Free Republic

LGF nails them to the wall, but the Times’s complicity in this whitewash is actually even worse than Charles suggests.

Two Hollywood actors who dined with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in early 2001 at actress Candice Bergen's home confirmed reports that he told the assembled group he did not vote for George W. Bush in the 2000 election, but McCain denied the claim at a news conference. In separate phone interviews, Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff -- both of whom starred in television's "The West Wing" -- said late Thursday night that the senator made the remarks after he spoke at length about his reservations about Bush becoming president. Liberal blogger Arianna Huffington first wrote about the incident Monday, asserting...

WASHINGTON — Sen. Hillary Clinton excluded nearly $24 million of her husband's earnings from Senate financial statements from 2004 through 2006, capitalizing on rules that permit senators to limit disclosures of some of their spouses' income. Her decision, while fully consistent with Senate rules and norms, delayed the release of financial information about former President Clinton's soaring income until the couple released their tax returns in early April, under pressure from Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama. By then, about 40 states had completed their Democratic primaries and caucuses, meaning that those voters didn't get a clear look at Bill Clinton's...

MIAMI - The Republican National Committee demanded Monday that television networks stop running a television ad by the Democratic Party that falsely suggests John McCain wants a 100-year war in Iraq. The ad says President Bush has talked about staying in Iraq for 50 years, then plays a clip of McCain saying, "Maybe 100. That'd be fine with me." The announcer then says: "If all he offers is more of the same, is John McCain the right choice for America's future?" Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan said the ad deliberately distorts what McCain, the likely GOP presidential nominee, said....

During the Pennsylvania primary campaign, Barack Obama made a rather charitable gesture not only toward his Democratic rival but toward the presumptive Republican nominee as well. "You have real choice in this election," he told a crowd in Reading. "You know, either Democrat would be better than John McCain, but ... all three of us would be better than George Bush." That was all it took to set off Hillary Clinton. She rattled off a list of McCain's misguided positions, asking her audience over and over, "Is that better than George Bush?" She concluded, "We need a nominee who will...

While Barack Obama starred in television ads this month claiming he doesn't take money from from oil companies he actually raked in thousands of dollars in donations from industry executives and employees. In the television commercials promoting his infamous change theme, Obama sternly assures that he doesn't take money from oil companies immediately after pointing out that Exxon is making $40 billion a year and Americans pay $3.50 for gas. As the deceiving commercials were being broadcast Obama was filling his campaign coffers with oil dollars, bringing to light serious credibility and honesty issues... The Illinois senator has accepted at...

OBAMA SAID: "Well, I don't actually think there are Council On Foreign Relations 'MEMBERS...' He thinks we are STUPID!

Both his fans and his critics hail Bill Clinton as the first postmodern president. In his personal constructions of truth and morality, his continual re-invention of himself, and his insistence that even the word "is" depends upon your interpretation, President Clinton became a poster boy for the relativistic worldview. Now Hillary Clinton is continuing her husband's political legacy. The most flagrant example of Mrs. Clinton's embrace of contemporary philosophy is her description of a trip to Bosnia in which she had to duck sniper fire, landing with no ceremony into a war zone and running from the airplane with her...

(CNN) — John McCain's campaign is crying foul over what it characterizes as repeated distortions from Barack Obama, saying on Friday the Illinois senator is "recklessly dishonest." The most recent dustup comes after Obama criticized McCain earlier Friday for comments the Arizona senator made in an interview on Bloomberg Television.

Hillary Clinton got caught in a lie when she said she had dodged sniper fire during a 1996 visit to Bosnia. Now her Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama has been caught in a “sniper fire” lie of his own. During Thursday’s debate in Pennsylvania, Obama was asked why he doesn’t wear an American flag lapel pin, as do many other politicians as well as servicemen and law enforcement officials. “I have never said that I don’t wear flag pins or refuse to wear flag pins,” he responded. “That is the kind of manufactured issue that our politics has become obsessed...

On his April 11 HBO show, “Real Time with Bill Maher,” the comedian went into an extended assault on Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church. For a transcript, click here.Catholic League president Bill Donohue responded as follows:“Maher’s obsession with the Catholic Church continues, only this time there isn’t enough material for him to use as a club, so he literally makes things up. His lies include the following statement: ‘When the—when the current pope was in his previous Vatican job as John Paul’s Dick Cheney—he wrote a letter instructing every Catholic bishop to keep the sex abuse of minors...

