Free Republic

This month reveals how deeply we have descended into an anti-human kind of Dante's Hell.  From Newsweek, which told us a month ago that "We Are All Socialists Now," last week's cover story was: The Case for Pulling the Plug on Granny. , written by Evan Thomas, the grandson of famous socialist  Norman Thomas, a six-time Presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America. But now that we're all socialists, Evan Thomas can confess that he's just a Democrat. The fundamental delusion of Socialism is that there's a free lunch, plus free health care, free national defense (by decimating the...

In Kabul, the entrance to the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force—the coalition of NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan—is easy to miss. Ever since the Taliban blew up the main gate a month ago, visitors have been required to pass through a small metal door and down winding, dingy passageways topped with barbed wire. Inside the ISAF compound, grimy trailers, used to provide office space, are stacked up around a seedy, once grand building that was long ago a social club for officers of the British Empire. There was a bar, but a couple of weeks ago, Gen....

When Gerard Baker a year ago wrote in the Times of London that Barack Obama had "Ventured Forth to Bring Light to the World," it was widely acknowledged to be a clever satire, but this past week we have broken new ground in divinity politics. Forget the comparisons to our Slain Prince (John F. Kennedy), to our Good Father (Franklin D. Roosevelt), and even to Abraham Lincoln, the closest thing to a martyred saint that Americans have in our secular lexicon. These are mere mortals. According to those who should know--Chris Matthews of MSNBC, and Evan Thomas of the New...

[Evan Thomas:] "...he [Obama] has a very different job from Reagan was all about America and you [Chris Matthews] talked about it. Obama is 'we are above all that now.' We're not just parochial. We stand for something. I mean in a way, Obama's standing above the country, above the world, he's sort of God."

UNBELIEVABLE!

“In a way Obama is standing above the country, above the world. He’s sort of GOD. He’s going to bring all different sides together.” - Newsweek editor Evan Thomas

EVAN THOMAS: Well, we were the good guys in 1984, it felt that way. It hasn’t felt that way in recent years. So Obama’s had, really, a different task We’re seen too often as the bad guys. And he – he has a very different job from – Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is ‘we are above that now.’ We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial. We stand for something – I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of...

Newsweek editor Evan Thomas brought adulation over President Obama’s Cairo speech to a whole new level on Friday, declaring on MSNBC: "I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God." Thomas, appearing on Hardball with Chris Matthews, was reacting to a preceding monologue in which Matthews praised Obama’s speech: "I think the President's speech yesterday was the reason we Americans elected him. It was grand. It was positive. Hopeful...But what I liked about the President's speech in Cairo was that it showed a complete humility...The question now is whether the...

Newsweek editor Evan Thomas brought adulation over President Obama’s Cairo speech to a whole new level on Friday, declaring on MSNBC: "I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God." Thomas, appearing on Hardball with Chris Matthews, was reacting to a preceding monologue in which Matthews praised Obama’s speech: "I think the President's speech yesterday was the reason we Americans elected him. It was grand. It was positive. Hopeful...But what I liked about the President's speech in Cairo was that it showed a complete humility...The question now is whether the...

Newsweek editor Evan Thomas brought adulation over President Obama’s Cairo speech to a whole new level on Friday, declaring on MSNBC: "I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God."

He's deeply skeptical of the bank bailout and pessimistic about the economy. Why the establishment worries he may be right. He criticizes the Obamaites for trying to prop up a financial system that he regards as essentially a dead man walking. He portrays Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and other top officials as, in effect, tools of Wall Street (a ridiculous charge, say Geithner defenders). These men and women have "no venality," Krugman hastened to say. But they are suffering from "osmosis," from simply spending too much time around investment bankers and the like. The day Geithner announced the details of...

With help from a former UBS banker, the Feds are demystifying how the Swiss do business. Inside the tradecraft.___ Among the very rich, it's known as "the nut." That's the amount of money they need to salt away for a "rainy day"—for when the bubble bursts or the subpoenas arrive. It's enough money to keep paying for, say, the grandkids' private-school tuitions or the landscape gardener on Martha's Vineyard. ("Every Master of the Universe knows the number," wrote "The Bonfire of the Vanities" author Tom Wolfe.) Usually, the money is invested in something safe, such as T-bills. But sometimes it's...

