Free Republic

I think I understand why the audience at Wednesday’s CNBC debate booed Maria Bartiromo’s question to Herman Cain about sexual-harassment allegations. They don’t believe there is any truth to them. They suspect, along with the candidate, that the women concerned are part of a liberal lynch mob out to smear another strong, conservative, black man. They know that accusations of sexual harassment are often nebulous and PC. If I guess correctly, they also believe — with considerable justification — that the press is less interested in the dry details of policy than in salacious tales of misbehavior. They resent being...

Kate Bolick stares out at the world from the cover of The Atlantic magazine. She's wearing a black lace evening dress. "What, Me Marry?" asks the headline. She isn't smiling. In fact, she isn't smiling in any of the photos that accompany her several thousand-word essay on singleness, marriage and the changing nature of dating and mating in America today. Bolick, 38, is groping toward accepting the idea that she may never marry. She badly wants to convince herself -- and us -- that older ideas about "unhappy" spinsters are silly cultural baggage best dropped off at the curb. And...

If the Iranian government doesn't frighten you, you haven't been paying attention. The regime in Iran has been killing Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan for many years and has sworn countless times in the past 30 years to preside over the destruction of the United States. If it wasn't for a lucky break, Washington D.C., this autumn, would have been the scene of a massive explosion detonated at a high-end restaurant, with scores and perhaps hundreds killed and maimed. The principal target of this terror attack was to be the Saudi ambassador to the United States, but as one of...

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. -- Winston ChurchillThere is history -- a chronicle of human events -- and then there is perceived history. So often, the two are wildly at odds. In 1963, a popular Democratic president was assassinated by a Marxist named Oswald, who had actually defected to the Soviet Union and returned to the U.S. with a Soviet wife, was an active member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and had attempted to assassinate a right-wing general named Edwin Walker earlier in the year. Yet those who write history found...

Who won the battle of Wisconsin? Republican Gov. Scott Walker got a legislative victory. On the other hand, Democrats, with a wary eye on 2012 and noting the worrying drop in support for President Obama in union-heavy states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, claim to be delighted that Walker has picked this fight. "Republicans have done organized labor a great favor by putting the movement back in (the) labor movement, creating a level of passion and activism for workers' rights that hasn't been seen in generations," crowed Democratic strategist Mike Lux. Maybe so. Though the three-week tantrum by union protesters in...

The media just loves to hate Sarah Palin. And, if polls are to be believed, the constant media bombardment has hurt her standing among many independents. Unfortunately, over the last couple of weeks, even conservative media pundits such as Mona Charen, Peggy Noonan, George Will, Joe Scarborough and Matt Labash see these attacks and warn that she can’t win the presidency. They even buy into the attacks on her judgment, intelligence, and competence. But what these conservatives don’t appreciate is that Palin is being attacked because she is smart and effective, not because she is dumb. For just how far...

A couple of weeks ago, on the occasion of the annual hajj, in which 2.5 million Muslim pilgrims fulfill their obligation to travel to Mecca, prominent Muslim clerics from Asia, Africa, and Europe, along with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq denounced violence in the name of Islam and issued a manifesto, signed by all, declaring that "murder of innocents is never justified and violates the teachings of Islam." If you haven't heard about this, it's because it never happened. I conjured it to clarify the nature of the problem. Well-intentioned non-Muslims never tire...

For once, I'm with Hillary Clinton. Regarding the Rev. Terry Jones, would-be Quran igniter, the secretary of state said, "It is regrettable that a pastor in Gainesville, Florida, with a church of no more than 50 people can make this outrageous and ... disgraceful plan and get the world's attention, but that's the world we live in right now." "Get the world's attention" is putting it mildly. The until-recently justifiably obscure Jones is now famous on seven continents. He is doubtless far better known in the Muslim world than, say, N.Y. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has carried water for the...

President Obama has a weakness for thinking in categories. For someone who provokes swoons among liberals for his great intellect, he has repeatedly evidenced an unsophisticated, one might even say simple-minded, view of the world: Workers good; bosses exploitative. Borrowers good; lenders bad. Patients good; insurance companies bad. Again and again, the president and his spokesmen have justified their expansions of government power as efforts to help those who "through no fault of their own" find themselves in difficulties. Many politicians traffic in this kind rhetoric during campaigns, but Obama has institutionalized it in policy. One of those reifications --...

MONA CHAREN FEBRUARY 26, 2010 12:00 A.M. The Anti-Obama? Mitch Daniels might challenge Obama in 2012; the GOP would be lucky to have him. On the morning of November 5, 2008, the world rocked to news that the United States had elected Barack Obama to the presidency. That same morning, Mitch Daniels, governor of Indiana, joined the list of those most often mentioned as potentially defeating President Obama in 2012. In what may be a sign of unusual mental health and emotional balance, Daniels persistently declined to be considered a candidate. Among his many reasons, he told C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb,...