Obama’s Big Lie: Radio Ad Blames Oil Companies for Gas Prices Use Obama’s own proven lie to destroy his candidacy Barack Obama’s latest radio advertisement underscores his belief that small town Pennsylvanians are dirt-ignorant farmers, coal miners, and factory workers who “cling to guns and religion,� and are therefore incapable of knowing when a slick college boy and Harvard lawyer from a real city like Chicago is telling them a whopper. Then again, Obama’s efforts to blame “Big Oil� for $4.00 a gallon gasoline–the quoted price itself being an outright lie–conforms perfectly to the following principles.…there was no point in...

Possibly to avoid being one-upped on Indiana national security politics, former President Bill Clinton told a crowd in Columbus, Indiana, today that his wife had tried to join the Army. "I remember when we were young, right out of law school, she went down and tried to join the Army and they said 'Your eyes are so bad, nobody will take you,'" he said, after heralding her record on issues of concern to the military, such as body armor and access to health care. I assume this is a version of the "Hillary Clinton tried to join the Marines" anecdote...

At a campaign stop in Philadelphia, Hillary Clinton proposed an anti-crime package that would put 100,000 more cops on the streets of the U.S. It’s a good thing, too: Another part of her package calls for letting imprisoned crack users back out on the streets to mix it up with the extra cops. According to the Los Angeles Times, this is all part of a plan to reduce recidivism and achieve fair treatment for blacks and whites under the law. Crack users “are disproportionately black,” and “the law punishes them more harshly than powder cocaine users, who are predominantly white.”

Watching the Democrat Presidential candidates swing through the state of Pennsylvania, it's as if the state all of the sudden had an epidemic of "lifelong Republicans", going through a change of heart and switching over to the Democrats. Not to take part in their primaries, but due to ideological reasons. Obama seemed to be the major, perhaps the only, beneficiary of all these former "lifelong Republicans", now Democrat voters. It seems that we are dealt this left wing propaganda every election, every primary year. Hordes of "lifelong Republicans" who tell us that they are now Democrats. In reality, the vast...

Bill Clinton Retells Hillary's 1996 Bosnia Story April 10, 2008 7:10 PM ABC News' Sarah Amos and Eloise Harper Report: After a trip to Puerto Rico and two days entirely off the campaign trail, former President Bill Clinton eagerly discussed myriad topics with the crowd that awaited him in Boonville, Ind., and what he said of a trip his wife made to Bosnia in 1996 seemed a bit misleading. "I am so glad to be here. And I'm glad that Indiana is gonna have a say in who the nominee of the Democratic Party is and the next president of...

On Saturday, the New York Times reported that a sob story Clinton had been repeating on the campaign trail—that of an uninsured pregnant lady who lost her baby and died herself after she couldn't pay $100 for treatment in an Ohio hospital—is not true and was never even checked for authenticity. Just as troubling, though, is that the events as Clinton's team tells them are actually illegal, which Hillary, as architect of the $110 billion "American Health Choices Plan," should presumably know. A spokesperson for the Ohio Hospital Association tells Radar that "Federal law requires that hospitals treat patients in...

Details of Hillary Clinton's firing from the House Judiciary Committee staff for unethical behavior as she helped prepare articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon have been confirmed by the panel's chief Republican counsel. Franklin Polk backed up major claims by Jerry Zeifman, the general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee who supervised Clinton's work on the Watergate investigation in 1974, reported columnist Dan Calabrese in a column republished by WND. Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, called Clinton a "liar" and "an unethical, dishonest lawyer." He contends Clinton was collaborating with allies of the Kennedys to block revelation...

April 6, 2008 -- Hillary Rodham Clinton "misspoke" again on the campaign trail - and a distraught Ohio family is furious about it. Several times in recent months while talking about her plan for universal health care, Clinton told a tale of woe about a young pregnant woman who sought medical care at a local hospital and was turned away for lack of insurance - and both she and the baby died. But the family of the 35-year-old woman - Trina Bachtel - says the story is simply not true. "Trina had good insurance. She was a good girl, and...

I will start the list; 1) Bill was not doinking Monica, the vast right wing is just conspiring and making the whole thing up!