We Are All Socialists Now In many ways our economy already resembles a European one. As boomers age and spending grows, we will become even more French.

I just read the cover of Newsweek. We are all Socialists now

Newsweek: Celebrating America as a New, Socialist France by Warner Todd Huston Sunday, February 8th 2009 Newsweek’s Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas are tired of all this talk of socialism. We need to stop talking about yesterday’s news, they say, and embrace the great new fact that America is already a socialist country. They chortle that America is just like France. Meacham and Thomas chide Sean Hannity for using socialism as a dirty word because it “seems strangely beside the point.” The pair is enthusiastic about our new American socialist society! We are a European country and we like it,...

In many ways our economy already resembles a European one. As boomers age and spending grows, we will become even more French. [snip] We remain a center-right nation in many ways—particularly culturally, and our instinct, once the crisis passes, will be to try to revert to a more free-market style of capitalism—but it was, again, under a conservative GOP administration that we enacted the largest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years: prescription drugs for the elderly. People on the right and the left want government to invest in alternative energies in order to break our addiction to foreign...

Published on NewsBusters.org (http://newsbusters.org) Evan Thomas: 'A Disgrace' If McCain Beats Obama with Ayers By Brent Baker Created 2008-10-11 15:08 Newsweek's Evan Thomas and NPR's Nina Totenberg, likely reflecting the attitude of many of their Washington press corps colleagues, declared Barack Obama's connection to unrepentant terrorist William Ayers as an out of bounds subject for the campaign. On Inside Washington [1], a weekly show produced and aired over the weekend by Washington, DC's ABC affiliate, but first broadcast Friday night on the local PBS station, Thomas, Editor at Large with Newsweek, charged: “If he loses the election because of...

Sarah Palin posed for a photo spread in Vogue, but that's about as far as the glamour goes. She piles her hair up in a librarian's bun and wears what she calls "schoolmarm" glasses (one blogger compared her to "Tina Fey's sexier sister"). She was at one time a beauty queen, Miss Wasilla 1984, in her hometown, population: 7,000 or so. "We were really surprised when she wanted to do it," her father, Chuck, told the Vogue reporter. "That wasn't her thing." Basketball and hunting were more like it. Palin regretted the whole beauty pageant experience. "They made us line...

The hundreds of drones cruising over Iraq and Afghanistan have changed war forever."The whole art of war consists of getting at what is on the other side of the hill," said the Duke of Wellington, conqueror of Napoleon at Waterloo. In the murky kind of fight that marks modern warfare against terrorists and guerrillas, knowing what's on the other side of the hill—or inside a building—takes on a whole new urgency and meaning. Lt. Col. Scott Williams, who leads a unit of Apache helicopters in Baghdad, is in the business of "servicing" targets, by which he means anything from blowing...

How do you know if Barack Obama is unhappy with what you're saying—or not saying? At meetings of his closest advisers, he likes to lean back, put his feet on the table and close his eyes. If he doesn't like how the conversation is going, he will lean forward, put his feet on the floor and "adjust his socks, kind of start tugging at them," says Michael Strautmanis, a counselor to the campaign. Obama wants people to talk, but he doesn't want to intimidate them. "If you haven't said anything, he'll call on you," says Strautmanis. "He's never said it,...

WILL: I was at the Truman library in Independence, Mo., last week, and was looking at a black-and-white photograph of Harry Truman giving a speech in a stadium in Los Angeles during the '48 campaign. Seated next to the lectern, right next to Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, is a man who had introduced Truman, and it was a 37-year-old Ronald Reagan. That was probably the last time he voted for a Democrat. And so Sean's right, he was the first Reagan Democrat, but what really made Reagan Democrats were Democratic policies. One of the worst things that ever happened...

Obama still has his fans in the MSM, or Hillary her detractors . . . Appearing on this afternoon's Hardball, the seemingly mild-mannered Evan Thomas of Newsweek took a surprisingly tough shot at Clinton, undermining the very premise of her now-famous "it's 3 AM" ad. Discussing Hillary's comeback, Evans offered his blunt assessment with no real prompting. EVAN THOMAS: What I don't get about his ad, the whole idea about 3 AM is you want coolness and detachment, right? She's not cool and detached. She's either really hot and angry, or she's icy cold and tough. But I don't think...

