Free Republic

<p>On this weekend's broadcast of The McLaughlin Group, regular liberal panelist Eleanor Clift accused Senator Rand Paul of trying to "stir a revolt against the U.S. government."</p> <p>ELEANOR CLIFT: I'm with John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who basically said this was over the top and creating a sense that the government is really just waiting for this opportunity to drop a drone on you. But, I'll grant you the point. The ACLU put out a statement siding with Rand Paul and this is where the left and the right do meet.</p>

The wily House minority leader put everything on the line to pass the president’s health-care bill, remained confident it would survive legal challenge—and was proved right when the Supreme Court largely upheld it. Among her first phone calls were her husband (“Sweetie, we won.”) and Vicki Kennedy, Sen. Ted Kennedy’s widow, telling her, “Now Teddy can rest.” Ted Kennedy had long been the inspiration for health care as a right, not a privilege, calling it “the cause of my life,” and Nancy Pelosi, in her role as the first woman speaker of the House, had made it happen. Rushing to...

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has up to this point opted not to make his tax returns public. Not surprisingly, Newsweek's Eleanor Clift smells a rat and expressed her conspiratorial opinion during the predictions segment of PBS's McLaughlin Group Friday (video follows with transcript): ELEANOR CLIFT, NEWSWEEK: Romney’s refusal so far to release his income tax returns will be linked to probable investments in the Cayman Islands and the likelihood that he paid a very small percentage of his income in taxes.

Eleanor Clift on this weekend's "McLaughlin Group" made a truly absurd comment about the disparate ways Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan handled Libya during their respective presidencies that left Monica Crowley in stitches. After Clift mocked Reagan by saying, "You don’t need leadership that goes into a Muslim country all alone," Monica laughed loudly before replying, "American presidential leadership, Eleanor, never goes out of style" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Eleanor Clint doesn't exactly say that President Barack Obama is completely clueless about politics but she comes pretty close to it in her latest Newsweek column. The lack of a basic ability to control the political agenda in Washington is a prospect that makes a committed liberal like Clift somewhat less than happy:Obama’s storied political career took him from the relative obscurity of the Illinois State Legislature to the presidency in such a short time that he didn’t get much of a feel for the nitty-gritty politicking that consumes so much of today’s partisan bickering. He didn’t have the benefit...

The Justice Department has dropped its case against former House Majority Leader, Tom Delay, and Newsweek's Eleanor Clift is in mourning. She just can't accept the fact that there was no substance to the charges against DeLay and ascribes the dropping of the case to the Obama Justice Department trying to score points with Republicans in the interest of bipartisanship. Clift also manages to smear the late former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens in her angst over the dropped charges: The Justice Department’s decision to let former House majority leader Tom DeLay off the hook and end the six-year-long investigation that...

We all probably knew the sentiment of the American left for just not getting the entire Tea Party movement concept, but this statement ought to cement that notion. On the July 18 broadcast of "The McLaughlin Group," host John McLaughlin asked his panelists what the long-term implications of national debt could be for the United States. "Is America in danger of the current debt crisis becoming a sovereign debt crisis as Mort [Zuckerman] mentioned, like the one that is now hitting Greece, yes or no?" McLaughlin asked. MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan warned it was more "imminent" than many people...

In 1992, the feminists in the media rejoiced at what they called “The Year of the Woman,” when ten Democratic women (and one Republican) were running for the Senate in the aftermath of Anita Hill’s unproven sexual-harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas. Just two years before, seven Republican women (and two Democrats) ran. But the media yawned. In 1992, the evening newscasts aired 29 stories exclusively devoted to women Senate candidates. In 1990, there was one...on election night. In 1992, the morning shows interviewed women Senate candidates on 26 occasions. In 1990, there were zero interviews. This was all about the...

Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, on this weekend's syndicated The McLaughlin Group, slighted conservative pro-life women everywhere when she applied California Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina's "so yesterday" description of Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer's hairstyle to women who hold anti-abortion views in the Republican Party. Clift, in a segment about the primary victories of both Fiorina and GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman began actually crediting Sarah Palin as "Saint Sarah" for the wins as she claimed that the former Alaskan Governor is "emboldening conservative women" and "reshaping the religious right" but then went on to question if pro-life women candidates could win...

Pure genius, I tell you. With an estimated half a million illegal immigrants residing in Arizona according to the Pew Hispanic Center, questions are being raised about what this means for the United States and its national identity. But according to Newsweek contributing editor Eleanor Clift, it's a "happy" thing with lots of upside. On the May 2 airing of "The McLaughlin Group," show moderator John McLaughlin raised the issue about the country's identity, particularly when it comes to English as the United States' primary language. "The bedrock is national identity," McLaughlin said. "If the national identity suffers by reason...

