Free Republic

In the spring of 1990, after he had helped the first George Bush reach the presidency, the political consultant Lee Atwater learned that he was dying. Atwater, who had just turned 39 and was the head of the Republican National Committee, had suffered a seizure while at a political fund-raising breakfast and had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. In a year he was dead. Atwater put some of that year to use making amends. Throughout his meteoric political rise he had been known for both his effectiveness and his brutality. In South Carolina, where he grew up, he...

Lee Atwater, the famous Republican political strategist of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s and a musician led Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush to victory 1980, 1984, and 1988. I remember a couple of weeks ago, here on FR, one of you said if Atwater was still alive there would have been no Clintons or Obamas. They would have been eaten alive by Atwater's research and that Bush II would have won in bigger margins in '00 and '04. Would Atwater be on the Trump train? Would he have destroyed the Left today (Resistance, Maxine, etc.)?

By Roger Stone The continued attacks on Sarah Palin by campaign Aides to Senator John McCain are almost beyond belief. Continued attacks on Palin, and on her performance as the Vice Presidential candidate by McCain Aide Steve Schmidt, are particularly ridiculous given Schmidt's track record of incompetence and missteps by the senior McCain aide during the Presidential campaign. Schmidt is, after all, part of the gang that had McCain suspend his presidential campaign and rush back to Washington to take the exact same position as Barack Obama on the first Federal bailout bill which in the end, only bailed out...

Another young product of Columbia J-school, another typical MSMer . . . Appearing on MSNBC's Daily Rundown today, NBC reporter Domenico Montanaro spoke of "the egregious Lee Atwater." What made the insult particularly . . . notorious is that it was entirely gratuitous, utterly unrelated to the subject at hand. Montanaro was reporting on the fact that Reince Priebus is the youngest RNC Chairman since Atwater. Montanaro first refers simply to "Lee Atwater," but then pauses and rephrases as "the notorious Lee Atwater." So Montanaro went out of his way to swipe at the late Atwater, who at the end...

As heard on Glenn Becks show today this is video of Anita Dunn discussing the tactics to be used in controlling the media and press. For Example: She talks about how they would use David Pluths videos to bypass having to talk to reporters. "We'd put those out and make them write what Pluth had said as opposed to Pluth doing an interview.." Here is the video Here is the video of Anita Dunn.

The war of words between the White House and Fox News is intensifying — and getting personal. * * * * * * In an e-mail message, Ms. Dunn said, “My source for the Mao quote was actually the late Lee Atwater, either in an article or bio I read after the 1988 election. Now that I’ve revealed this I hope I don’t get Keith Olbermann angry with me. Let it be noted that I also quoted Mother Teresa, but no one is accusing me of being a saint!”

It’s not exactly a bloody horse head left in the bed overnight, but Fox News has sent a message it’s ready to play hardball with the White House Communications Director who says she’s going to treat Fox News “the way we treat an opponent” and not like an ordinary cable network. (See Toby Harnden’s post, “Barack Obama’s Silly Obsession with Fox News“.) Anita Dunn went on one of the Sunday talk shows last weekend to fulminate about Fox, calling it “a wing of the Republican Party” and “not a news organization in the sense that CNN is a news organization.”...

White House communications director Anita Dunn fired back at criticism from TV commentator Glenn Beck on Friday, saying that a Mao Tse-tung quote Beck took issue with was picked up from legendary GOP strategist Lee Atwater. "The Mao quote is one I picked up from the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater from something I read in the late 1980s, so I hope I don't get my progressive friends mad at me," Dunn told CNN.

Making its debut at the Los Angeles Film Festival this week, “Boogie Man” tells the life story of Lee Atwater, the late, legendary GOP operative who changed the course of modern political campaigning by emphasizing attack ads, wedge issues and, occasionally, outright chicanery. You won’t find the documentary at the local multiplex, and you might even have to sniff around to find it a month or two from now — it’s been sold overseas, but at press time, a domestic distributor had not emerged for the low-budget indie. George H.W. Bush once said that Atwater — a music fan whose...

Shortly before a Republican presidential primary debate in Columbia, South Carolina, this last May, several conservative activists in the state received mysterious envelopes in the mail. The letters arrived anonymously, each one containing an eight-page document, a typewritten manifesto with a pseudo-academic title: "Mormons in Contemporary American Society: A Politically Dangerous Religion?" The letters depicted Mormonism as based on "hoaxes" and ridiculed the church's founder, Joseph Smith, as a "gold digger turned prophet." The mailing also provocatively dubbed Smith "the Mohammed of the West." "Like the prophet of Islam," it said, "Smith founded his religion upon prophecies and revelations which...

I had expected this year’s 34th annual Conservative Political Action Conference to be a low-attendance dud. The conventional wisdom was that conservatives were a spent, divided force in American politics. Well, they are divided, to be sure. But, judging from CPAC, they aren’t finished with us. I’ve been to many CPACs over the years, and this was the most heavily attended and, more significant, the most youthful, and amped-up since Ronald Reagan’s day. To understand why, I’d like to introduce you to the conservative—pro-life, anti-tax, pro-Mexican-fence, pro-“surge”—“director of campus activism” for the Georgia College Republicans. This Georgia Tech business major...

[SNIP] Can Wadhams take Allen from a little-known senator to a spot on the national ticket? It's a gamble, for sure: Even some Republicans snicker at Allen's tendency to turn every thought into a football metaphor (primaries are "intersquad scrimmages"; Senate recess is "halftime"). Questions about whether Allen is smart enough to be president are sure to dog a potential bid. And Wadhams has never run a national campaign before—or for that matter, a campaign outside a red state. The Republican presidential primary will be crowded, which means that his reflexive go-negative strategy could be risky: Voters who are turned...

Cannabis poses a greater threat to health than tobacco, lung experts have warned. The warning comes on the day that Home Secretary David Blunkett is due to make a Commons statement about the future of government drug policy. Many young people are simply not aware that smoking cannabis may put them at increased risk of respiratory cancers and infections . Dame Helena Shovelton: The Home Affairs Select Committee has recommended that cannabis is downgraded from a class B drug to class C. This would mean that possession would lead to a caution, rather than arrest. The British Lung Foundation is...