The Buckley dinner salons were held at Bill and Patricia's Park Avenue apartment, a ground-floor maisonette at 73rd Street in Manhattan. Literary sportsman George Plimpton might be there, chatting with statesman Henry Kissinger or novelist Dominick Dunne. At the same time, standing in the corner might be a lumpy, Trotskyite-turned-Catholic intellectual talking to a nervous Yale undergraduate. There were rarely politicians to be seen at the Buckleys' elegant home, but, standing by the Bösendorfer piano in the living room, guests often heard worldclass pianist Bruce Levingston playing the same Bach concerto he would be performing the next week at Carnegie...

The president has left his party in a precarious state. But the GOP candidates running in the wake of his wreckage can learn much from his failures. We are all stars in the movies that play in our minds: not true-life stories, exactly, but life as we imagine it could or should be. Little imperfections are conveniently forgotten or smoothed over, messy relationships downplayed or deep-sixed. The future beckons brightly, even if the past was dark or dreary. This need to believe in an idealized self is especially strong in politicians. They must get up every day and sell a...

Partisan warriors may love our polarized political culture. Everyone else is turned off, and tuning out. ___ There are, as they say, two Americas. There is the America of the rich and the America of the poor, as Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards likes to point out. There is the America of Red States and Blue States, populated, as columnist Dave Barry likes to joke, by "ignorant racist fascist knuckle-dragging NASCAR-obsessed cousin-marrying road-kill-eating tobacco-juice-dribbling gun-fondling religious fanatic rednecks" and "godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving leftwing Communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts." These divisions seem to grow, and to...

The Americans were getting close. It was early in the winter of 2004-05, and Osama bin Laden and his entourage were holed up in a mountain hideaway along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Suddenly, a sentry, posted several kilometers away, spotted a patrol of U.S. soldiers who seemed to be heading straight for bin Laden's redoubt. The sentry radioed an alert, and word quickly passed among the Qaeda leader's 40-odd bodyguards to prepare to remove "the Sheik," as bin Laden is known to his followers, to a fallback position. As Sheik Said, a senior Egyptian Qaeda operative, later told the story, the...

If anyone ever starts a museum of horrible explanations, the one-liner by Newsweek's Evan Thomas about his magazine's dubious reporting on the Duke non-rape case— "The narrative was right but the facts were wrong" —is destined to become a popular exhibit, right up there with "we had to destroy the village to save it." What Mr. Thomas seems to mean is that the newsroom view of the lacrosse players as privileged, sexist, and arrogant white male jocks was the correct angle on the story. It wasn't. According to Duke's female lacrosse team and other women on campus, the male players...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer leaked the identity of a CIA operative to Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus during a 2003 phone call, Pincus testified Monday as the first defense witness in the CIA leak trial. Pincus was one of the first reporters to learn the identity of Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and prominent Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson. Pincus said he learned her identity July 12, 2003 but did not immediately write about it. Plame was outed by syndicated columnist Robert Novak two days later. Pincus testified on behalf of Vice...

When the show's ["Inside Washington"] substitute host Kathleen Matthews (wife of Chris Matthews) asked what the bottom line of Plamegate, Evan Thomas declared: "Nothing! Nothing! This is a big zero of a story that most of the American public has ignored, Washington has been feverishly consumed by, and it means something for Scooter Libby, who may go to jail, so it has some personal consequences, but in the great sum of American body politic, it means nothing."

With the hard right hoping for reversal, the black-and-white war over abortion finds itself immersed in shades of gray.March 6, 2006 issue - At first glance, it appeared that the forces of the pro-life movement were on the march last week. The question of abortion is much more ambiguous than the louder voices on either side of the pro-life/pro-choice divide are willing to admit. The hard-line anti-abortion crusaders may be disappointed by the legal realities, at least in the short term. At the same time, the pro-abortion-rights interest groups are just beginning to grapple with an uncomfortable truth: that many...

If, as he ponders the Threat Matrix at his daily intelligence briefing, Cheney really sees himself as a modern Achilles or Hector on the plains at Troy, he is not just being grandiose. Cheney is often lauded as that rare No. 2 who, having no political ambition for himself, can give his all to the president. But Cheney's aloofness from the ebb and flow of politics and public opinion has apparently dulled his senses in a way that is not helpful to his boss, who has been busy lately defending his administration from criticism that it was badly out of...

