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Former Alaska governor and Going Rogue author Sarah Palin talked to NRO this afternoon in a wide-ranging and frank interview. She thinks President Obama’s bow to the emperor of Japan reflects an attitude that America should be “subservient to other countries”; characterizes Newt Gingrich’s thinking on NY-23 as reflective of a “political machine”; thinks that South Carolina voters should consider sending Sen. Lindsey Graham a message by supporting a conservative primary challenger; calls the media’s treatment of Carrie Prejean “unfair”; and says she would give John McCain “the benefit of the doubt” in their dispute over whether she was charged...

November 17, 2009 Sarah Palin’s Roguish Charm Going Rogue Is Now Palin’s Operating Principle. Rich Lowry The Associated Press unleashed eleven fact checkers on her new book, Going Rogue, for a thoroughly tendentious critical examination. Newsweek, the influential liberal magazine of opinion, published a cover piece damning her to the outer darkness, balanced by another piece damning her to the further-outer darkness. The conservative-leaning New York Times columnist David Brooks called her “a joke.” It’s September 2008 all over again. All the same players are lining up to put a good hate on Sarah Palin. She’s like an isotope designed...

Listening to the debate on the floor today, it was clear that Democrats considered it a moral and ideological obligation to pass this bill—consequences be damned. The leadership is congratulating itself now—Pelosi is already the greatest speaker of all time apparently—but there's a tough rough ahead in the Senate. Pelosi could lose 39 votes. Reid can't lose any. Passage in the House definitely creates more pressure on Reid to get it done, but the slender margin—despite the size of the Democratic majority in the House and all the arm-twisting and deal-making (what did Cao get?)—has to make Senate moderates even...

The Republican Party has no national leaders. Its stand ing with voters is at an all- time low. It battens itself on an ideological purity that turns off the center and can't appeal to an increasingly suburban and diverse electorate. If it is not fated to go the way of the Federalists or the Whigs, it is certainly a spent force. This is the rote obituary for the GOP that the left can't resist. It is all the more alluring for its elements of truth: A party that holds neither the presidency, the House nor the Senate won't be stacked...

The Republican party has no national leaders. Its standing with voters is at an all-time low. It battens itself on an ideological purity that turns off the center and can’t appeal to an increasingly suburban and diverse electorate. If it is not fated to go the way of the Federalists or the Whigs, it is certainly a spent force. This is the rote obituary for the GOP that the Left can’t resist. It is all the more alluring for its elements of truth. A party that holds neither the presidency, the House, nor the Senate won’t be stacked with national...

October 20, 2009 Obama the Graceless Bush Will Be ObamaÂ’s Eternal Foil Rich Lowry. Republicans neednÂ’t trouble themselves to nominate a presidential candidate in 2012. No matter what, Pres. Barack Obama will be running against George W. Bush. Bush will be ObamaÂ’s eternal foil. At this rate, when Obama writes his post-presidential memoir, it will be titled: An Audacious Presidency, or How I Saved America from That Bastard Bush. His presidential library will have a special fright-house wing devoted to BushÂ’s misrule. He will mutter in his senescence about 43, like the Ancient Mariner about his albatross. Obama clearly wants...

October 2, 2009 Polanksi and Hollywood’s Perverse Moralism These are the kinds of people who consider Woody Allen a character witness. Rich Lowry. Rosemary’s Baby (“outdoes Hitchcock” — Roger Ebert), Chinatown (“outstanding” — Variety), and The Pianist (“definitive” — the New York Times) are fine films. They have been rightly honored and praised. The question is whether their excellence justifies criminal acts. The controversy over director Roman Polanski’s arrest in Switzerland on his way to a film festival exposes a stark front in the culture war. The divide is not necessarily between Right and Left, but between an artistic elite...

This Washington Post story captures the stark divide over Afghanistan, with a unified military command on the one side — including McChrystal, Mullen, and Petraeus — and a president who is not sure he wants to follow through on "the counterinsurgency strategy he set in motion six months ago" on the other. There's this anonymous quote from one observer: "He can send more troops and it will be a disaster and he will destroy the Democratic party. Or he can send no more troops and it will be a disaster and the Republicans will say he lost the war." Isn't...

