Free Republic

Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) has come under withering fire on the presidential campaign trail in recent days over allegations that a newsletter he edited years ago contained racist commentary. I am a firm believer in former President Ronald Reagan’s commandment not to speak ill of a fellow Republican, but racism has no place in our society today, and Paul’s comments on race should disqualify him from holding the most powerful job in the world. Many of the inflammatory comments in the Paul newsletters were published in the 1980s and 1990s. That these disturbing remarks came under such headings as “Ron...

... I was floored to see just how bad it was when I was researching Dupes, and, specifically, digging into the Soviet Comintern Archives on Communist Party USA, where TNR frequents the files.... here are just a few examples from those opening decades, smack in the middle of Lenin’s and Stalin’s unholy rampage: From the outset, TNR peddled gibberish on Bolshevism.... it's no surprise that numerous TNR editors, regulars, and contributors did pilgrimage to the Soviet Motherland, where they were paraded from Potemkin village to Potemkin village by master manipulators. From the likes of Lincoln Steffens to John Dewey, they...

Although your humble correspondent has crossed swords (nanny note: "crossed swords" is strictly a metaphor) with the senior editor of the The New Republic in the past, he highly recommends Jonathan Chait's latest article in The New Republic, "The Arizona Shooting Is Not A Product Of Right-Wing Rage," as required reading for those members of the mainstream media who have blamed the "right-wing" for the shootings of Congresswoman Gabrille Giffords and others in Arizona on Saturday. Despite the fact that most of Chait's article displayed some refreshing mental clarity I do have some caveats about it because he does revert...

The Dove World Training Center in Gainesville, Florida and its pastor Perry (sic) Jones plan a Koran bonfire on the ninth anniversary of the World Trade Center-Pentagon enormity. SNIP But it is disgusting. And it is disgusting no matter how many people believe the act would be and should be protected by the First Amendment. In fact, it is uncivilized. I believe that the Obama administration should go to the Supreme Court or maybe tactically to the most sensible and civilized appellate court and seek an injunction against this atrocity that 1. will encourage Muslim madmen to respond in kind...

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign. The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public –...

It seems that, in the wake of the liberal celebrations over the passage of the Senate ObamaCare bill, their former vociferous, opposition to it has been tossed down the memory hole. And woe betide anyone who points out how much they used to hate it. Such was the case of The New Republic senior editor Jonathan Chait who castigates your humble correspondent in this article for pointing out this inconvenient fact: P.J. Gladnick at Newsbusters accuses yours truly of hypocrisy:

Remember all that hype from the liberals until last night about how horrible the Senate ObamaCare was? Yes, they admitted it was a terrible piece of legislation but it was necessary for the House of Representatives to pass it in order for the Senate to somehow improve it via reconciliation. Well, toss that all out the window. Suddenly, sans any change in that formerly detested bill, it has suddenly become a "brilliant" piece of legislation as you can see in this gushing ode to the current unchanged ObamaCare bill by Jonathan Chait of the New Republic: Historians will see this...

The liberal meltdown as a result of the last week's election in Massachusetts continues apace. And the latest victim of the Bay State choosing Republican #41 for a Senate seat is the editorial staff of The New Republic. Anybody who follows The New Republic, such as your humble correspondent who has kept the NewsBusters Eye of Sauron focused on that liberal outpost knows they are a bunch of policy wonks who have spent the better part of the past year obsessed over every arcane detail of ObamaCare as well as closely following its passage in its various versions through the...

Few liberals have been more insistent on the inevitability of ObamaCare than The New Republic editor Jonathan Chait (along with his TNR colleague Jonathan Cohn). He is stubbornly clinging to the notion that ObamaCare can be a done deal despite the results of yesterday's election in Massachussets giving Republicans the 41st vote to block it in the Senate. To give you an idea of how far Chait has gone off the deep end, take a look at his money quote on the topic of liberal Democrats who consider the Mass. election a referendum on ObamaCare in his ironically titled column,...

