in a very short phrase, the philosophy of “no excuses!” Life may be difficult; circumstances may be...

Ron Paul is no compassionate conservative. His supporters love him for it. If there's been a phenomenon in this Republican presidential race, it's been the strength of a fiery doctor from Texas and his message of limited government. As the GOP front-runners address crowds of dispirited primary voters, Mr. Paul has been tearing across the country, leaving a trail of passionate devotees in his wake. Paul rallies heave with voters waving placards and shouting "Liberty! Liberty!" Money is pouring in from tens of thousands of individual donors--so much cash that the 10-term congressman recently admitted he wasn't sure he could...

Bowden accused of imposing religious beliefs on players ACLU wants Clemson to stop coach's annual team trip to local church The American Civil Liberties Union has accused Clemson head football coach Tommy Bowden of abusing his authority by imposing his religious beliefs on his players, and it has asked the university to discontinue the coach’s practice of strongly recommending players to participate in an annual team visit to a local church. The university on Wednesday denied the ACLU’s claim that Bowden, who is a state employee in a supervisory position, has violated the players’ constitutional rights of separation of church...

The New York Times report that social conservatives are talking of bolting to a third-party candidate, should Rudy Giuliani get the GOP nomination, is another sign of the disintegrating Reagan coalition. In truth, that coalition—the 49 states and 60 percent of the nation Reagan won in 1984—was but a Xerox copy of Nixon’s New Majority of 1972. A decade before Reagan won the presidency, Kevin Phillips had already published The Emerging Republican Majority.To understand why the Republican coalition is disintegrating, one must understand what held it together.To create a GOP majority in the 1960s, as Nixon did, one had first to...

...In response, the men seeking the 2008 GOP presidential nomination have largely turned that race into a contest over which candidate can best remind primary voters of Ronald Reagan, the model small-government Republican. ...In his inaugural address in 1981, Reagan said, "It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people." In his farewell address eight years later, the president said, "[M]an is not free unless government is limited. There's a...

Conservatives today are in a funk. The strains of governing, the challenges of war, and the frustration of an unsuccessful mid-term election have contributed to unease and unhappiness. But deeper than these issues is an intellectual fatigue and uncertainty about where the attention of the conservative movement now should be directed. What domestic issues can unite and motivate conservatives to great political exertions, and can win the allegiance of the public? In this respect, the right is partially a victim of its own successes. If 25 years ago you had asked an American conservative to name the preeminent domestic policy...

Some of you guys are jerks. No, I'm not talking about you, dear reader, whose erudition and class I've always admired. And you smell good, too. But some of you other guys are some seriously pre-literate knuckle draggers. Exhibit A would be the relatively new message boards on the Web site of that great metropolitan newspaper, The Miami Herald. Or at least it would have been, before management stepped in a few weeks back, began policing the boards more closely and put up a notice asking people to keep their comments on-point. Before that, the message boards, theoretically a place...

In the video, which has made the rounds online and on television, Nugent stands onstage with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle in each hand. First he tells of his recent visit to Chicago, during which he claims he said to Sen. Barack Obama, "Hey, Obama! You might want to suck on one of these [guns], you punk!" Nugent adds, "Obama, he's a piece of s---, and I told him to suck on my machine gun. Let's hear it for him!" Nugent then relays details of a recent visit to New York, during which he putatively conveyed a similar message to another...

Our government, we're been told, is one of laws, not of men. Yet, our politics have fast become a politics devoid of ideas and focusing instead on personalities. Patrick Ruffini, writing on Hugh Hewitt's blog, recently declared, "policy is boring and politics is interesting." A journalist told me something similar a while back. And heretofore the campaign coverage has aligned with that fact. The truth is, we've had a campaign of irrelevancy with red herring being the fish of the day. We've talked about John Edwards' haircut, Hillary Clinton's cleavage, what some Huckabee supporter said about Catholicism, and the smack...

