Free Republic

Last week, during a bit of banter on Fox News, my colleague Jonah Goldberg reminded me of something I’d all but forgotten. Last September, during his address to Congress on health care, Barack Obama declared: “I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.” Dream on. The monstrous mountain of toxic pustules sprouting from greasy boils metastasizing from malign carbuncles that passed the Senate on Christmas Eve is not the last word in “health” “care,” but the first. It ensures that this is all we’ll be talking about, now and...

The best summation of the U.N. climate circus in Denmark comes from Andrew Bolt of Australia’s Herald Sun: “Nothing is real in Copenhagen — not the temperature record, not the predictions, not the agenda, not the ‘solution.’” Just so. Reuters, for example, carried a moving account of the speech by Ian Fry, lead negotiator for Tuvalu, the beleaguered Pacific island nation soon to be underwater because of a planet-devastating combination of your SUV and unsustainable bovine flatulence from Vermont farms. “The fate of my country rests in your hands,” Fry told the meeting. “I make this as a strong and...

It wasn’t so long ago that Barack Obama’s speeches were being hailed as “extraordinary” “rhetorical magic” (Joe Klein in Time) that should be “required reading in classrooms” (Bob Herbert in the New York Times). Pity the poor grade-schoolers who have to be on the bus at 5 a.m. for a daylong slog through the 4,000-word sludge of the president’s Nobel thank you. Rich Lowry, my boss at National Review, writes that Obama has become a “crashingly banal” bore. The good news is that he “is not nearly as dull as, say, Herman van Rompuy.” Who? Oh, come on. Herman van...

To its credit, National Review once attacked those who refused to accept the prima facie evidence of Barack Obama's birth certificate as proof of his eligibility to be president of the United States. The hallmark of a conspiracy theory is that a lack of evidence for the theory is taken as yet more evidence for the theory. Indeed, the maddening thing about dealing with conspiracy hobbyists of this or any sort is the ever-shifting nature of their argument and their alleged evidence: Never mind the birth certificate, his step-grandmother said he was born in Kenya! (No, she didn't.) Now examine...

The Strangest Sentence I've Read Recently [Ramesh Ponnuru] comes from Hitchens's latest Palin article: "Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days and the Second Coming will occur in her lifetime." If she held it in the past and no longer does, a possibility Hitchens admits, how can it be her "core conviction"? Or does a discarded belief remain a "core conviction" until a press conference is held to "repudiate" it? If it...

Benjamin Disraeli’s most famous advice to aspiring politicians was: “Never complain and never explain.” For the greatest orator of our time, a man who makes Churchill, Lincoln, and Henry V at Agincourt look like first-round rejects on Orating with the Stars, Barack Obama seems to have pretty much given up on the explaining side. He tried it with health care with speech after speech after exclusive interview for months on end and the more he explained the more unpopular the whole racket got. So he declared that the time for explaining is over, and it’s time to sign on or...

National Review Online's weekend scrolling headline banner displayed 'DRILL SARAH PALIN" as one of its headers. Where's the outrage?

10. Dead people can’t vote at IOC meetings 9. Obama distracted by 25 min meeting with Gen. McChrystal 8. Who cares if Obama couldn’t talk the IOC into Chicago? He’ll be able to talk Iran out of nukes. 7. The impediment is Israel still building settlements. 6. Obviously no president would have been able to accomplish it. 5. We’ve been quite clear and said all along that we didn’t want the Olympics. 4. This isn’t about the number of Olympics “lost”, it’s about the number of Olympics “saved” or “created”. 3. Clearly not enough wise Latina judges on the committee...

Top 10 Reasons Chicago Didn't Get the Olympics 10. Dead people can't vote at IOC meetings 9. Obama distracted by 25 min meeting with Gen. McChrystal 8. Who cares if Obama couldn't talk the IOC into Chicago? He'll be able to talk Iran out of nukes. 7. The impediment is Israel still building settlements. 5. We've been quite clear and said all along that we didn't want the Olympics. 4. This isn't about the number of Olympics "lost", it's about the number of Olympics "saved" or "created". 3. Clearly not enough wise Latina judges on the committee 2. Because the...