Vice President Joe Biden, well-known for his verbal gaffes, may have finally outdone himself, divulging potentially classified information meant to save the life of a sitting vice president.

This just in from Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, a frequent purveyor of political anecdotes. She bring us an enlightening one here regarding the (quote) undisclosed location (unquote) we heard lots about in the days after Sept. 11. Here's Eleanor: Ever wonder about that secure, undisclosed location where Dick Cheney secreted himself after the 9/11 attacks? Joe Biden reveals the bunker-like room is at the Naval Observatory in Washington, where Cheney lived for eight years and which is now home to Biden. The veep related the story to his head-table dinner mates when he filled in for President Obama at the Gridiron...

It's a response that might incite laughter, as it did from conservative pundit Monica Crowley and MSNBC paleocon talker Pat Buchanan. According to Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, the current problems facing the country and President Barack Obama are due to capitalism. Clift, appearing on the syndicated April 26 "The McLaughlin Group" gave Obama high marks for his first hundred days and said Republicans were misguided for attacking the growth of the size of government. "I give him a B+ because there's a lot of outcomes that haven't come in yet," Clift said. "But look, this isn't about the failure of government...

Is this a sign of the times? Liberal columnist Eleanor Clift has joined her ideological colleagues, Mika Brzezinski and Paul Krugman, in criticizing President Barack Obama recently. What set Clift off was Obama's evasiveness in revealing whether he approved or knew in advance the AIG bonuses provided by his stimulus bill. Clift takes aim at both Obama and Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, in her latest Newsweek column: Who would have thought 55 days into this administration we would be asking the question, what did he know and when did he know it? Word that a provision in the stimulus bill...

Rev. Jeremiah Wright was a voice crying in the wilderness that the mainstream media and middle class America weren't quite ready for and megachurch pastor Rick Warren is an ignorant evangelical rube who isn't totally without hope, given his awareness of AIDS and other favored liberal causes. That's essentially what Eleanor Clift preached to her choir in her December 19 "Capitol Letter" column, "Choosing a Church: Obama's next big decision -- and its implications." Wrote Sister Eleanor (emphasis mine): Black religious leaders did not stand up for Wright even as they understood and sympathized with the prophetic theology he was...

Sarah Palin strode onto the stage, cheeky from the start. "Can I call you Joe?" The normally voluble Joe Biden seemed restrained by comparison as Palin made her play for the working-class, Joe Sixpack voters that have been his bread and butter as a politician. She's short on facts, but she has command of phrases ("We're mavericks!") and she strings them together with good effect. Biden looked on with a mixture of awe and horror as she did her every-woman show, winking at the camera, celebrating hockey moms and giving a shout-out to her brother's third-grade class. She succeeded in...

The "bitter" answer, captured on audiotape, came in response to a question about whether Obama could win white rural voters because he is black. He basically said these voters have other grievances more salient than race, which is why they don't vote their economic interests and are vulnerable to wedge issues having to do with God, gays and guns. Clinton surely knows what Obama was trying to say, but seeing her path to the nomination narrowing, she manipulated his words for political gain. Fair enough. She hurts him, but she hurts herself more. Pollster Doug Schoen, who has advised her...

Some 50 delegates were reportedly poised to unite behind Barack Obama if he had won by even 1 point in Texas. He lost the popular vote by 100,000 ballots, and now we learn that 100,000 Republicans voted for Hillary Clinton, probably not because of some change in party allegiance but because they thought she would be the easier candidate to beat. This kind of strategic voting often backfires (think Ralph Nader). The Texas crossovers are winners. By helping to prolong the Democratic race, they can claim credit for weakening the eventual nominee, whoever it turns out to be. Obama has...

One of the criticisms of the media's coverage of Sen. Barack Obama's candidacy - both from his opponents on the right and on the left, has been that he's been given a free pass on a lot of issue. The latest in particular had been the recently uncovered of Obama's former church minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who had made several incendiary remarks about race and the government. Eleanor Clift, known for her defense of Bill and Hillary Clinton on the syndicated show, "The McLaughlin Group," came to the defense of Obama in a March 17 appearance at The National Press...

Newsweek's Eleanor Clift on Friday morning complained, as many liberals have this week, that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has drained all the independence out of his office, that he's acting too much like the president's "personal lawyer." In 1993, when Janet Reno announced the mass dismissal of all 93 U.S. Attorneys, no one demanded her resignation for her lack of independence from the White House. In fact, it could be because someone else was coordinating with the White House on how to run the Justice Department, the felonious one-man Webster Hubbell. At that time, the Wall Street Journal editorial page...