Free Republic

The Democrats already know the cause of their utter electoral humiliation: all those flyover people who had voted for Obama last time were actually racists who demonstrated their racism by not voting for the tired old white lady too.Far be it for me to help out you terrible Democrat clowns by suggesting that your terrible party has a terrible problem and you might want to figure out how to fix it. Sure, Hillary did get a lot of votes. Maybe even a majority of votes. And, considering we are not a democracy but a constitutional republic, of equal relevance is...

From the wisdom of Keillor: "So he won. The nation takes a deep breath. Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out, and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president. We are so exhausted from thinking about this election, millions of people will take up leaf-raking and garage cleaning with intense pleasure. We liberal elitists are wrecks. The Trumpers had a whale of a good time, waving their signs, jeering at the media, beating up protesters, chanting “Lock her up” — we elitists just stood and clapped. Nobody chanted “Stronger Together.” It just doesn’t chant....

Condescension against "red" America, evangelicals, and working-class Americans did nothing but ensure the defeat of Hillary Clinton Like many of my fellow Republicans and evangelicals, I was not initially enthusiastic about Donald Trump as the GOP nominee. Many of us had issues with Trump’s seeming inconsistency over key conservative values; like his support of continued taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood. The division among Republicans and evangelicals over Donald Trump was stark.

Clinton’s campaign strategy, especially when it came to appealing to white women, indicates that she and her staffers didn’t quite grasp these dynamics. Her campaign employed a candy-colored brand of female empowerment seemingly based on the assumption that white women’s political priorities are influenced by the pop culture they consume. White working-class women weren’t going to vote for Clinton just because Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Lena Dunham, and Sheryl Sandberg were. These celebrity overtures were out of step with the priorities and concerns of white working-class women. How can you “lean in,” as Sandberg implores working women to do, when...

Congratulations to Democrats on a very successful turnout effort, I guess. As hard as this is to believe given how highly touted the Clinton GOTV effort was, it makes some sense once you realize where the fatal error probably lay. Democrats assumed that white women and working-class whites who had voted for Obama would stick with Clinton this time for the most part, especially in the Rust Belt. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania were part of the blue firewall, weren’t they? Well, there you go. No need to even visit Wisconsin. Their loyalty was taken for granted. So when the time...

Less than a month after gloatingly predicting a major loss for Donald Trump, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne reacted on Wednesday to the election result in a highly bitter manner. Poor guy. His Beltway Bubble safe space is about to be punctured by those he spent over a year sneering at and his latest column reflects his rage. You would think someone with such a poor prediction track record would absorb just a bit of humility and keep his anger in check. However, Dionne never seems to learn from experience. His legacy for laughably wrong predictions about Trump which led...

As the reality of President-elect Donald Trump settled in very early Wednesday morning, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes summed up an explanation common to many on the left: The Republican nominee pulled ahead thanks to old-fashioned American racism. But the attempt to make Trump’s victory about racism appears to be at odds with what actually happened on Election Day. Consider the following facts. Twenty-nine percent of Latinos voted for Trump, per exit polls. Remarkably, despite the near-ubiquitous narrative that Trump would have deep problems with this demographic given his comments and position on immigration, this was a higher percentage of those who...

Before he became FBI director, James Comey lived the Gold Coast high-life in Connecticut as a hedge fund high-roller. Now the besieged Comey - under fire for his surprise letters to Congress about Hillary Clinton's controversial emails that have thrown the presidential election into chaos - is about to take another hit, this time on his palatial $3 million-plus home. Comey bought the estate on more than three acres not far from where Martha Stewart used to live in ritzy Westport, Connecticut, for $3,050,000 in August 2010. He's now had to reduce the price four times down to $2.5 million...

Donald Trump’s popularity is prompting the tech industry to wonder whether its massive success has left some Americans behind. Unless you’re invited to Graydon Carter’s private dinner, the cocktail party at San Francisco’s historic Ferry Building is supposed to be the highlight of the annual Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit, a high-end business conference for the coastal elite. On Wednesday evening, guests were escorted from the Yerba Buena Center to the Embarcadero by trolley and greeted by a six-person mariachi band who played through the selfies. But a little past 6 p.m., the crowd in the cathedral-esque lobby had already...