President Obama began his speech tonight by noting that liberals have been trying to foist “comprehensive health reform” on this nation for nearly seven decades. (He did not use these exact words.) These decades of failure have not led liberals to reconsider their basic assumptions about the proper role of government in American health care. It was thus overly optimistic to expect a few difficult months to make Obama rethink his health-care initiative. Neither the government-heavy substance nor the dishonest and demagogic tactics have changed. The president denounced “scare tactics” — in a speech that warned that failure to go...

August 27, 2009 Kennedy, Unsentimentally By the Editors He may have sometimes seemed like a gin-soaked anachronism from The Beautiful and the Damned who somehow wandered into 21st-century America, but Edward M. Kennedy is a permanent rebuke to F. Scott Fitzgerald and his assertion that there are no second acts in American lives. Kennedy’s life was a string of second acts: Expelled from Harvard for academic dishonesty, he was readmitted to the good graces of the Ivy League under a gentlemen’s agreement; politically marginalized after leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to die of asphyxiation in his sinking Oldsmobile, he was readmitted...

In an earlier post today, we noted Andy McCarthy's minority opinion in a dissent from an NRO editorial which complained about "hysteria" surrounding former Governor Sarah Palin's characterization of "death panels" in proposed health care reform legislation. The Conservasphere is beginning to erupt over the editorial also, and National Review editor Rich Lowry has to be feeling the heat . Here are five prime examples... Robert Stacy McCain: National Review contributes more evidence for the prosecution in the continuing case of Why Rich Lowry Should Have Been Fired No Later Than 2001. [...] Lowry's stayed too long at the dance,...

You’d think that if he’s going to anchor on MSNBC, a network that was started as a joint venture with Microsoft, Donny Deutsch would learn how to email or at least use MSN’s search engine. But it’s been 2 weeks since Donny called National Review’s John Miller “ignorant” and promised to email him the proof. So far, not a peep from Donny. Actually, ignorance is not his excuse. He was caught in a lie, and used the dodge to get away. Donny blasted out of the gate with non-sequiturs, mangled metaphors, factual misstatements and bloviating worthy of Keith Olbermann, reacting...

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...

VIDEO - Amy Holmes tells Will Cain who the new Republican All-Stars could be, and how they will emerge from the scandals and resignations of now.

She didn’t do it for Alaska. By Rich Lowry EDITOR’S NOTE: This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate © 2009 by King Features Syndicate

Barack Hussein Obama has the blood of American soldiers on his hands. A fine way to say Happy Fourth of July to our troops. Barack the magic president used the distraction of the troop pullout in Iraq to hide the fact that he traded the murderer of five US soldiers for the bodies of five British troops. He released his brother just because. Happy Independence day.

Given the Obama administration's rapid takeovers of General Motors and Chrysler, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to conservatives that, in the name of "financial reform," President Obama is arguing that government should get vast new powers to seize private firms. What may surprise members of the center-Right coalition, however, is that the venerable conservative publication National Review is backing Obama's bid to have the government do so. The 85-page white paper the administration unveiled last week proposing a grab-bag of new financial regulations contains a prominent section on what it calls a "resolution regime" for "nonbank financial...

McCain explicitly included the Fifth Amendment in his legislation because it addresses his target, coercive interrogation. As we’ve seen, in Dickerson, the Supreme Court held that Miranda was now considered part of the Fifth Amendment’s core. In the al-Owhali case, Judge Sand ruled that Miranda imposes daunting burdens on American agents overseas — burdens far more challenging than the rote reading of an advice-of-rights card that typically happens in domestic policing. With the Supreme Court, beginning in 2004, imposing more and more criminal-justice procedure on the battlefield, the McCain Amendment would almost certainly be used by courts or a Democratic...

... For conservative commentators Mr. Obama’s election and the turmoil of the opposition present a changed environment, not only from the past eight years when Republicans held the White House, but from the previous three decades, when conservative ideas dominated the national political agenda. Since the financial meltdown, though, many Americans have sought government action, prompting conservative magazines to refocus on first principles and refight battles they assumed had already been won. “We’re seeing free-market capitalism trampled in some new way every 12 hours,” said Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, the magazine William F. Buckley started in 1955, which...

