Free Republic

Ross Douthat has a powerful new book about his battle with chronic Lyme disease. In "The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery," he writes beautifully, with honesty and gratitude. I was overcome with emotion when I got to the part about our mutual friend Andrew Walther, who died a year ago. Douthat describes Andrew as "a Knight of Columbus and energetic global diplomat who was saving Middle Eastern Christians from the Islamic State while I was wandering around our rural property and dosing myself with tetracycline and tweeting against Trump. He and his wife had their fourth child...

DALLAS, Texas - Both sporting hunter green blazers and blue oxford shirts, Ross Douthat and Austen Ivereigh’s accidental clothing match marked a rare convergence during an event otherwise marked by sometimes pointed disagreement over the Francis papacy, as two of the most prominent commentators on 21st century Catholicism shared a stage for the first time Wednesday evening. “The Papacy in the 21st Century: Where Are We, and Where Are We Going?” was organized by the University of Dallas as a part of their annual McDermott Lecture Series, and co-sponsored by DeSales Media of the Diocese of Brooklyn, in an effort to welcome civil,...

There is nothing more characteristic of the Trump era, with its fire hose of misinformation, scandal and hyperbole, than that America and its allies recently managed to win a war that just two years ago consumed headlines and dominated political debate and helped Donald Trump himself get elected president — and somehow nobody seemed to notice. I mean the war against the Islamic State, whose expansion was the defining foreign policy calamity of Barack Obama’s second term, whose executions of Americans made the U.S.A. look impotent and whose utopian experiment drew volunteers drunk on world-historical ambitions and metaphysical dreams. Its...

....The weird rigors of this process have not always protected the parties from politically disastrous nominees, like Barry Goldwater or George McGovern. But Goldwater and McGovern were both men of principle and experience and civic virtue, leading factions that had not yet come to full maturity. This made them political losers; it did not make them demagogues. Trump, though, is cut from a very different cloth. He’s an authoritarian, not an ideologue, and his antecedents aren’t Goldwater or McGovern; they’re figures like George Wallace and Huey Long, with a side of the fictional Buzz Windripfrom Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen...

'Good news guys I've figured out how [his] campaign ends' New York Times columnist Ross Douthat joked about an assassination ending Donald Trump's run for president. The New York Times columnist caused a social media stir with a tweet that joked of billionaire businessman and GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump's assassination. "Good news guys," wrote Ross Douthat in his tweet. "I've figure out how the Trump campaign ends." He then included a link to a YouTube video of the 1983 movie, "The Dead Zone," a movie that features Christopher Walken as a character who tries to shoot to death a...

A Midlothian woman survived a bear attack Saturday at Douthat State Park in Bath County that left her with 14 stitches in her back and 14 in her leg. An adult female black bear believed to be the attacker was tracked and killed early Sunday. The bear attack prompted the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation to close several miles of trails on the west side of state Route 629, which was scheduled to be reopened today. Laurie Cooksey was hiking Saturday with three of her four children after a day of canoeing and camping the night before. When they...

IN the months since President Obama first seem poised — as he now seems poised again — to issue a sweeping executive amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants, we’ve learned two important things about how this administration approaches its constitutional obligations. First, we now have a clear sense of the legal arguments that will be used to justify the kind of move Obama himself previously described as a betrayal of our political order. They are, as expected, lawyerly in the worst sense, persuasive only if abstracted from any sense of precedent or proportion or political normality. Second, we now have...

IT now seems certain that before too many years elapse, the Supreme Court will be forced to acknowledge the logic of its own jurisprudence on same-sex marriage and redefine marriage to include gay couples in all 50 states. Once this happens, the national debate essentially will be finished, but the country will remain divided, with a substantial minority of Americans, most of them religious, still committed to the older view of marriage. So what then? One possibility is that this division will recede into the cultural background, with marriage joining the long list of topics on which Americans disagree without...

WINNING an election doesn’t just offer the chance to govern the country. It offers a chance to feel morally and intellectually superior to the party you’ve just beaten. This is an inescapable aspect of democratic culture: no matter what reason tells us about the vagaries of politics, something in the American subconscious assumes that the voice of the people really is the voice of God, and that being part of a winning coalition must be a sign that you’re His chosen one as well. This means the losing coalition must be doomed to wander east of Eden, and liberals have...

The race for the Republican nomination may be coming down to Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, but in the contest for the Iowa caucuses, their high-profile battle might still turn out to be a sideshow. The national party has spent the last two weeks resigning itself to a choice between the former speaker and the former Massachusetts governor. But Iowa Republicans may end up choosing between Gingrich and Representative Ron Paul. In every post-Thanksgiving poll but one, Paul has been neck and neck for second place in Iowa. In most of them, he has lagged well behind the soaring speaker,...

