Free Republic

Democrats can defeat the Trump base. But only if they ditch Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi — and rally female voters What the angry white male writing this column wants to know is who will hit back for the Democrats? My polling cohort, older white men, took a public-relations beating during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings — and I say it’s about time. Never in modern political history have so many been given so much by our culture and yet have been so casual about the health of the Republic.

ARLEY, Ala. — I recently drove the back roads from Birmingham for over two hours before I finally found a sign for Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for the United States Senate, outside the Arley Coffee Shop. A retired coal miner who frequents what the cashier called the “liars’ table” put it to me in the familiar Winston County way. “The women,” he said of Mr. Moore’s accusers, were lying to make him look like a sexual predator. “Groping,” he added, “used to be all right anyway.” The Free State of Winston is Alabama’s most distinctive political culture, and now...

We are told by careful pollsters that half of the American people believe that American troops should be brought home from Iraq immediately. This news discourages supporters of our efforts there. Not me, though: I am relieved. Given press coverage of our efforts in Iraq, I am surprised that 90 percent of the public do not want us out right now. Between January 1 and September 30, 2005, nearly 1,400 stories appeared on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news. More than half focused on the costs and problems of the war, four times as many as those that discussed...

Media: In changing times the old guard can either adapt or they can react bitterly. As the old world of elite journalists crumbles, the latter kind of outburst is predictable. But some outbursts are astonishingly clueless. Take Howell Raines. No journalist was more elite — or more locked into a rigid world view that is also crumbling. In 2003 Raines left his post as executive editor of the New York Times in disgrace. Raines retains admirers in the old world. Before his elevation to the newspaper's top position, he led its editorial page. Some still lionize him for bringing a...

Former NYT editor Howell Raines accuses Fox News of sabotaging Obamacare and waging Jihad on Obama's administration in a new op-ed slated to appear in the Washington Post this Sunday. Raines is the disgraced, former editor of the NYT who ran the yellow journalism rag for a very short time, from 2001 until 2003, when the laughable scandal of the affirmative-action plagiarist, Jayson Blair, forced him to resign. Ironically, Raines' accusations against Fox News make no sense because as anyone who watches Fox News will tell you, the channel boasts its fair share of liberal and Democrat commentators—Alan Colmes, Bob...

Former executive editor of the New York Times Howell Raines, in a Washington Post piece criticizing the objectivity of Fox News, apparently draws some of his arguments straight out of the Twilight Zone. Raines writes: (emphasis added) **************** "One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration...

One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration -- a campaign without precedent in our modern political history? Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and...

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Howell Raines might have viewed his meteoric fall from journalistic grace as a dead end, but he instead saw a new opportunity. The former New York Times executive editor, who resigned after the Jayson Blair scandal, talked about his new memoir at the Aspen Institute on Thursday. "The One That Got Away: A Memoir" is a tale of fishing, but an allegory for life. Raines strayed from the book to lament the direction journalism is headed in - a path he feels is too strongly dictated by consumerism. He also discussed what it means to be a writer and journalist,...

The always modest, always charming Howell Raines, executive editor of the New York Times, has a new autobiography out, “The One that Got Away,” a sequel to his 1993 memoir “Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis.” Dipping into his latest book on his love of fly fishing, we find Raines still rising to the conservative-bashing bait. On page 189, he lets fly with thoughts about liberal bugbear Fox News: “Fox, by its mere existence, undercuts the argument that the public is starved for ‘fair’ news, and not just because Fox shills for the Republican Party and panders to the latest...

Ex-New York Times Editor Writes On Getting Fired In Memoir POSTED: 7:21 pm EDT April 13, 2006 UPDATED: 7:49 pm EDT April 13, 2006 NEW YORK -- Howell Raines, the former executive editor of The New York Times, warns at the beginning of his new memoir that the book is about sport fishing and the "unpredictability of luck," not the episode that led to his firing: the Jayson Blair scandal. Blair was the young Times reporter revealed in 2003 to have fabricated or plagiarized parts of several articles. Raines lost his job over the incident, in part because the paper...