They were loyal conservatives, and Bush appointees. They fought a quiet battle to rein in the president's power in the war on terror. And they paid a price for it. A NEWSWEEK investigation. Feb. 6, 2006 issue - James Comey, a lanky, 6-foot-8 former prosecutor who looks a little like Jimmy Stewart, resigned as deputy attorney general in the summer of 2005. The press and public hardly noticed. Comey's farewell speech, delivered in the Great Hall of the Justice Department, contained all the predictable, if heartfelt, appreciations. But mixed in among the platitudes was an unusual passage. Comey thanked "people...

Feb. 6, 2006 issue - James Comey, a lanky, 6-foot-8 former prosecutor who looks a little like Jimmy Stewart, resigned as deputy attorney general in the summer of 2005. The press and public hardly noticed. Comey's farewell speech, delivered in the Great Hall of the Justice Department, contained all the predictable, if heartfelt, appreciations. But mixed in among the platitudes was an unusual passage. Comey thanked "people who came to my office, or my home, or called my cell phone late at night, to quietly tell me when I was about to make a mistake; they were the people committed...

Jan. 9, 2006 issue - The talk at the White House in the days and weeks after 9/11 was all about suitcase nukes and germ warfare and surprise decapitation strikes. Every morning, as they crossed West Executive Drive on their way to work in the West Wing, Bush administration staffers recall seeing a plain white truck with a galvanized metal chimney. Sensors sniffing for pathogens or radioactivity, they guessed, though they couldn't be sure. Like just about everything else at that spooky time, the purpose of the truck was a secret.

It's time for the 18th annual Media Research Center's awards for the most biased, manipulative or downright goofy quotes from liberals in the "mainstream" media. I'm honored to serve, once again, on MRC's distinguished panel of conservatively biased judges. Here are some of the highlights from among the winners and runners-up of Best Notable Quotables of 2005:

Jan. 9, 2006 issue - The talk at the White House in the days and weeks after 9/11 was all about suitcase nukes and germ warfare and surprise decapitation strikes. Every morning, as they crossed West Executive Drive on their way to work in the West Wing, Bush administration staffers recall seeing a plain white truck with a galvanized metal chimney. Sensors sniffing for pathogens or radioactivity, they guessed, though they couldn't be sure. Like just about everything else at that spooky time, the purpose of the truck was a secret. Such chilling sights are not likely to inspire thoughtful...

Newsweek: Bush Most 'Isolated' President George W. Bush may be the most isolated president in modern history, at least since the late-stage Richard Nixon, write Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas and Senior White House Correspondent Richard Wolffe in the December 19 issue of Newsweek. Lately, there are some signs that the White House is trying to dispel the image of the Bush Bubble (or Bunker), although Congressman Jack Murtha may disagree. When Murtha tried to write George W. Bush with some suggestions for fighting the Iraq war, as he had done for the president's father, the congressman's letter was ignored...

Sept. 19, 2005 issue - It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington....

The grieving room was arranged like a doctor's office. The families and loved ones of 33 soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan were summoned to a large waiting area at Fort Bragg, N.C. For three hours, they were rotated through five private rooms, where they met with President George W. Bush, accompanied by two Secret Service men and a photographer. Because the walls were thin, the families awaiting their turn could hear the crying inside. President Bush was wearing "a huge smile," but his eyes were red and he looked drained by the time he got to the last widow,...

Aug. 22, 2005 issue - The grieving room was arranged like a doctor's office. The families and loved ones of 33 soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan were summoned to a large waiting area at Fort Bragg, N.C. For three hours, they were rotated through five private rooms, where they met with President George W. Bush, accompanied by two Secret Service men and a photographer. Because the walls were thin, the families awaiting their turn could hear the crying inside. President Bush was wearing "a huge smile," but his eyes were red and he looked drained by the time he...

The International Committee of the Red Cross announced that it had provided the Pentagon with confidential reports about U.S. personnel disrespecting or mishandling Qur'ans at Gitmo in 2002 and 2003. VanNatta recounted that in 2002, the inmates suddenly started yelling that the guards had thrown a Qur'an on or near an Asian-style squat toilet. The guards found an inmate who admitted that he had dropped his Qur'an near his toilet. According to VanNatta, the inmate then was taken cell to cell to explain this to other detainees to quell the unrest. But the incident could partly account for the multiple...