September 15, 2009 The E. F. Hutton of Prostitution When ACORN talks, pimps and hookers listen. Rich Lowry The radical activist group ACORN is the E. F. Hutton of prostitution. It stands ready to provide discreet advice on setting up a brothel and engaging in other, associated acts of criminality. When ACORN talks, pimps and hookers listen. This has been established by an audacious video sting operation undertaken by guerrilla conservative documentarian James O’Keefe, 25, and his sidekick Hannah Giles, 20. O’Keefe posed as a pimp and Giles as a prostitute seeking help getting a mortgage for a brothel. In...

Everyone marvels at Barack Obama's rhetorical prowess. But don't be overly bedazzled. With these 13 easy steps, you, too, can give a Barack Obama speech. 1) Create a false center. In his speech to a joint session of Congress, Obama positioned himself between the Left's calling for a single-payer system and the Right's agitating to end employer-based health insurance. Presto - he's the very definition of a centrist. Anyone advocating almost any position can benefit from the same insta-centrism. 2) Scorn ideology. Obama warned against "the usual Washington ideological battles." Message: He has no philosophical commitments himself. He's pushing a...

THE best moment of almost every YouTube video of the raucous town-hall meetings on health care is the same: It's the nonplussed look on the face of the senators and congressmen who have rarely suffered such indignity. Be assured: No one talks to them that way in the "members only" elevators in the US Capitol. Nancy Pelosi and Co. insist that the town-hall protesters are the tools of special interests. Not likely. Almost all of the special interests have been enticed or bullied into cooperating with ObamaCare. President Obama and the Democrats may still imagine themselves insurgents storming the gates,...

August 7, 2009 In Pursuit of a Silent Majority Obama wants the majority that opposes or questions his policies to stay silent. By Rich Lowry Like Richard Nixon, Barack Obama wants to govern on the strength of a silent majority, although with a twist. Obama wants the majority that opposes or questions his policies to stay silent. Obama’s White House and its allies have unleashed a barrage of criticism and condescension at people daring to show up at town-hall meetings and ask their elected representatives pointed questions. “Fired up and ready to go!” apparently works only one way. If engaged...

A friend just invited me to join a Facebook group called, "Birthers for Intellectual Honesty." This is probably a joke, and he is a friend, so I will not get mad at him. Whatever the circumstances of Obama's birth, they cannot now constitute the basis of an effective political attack. So any further attempt to advance along that line is wasted time or, worse, giving fodder to those who delight in portraying conservatives as kooks. Mitchell Blatt writes: [D]id you know that NBC was planning on asking [Michelle Malkin] if she is a birther conspiracy nut? . . NBC wanted...

BY all accounts, Barack Obama's father, the Kenyan student studying in America, was cocksure and impressed with his own talents. The arrogance gene must be dominant. Obama clearly has it. And that, more than any other factor, is driving his summertime swoon. Hubris made him reach for too much, too soon; brazenly overpromise about the effects of his program; overestimate his control of events; think the golden touch of his brilliant team could solve intractable problems; and believe his words could trump reality. The Obama team is fiddling with his health-care talking points. But the verbiage is beside the point....

BARACK Obama raised near-millennial expectations last year. If elected, he'd transform the dreary realities of Washington with his blazing freshness. He'd win over Republicans with his engaging post-partisanship. He'd solve long-standing national problems with his nonideological pragmatism. None of this overpromising was ever very likely to come to fruition. But Obama has now fallen down on a much more elemental test of leadership: He can't tell the truth about his signature initiative. Obama's health-care push has been the most dishonest White House advocacy in recent memory. What he says about reform bears no relation to the legislation he wants Congress...

The cap-and-trade bill passed the House of Representatives shrouded in a fog of willful ignorance and calculated irrationality. No one could be sure what he was voting for — not after the 1,200-page bill had a 300-page amendment added at 3:09 a.m. the day of its passage. The bill is so complex and jerry-built that even its supporters can’t know how, or if, it will work. And it’s metaphysically impossible for someone to know whether the motivating crisis, impending planetary doom, will ever materialize. Other than that, it’s a model exercise in thoughtful lawmaking. The formulation of the so-called Waxman-Markey...