If I were to ask you to list just one way in which things could go wrong at the Copenhagen climate conference, the answer that would leap to the front for most of you would be "ClimateGate." Yet The New Republic lists three things that could mess up the talks at Copenhagen and guess what? ClimateGate appears in none of the answers. Here is The New Republic ignoring the gigantic elephant in the room in Three Ways The Copenhagen Talks Could Succeed (Or Go Bust). Writer Jesse Zwick starts out by admitting that there is really no chance a climate...

This is highly ironic. While the New York Times house "conservative," David Brooks, continues to shower love upon President Barack Obama, editor-in-chief Marty Peretz of the liberal New Republic has become highly critical of The One. Just how critical? Well, here is Peretz using a Financial Times report on the humiliating Olympic snub of Obama in Copenhagen as the platform to launch a withering critique of the president's self-defeating attitude: As the FT went on to say, the IOC "delivered an astonishing snub" to the president "by eliminating Chicago in the first round of voting." Chicago was dumped before Madrid...

When one first looks at this article in The New Republic speculating about if Ted Kennedy's son, Patrick Kennedy, could grow into a great political leader, you wouldn't be blamed for thinking it was a satirical story written by either Scott Ott or some other humor columnist. However the name of the author is Jason Zengerle and he is being dead serious which actually makes it funnier than any intentionally satirical story could be. What makes Zengerle's article especially funny is that he provides absolutely no proof that Patrick Kennedy displays the slightest bit of political leadership. In fact, Zengerle...

The Washington Post has published a glowing article about likely incoming AFL-CIO president, Richard Trumka (photo), titled "Trumka Hopes to Mend the AFL-CIO." Writer Chris Cillizza asks in the very first sentence of his story, "Can Richard Trumka reunite the labor movement?" Cillizza portrays Trumka as genuinely puzzled over the reason for the big split in the labor movement: With Trumka's election virtually ensured, the central question is whether he can heal the rift that occurred four years ago when the Service Employees International Union and the Teamsters (among others) left the AFL-CIO to form a new labor coalition known...

Keep in mind this is supposed to be a "modest," not laughable, proposal by the New Republic: replace Roland Burris in the U.S. Senate with Michelle Obama. And if she is not available, then send Barack Obama's mother-in-law to the Senate. I kid you not. Stand by for yet the latest chapter in Obama worship as you read this "modest" proposal by Jason Zengerle of the New Republic: Roland Burris is obviously going to put "U.S. Senator" on his mausoleum, but I can think of another entry that might belong there, as well: "Destroyer of the Illinois Democratic Party."

Mark Pinsky, writing for the New Republic, has an idea of what to do with all the journalists currently being laid off by the dying newspapers around the country: put them on the public payroll by hiring them for a resurrected Federal Writers Project. This was the New Deal project which provided funding for works which were primarily of a leftwing nature. And any current version of this government program is likely to have the same political ideology as its predecessor. Pinksy explains his dream of subsidizing unemployed journalists (emphasis mine): Barack Obama sounds like he wants to reach back...

They don't have political rallies to bring them together anymore, but it's no secret that a lot of people out there don't much like Barack Obama. The president-elect, according to his more fervent campaign-season detractors, has a raft of unforgivable faults: He's a socialist, a Muslim, an actual love-child of Malcolm X. His birth certificate was missing, his book had been ghost-written by William Ayers, and his wife, "Mrs. Grievance," as a National Review cover dubber her, was perennially on the cusp of getting caught ranting against the white man. The only thing keeping the Illinois senator's infamy from going...

Most liberal commentators have preferred not to dwell on Barack Obama's broken promise to accept public financing of his campaign. For years, liberals have been at the forefront of demanding such public financing with pious lectures about the corrupting effects of money on politics. So the McCain-Feingold public financing law was passed and guess who was the first presidential candidate to opt out of that system? The Lightworker who flat out lied to the public when he earlier pledged to accept public financing. So when Obama announced he was breaking his public financing pledge a few months ago, there was...