Welcome to America's longest running hit show -- the race farce, in which feigned shock and outrage lead to fawning apologies and bumbling explanations to all the wrong people. Taking offense has been reduced to low comedy in America -- as hypocrites play out their assigned parts. S. Harry Reid was quoted in a new book as enthusing in 2008 about Obama's candidacy because he is "light-skinned" and speaks without a "Negro dialect, unless he wants one." Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post called it "beyond stupid" to use the word Negro in 2008. Liz Cheney labeled Reid's words "fairly...

It may not be President Obama's fault that our multibillion-dollar Homeland Security apparatus is more Keystone Kops than "24," anymore than it was President Bush's fault that city, state, and federal agencies failed to respond adequately to Hurricane Katrina. The federal government is (alas) a vast ungovernable enterprise. And the bigger it gets, the less effective it will become. Still, the entire Democratic Party -- led by Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Harry Reid -- swarmed over President Bush like piranhas as the waters rose in 2005. "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" entered the lexicon as one...

We must overcome our self-delusions about the enemy. When tens of thousands of Iranians took to the streets last spring and braved the most brutal repression the regime could inflict, Michael Ledeen was the least surprised man in Washington. In season and out, Ledeen has chronicled the profound weakness of the mullahocracy and its deep unpopularity with the Iranian people. Impatiently, year after year, he has identified opportunities for the United States to help the people of Iran replace their sinister and menacing rulers. After each new post on the subject, Ledeen signed off with, “Faster please.” In Accomplice to...

Former President Bill Clinton visited Capitol Hill recently to deliver a pep talk to Senate Democrats. "It's not important to be perfect here. It's important to act, to move, to start the ball rolling," he reportedly told senators. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel sounded a similar theme in an interview with the New York Times. "I'm sure there are a lot of people sitting in the shade at the Aspen Institute ... who will tell you what the ideal plan is. Great, fascinating. You have the art of the possible measured against the ideal." So the strategy on...

Tide turns in D.C.2010 elections could be painful for Democrats By Mona Charen Published: October 18, 2009 As Obama, Pelosi and Reid rush to transform America into a European-style social democratic state, they must be nervous; they must feel the sand sliding under their feet. The 2010 elections are just over the horizon and the omens are not encouraging for them. Thomas Jefferson warned that "Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.” Maybe so. But the Democrats may be calculating that a slender majority is better than an anorexic majority, or no majority at all. In 2006, it...

Well, that's one way to look at it. Writing in Haaretz, Orna Coussin praised Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement that began Sunday night and ended Monday night) as the ultimate green holiday. Coussin is a secular Israeli and was expressing her appreciation for the fact that everyone is obliged to travel by foot on Yom Kippur. All traffic stops in Israel. No cars, busses, trains, or taxis clog the streets on that day. The shops and offices are closed and the city is given over to pedestrians. "Last year, on Yom Kippur," she exults, "carbon monoxide levels fell...

The death of Sen. Edward Kennedy, we are being told, should strengthen our resolve to act in a bipartisan fashion. Many of the tributes, from former presidents and Republican colleagues, have stressed the late senator's willingness to find "common ground." Well, since ancient Rome we've been exhorted not to speak ill of the dead. But neither should we completely disfigure the truth. Before offering some less than hagiographic reflections on the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (may he rest in peace), one pleasant memory: About a decade ago, I was late for a party in northwest Washington D.C. -- a neighborhood...

He was certainly brave, but was he crazy? That's what I wondered when I picked up Rory Stewart's "The Places in Between," an account of the Scotsman's 2002 solo walk across Afghanistan. That's right, he walked. Many Afghans doubted he would survive the journey. Just weeks after the fall of the Taliban, in the dead of winter, in some of the most remote and difficult terrain in the inhabited world, he went from village to village on foot. Relying on the tradition of hospitality, Stewart found welcome, sustenance, and shelter (mostly, but not always) graciously offered by people who had...

July 28, 2009 Mr. Oblivious to Evidence Obama should be the last man to talk about keeping others honest. By Mona Charen The final moments of President Obama’s press conference last week have gotten the most attention, and some of the president’s supporters have wondered whether his big-footed interference in the Harvard professor’s melodrama has overshadowed his push for health-care reform. But the president’s response to Gatesgate actually sheds a lot of light on his approach to health care and other issues, for this reason: Obama adopts his positions before knowing what he is talking about. To be fair, Obama...

There were so many examples of presidential mendacity on view Wednesday night that I had planned to itemize a few in this column. But since even the New York Times is challenging a number of presidential whoppers -- for example, Obama's assertion that "If we had done nothing, if you had the same old budget as opposed to the changes we made, the deficit over the next 10 years would be $2.2 trillion greater" is pure deception. OK, the Times didn't use that word, but reporters Peter Baker and Robert Pear did say, "In fact, $1.5 trillion of those 'savings'...