THE cap-and-trade bill passed the House of Representatives shrouded in a fog of willful ignorance and calculated irrationality. No one could be sure what he was voting for -- not after the 1,200-page bill had a 300-page amendment added at 3:09 a.m. the day of its passage. The bill is so complex and jerry-built that even its supporters can't know how, or if, it will work. And it's impossible for someone to know whether the motivating crisis, impending planetary doom, will ever materialize. Other than that, it's a model exercise in thoughtful lawmaking. The so-called Waxman-Markey bill's formulation was less...

IS Barack Obama approaching the end of his masterly run? Starting with his win in the Iowa caucuses in January 2008, he has been, if not the one we've been waiting for, the one best suited to tap the wellsprings of public sentiment and capitalize on political circumstances for his own and his party's benefit. During his golden year and a half, Obama caught a wave of change that propelled him into the White House, a wave that only grew stronger when he took office amid an economic crisis. When challenged, Obama has resorted to his rhetorical prowess to defuse...

IMAGINE you are an evil Republican genius, tasked with frustrating liberal goals while Karl Rove is distracted by writing his book. What would be your strategic imperative, and how would you go about effecting it? The first part of the question is easy: You'd want to defeat the further nationalization of health care. Were a sweeping, government-heavy reform to pass, it would be an irreversible step toward a European-style social democracy. How to beat back such reform is the harder question. Your tools are limited. The press hates you, and you have frighteningly few votes in Congress. The public scorns...

On the Sack of Rome: "Any time a major urban area is plundered so quickly, it is concerning to us. We are sure the Gauls and Chieftain Brennus understand Roman worries about the utter devastation of their city." On the Blitz: "Any time a city is bombed for 57 straight nights, we take notice. That is something that interests us. We hope all national air forces involved in this dismaying conflict behave responsibly." On the creation of the Berlin Wall: "Any time a barrier divides people we get worried, and perhaps even chagrined. We hope all Germans can work this...

Obama’s Fantastical Realism The president is putting human rights behind stability. By Rich Lowry If only the Obama administration considered motorcycle-riding thugs beating demonstrators in Iran an offense on par with Israel’s West Bank settlements. Then it could speak with moral passion. It could unmistakably denounce the killings, and relieve its State Department spokesman of the trouble of dancing around the word “condemn.” It could say that our relationship with the Iranian government depends on the unconditional end of its thuggery. It could explain that only if Iran stops the crackdown can we “move forward” in the Middle East. But...

WHERE does Newt Gingrich go to get his apology? Back in the mid 1990s, Gingrichproposed slowing the rate of growth of Medicare and Medicaid -- and was clobbered by Democrats and the press for waging war on the elderly and the indigent. Now, almost every other day, President Obama finds another hundred billion dollars to cut out of Medicare and Medicaid. Over the weekend, Obama announced the discovery of another $313 billion in savings over 10 years, on top of $300 billion he'd already proposed. Soon enough, he'll make Gingrich -- who infamously sought $450 billion in savings over seven...

May 22, 2009 President Above-It-All There Obama stands, bravely holding his flanks against straw men on all sides. By Rich Lowry Put Barack Obama in front of a teleprompter and one thing is certain — he’ll make himself appear the most reasonable person in the room. Rhetorically, he is in the middle of any debate, perpetually surrounded by finger-pointing extremists who can’t get over their reflexive combativeness and ideological fixations to acknowledge his surpassing thoughtfulness and grace. This is how Obama, whose position on abortion is indistinguishable from NARAL’s, can speechify on abortion at Notre Dame and come away sounding...