The New Republic associate editor, Eve Fairbanks, needs to send a royalty payment to her senior editor, Michelle Cottle. Actually, Fairbanks might as well bypass Cottle and send the payment directly to your humble correspondent since The New Republic senior editor ripped me off when she wrote that the Washington Post compared Todd Palin to Hillary Clinton just a half hour after I made the same suggestion. Since the Washington Post story never mentioned Hillary, where do you think Cottle got her story idea from? The following update to my September 22 blog post explains: UPDATE: Your humble correspondent wishes...

Your humble correspondent is of the opinion that, without even knowing who wins the election in November, one can easily determine the winner by simply looking at the screen shots of liberal members of the MSM on the day after the election. Are the faces of Brian Williams, Katie Couric, Chris Matthews, etc. mournful? That will pretty much tell you who won the election the previous day. Likewise, simply by reading an analysis of last night's debate in Oxford, Mississippi in liberal publications, one can determine who won that debate without even watching it. It is called reading the liberal...

The New Republic has come up with a new way to drag conservatism through the mud---Simply describe racists as "racially conservative." Get it? They are implying that if you are a conservative then you must somehow be a racist. Your humble correspondent caught them using this term in a story headlined on The New Republic front page as: "Are People Who Hang Up On Pollsters More Racist Than Those Who Don't?" The story itself pretty much goes nowhere since no voting trend by people who refuse to talk to pollsters can be discerned. However, the story does link conservatism with...

Jonathan! Oh Jonathan! Paging Jonathan Chait! To paraphrase a certain wide stance senator, you've been a bad boy, a naughty boy. In fact, you're probably even a nasty, bad, naughty boy. You see, you've written a long smear of Sarah Palin in the New Republic where you are The senior editor and yet a certain name was missing in your attack. What was that name? Why, Joe Biden. And why is Chait so reluctant to so much as mention Biden nowadays except in passing? Simple. When it looked like Biden had not a chance in the world of ever being...

What a difference a few weeks make. It wasn't too long ago that the liberal media were already congratulating themselves on Barack Obama's "inevitable" victory. Many of those reports crossed the line into flat out gloating in which the election itself was a mere formality on the road to the coronation of the Lightworker. Well, that was then and now it appears that Obama's halo of perfection has become quite tarnished to the extent that the liberal New Republic is worrying if their erstwhile messiah is heading towards a "long, disappointing fall." John B. Judis, a senior editor of The...

Interesting TNR article here. The thing is about how the Obama campaign's hubris is starting to piss off the media. In particular an incident with a NYT reporter is written about in some length. When you get lefty rags like TNR openly making admissions like the quote below, and whining about how closed and controlling the Obama campaign is, it sounds to me like the campaign's honeymoon is just about over....The press certainly helped Obama get so far so fast; the question is, how far can he get if his campaign alienates them?... ...But, as Obama ascended from underdog to...

The presidential election has an oddly placid feel to it. Four years ago, the notion that George W. Bush would get another four years in office, actually ratified by a plurality of the voters, was more than any liberal could bear, and, after the election, there was loose talk everywhere about "Jesusland" and wanting to flee to Canada. This time, even though Democrats are extremely enthusiastic about Barack Obama, that life-and-death quality is absent. I think the reason is that a lot of liberals kind of like John McCain. I know I do.

Gay Activists Ascendant by: Audra Taylor, July 10, 2008 Anticipating unprecedented victories in the United States, gay rights groups in America are raising their profile at home and abroad. “It’s a really exciting time to be an LGBT American,” Rob Anderson, who edits the web site for Campus Progress, said at the group’s fourth annual national conference last week. The progressive student organization held its annual meeting at the Omni Shoreham Hotel. The panel was entitled, “Is LGBT Activism Obsolete?: Assessing the goals and methods of the LGBT movement,” and offered a particularly notable presentation. The panel of four LGBT...

The New Republic Bush's Last Laugh The Editors: On Obama vs. Clinton, Democrats need to choose or lose. In the recent history of presidential campaigning, April is the time when hope springs eternal. When every Democratic general election candidate--Michael Dukakis! John Kerry!--looks like he might have the stuff to pull off a landslide. It is the time to heal from the knocks and bruises suffered during the primary season. You raise money, you begin building a case for the fall, you vet vice presidential candidates, you start to knock around your opponent, and you still have time to head to...