NEW YORK The long-awaited memoir by Howell Raines, the former New York Times executive editor, will be published on May 9, according to an e-mail to E&P today by its publisher, Scribner's. It is called "The One That Got Away," which may be taken as a reference to Raines exiting the Times after the Jayson Blair scandal, but which actually (or also) concerns fishing. The cover, in fact, shows Raines in the water holding a whopper. His previous memoir was "Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis." Scribner's said review copies would be arriving in early April. It describes the book's...

I was just wondering if any Freepers knew anything about Howell Raines son Ben? Are they cut from the same cloth journalistically speaking? Any info appreciated

The Bush generations have enriched themselves while impoverishing the presidency.AT THIS point, the policy legacy of George Bush seems pretty well defined by three disparate disasters: Iraq in foreign affairs, Katrina in social welfare, corporate influence over tax, budget and regulatory decisions. As a short-term political consequence, we may avoid another dim-witted Bush in the White House. But what the Bush dynasty has done to presidential campaign science — the protocols by which Americans elect presidents in the modern era — amounts to a political legacy that can haunt the Republic for years to come. We are now enduring the...

Richard Nixon once gave me a lesson in the politics of war. Howell Raines, then the Washington bureau chief for The Times, took some reporters to meet Mr. Nixon right before the 1992 New Hampshire primary. The deposed president had requested that Howell bring along only reporters who were too young to have covered Watergate, so we tried to express an excess of Juvenalia spirit. Before the first vote of '92 was cast, Mr. Nixon laid out, state by state, how Bill Clinton, who was not even a sure bet for the Democratic nomination at that point, was going to...

-SNIP-What is presidential intelligence and how much does it really matter? We can all recite the lists of ostentatiously brilliant presidents who faltered (Wilson, Hoover, etc.) and apparent plodders who triumphed (Truman). When I was covering the Reagan White House in 1981, all his top aides were wholesaling Oliver Wendell Holmes's famous comment about Franklin Roosevelt's possessing "a second-rate intellect, but a first-rate temperament." In the end, Reagan confounded scholars, journalists and voters alike. In an obituary essay, his biographer Edmund Morris referred first to Reagan's "intelligence" and later to his "ignorance." To be fair, innate intelligence has to do...

I've been doing this for a long time now. By "this" I of course mean eating while I type. But I also mean this Internet thing. This column in fact pre-dates NRO itself and NRO is now considered one of those ancient landmarks of the Internet, like some old city that has been razed and rebuilt so many times nobody remembers why certain streets have the names they do. I remember when the first blogs started to appear and I was not particularly bullish on their chances for success. Of course, I was wrong about a great deal and right...

STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES(the self-anointed 'intelligentsia' and 'intelligence' are mutually exclusive constructs) by Mia T, 11.05.04 'I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot.'" John KerryNEWSWEEK ELECTION ISSUE: 'How He Did It' "Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a higher IQ than Bush? I'm sure the candidates' SATs and college transcripts would put Kerry far ahead." Howell Raines - Former Executive Editor of the New York Times "The 'Dumb' Factor"Washington Post, August 27, 2004 "Stupid is as stupid does." Forrest Gump LOWER IQ = SMARTER WAR?(AND WHY DOESN'T KERRY SIGN FORM 180, ANYWAY?) POURQUOI JOHN KERRY EST...

POCONO SUMMIT, Pa. -- It was here in the parking lot of Cramer's Home Center, less than seven miles from a NASCAR track, in a pivotal battleground state, on the back of a battered work van, that we saw the first one. "Somewhere in Texas," the bumper sticker said, "A Village Is Missing Its Idiot." The next showed up at the Home Depot on the back of an equally battered pickup driven by a tough-looking kid dressed for construction work. It said: "Bush," and then, "Like a Rock Only Dumber."

ELECTION 2004 Kerry likened to 'Lurch' by ex-N.Y. Times editor Howell Raines says 'pompous' John has 'Addams Family' face, no clear message -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: June 2, 2004 2:55 p.m. Eastern © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com John Kerry, left, likened to TV's Lurch While talk-show hosts across America have for some time likened presidential candidate John Kerry to television's comedic monsters Herman Munster of "The Munsters" and Lurch from the "Addams Family," the comparison is now being drawn by Howell Raines, the former editor of the New York Times. In a commentary published in today's Guardian newspaper in Britain, Raines writes: "The TV...