PUT Barack Obama in front of a Tele PrompTer and one thing is certain -- he'll make himself appear the most reasonable person in the room. Rhetorically, he is in the middle of any debate, perpetually surrounded by finger-pointing extremists who can't get over their reflexive combativeness and ideological fixations to acknowledge his surpassing thoughtfulness and grace. This is how Obama, whose position on abortion is indistinguishable from NARAL's, can speechify on abortion at Notre Dame and come away sounding like a pitch-perfect centrist. It's natural, then, that his speech at the National Archives on national security should superficially sound...

IF there were ever a senator a party would want to show the door, it's Arlen Specter. Personally disagreeable, philosophically unmoored and fundamentally self-interested, he represents the worst of the US Senate. So the collective cry of good riddance on the right that greeted his departure from the GOP is understandable. Specter joined the Republican Party in the '60s for opportunistic reasons, and he left it last week for opportunistic reasons -- a primary challenge from the talented conservative Pat Toomey he probably wouldn't have been able to overcome. A better politician wouldn't have so lost the affection and loyalty...

THE debate over the just-released Jus tice Department memorandums on interrogation techniques ended as soon as they were dubbed the "torture memos." Forevermore, they will be remembered as the legal lowlights of a "dark and painful chapter in our history," as President Obama put it. Rightly considered, the memos should be a source of pride. They represent a nation of laws struggling to defend itself against a savage, lawless enemy while adhering to its legal commitments and norms. Most societies throughout human history wouldn't have bothered. The memos cite conduct that is indisputably torture from a court case involving Serbs...

THE National Security Act of 1947, a reor ganization of the foreign-policy and military apparatuses of the U.S. government, created what historians call "the national security state." Critics complain that the national security state vastly empowered government and cut the executive branch loose from legislative accountability. It marked the beginning of a hyperactive interventionism abroad. Domestically, all the same criticisms apply to the consequences of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, which marks a new era in American economic policy just as the 1947 act did in foreign policy. Since last fall, we have seen the rise of the TARP state...

Anyone worried that, once in charge, Democrats wouldn’t be vigilant in protecting our southern border can relax. The grave threat of Mexican long-haul truckers has been shut down. With any luck, Mexicans will never have the temerity to attempt to deliver commercial goods into the United States again. At least such is the fervid hope of the Teamsters, the fiercest adversary the Mexicans have faced since Pres. James Polk sent Winfield Scott south in the Mexican-American War. The union can’t abide Mexican trucks because they represent competition, and so they must be blocked — legal obligations, economic rationality, and diplomatic...

Ann Coulter vs. Joy Behar on 'Larry King Live': TKO Coulter? Feb 20, 2009, 11:14 AM | by Ken TuckerCategories: Television Ann Coulter appeared on a Joy Behar-hosted edition of Larry King Live last night, and CNN kept superimposing the caption, "Ann Coulter Unleashed!" Boy, was the network, and Behar, just aching for Coulter to scorch up the airwaves. This is why Coulter gets invited on TV shows when she has a book to flog: she can be relied upon to say outrageous things, egged on by her hosts. But last night, Behar was trying too hard. Quoting the conservative...

February 17, 2009 Obama’s Tainted Win Obama has chosen to abandon his commitment to a different, more open process. By Rich Lowry By his own standards, President Barack Obama’s first major legislative victory was a tainted win. At the outset of the stimulus debate, Obama said his package would set a “new higher standard of accountability, transparency and oversight.” He wanted a bill free of earmarked spending for parochial projects, and talked of incorporating good Republican ideas. His team floated the goal of winning some 20 Republican votes in the Senate for legislation that — if Obama’s campaign pledges were...

February 06, 2009 ‘I Won,’ He Explained On the stimulus, when Obama says “I won,” he’s out of better arguments. By Rich Lowry Barack Obama, a reputed master of the persuasive art, has settled on his central argument for the stimulus bill: I won. That Obama is reduced to this crude appeal is a symptom of the intellectual collapse of the case for his stimulus bill, a congressional spendfest untethered from its stated goal of providing a rapid “jolt” to the economy. As far as political arguments go, “I won” has its power—provided it’s made on behalf of an agenda...

WHY NO THREADS ON THIS YET!!!!!! Drudge has just a snippet posted. I was LIVID when watching/listening to this live. Am I the only one who was offended????