Here's James Kirchick, Assistant Editor of the liberal New Republic, writing in NR's "Plank" blog last night about the New York Times McCain article [emphasis added]: What Story? So here's the essence of the Times' 3,000-word "bombshell" on John McCain. John Weaver, whom McCain fired last summer (indentified in the Times piece as "now an informal campaign adviser" to McCain, which sounds like a puffed-up euphemism for "unemployed") says that 8 years ago, he and two other former employees who have since "become disillusioned" (read: disgruntled), suspected that McCain was having an affair with a lobbyist. The rest of the...

Documents released by the Office of the Chief of Staff, U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base Florida, in relation to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests files for documents relating to the military investigation into the Scott Thomas Beauchamp "Shock Troops" article in The New Republic magazine. The following are the never-before published statements of soldiers interviewed in the course of the investigation. Names are redacted per federal privacy laws.

You hear a lot these days about the chaotic state of the GOP race, which is obviously true insofar as lots of candidates still have a shot at winning. But I don't think it's true in the sense that several candidates have an equal shot of winning. My sense is that Mitt Romney emerges from Michigan with some pretty clear advantages. For one thing, the first kind of chaos ("type 1") makes it pretty tough for Romney's rivals to raise money, which will, perhaps more than anything else, influence the outcome of the 21 February 5th contests. As this Politico piece notes, the GOP's general fundraising environment...

This is definitely a KOmmie THREAD that the Daily KOs would dearly wish to have disappeared down the memory hole. This thread titled, "Wingnut Thugs Personally Attack Soldier Serving In Iraq," was published in KOmmieland back in July. As you can see, the KOmmies are angrily attacking the "Wingnut Thugs" for daring to question the veracity of a soldier, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, whose allegations of atrocities in Iraq were published in The New Republic. One problem now for the KOmmies, it turns out that, in fact, the stories written by Beauchamp, The New Republic's Fabulist, were untrue. And WHO...

A Scott Beauchamp Update Since our last statement on “Shock Troops,” a Diarist by Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp that we published in our July 23 issue, we have continued our investigation into the article’s veracity. On Wednesday, for a brief period, The Drudge Report posted several documents from the Army’s own investigation into Beauchamp’s claims. Among those documents was a transcript of a phone conversation that TNR Editor Franklin Foer and TNR Executive Editor J. Peter Scoblic had with Beauchamp on September 6—the first time the Army had granted TNR permission to speak with Beauchamp since it cut off...

The story of General Petraeus getting accidentally shot in the chest is a case in point. One of his own soldiers had pulled the trigger. Normally, something very bad would have happened to that soldier and his commander. Instead Petraeus sent that soldier to Ranger School, and his Captain (Fred Johnson) was promoted early. In June, I witnessed LTC Fred Johnson helping to restore security and rebuild Baqubah. Fred Johnson is a believer in second chances. Some months ago, a soldier in Baghdad wrote a piece on the way war can degrade the morals and affect the judgment of combat...

The soldier whose New Republic article about military cruelty in Iraq was labeled false by Army investigators refused to defend his accusations when questioned by the magazine, even after being told that the editors could no longer support him unless he cooperated.In a recorded Sept. 6 conversation, the writer, Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, said from Iraq that the controversy had "spun out of control" and had become "insane" and "ridiculous" and concluded: "I'm not going to talk to anyone about anything." Beauchamp stood his ground even after Editor Franklin Foer told him "that if you're not able to talk about...

SHOCK DOCS: THE NEW REPUBLIC 'SHOCK TROOPS' STORY COLLAPSES WED Oct 24 2007 12:29:44 ET The DRUDGE REPORT has optained internal documents from the investigation of THE NEW REPUBLIC'S "Baghdad Diarist", Scott Thomas Beauchamp, an Army private turned war correspondent who reported tales of military malfeasance from the Iraq War front. The documents appear to expose that once the veracity of Beauchamp's diaries were called into question, and an Army investigation ensued, THE NEW REPUBLIC has failed to publicly account for publishing slanderous falsehoods about the U.S. military in a time of war. Document 1: Beauchamp Refuses to Stand by...