May 23 issue - By the end of the week, the rioting had spread from Afghanistan throughout much of the Muslim world, from Gaza to Indonesia. Mobs shouting "Protect our Holy Book!" burned down government buildings and ransacked the offices of relief organizations in several Afghan provinces. The violence cost at least 15 lives, injured scores of people and sent a shudder through Washington, where officials worried about the stability of moderate regimes in the region. advertisement The spark was apparently lit at a press conference held on Friday, May 6, by Imran Khan, a Pakistani cricket legend and strident...

Evan Thomas of Newsweek was one of the few journalists who admitted that the mainstream media wanted John Kerry to win. He said media bias was worth as many as 20 million votes for Kerry. But that doesn't mean that Newsweek is free of liberal bias. We picked up a copy of the January 10 issue and were astounded by the examples of bias contained therein. Page 5 featured a "Conventional Wisdom" segment that criticized the President for vacationing and then "taking three days" to address the Tsunami disaster. That's a lie. The President addressed the problem on the day...

Lame Ducks and New Canucks When I was young, some thousands of my countrymen fled to Canada in order to avoid fighting the evils of communism in a distant land. More than thirty years later, some thousands of liberals are planning to ascend to the Great White North to avoid fighting the evils of conservatism in their own back yard. Although I’m not sure that flight is the proper response to the recent election results, I wish them a swift transition to a land more amenable to their sensitive, pacifistic dispositions and one that will accommodate their rampant Francophilia. Some...

...There is no doubt that John Kerry showed great skill at embracing deeply contradictory positions, but that does not make him unusual; all politicians have mastered the art of self-contradiction. What was remarkable in this election is that one candidate, President Bush, never changed: He said what he meant and meant what he said. If the Democrats could not appeal to the moral values of people, that fact must have been lost on the 48% of the voters who supported Sen. Kerry.... I am just as mystified by Mr. Friedman's lament that "Christian fundamentalists" are ruining his America by fostering...

See comments and synthesis below, which is NOT a copy-paste of the series of articles, but an outline to them with links.

"Nov. 15 issue - In the winter of 2003-04, Jenna Bush, one of president Bush's 22-year-old twin daughters, dreamed that her father lost the election. Jenna had never before shown any interest in politics or much desire to get involved in her father's campaigns. But now she, along with her sister, Barbara, volunteered to help their father get re-elected. The president was overjoyed to have the girls on the campaign bus, recalled his wife, Laura. His mood lightened, to the relief of his handlers, who had been anxiously discussing their candidate's surliness and impatience." and "Nov. 15 issue - John...

MATTHEWS: Well, Evan, if that‘s the case, if voters are going into the booth next Tuesday or have already voted for the president and the vice president based upon their belief that there was a strong functioning relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in terms of obviously 9/11, [...Saddam was supporting, funding, and harboring terrorists -- that makes him a terrorist (see Bush doctrine)...] and that there‘s a clear-cut case that there was WMD in that country at the time we went in, [...no one can tell what Saddam did with explosives at Al Qaa Qaa, what else did...

October 10, 2004 -- Mainstream media bias against Republican presidental candi dates is a fact of American po litical life. Rarely, though, has this been so evident as this year; the establishment media seems to have become a wing of John Kerry's campaign. One unusually candid member of the liberal media mafia admitted as much during the Democratic convention. Evan Thomas, assistant managing editor of Newsweek, offered this confession on media bias on the PBS program "Inside Washington." "The media, I think, wants Kerry to win. And I think they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards — I'm talking about...

...The election coverage from Big Media has been unusually partisan this time around. As Newsweek's Evan Thomas famously remarked: "Let's talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win... that's going to be worth maybe 15 points." ...Mr. Kerry, as even many Dems are admitting, is a weak candidate. But the big media advantage doesn't seem to have turned out to be as big as some thought. ...In a Boston Herald ...Mr. Kerry wrote: "On more than one occasion, I, like Martin Sheen in 'Apocalypse Now,' took my patrol boat into Cambodia...." But the story...