Benediction at Obama 's inauguration, Rev. Joseph Lowery: 'Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen. Say Amen'...

While I admire his civil rights struggles early in his life Dr. Lowery shows once again that he has become nothing but a racist himself. Shame on you Dr. Lowery for talking me down because of my skin color.

Conservatives sworn to dinner secrecy By: Jonathan Martin January 14, 2009 12:40 PM EST Call it a charm offensive or a high-level “Listening Tour,” but Barack Obama is already signaling that he intends to break with the current president in one obvious way: hearing from his critics. Obama Tuesday night trekked to the Chevy Chase, Md., home of conservative columnist George F. Will to talk politics and get to know some of his fiercest intellectual adversaries: Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Larry Kudlow, David Brooks, Rich Lowry, Peggy Noonan, Michael Barone, and Paul Gigot. The two-and-half-hour dinner, which came at Will’s...

Tuesday's Republican debacle was, as the social scientists say, "over-determined." It had many causes. Was it brought on by congressional corruption, Bush administration incompetence, intellectual exhaustion or John McCain's failings as a candidate? All of the above -- and then some. In 2006, voters set out to punish Republicans for loose practices in Washington -- most spectacularly the scandal involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff -- and the mishandling of the Iraq war. This year, they decided that Republicans deserved another whipping, even before the September financial meltdown added yet another black mark against the Bush administration.

Republicans are consoling themselves by telling anyone who will listen that we still live in a "center-right country." They're right. That's the good news. The bad news is that they've lost the center. According to exit polls, Barack Obama won moderates by a whopping 21 points on Tuesday, 60-39 percent. That more than doubled John Kerry's nine-point margin over George W. Bush among moderates in 2004. The ideological composition of the electorate was remarkably unchanged from 2004. The percentage of self-identified conservatives and moderates -- the center-right -- held steady. Conservatives were 34 percent of voters and moderates 44 percent,...

A Word on Christopher Buckley [Rich Lowry] Chris is up with a post at The Daily Beast, "Sorry, Dad, I Was Fired." I’d like to clarify this “firing” business. Over the weekend, Chris wrote us a jaunty e-mail with the subject line "A Sincere Offer," in which he offered to resign his column on NR's back page and said that if we accepted, there "would be no hard feelings, only warmest regards and understanding." We took the offer sincerely. Chris had done us the favor of writing the column beginning seven issues ago on a "trial basis" (his words), while...

Barack Obama has already brought change: He's ended the "chilling effect." Any restrictions on speech - real or imagined - were once inevitably deemed to have a "chilling effect" on people who would otherwise exercise their First Amendment rights if they weren't so frightened by the possibility of running afoul of the law. Claims of a "chilling effect" were the most reliable weapon in the American Civil Liberties Union's absolutist campaign against, say, even the most common-sensical laws against obscenity. But the politics of free speech has been subtly shifting. Opponents of the ACLU on the right increasingly worry about...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Has Sarah Palin become a liability for John McCain? Since joining his ticket, the overnight political celebrity has seen the shine come off her poll standings and doubts surface among some conservatives once excited about her candidacy. The Alaska governor still draws huge crowds and energizes McCain's drive for the White House. Yet a whirlwind month after he made her his running mate, Palin is starting to seem very, very vulnerable. A stumbling interview with CBS's Katie Couric last week in which Palin equated her state's proximity to Russia with foreign policy experience may have been her...

JOHN BOLTON, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO U.N.: Glad to be here. LOWRY: Now, do you think it makes any sense to have dis-invited Sarah Palin to this event? Yes, Hillary Clinton had canceled, but there still would have been other Democrats there. And it's not as though the mere presence of Sarah Palin would have discredited this thing as a partisan event. BOLTON: Well, I think it was a mistake. But I know the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. It's a very important group. They have never done anything, in my view, that was partisan. So they must...