A few not to be missed articles or blogs have appeared in the past few days. The first is by the conservative New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat. Most people, especially those who still buy the print edition, see his regular featured column. But fewer people read his blog, which appears only on the paperÂ’s website, and for that, one usually has to search to find. Two days ago, Douthat wrote about the myth spread by many Democrats and liberals: that conservatives and Republicans want to institute a theocracy in America. As Douthat points out, [A] spate of recent articles...

Last August, I wrote the following about Mitt Romney’s odds of winning the Republican nomination: In a sense, the stronger President Obama looks next year, the better Romney’s chances of being nominated. He needs the prospect of an uphill general-election battle to keep his potential rivals for establishment support safely on the sidelines. And then he needs that same establishment to rally around him once the primary voting starts — not out of love or admiration, but out of fear of the populist alternative. Six months later, this is almost exactly how things are playing out. In many ways, Romney...

Ron Brownstein and Bill McKibben both have pieces up lamenting the ascendancy of climate change skepticism in the Republican Party. While McKibben ponders the intellectual roots of this phenomenon (a subject I touched on, as he notes, in a column earlier this year), Brownstein points out that the G.O.P. is an outlier among the developed world’s right-of-center parties:

The Great Recession has done wonders for the Republican Party. Two years after being tossed out of power at every level, it's about to waltz right back in, kicking aside the corpses of Democrats foolish enough to go along with the designs of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. This is good news for most conservatives. It's slightly worse news for a smaller group of conservatives—namely, the ones who spent the end of the '00s explaining why a Republican comeback like this was not really possible. Take, for example, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, whose 2005 Weekly Standard cover story, "The...

Here are two more data points from the weekend to back up my argument that the 2012 Republican nomination is not Sarah Palin’s to lose. First, the Values Voter Summit straw poll, a decent gauge of sentiment among the kind of activists Palin would presumably need to rally, in which the former Alaska governor racked up just 7 percent of the vote, trailing Mike Pence (who gave a barn-burner of a speech), Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Second, a new 2012 poll from Public Policy Polling, showing Romney leading with 22 percent, followed by Huckabee at 21, Gingrich...

Entering this weekend, I was convinced that Glenn Beck’s star was about to go into eclipse. Just as Michael Moore, amid Democratic disarray, became the unlikely face of liberal opposition to George W. Bush, the mercurial, weepy, demagogic Beck has spent the last 18 months filling the void left by the institutional collapse of the Republican Party. And just as Moore’s influence diminished as the Democrats came roaring back, it seemed plausible that Beck would matter less and less as the midterms and then the 2012 election re-empowered actual Republican politicians. But after spending my Saturday at Beck’s “Restoring Honor”...

Erik Hayden of The Atlantic Wire much admires Mark Levin taking down a poser: The latest pundit to lambaste Douthat [aka Ross doo-TOT] is hard-right radio talk show host Mark Levin, who not only slams the Times' columnist's recent article on The Right and Climate Change, but also makes some incendiary attacks on his character, talent and position. All this in a 166-word Facebook note entitled What is a Ross Douthat? His answer: This is your typical pretender. He's not a thinker. He's not a scholar. He's not accomplished. What, exactly, does he know about climate in specific or science...

Over the weekend, Dave Weigel resigned as WaPo's house chronicler of conservatives after revelations of his antipathy toward the people he was covering. Tonight brings us the spectacle of Ross Douthat, an ostensibly conservative columnist at the New York Times. Appearing on MSNBC's Ed Schultz show, Douthat proffered precisely zero criticism of anyone or anything liberal. But he did manage to mock Mike Huckabee as "passive-aggressive." For good measure, Douthat suggested that "right-wing" people who question Barack Obama's place of birth are too dense to realize that Hawaii is a state of the union. The Nation's Chris Hayes subbed for...

And John McCain’s defeat has been taken as the vindication of this premise. We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation. “Real conservatism,” in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation. The former vice-president kept his distance from the Bush administration’s attempts at domestic reform, and he had little time for the...

snip But drop down to ground level for a moment, and consider Ta-Nehisi's response to my post on prison reform. Here we have an issue - the design of our criminal-justice system - that's of burning concern to the African-American community. It's not an easy issue to wrestle with by any stretch: My preferred approach to reform, for instance, would marry a reduced incarceration rate to a substantial increase in the police presence on America's streets, which if implemented clumsily (as most policy shifts are) could mean fewer black men behind bars, but more tragedies like the death of Ta-Nehisi's...