Free Republic

“[Donald] Trump’s second-place finish to Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) in Tuesday’s Wisconsin Republican primary may represent no ordinary setback,” write the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty, Jose A. DelReal and Robert Costa. “It appears to be a pivot point—although it has yet to be seen whether the trajectory from here points downward or upward.” ~snip~ The last time he faced the prospect of venturing into hostile territory—when his rally in Chicago was overrun by left-wing disruptors—he ended up bugging out. If he fails to secure a majority of delegates, perhaps rather than endure defeat in Cleveland he will find a way...

BILOXI, MS – On a chilly January evening, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump addressed an overflowing crowd at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum – at a rally billed as the largest presidential campaign event in Mississippi history. Trump’s wide-ranging speech touched on topics from “Trojan horse” Syrian refugees and trade deals to Common Core, the Iran nuclear deal, illegal immigration and ISIS. He told the audience that although he has not spent the most money of the GOP candidates he will begin to spend more in order to avoid taking “any chances.” Trump, however, argued his campaign should be a model...

You must concede this about Donald Trump: He does keep his enemies and opponents rocking back on their heels. He does it, as the Wall street Journal's sage James Taranto, observes, by following the very Saul Alinsky tactics that so impressed Hillary as a Wellesley undergrad. This week he made clear that if Hillary was going to charge him with being part of the "war on women" (the successor, I take it, to her historic "vast right wing conspiracy"), he was going to attack her as an enabler and defender of a serial sexual predator -- her husband. Now, he...

One of James Taranto's tongue-in-cheek tropes at his Best of the Web Today column is "We Blame George Bush." In a recent example, "We Blame George W. Bush" was placed over a headline reading: “Slipping Into a Food Coma? Blame Your Gut Microbes.” As Wikipedia describes it, the trope "is a play on the perceived tendency for many of his detractors to lay the blame for pretty much anything" on Bush. And lo and behold, from today's Morning Joe comes a real-life example of the phenomenon. Mika Brzezinski blamed Donald Trump's proposal to ban all Muslims from the US, on...

An eerie silence descended on American journalism's attic Saturday morning. Elsewhere the house was loud with cries of mourning for 92-year-old Helen Thomas and of celebration for her life. This columnist was anything but an admirer of Thomas, and normally we'd give the subject a rest out of respect for the recently departed. But the over-the-top encomiums demand a critical examination because they exemplify a moral and intellectual rot within the journalistic profession

On Monday, Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto expanded on themes he recently wrote about relating to Florida’s thin case against George Zimmerman, the man accused of murdering Trayvon Martin in 2012. Taranto told WSJ’s Mary Kessel that the prosecution of Zimmerman, in the words of one Slate columnist, was supposed to serve as a “referendum” on racial privilege in America. “There’s a word for a trial that is held as a referendum – it’s a show trial,” Taranto said. “We don’t do show trials in this country.” “Why has the press been so convinced from the very beginning that...

Mary Kissel and James Taranto discuss the current scandals facing the White House and put them into recent historical perspective

“Liberal media bias is an old complaint,” the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto noted in his “Best of the Web Today” column this past Monday on responses to the Obama scandals, before warning: “The Obama presidency has given it a new and dangerous form. Never has the prevailing bias of the media been so closely aligned with the ideological aims and political interests of the party in power.”He recognized “the American media remain free and independent, or you would not be reading this column,” but zinged, “to a large extent they have functioned for the past few years as if...

"The Democrats have lost on sequestration," Journolist founder Ezra Klein declares ..... (snip) Reader Harriet Hart is on to something with this observation: So far I haven't seen any commentary on the correlation between Mr. Obama's training as a community organizer and the sequester fiasco. Community organizers' main efforts are to stir up public sentiment to achieve special goals without implementing any solutions. Solutions are the province of someone else. The present administration has used this tactic endlessly, most noticeably with the White House tour shutdown during spring break and now flight-controller furloughs. This is definitely not an effort to...

FORGIVE THE MIXED METAPHOR, but did the mainstream media jump the shark this summer? The expression “jump the shark” comes from the long-running 1970s sitcom Happy Days. In the 1977 fifth-season premiere, Fonzie (Henry Winkler) dons water skis, swim trunks, and his trademark leather jacket and launches over a trapped shark. The episode marked the point at which the show’s writers ran out of ideas and began substituting extravagant gimmicks in place of the solid plots that had made it a success in the first place. “Jumping the shark” has since become a metaphor for the beginning of such a...