The Dalai Lama has been visiting the Boston area, and I’d like to mention a few reports. First, a note from an NRO reader: Hi, Jay, I had the great opportunity to see the Dalai Lama speak at MIT this afternoon. When he opened the forum to audience Q&A, the following stunning exchange occurred (I will paraphrase):  Audience member: “Can you give us an example of a leader we should look up to as a positive influence?” Dalai Lama (after thinking for a few seconds): “President Bush. I met him personally and liked him very much. He was honest and straightforward, and...

Long before he became one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate — and the target of Congressman Pat Toomey's GOP primary challenge — Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania demonstrated a knack for notoriety. In 1964, as a member of the Warren Commission, he invented the "single-bullet theory" to explain how Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy. Conspiracy junkies have obsessed over him ever since. (In Oliver Stone's movie JFK, Kevin Costner's character labels Specter "an ambitious junior counselor" behind "one of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people.") Between serving on the Warren Commission and becoming a...

I don’t know what’s wrong with people like Ramesh Ponnuru and Lindsey Graham. Over at the National Review, Ponnuru blamed the Club for pushing Specter to the Democratic Party, calling us, “The Club for Shrinkage.” Senator Graham lamented Specter’s switch-a-roo, saying, “I don’t want to be a member of the Club for Growth. I want to be a member of a vibrant national Republican Party that can attract people from all corners of the country.” But the only person to blame for Arlen Specter’s defection is...Arlen Specter. Today, the senior senator from Pennsylvania proved that he cares about one thing...

During the Obama administration’s foray to London this last week, officials provided a special telephone number to journalists interested in discussing foreign-policy issues in an “on-the-record briefing call with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and National Security Advisor Jim Jones.” Unfortunately, as part of the curious run of bad luck currently afflicting our new Secretary of State, upon dialing the number the gentlemen of the press were greeted by a honey-voiced seductress, presumably not Secretary Clinton, offering them “phone sex” and seeking their credit-card number if they “feel like getting nasty.” No, it’s not a White House April Fool’s gag....

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...

Full disclosure: Rush Limbaugh is a friend and benefactor of this magazine, as he was a friend of its founder. He has sometimes written for us. That friendship has, however, never prevented him from expressing disagreement with our writers when he felt it appropriate, or vice versa. The controversies of recent weeks, largely ginned up by Democrats, provide us with another opportunity to express both our friendship and our occasional disagreement. The Democrats are trying to place Republicans in a bind by giving them a false choice: They can “kowtow” to Limbaugh, or they can denounce him as outside the...

Kathryn, in all the Rush-bashing, I was more disturbed by Michael Steele's wretched performance. His initial reaction — that Rush's show is "incendiary" and "ugly" — revealed: a) that he never listens to it; b) that he takes his cues from the mainstream media, for whom Rush is invariably "angry". They don't listen either. Rush is a lot of things, but "angry" isn't one of them. If you catch him for 20 minutes, you know he's full of fun, laughing it up, having a grand old time. There are a lot of angry talkshow hosts out there bellowing at the...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has landed himself on yet another national magazine cover. Except this one isn't so flattering: "Girly-Man Ruins State," is how the National Review headlines the piece. The full story is not available online, but Chris Reed, editorial writer for the San Diego Union-Tribune, excerpts parts of the piece. Key line: "Conservatives were cheap dates and missed the subtle signals that Arnold lacked the fierce spirit of liberty that characterized (President Ronald) Reagan's approach to governance."

It is hard to understand this deal,” said Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy. And, if the special envoy of the so-called smartest and most impressive administration in living memory can’t understand it, what chance do the rest of us have? Nevertheless, let’s try. In the Swat Valley, where a young Winston Churchill once served with the Malakand Field Force battling Muslim insurgents, his successors have concluded the game isn’t worth the candle. In return for a temporary ceasefire, the Pakistani government agreed to let the local franchise of the Taliban impose its industrial strength version of sharia across the...