When Pajamas Media heard the authenticity questions surrounding the “Baghdad Diarist” articles by Scott Thomas Beauchamp in The New Republic, we asked our Washington Editor Richard Miniter to look into how the respected opinion magazine could once again be the locus of such a scandal. Miniter spoke with several people involved in the extraordinary story, including the whistle-blower and a German woman who was Beauchamp’s fiancée until just before he married, of all people, Miniter discovered, a fact-checker at The New Republic. That fiancée said of her former boyfriend, the soldier/reporter: “He hates the army. The only reason he joined...

The New Republic magazine recently ran into big trouble for publishing a first-person account of military savagery in Iraq. The author, Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, used the pseudonym "Scott Thomas" to write of the debasement of war that he claims he saw in the cauldron of Iraq. But it was soon discovered that one of the gruesome "wartime" incidents the private described -- the author, desensitized by war, mocking a disfigured woman -- took place in Kuwait before his unit actually went into Iraq. And when, post-publication, The New Republic rechecked Beauchamp's other suspicious anecdotes and assured its readers they...

If anyone ever starts a museum of horrible explanations, the one-liner by Newsweek's Evan Thomas about his magazine's dubious reporting on the Duke non-rape case— "The narrative was right but the facts were wrong" —is destined to become a popular exhibit, right up there with "we had to destroy the village to save it." What Mr. Thomas seems to mean is that the newsroom view of the lacrosse players as privileged, sexist, and arrogant white male jocks was the correct angle on the story. It wasn't. According to Duke's female lacrosse team and other women on campus, the male players...

NEW YORK - A magazine gets a hot story straight from a soldier in Iraq and publishes his writing, complete with gory details, under a pseudonym. The stories are chilling: An Iraqi boy befriends American troops and later has his tongue cut out by insurgents. Soldiers mock a disfigured woman sitting near them in a dining hall. As a diversion, soldiers run over dogs with armored personnel carriers. Compelling stuff, and, according to the Army, not true. Three articles by the soldier have run since January in The New Republic, a liberal magazine with a small circulation owned by Canadian...

In their latest demonstration of how much they love the troops, liberals have produced yet another anti-war hoax.

Can't say we haven't seen this before: Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a writer for the New Republic, has recanted his tales of American military savagery according to the Weekly Standard (h/t Powerline): The Weekly Standard has learned from a military source close to the investigation that Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp--author of the much-disputed "Shock Troops" article in the New Republic's July 23 issue as well as two previous "Baghdad Diarist" columns--signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods--fabrications containing only "a smidgen of truth," in the words of our source.Separately,...

Col. Steven Boylan, Public Affairs Officer for U.S. Army Commanding General in Iraq David Petraeus, just emailed me the following in response to my request to confirm an earlier report that the U.S. Army's investigation into the claims made by PV-2 Scott Thomas Beauchamp made in The New Republic had been completed. He states: To your question: Were there any truth to what was being said by Thomas? Answer: An investigation of the allegations were conducted by the command and found to be false. In fact, members of Thomas' platoon and company were all interviewed and no one could substantiate...

The New Republic has published the results of their investigation into the events described by Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp. The editors say, we spoke with five other members of Beauchamp's company, and all corroborated Beauchamp's anecdotes, which they witnessed or, in the case of one solider, heard about contemporaneously. Except they didn't. The recollections of these three soldiers differ from Beauchamp's on one significant detail (the only fact in the piece that we have determined to be inaccurate): They say the conversation [mocking a disfigured woman] occurred at Camp Buehring, in Kuwait, prior to the unit's arrival in Iraq. When...