The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto on Thursday offered a plausible explanation for why President Barack Obama, during Tuesday night’s debate, felt confident he could count on moderator Candy Crowley of CNN to back him up on how he had uttered the phrase “acts of terror” the day after the Benghazi attack. On her CNN State of the Union show back on September 30, Crowley interviewed David Axelrod and during that segment she was as incredulous as Mitt Romney was at the debate that Obama had initially referred to “acts of terror” in any relationship to Benghazi. In “Was Candy...

If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, you might say that James Taranto became solidly conservative when his free speech was mugged by liberals. Taranto is the author of the inimitable Best of the Web Today column at the online edition of the Wall Street Journal. In a wide-ranging interview with NewsBusters at the RNC yesterday, Taranto—asked how he became a conservative—described his experience as a college student-newspaper editor. He had written a column defending the free speech rights of a college journalist at another university who had been suspended for published a politically-incorrect cartoon regarding affirmative...

James Taranto could be the best columnist around. Every day at his Best of the Web at the Wall Street Journal online, Taranto turns out an original, often unconventional, conservative take on the news, managing to leaven it with humor. Rush today rightly extolled Taranto's column of yesterday, in which he made the point that there is a vast, inherent difference between private and public sector unions. In the former case, unions are negotiating against corporate interests. In the latter, unions are, by definition, organizing against the interests of the public itself. Surely even Cenk Uygur understands this. So when...

James Taranto profiles Sean Bielat, the congressional candidate in Massachusetts who is seeking to defeat Barney Frank in November's election: A native of Rochester, N.Y., Mr. Bielat caught the "political bug" as a teenager, when he did a stint as a House page. After earning a master's in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, he went to work as a consultant at McKinsey & Co. and an executive for iRobot Corp., a defense contractor based in Bedford, Mass. He's also a new father; his wife gave birth to their son, Theodore, over the summer... Can he win? In...

WASHINGTON -- The exposure of Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal as a hoaxster boasting of a nonexistent record of service in the Vietnam War is a splendid example of what is known as the Taranto Principle. Someday the Taranto Principle will be taught in all the journalism schools, assuming one or two survive the present detumescence of journalism. Formulated by the inimitable Wall Street Journal editorialist James Taranto, the principle posits that when the liberal mainstream press indulges a liberal politician's deceits or fails to hold the politician accountable for his misbehavior, it encourages the politician to ascend to a...

In Friday’s edition of “Best of the Web Today,” James Taranto writes this analysis of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan giving Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres a tongue-lashing during a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos: “One obvious point is that Turkey is hardly in a position to criticize Israel for responding firmly to terrorist attacks” (referring to repeated Turkish air and ground incursions into northern Iraq to go after the Kurdish Workers' Party), and “[a] less obvious point is that Erdogan might have killed whatever chance his country had of becoming a member of the...

One of the greatest rewards of being a journalist is that every now and then, you get to tell the world about an act of heroism that might otherwise go unheralded--the story of an ordinary person who, confronted with an injustice, takes a stand and helps, in his own small way, to make the world a better place.

...But Obama did not decide only that "community organizing" was not for him. Judis reports the future senator took part in a September 1989 symposium in which he "rejected the guiding principles of community organizing: the elevation of self-interest over moral vision; the disdain for charismatic leaders and their movements; and the suspicion of politics itself." Later, Obama "would begin to construct a political identity for himself that was not simply different from his identity as a community organizer--but was, in fact, its very opposite."...

Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman weighs in with an argument to DO SOMETHING!!!! about global warming: It's true that scientists don't know exactly how much world temperatures will rise... While there's a chance that we'll act against global warming only to find that the danger was overstated, there's also a chance that ...the results of inaction were catastrophic. Which risk would you rather run? It wasn't so long ago that global warmists were ...likening skeptics to Holocaust deniers. Now they are reduced to saying we really don't know if global warmism is true ...but since the consequences are so dire...

In the ABC News blog, "The Blotter," Brian Ross reports that the list of luminaries who say that they were the subjects of fake interviews written by former ABC News consultant Alexis Debat, 35, and published in Politique Internationale is growing exponentially.In addition to Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) who said an article published in the June issue French foreign affairs journal was a fabrication, the list of faked interviews now includes: Former President Bill Clinton, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Microsoft founder...