When the very tent poles of your worldview are being pulled up, it's only natural to try and find shelter where you can. So as the outlook for global capitalism gets ever bleaker, should it come as any surprise to find rightwing voices laying claim to their previous bete noire of Hollywood movies as friends of the cause? Such is the gist of a recent pair of efforts from two cornerstones of American conservatism, National Review magazine and the Wall Street Journal, each venturing forth with largely barking judgments on modern cinema (then picked up by Some Came Running). In...

Just asking, but are beheadings common in western New York? I used to spend a lot of time in that neck of the woods and I don't remember decapitation as a routine form of murder. Yet the killing of Aasiya Hassan seems to have elicited a very muted response. When poor Mrs Hassan's husband launched his TV network to counter negative stereotypes of Muslims, he had no difficulty generating column inches, as far afield as The Columbus Dispatch, The Detroit Free Press, The San Jose Mercury News, Variety, NBC News, the Voice of America and the Canadian Press. The Rochester...

When a liberal progressive friend of mine asked me to subscribe to a few magazines for her daughter's Girl Scout troop I was pleased to re-subscribe to the print version of the National Review. The magazine is like having an old friend over the house for a couple of cognacs. I have been reading it since my early 20s, so it's comfortable but rarely surprising. My wife, on the other hand ordered a relatively new magazine called Garden & Gun: Soul of the New South, and it is the coolest little magazine I've seen in years. Garden & Gun is...

This week on NRO, we're going to count down the 25 best conservative movies of the last 25 years, starting with #25 later this morning and finishing with #1 on Friday.

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, is on TV explaining the (at this point the congregation shall fall to its knees and prostrate itself) “stimulus.” “How,” asks the lady from CBS, “does $335 million in STD prevention stimulate the economy?” “I’ll tell you how,” says Speaker Pelosi. “I’m a big believer in prevention. And we have, er, there is a part of the bill on the House side that is about prevention. It’s about it being less expensive to the states to do these measures.” Makes a lot of sense. If we have more STD prevention, it will be safer...

How dazzling is President Obama? So dazzling that he didn’t merely give a dazzling inaugural speech. Any old timeserving hack could do that. Instead, he had the sheer genius to give a flat dull speech full of the usual shopworn boilerplate. Brilliant! At a stroke, he not only gently lowered the expectations of those millions of Americans and billions around the world for whom his triumphant ascendancy is the only thing that gives their drab little lives any meaning, but also emphasized continuity by placing his unprecedented incandescent megastar cool squarely within the tradition of squaresville yawneroo white middle-aged plonking...

In Toronto, anti-Israel demonstrators yell “You are the brothers of pigs!”, and a protestor complains to his interviewer that “Hitler didn’t do a good job.” In Fort Lauderdale, Palestinian supporters sneer at Jews, “You need a big oven, that’s what you need!” In Amsterdam, the crowd shouts, “Hamas, Hamas! Jews to the gas!” In Paris, the state-owned TV network France-2 broadcasts film of dozens of dead Palestinians killed in an Israeli air raid on New Year’s Day. The channel subsequently admits that, in fact, the footage is not from January 1st 2009 but from 2005, and, while the corpses are...

The Israelis just struck back hard at Hamas in Gaza. In response, the United Nations, the European Union and the Arab world (at least publicly) expressed their anger at the killing of over 300 Palestinians, most of whom were terrorists and Hamas officials. For several prior weeks, Hamas terrorists had been daily launching rockets into Israeli towns that border Gaza. The recent volleys of missiles had insidiously become more frequent — up to 80 a day — and the payloads larger. Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists were reportedly supplying their own training and expertise. These terrorists point to the Lebanon war of...

Just for a lark, I decided to google “international condemnations of Hamas” this morning. You can guess what came up, right? Naturally, searching for condemnations of Hamas, one finds only international condemnations of Israel. An Australian report noted that the “British Foreign Secretary David Miliband is calling for an urgent ceasefire, while Russia’s Foreign Minister says he’s told his Israeli counterpart to urgently halt the military action.” The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, “strongly condemned Israel’s disproportionate use of force,” as did Brazil. Indonesia called on all countries to “sever all forms of diplomatic and business...