New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is being hobbled in her race to overtake Illinois Sen. Barack Obama by persistent questions among voters about her honesty, according to polls. A new poll in North Carolina - which after the April 22 Pennsylvania primary, is the next big prize on the campaign trail - says a key element in Obama's success is that the state's voters value trust over experience. The survey for the Charlotte Observer/WCNC-TV reported that only 25 percent of voters gave high marks to Clinton for trustworthiness compared to 48 percent for Obama and 54 percent for Arizona...

In Eugene, Oregon, Saturday. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, attempted to change the measure by which anyone might assess who criticized the Iraq war first, her or Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, by saying those keeping records should start in January 2005, when Obama joined the Senate. (A measure that conveniently avoids her October 2002 vote to authorize use of force against Iraq at a time that Obama was speaking out against the war.) She claimed that using that measure she criticized the war in Iraq before Obama did. But Clinton's claim was false. Clinton on Saturday told Oregonians, "when Senator Obama...

Hillary Clinton’s campaign says the candidate will stop telling the story of an uninsured pregnant woman who lost the baby and died after being denied medical care, following a hospital raising questions over its accuracy. Clinton has frequently told the emotional story of the woman from rural Ohio since late February. In the speech, Clinton said the woman made minimum wage working at a local pizza restaurant, without insurance, when she became pregnant. Clinton said the woman ran into trouble, went to a hospital in a nearby county but was denied treatment because she couldn’t afford a $100 payment. In...

I've heard Hillary tell the story many times in campaign speeches, and it rarely fails to bring a horrified gasp from the crowd: An uninsured and pregnant Ohio woman, working for minimum wage at a pizza parlor, is turned away from a hospital because she can't come up with $100. The baby dies, and so does the woman. Clinton talks about how this woman haunts her, and how stories like this show the moral imperative - and the urgency - of fixing a badly broken health care system. (video) Except, it turns out, it didn't happen - at least not...

Clinton Drops Another Tale From Stump Speech Another Clinton Campaign Story Shot Down By ELOISE HARPER April 5, 2008 — For the second time in recent days, Sen. Hillary Clinton has had to drop a story from her stump speech after being challenged on its accuracy. For the past month, the New York senator liked to tell the tale of a pregnant woman who was denied health care from an Ohio hospital because she did not have $100 the hospital demanded to treat her. After being turned away, the woman was brought back to the hospital days later with severe...

Hillary Clinton is honoring an Ohio hospital’s request that she stop retelling the tragic story of an uninsured pregnant woman who died after being denied care, after the hospital referenced in the story disputed the account.... She died in August after her baby was stillborn at the hospital, but hospital administrators told the Times Bachtel actually was insured and kept under the care of a practice affiliated with the hospital.

Over the last five weeks, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York has featured in her campaign stump speeches the story of a health care horror: an uninsured pregnant woman who lost her baby and died herself after being denied care by an Ohio hospital because she could not come up with a $100 fee. The woman, Trina Bachtel, did die last August, two weeks after her baby boy was stillborn at O’Bleness Memorial Hospital in Athens, Ohio. But hospital administrators said Friday that Ms. Bachtel was under the care of an obstetrics practice affiliated with the hospital, that she...

OBAMA LAUNDRY LIST OF LIES as of April 03, 2008 (68 lies and counting)

1.) Selma Got Me Born - LIAR, your parents felt safe enough to have you in 1961 - Selma had no effect on your birth, as Selma was in 1965. 2.) Father Was A Goat Herder - LIAR, he was a privileged, well educated youth, who went on to work with the Kenyan Government. 3.) Father Was A Proud Freedom Fighter - LIAR, he was part of one of the most corrupt and violent governments Kenya has ever had 4.) My Family Has Strong Ties To African Freedom - LIAR, your cousin Raila Odinga has created mass violence in attempting...

Hillary Clinton met her Waterloo at Tuzla. She'd been regaling audiences with tales of a dangerous landing under sniper fire in the Bosnian city 12 years ago and then running for cover. None of this occurred. When CBS provided the tape, she was forced to admit to "a misstatement." Now, confabulation is a fairly common psychological phenomenon. We all have internalized childhood stories so oft repeated by elders that we come to falsely "remember" the actual experience. Adult memories are less susceptible to such unconscious inventions, but experiences embellished over time by repeated recounting can reach the point where we...