Piecing it together, bit by bit.

A group of 30 former GOP lawmakers signed a blistering open letter to Republicans on Thursday, warning that Donald Trump lacks the "intelligence" and temperament to be president and urging the party to reject the GOP nominee at the polls on Nov. 8. The group includes several former lawmakers who have openly opposed Trump from the start, including former Sen. Gordon Humphrey (R-N.H.) and former Rep. Vin Weber (R-Minn.).

Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday saluted German Chancellor Angela Merkel for welcoming thousands of refugees into her country, and warned against "demagogues" who would undermine the alliances that have formed in the decades since World War II. . . And everybody here knows that you cannot allow demagogues to start building up an unrealistic political platform based on bigotry, xenophobia, fear nationalism

The aging-boomer hippie magazine Rolling Stone still enjoys mocking their percieved bad taste of Flyover Country. This week, they made a list of the "12 Worst TV Shows of All Time" and topped hit list of "cream of the crud" with Duck Dynasty. Rob Sheffield asked: "Too much quality TV got you down? All that art and introspection making you pine for the long-gone age of junk?" The headline singled out "bottom-feeding reality shows." That apparently includes both the Bible-toting Robertsons and Ozzy Osbourne's clan in MTV's Osbournes Reloaded. Duck Dynasty was rated worse than the 1970s sitcom spinoffs on...

Donald Trump made it very clear last night that he is disgusted with Washington. Unluckily for Hillary Clinton, she is the standard-bearer for the Washington establishment and he didn’t let her forget it. He spoke to the plight of the middle class and hammered big, clumsy government and tax increases as the cause.

Brendan Coffey reports in Bloomberg that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is outraising Donald Trump by 20-to-1 among billionaires, a statistic which plays to her Republican rival’s populist appeal.

For over a year now, the mainstream press has attacked Trump for not being "presidential".  Even still, citizens are genuinely concerned that their president look the part of a president and carry themselves in a way that makes us proud.  So what exactly is meant when someone says a candidate looks or is "presidential"?  And why should we care?  This is the subject I'm going to explore and discuss in this vanity. JFK, Jackie and the Royalty of Camelot Well, to begin, I think our current notion of a "presidential" style was strongly influenced by JFK in the 1960s. ...

Those in power see people at the bottom as aliens whose bizarre emotions they must try to manage. ############# This is about distance, and detachment, and a kind of historic decoupling between the top and the bottom in the West that did not, in more moderate recent times, exist. Recently I spoke with an acquaintance of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and the conversation quickly turned, as conversations about Ms. Merkel now always do, to her decisions on immigration. Last summer when Europe was engulfed with increasing waves of migrants and refugees from Muslim countries, Ms. Merkel, moving unilaterally, announced...

This is about distance, and detachment, and a kind of historic decoupling between the top and the bottom in the West that did not, in more moderate recent times, exist. Recently I spoke with an acquaintance of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and the conversation quickly turned, as conversations about Ms. Merkel now always do, to her decisions on immigration. Last summer when Europe was engulfed with increasing waves of migrants and refugees from Muslim countries, Ms. Merkel, moving unilaterally, announced that Germany would take in an astounding 800,000. Naturally this was taken as an invitation, and more than a...

Mike Murphy — who ran Jeb’s Super PAC — says that “if it came down to just my vote and I had to decide, I’d probably vote for Hillary and then jump in a lake out of massive depression.” Appearing on With All Due Respect, Murphy added that he hopes Trump doesn’t win because he’s “a demagogue and a neo-racist.” Murphy gave Trump a 10% black-swan shot of winning. View the video here.

The Harvard Republican Club came out against Donald Trump this week, making this the first time in 128 years the college organization has refused to support the Republican presidential nominee. “Donald Trump holds views that are antithetical to our values not only as Republicans, but as Americans,” the club wrote on their Facebook page. “The rhetoric he espouses – from racist slander to misogynistic taunts – is not consistent with our conservative principles, and his repeated mocking of the disabled and belittling of the sacrifices made by prisoners of war, Gold Star families, and Purple Heart recipients is not only...