December 23, 2008, 4:00 a.m. Gross Dereliction of DutyBy the Editors As attorney general of California, Jerry Brown has a duty to defend the state and its laws in court. That duty requires him to offer the best grounds in defense of any law that may reasonably be defended. In a brief he filed last Friday in the case challenging Proposition 8 — the ballot measure that amended California’s constitution to ban same-sex marriage — Brown grossly violated that duty. On Election Day, California voters approved Proposition 8. Opponents of Proposition 8 then rushed to court to invalidate it...

Yes, I know you guys and gals don't like vanities, but I need advice, and I don't who else to ask. Anyway, does anyone here subscribe to Human Events? How is it different from the online version? Is a subscription worth it? Which one is better: Human Events, National Review, or American Spectator? Those are the only ones I know.

December 22, 2008, 1:30 a.m. A Vindication of Edmund Burke An NRO Flashback EDITOR’S NOTE: Edmund Burke biographer Conor Cruise O’Brien died this past weekend at the age of 91. The O’Brien piece below was the cover story in the December 17, 1990, issue of National Review. I. TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES On November 1, 1790, Edmund Burke’s most famous book, Reflections on the Revolution in France, was published. It is important to get the title right. The book is often referred to as Reflections on the French Revolution. The book’s real title adequately reveals Burke’s intentions. Burke’s point, in...

"The consensus forming in anticipation of Barack Obama’s ascendancy is that, with apologies to Code Pink, pragmatism is the new black. The president-elect himself has encouraged this vogue, both explicitly in his rhetoric and implicitly in his recent cabinet appointments. It remains to be seen whether a substantive departure from doctrinaire liberalism will follow, but in the meantime we suffer from an annoying side effect: Suddenly every third person is walking around pronouncing himself a pragmatist and sneering smugly at “ideology,” as if the distinction were something more than empty rhetoric...."

Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s columnar wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline: “British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.” Indeed. And so it goes. This time round — Bombay — it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims “found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion.” ' Oh, I don’t know about that. In fact, you’d be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was “linked” to any religion,...

"Let's face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did NATIONAL REVIEW not exist, no one would have invented it. The launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that, of course; if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have...

Vanity...for those interested in the National Review post-election cruise.

Irony . . .

In a span of 252 days, the National Review lost two Buckleys — one to death, another to resignation — and an election. Now, thanks to the coarsening effect of the Internet on political discourse, the magazine may have lost something else: its reputation as the cradle for conservative intellectuals and home for erudite and well-mannered debate prized by its founder, the late William F. Buckley Jr. In the general conservative blogosphere and in The Corner, National Review’s popular blog, the tenor of debate — particularly as it related to the fitness of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska to be...

By almost any measure, American conservatives should be thoroughly depressed. The Republican Party they support has just lost control of the White House, the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. They are about to lose the Supreme Court, which they never really managed to control. And the Washington punditocracy has declared almost unanimously that they are just starting a long march through the wilderness of opposition. So why are the 700 conservatives here on the National Review Post-Election Cruise enjoying themselves so much? Why do Governor Mitt Romney and Senator Fred Thompson exude such a relaxed confidence? Why is...

The Death Of An Americam Idea An electorate living high off the entitlement hog. By Mark Steyn ‘Give me liberty or give me death!” “Live free or die!” What's that? Oh, don't mind me. I'm just trying out slogans for the 2012 campaign and seeing which one would get the biggest laughs. My Republican friends are now saying, oh, not to worry, look at the exit polls, this is still a “center-right” country. Americans didn't vote to go left, they voted to go cool. It was a Dancing With The Stars election: Obama's a star and everyone wants to dance...

Marriage Moves Voters Extending constitutional protection to traditional marriage is hardly a narrow partisan affair. By William C. Duncan Beyond their practical effects, the very fact that 30 states have amended their constitutions to protect the definition of marriage in just over a decade is remarkable. This week, Arizona, California, and Florida joined the 27 states with existing marriage amendments. The most interesting campaign was in California where voter approval of Proposition 8 reversed a May decision of the California Supreme Court. That decision had purported to discover a previously unknown mandate to redefine marriage as the union of any...