What worked for P.T. Barnum didn’t do as well for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). When the great showman said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” he unknowingly anticipated the fundamental assumption that underlay the campaign of the first woman seriously to contend for the presidency. But however correct Barnum’s observations may have been about the circus audiences of years ago, it has proven a flawed premise for a 21st century presidential campaign. From the very beginning of her solo political career, Hillary Clinton has manifested a consistently low opinion of the intelligence of voters....

53 minutes ago (at time of posting this thread) WASHINGTON (AFP) - Republican John McCain Thursday portrayed his possible Democratic presidential election rival Barack Obama as a national security neophyte who was dishonestly misrepresenting him on Iraq. Intensifying his assault, McCain questioned Obama's plan to leave a "strike force" of US troops in the Middle East after an eventual withdrawal from Iraq, and accused him of being "disingenuous" about his own Iraq stance. [SNIP] "I think somebody ought to ask what in the world he's talking about, especially since he has no experience or background at all in national security...

I owe an apology to Sen. Barack Obama. In 14 previous columns and many answers in my weekly question-and-answer columns, I said he was a world-class liar, phony, hypocrite, artful dodger, and is unpatriotic to boot. But as more comes out on the senator, who has long had a free pass from the mainstream media, it turns out he's a bigger liar than I thought, even as his lies become less and less convincing. Example: Mr. Obama claims the words of his friend, mentor, associate, advisor, inspiration, spiritual adviser and pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are being taken out of context...

RICHMOND, April 1 -- Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine announced Tuesday that he is halting all executions until the Supreme Court decides whether lethal injection violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Clinton, Obama Claims Don't Hold Up Both Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama Have Made Dubious Claims in '08 Race By JAKE TAPPER April 1, 2008 — Facts are stubborn things, but they often meet their match with politicians. Campaigning in Pennsylvania, Tuesday, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., continued to argue she has opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement since 1992. "I did speak out and opposed NAFTA," Clinton told an AFL-CIO audience in Philadelphia. "I raised a big yellow caution flag. I said, 'I'm not sure this is going to work.'" But if Clinton "spoke out" against NAFTA, she...

Barack Obama - To Hell and Back -

About this business of Hillary coming under intense sniping, I have some sympathy. The Clintons got away with this sort of thing for so long that you can’t blame them for wondering how they missed the memo advising that henceforth the old rules no longer apply. Bill, being warier, was usually canny enough to set his fantasies just far enough back in time that live cable footage was unlikely to be available — his vivid memories of entirely mythical black church burnings in his childhood, etc. But Hillary liked to live a little more dangerously. The defining fiction arose back...

The Obama campaign has made political points over Hillary Clinton’s dishonest comments about coming under “sniper fire” in Bosnia, but Obama also has some opportunist lies for which to account. The Washington Post calls it “overstating,” but make no mistake; this is a flat-out lie: Obama Overstates Kennedys’ Role in Helping His Father.

The punishment visited on Sen. Hillary Clinton for her flagrant, hysterical, repetitive, pathological lying about her visit to Bosnia should be much heavier than it has yet been and should be exacted for much more than just the lying itself. There are two kinds of deliberate and premeditated deceit, commonly known as suggestio falsi and suppressio veri. (Neither of them is covered by the additionally lying claim of having "misspoken.") The first involves what seems to be most obvious in the present case: the putting forward of a bogus or misleading account of events. But the second, and often the...

Is Hillary Mentally Ill? by Joan Swirsky, Featured Writer March 31, 2008Newspaper articles and TV specials have made most people familiar with the psychiatric disorder called Munchausen-By-Proxy, in which a person (usually a woman) or a parent (usually the mother) makes herself or her child sick – by poison, overmedication, smothering, etc. – and then reports the dire symptoms to authorities, thereby garnering the attention and sympathy she craves, as well as heroine status for “saving” herself or her child. When this bizarre pattern of behavior is observed over time – by family members, friends, psychiatric professionals – and they...

Addressing civil rights activists in Selma, Ala., a year ago, Sen. Barack Obama traced his "very existence" to the generosity of the Kennedy family, which he said paid for his Kenyan father to travel to America on a student scholarship and thus meet his Kansan mother. The Camelot connection has become part of the mythology surrounding Obama's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. After Caroline Kennedy endorsed his candidacy in January, Newsweek commentator Jonathan Alter reported that she had been struck by the extraordinary way in which "history replays itself" and by how "two generations of two families -- separated...