A STATEMENT FROM SCOTT THOMAS BEAUCHAMP: As we've noted in this space, some have questioned details that appeared in the Diarist "Shock Troops," published under the pseudonym Scott Thomas. According to Major Kirk Luedeke, a public affairs officer at Forward Operating Base Falcon, a formal military investigation has also been launched into the incidents described in the piece. Although the article was rigorously edited and fact-checked before it was published, we have decided to go back and, to the extent possible, re-report every detail. This process takes considerable time, as the primary subjects are on another continent, with intermittent access...

A STATEMENT FROM SCOTT THOMAS BEAUCHAMP: As we've noted in this space, some have questioned details that appeared in the Diarist "Shock Troops," published under the pseudonym Scott Thomas. According to Major Kirk Luedeke, a public affairs officer at Forward Operating Base Falcon, a formal military investigation has also been launched into the incidents described in the piece. Although the article was rigorously edited and fact-checked before it was published, we have decided to go back and, to the extent possible, re-report every detail. This process takes considerable time, as the primary subjects are on another continent, with intermittent access...

The New Republic has published an article entitled "Shock Troops" which paints a most unflattering pictures of our troops in Iraq. The problem is that it seems to be the work of another fabulist who like Time's McGirk was telling a story about soldiers "too good" to be checked. Dean Barnett notes: "...PERSONALLY, I FIND THIS TO BE ONE OF THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS incidents of the war. I've spent much of the past couple of weeks speaking to men who have served in Iraq to prepare a piece for the next issue of the Weekly Standard about what I call...

Over at the Weekly Standard, Michael Goldfarb continues to do yeoman’s work tracking down that very suspicious looking New Republic story from "Scott Thomas", a man purporting to be a soldier in Baghdad. Goldfarb’s doing such a good job, if he keeps it up through the day I may consider having him on as a guest this evening when I’m pinch-hitting for Hugh The New Republic dispatch from the pseudonymous soldier related several horrific tales, all of which seemed too horrifically perfect to check or corroborate: Goldfarb reports: "The first episode puts 'Thomas’s' unit at a 'chow hall' at an...

The Canadian media giant CanWest has taken a majority stake in the 92-year-old New Republic, and plans to relaunch the weekly as a thicker, glossier – and half as frequent – magazine with a more robust Web site. The new ownership and redesign completes a period of change at the magazine, which shifted markedly to the political left under its new editor, Franklin Foer, and has sought to shake off its association with the Bush administration’s pursuit of the Iraq war. CanWest, which publishes a dozen Canadian daily newspapers and owns other media properties around the world, is controlled by...

f you ever wander into a stranger's house and see Chris Hansen lurking about, it's time to call a lawyer. The gotcha "journalist" behind "Dateline" NBC's "To Catch A Predator" series has created a huge buzz by exposing and shaming Internet predators to the delight of millions of Americans, parents' groups, and even a swooning Oprah Winfrey. Nowadays, the "To Catch A Predator" website is, oddly enough, even hyping the fact that former Representative Mark Foley at one time praised the program--making the show seem like a twofer, I suppose: "To Catch A Hypocrite!"

In recent years, The New Republic, one of the nation's leading magazines of political and cultural commentary, has been embarrassed by scandals involving two of journalism's original sins: fabrication of stories and plagiarism. But the latest scandal, involving the magazine's cultural critic Lee Siegel, has to do with a transgression peculiar to the Internet age: sock puppetry. A sock puppet, in Internet parlance, is a false Internet identity created for deceptive purposes. Siegel, who had been writing a culture blog for The New Republic, had started using the pseudonym "sprezzatura" on the blog's forums to praise himself and savage his...

by Mark Finkelstein September 1, 2006 - 16:49 During the course of a conversation with former Deputy Defense Secretary Jed Babbin on this afternoon's show, Tucker Carlson described himself as "a real conservative." But it was just a few minutes earlier, chatting with New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart, that Carlson mentioned in passing that he hadn't supported President Bush for president in 2004. When Carlson stated that he had been wrong to support the war in Iraq [and now opposes it], Beinart retorted: "You've just made a statement which almost guarantees that you're going to have to support the Democratic...