Updated on August 31, 2007 thanks to retirement of Sen. John Warner of VA who was one of our 'GOP 13', now 12.Sen. Larry Craig’s indiscretion is just the latest in a series of poor judgments – both of a political and/or personal nature that has inflicted the Republican Party in recent years, thereby hurting the Republican ‘brand’. Now, thanks to actions such as these, we find the GOP in the minority in both houses in Congress, with a Democratic White House coming in 2009 looking increasingly likely. Unless the Republican Party – and its leaders – realize that the...

In summer 1991, beginning a long air trip on a National Review Institute delegation to the Far East, I opened a 14,000-word submission to National Review and settled down to read. My mood was a good deal more optimistic than it usually was toward 14,000-word submissions. Its author was a friend and gifted writer, Peter Brimelow, then a senior editor at Forbes, who had long wanted to write this piece. But was the topic “hot� enough to command as much as 20 pages in a national magazine? I was soon blown away by one of the most powerful and lively...

But now, in the sixth year of the Bush Administration, the Republican Party is in serious disarray. Only thirteen years after Gingrich brought the GOP roaring into power, and thanks in no small part to a congress who spent more and achieved less than any other in recent memory, the American people have tossed out the GOP, seeking fiscal discipline, and national security answers from, of all places, the Democratic Party.

Political activism on the Internet -- and in the so-called blogosphere, in particular -- has long been considered a liberal stronghold. But conservative bloggers show increasing signs of their own coming of age. They took a major leap forward by playing a central role in scuttling the Senate immigration bill. Meanwhile, many of the most popular talk-radio hosts are now posting on blogs, and the frequent collaboration of the two media is creating a unified conservative voice that is likely to be an important factor in the 2008 elections. One example: Fred Thompson, the actor and former Tennessee senator, was...

  Question: How can a candidate for president raise US$23-million in three months--only slightly less than John McCain and Rudy Giuliani combined--and still register barely above zero in polls of members of his own party? That is the sad story of Mitt Romney, the movie-star handsome former governor of Massachusetts. Romney registers a dismal fourth in Republican opinion polls. Yesterday's LAT/Bloomberg poll put him at 8% approval among Republicans. A year ago, Romney looked like an emerging Republic star. He had rescued Massachusetts from a large budget deficit without raising taxes. And he had engineered a state-wide health insurance...

Posted on Wed, Apr. 04, 2007 A victory for conservatives BY JONAH GOLDBERG Considering how badly things have been going for conservatives, right-wingers, Republicans and anyone else whose brain doesn't explode like one of those guys from the movie Scanners at the thought of another Republican president, it's worth noting that one of the greatest conservative victories of the last 40 years is quietly unfolding right in front of us. On March 9, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued an epochal ruling. The court found that the Second Amendment actually protects the right...

March 12, 2007, 6:00 a.m. Conservative WinSecond Amendment victory in D.C By Peter Ferrara The conservative movement won an historic victory last Friday. In the case of Parker v. District of Columbia, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does, indeed, protect a right for individual citizens to keep and bear arms for self-defense and other legal uses. Consequently, the court struck down a nettle of D.C. gun-control laws which effectively prohibited gun ownership and use within the District by law-abiding citizens. The media played the case as...

Mr. Toastmaster Mickey Edwards, thank you very much for those generous words - reverend clergy, ladies and gentlemen, we're delighted to be here at the ninth annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Anyone looking at the exciting program you've scheduled over these four days, and the size of this gathering here tonight, can't help but be impressed with the energy and vitality of the conservative movement in America. We owe a special debt of gratitude to the staffs of American Conservative Union, Young Americans for Freedom, Human Events and National Review for making this year's conference the most successful in the...

What a difference there is between a Republican defeat and a Democratic defeat.  After 1994 and 2000 and 2004 the Democrats were apoplectic.  They're coming for the children, they roared after 1994. We wuz robbed, they spat after 2000.  The voting machines did it, they squirmed after 2004. But like the sensible middle-class folks we are, we Republicans have gone home after November 2006 to do some thinking.  Some have complained about the congressional Republicans.  But they are politicians; they must deal in the art of the possible-this week!  It is our job, especially on a page named American Thinker,...