The Bush years will be remembered for the cruel triumph of realism over illusion. One of the era's great illusions was spun by President Bush -- that the force of freedom was so irresistible, it would prevail in a place like Iraq even in the absence of law and order. Bush himself eventually realized his mistake. The second illusion -- fed by anyone who possibly could get rich from it -- is bursting now. Wall Street is experiencing one of its most wrenching periods since traders began gathering around a tree there in the 1790s, beset by a terrible reckoning:...

Has some fascinating stuff. One, age appears to be a much bigger drag for McCain than race is for Obama (25% say their friends or neighbors are uncomfortable voting for a 72-year old; 6% say they are uncomfortable voting for an African-American). I'm interested in how McCain has fared in some of the personal attribute questions. He's closed the gap in "fights for people like me" from 53% to 33% in May, to 48% to 42% now; closed the gap on "will unite the country" from 53% to 33% in May to 47% to 39% now; and tied Obama...

Seems we are witnessing the coming next installment of the dismemberment of a well-intentioned, God-centered conservative, ala George Bush. He will be off the scene soon...the ravenous vultures have picked his bones unmercifully ( Everything wrong in every life on earth is Bush's fault) in an 8 year temper tanrum over the 2000 Florida vote. Can you IMAGINE, if Obama loses, how they will behave toward Vice President Sarah Palin as the iconic representation in snatching the presidency away from the first black?? The left--and the media-- will give her no berth of acceptance, no willingness to listen, they will...

My take (and I didn't see the bits that aired on 20/20 or Nightline last night, although I read the transcript) was that she survived. That's all she had to do. Politically, everyone was grading her on a pass/fail, and she passed. No gaffes, not that much to fuel damaging follow-on conversation. She's likable even when she's at her least authoritative. Most people, I believe, are rooting for her, and she was helped in the post-game by the incredible scorn directed at her by Charlie Gibson. But this was a merely adequate performance. The foreign-policy session was a white-knuckle affair....

Perhaps nothing Sarah Palin said in her boffo address at the Republican Convention had as much resonance as her statement that “sometimes even the greatest joys bring challenge.” That truism was redeemed from mere Hallmark-card sentimentality because everyone knew that Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant and that Palin herself gave birth to a boy, Trig, with Down syndrome in April. The joys in the Palin household lately have been particularly leavened with challenges. Palin’s choice to give birth to Trig after she learned of his condition 13 weeks into her pregnancy endeared her to pro-lifers and contributed to the...

Last night, the question about Sarah Palin wasn't if she's risen too fast, but where she's been for so long. She may have given the best speech of either political convention. She delivered a brilliantly written text flawlessly. Politicians who've been on the national stage for decades could do no better, and usually do worse. Newsrooms across America must be in abject despair. The unlikely VP nominee the media hoped to crush out of the gate is unaffected by their condescension and scorn - and is bent on giving better than she takes. Miss Congeniality isn't afraid to administer an...

Palin-hatred is an artifact of who she is rather than anything she's done. Joe Biden famously rose from the workng class to the Senate. Palin became governor of Alaska, but never left the working class - with her beehive hairdo and librarian glasses, with a husband who is a commercial fisherman and works on a North Shore oil field, and with her hobbies of hunting and fishing. If there's ever been an exemplar of rural America that, in Barack Obama's telling, "bitterly" clings to its guns and religion, it's Sarah Palin. It's her misfortune to be a pioneer with the...

IF it were the plot of a political movie, it'd be too cheesy to watch. An obscure governor of a small state, a working mom of five, is secretly spirited to a political rally four months after giving birth to her latest child and named the running mate on a national ticket as the country watches, agog. But there she was, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, trailing four of her kids (the other is in the Army and about to deploy to Iraq) and her husband - a young, attractive mother hen about to stand next to war hero and elder...

Republicans are sending onto the field a presidential candidate who perhaps has the least to offer middle-class voters on taxes since the first George Bush in 1992. Of course, Bush lost that year to a Democrat promising only to raise taxes on “the rich” and to cut them for the middle class — exactly Obama’s position now. In his primary campaign, McCain had to endorse the extension of the Bush tax cuts he voted against in the Senate. But they have turned into a trap. Because Obama also wants to extend the middle-class aspects of the Bush cuts, McCain is...