We know why politicians lie when they get in trouble: they think the consequences of telling the truth are too severe to bear. That's why Richard Nixon lied about Watergate, and Bill Clinton about Monica Lewinsky. The more complicated question is why they fib—why politicians insist on stretching unimportant stories in ways that are easy to check and refute. Hillary Clinton's oft-told yarn about ducking sniper fire on the tarmac in Tuzla, Bosnia, in 1996 has gotten a lot of publicity, maybe too much. Her misrepresentation of her role in the Northern Ireland peace talks was more serious but less...

Addressing civil rights activists in Selma, Ala., a year ago, Sen. Barack Obama traced his "very existence" to the generosity of the Kennedy family, which he said paid for his Kenyan father to travel to America on a student scholarship and thus meet his Kansan mother. The Camelot connection has become part of the mythology surrounding Obama's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. After Caroline Kennedy endorsed his candidacy in January, Newsweek commentator Jonathan Alter reported that she had been struck by the extraordinary way in which "history replays itself" and by how "two generations of two families -- separated...

It happens. Or rather it didn't happen. How many of us can remember an event, often full of emotional overtones, that didn't happen? It's a common enough experience to have a name: false memory. Just how that false memory forms and is reinforced over the years can be left to the psychologists to explain in detail. Maybe first we exaggerate what happened, then elaborate the imagined memory with each retelling, especially to ourselves. And before we know it, we've fully incorporated the event into our dramatic life story. Our ever-absorbent psyches could put any ordinary screenplay to shame. Maybe that's...

...Which brings us back to our question: Why would so smart a candidate play political Russian roulette with virtually all the bullet chambers loaded? Sometimes only a shrink can decipher why some politicians persist in flagrantly taking giant risks, all but daring others to catch them in the act (see: Spitzer, Eliot). Carl Bernstein, a sometimes admiring Hillary Clinton biographer, has called the Bosnia debacle “a watershed event” for her campaign because it revives her long history of balancing good works with “ ‘misstatements’ and elisions,” from the health-care task force fiasco onward. But this event may be a watershed...

Now that Obama and Hillary are offering images that are much weaker, LESS HONEST, and less solid and dependable, good old John McCain looks much better as he tours Iraq and Israel while Democrats rip one another apart.

WASHINGTON -- Asked at a New Hampshire campaign stop about possibly staying in Iraq 50 years, John McCain interrupted -- "Make it a hundred" -- then offered a precise analogy to what he envisioned: "We've been in Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea for 50 years or so." Lest anyone think he was talking about prolonged war-fighting rather than maintaining a presence in postwar Iraq, he explained: "That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed." And lest anyone persist in thinking he was talking about...

Hillary Clinton’s made-from-whole-cloth fantasy about the perils of her trip to Bosnia was no unique foray into a world of make-believe accomplishments. She’s been doing that for a long time. Here’s another telling example: At a 1997 race-relations forum for teenagers in Boston, Hillary recalled the “pain” of a “childhood encounter” that helped her to grasp the injury suffered by the victims of bigotry. Her comments came as her husband was launching his second term in office by calling for a national dialogue on race and reconciliation. In an effort to empathize with her audience and inject herself into the...

About this business of Hillary coming under intense sniping, I have some sympathy. The Clintons got away with this sort of thing for so long that you can’t blame them for wondering how they missed the memo advising that henceforth the old rules no longer apply. Bill, being warier, was usually canny enough to set his fantasies just far enough back in time that live cable footage was unlikely to be available — his vivid memories of entirely mythical black church burnings in his childhood, etc. But Hillary liked to live a little more dangerously. The defining fiction arose back...

I think we've reached a signal point in the campaign. This is the point where, with Hillary Clinton, either you get it or you don't. There's no dodging now. You either understand the problem with her candidacy, or you don't. You either understand who she is, or not. And if you don't, after 16 years of watching Clintonian dramas, you probably never will.... What struck me as the best commentary on the Bosnia story came from a poster called GI Joe who wrote in to a news blog: "Actually Mrs. Clinton was too modest. I was there and saw it...