Free Republic

In understanding how far the Democratic Party has moved from its center of gravity in an earlier generation, it is salutary to remember that Democrats were once known as the more international and hawkish of the two political parties. Until the late 1960s, Democrat presidents were consistently more likely than Republicans to flex America’s military might abroad. Democrat administrations led America into both World Wars. Democrat president Harry Truman promulgated the Truman Doctrine which like Bush’s own doctrine pledged America to support peoples fighting for their freedom abroad. No president during the Cold War sounded the call to arms...

David Frum has responded -- sort of -- to my Newsreal critique of his blistering attack on Glenn Beck in tones you would normally use for a Ward Churchill or a William Ayers or a Cynthia McKinney.I say "sort of" because he has not addressed the points I made and has instead misrepresented my views. I did not say that Beck's comments were false. Beck's sin so far as I can tell from David's posts are that he conflated Cass Sunstein with Peter Singer. His bad. How big a sin is this? Well it's all about context isn't it. Animal...

"It is also true that many liberals, despite sharing a common political front with the left, are not committed to radical agendas. They are pragmatic enough to tack in a conservative direction should the political wind shift. But by the same token, they are not anchored to any conservative principles that would hold them on course when the same wind shifts again." -- The Politics of Bad FaithThis Horowitz quote of the day was suggested by NewsReal blogger Chris Yogerst.

I distinctly remember one day when I was in the seventh grade and my father and I both had an appointment with a new dentist. (We'd recently moved back to Indiana after living in California for many years and had to find a new family dentist.)So we went to a dentist whose name I now mercifully forget. Both my Dad and I were a bit put off by several things. First was the sloppy dental hygienist who left us both with sore gums. Second was when the dentist tried to encourage my Dad to stop the orthodontics treatment I had...

Inspired by the dreamers who preceded them and innocent of their crimes, an unending cycle of generations would repeat what they had done. The suffering of the guilty and the innocent would continue without end, and nothing I could do or say would alter it. The summons I had answered was more modest by far. I was a witness. I needed not to forget what I had learned through pain, and to pay my debt. I needed to warn whom I could and to protect whom I might, even if it was only one individual or two. If I...

The last few days left many of us at a loss of words as we recalled the horrors of September 11th, 2001. But while people share stories of tragic loss and hope, pictures and afterthoughts, we still have the 9/11 “truthers” who like to tell us our fellow Americans died at the hands of our own government. Last night’s Red Eye discussed Charlie Sheen, the latest celebrity truther idiot to shoot off his mouth. He recently released a YouTube video demanding both a meeting with the president and a reinvestigation of 9/11: Sheen’s main message: “We want our country back,...

Thursday afternoon, MSNBC anchor David Shuster—who earned his stripes as a producer of “news segments” of the Michael Moore vein of "reporting" for Chris Matthews’s Hardball—made this statement while talking about the Joe Wilson “You lie,” kerfluffle: MSNBC ANCHOR DAVID SHUSTER: “You look at the image of the Republican Party, all white males with short haircuts. They look sort of angry. No women, no minorities, and it looks like they’ve sort of become unhinged.” I’m not willing to play Shuster’s game and count noses in the GOP, but if you looked at MSNBC’s coverage of Republicans, you would think the...

Barack Obama lied not once in his Health Care speech but twice -- and not on inconsequential issues, but big ones. The lies were direct and were compounded by the fact that he accused others of lying because they called him on his lies. Joe Wilson who sat on the congressional committees which reviewed the amendments that were then killed which would have required people to prove they're citizens. Of course! The Democrats are for open-borders and Obama is too. They lie all the time about their agendas. What we need is Republicans who refuse to apologize for telling the...

Conservative David Frum, having made a bad name for himself with a crusade against Rush Limbaugh in the leftwing press, has now taken out after Glenn Beck in a column titled "GOP Surrenders to Beck's Mob Rule." (Frum is an armchair aristocrat). I don't have a big quarrel with Frum's view that Beck's view of Cass Sunstein is "over the top" or off target. Conservatism is and should be a big tent where people can disagree in their judgments of issues and others. Frum is right that Sunstein is not a raving leftist. On the other hand he is not...

Tuesday night, MSNBC’s Hustler, Keith Olbermann, announced with a flourish that he would not follow the example of pornographer Larry Flynt and ask his tiny audience to go to work digging up dirt on Glenn Beck. Gee thanks. Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s not still NBC’s slime dog millionaire. Olbermann was MSNBC’s anchor for the broadcast of President Obama’s healthcare speech last night. (Imagine the screaming we would have heard from the whole mainstream media had Fox News used Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity in the anchor chair on for an Obama speech). Olbermann began the coverage immediately after...

Others here at NewsReal blog have already artfully analyzed President Barack Obama’s speech last night, in considerable depth and with great sobriety. Of all the reactions I’ve seen so far on the “right,” however, the one that surprised me most came from FOX News host Sean Hannity. That Hannity is no fan of the President’s policies is an understatement. Yet I don’t think I was the only viewer who was startled by Hannity’s no-holds-barred commentary yesterday evening. Among other things, Hannity called the President’s address “an attack speech that could have been written by James Carville,” one “full of partisan...

Barack Obama gave the most important speech of his presidency tonight and it was a partisan speech which -- as Ed Shultz put it on MSNBC -- said to Republicans, "we're going to roll over you." We will see if this political calculation works, or whether the Democrats driven by their ideological passions have over-reached and made another political miscalcuation which will bring their numbers even further to the ground. But perhaps the most remarkable moment of the speech -- and certainly the most politically bone-headed -- was to single out Sarah Palin and call her a liar because she...

“On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for our future.” --Van Jones, on his resignation as Green Jobs "Czar"With sadness probably not felt by the left since the death of Joseph Stalin, Amy Goodman and her fellow Communists at Democracy Now! offered an analysis of the events leading...

Yesterday, MSNBC hater-in-chief Keith Olbermann caused a minor kerflulffle in the online world with this threat posted on his blog at the Daily Kos: Find everything you can about Glenn Beck, Stu Burguiere, and Roger Ailes. . . . Tuesday we will expand this to the television audience and have a dedicated email address to accept leads, tips, contacts, on Beck, his radio producer Burguiere, and the chief of his tv enablers, Ailes . . . While this would be quite an escalation in the current ideological media battles—I personally find it hard enough to wade through the darkness and...

"Even as its own inhumanity and inefficiency consume revolutionary socialism in the East, however, a specter can be seen rising from its ashes in the West. The colors are no longer red but green, the accents are those of Malthus rather than Marx, but the missionary project is remarkably intact. The planet is still threatened, redemption through radical politics still presses: Better Green than Dead. In environmentalism, radicals have found a new paradigm for the paradigm lost." -- From Red to Green, in Left Illusions, page 310.

In all the excitement over Van Jones' resignation, people missed President Obama supporting Communists abroad, as he did at home. Late last week, SSINO (Secretary of State In Name Only) Hillary Clinton met with ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and cut off all remaining funds for Honduras' government: $30 million now, and $215 million over four years. Leftists are pushing for the IMF to follow suit. In addition to being part of the Castro-Chavez axis, Zelaya sought to subvert the constitution -- and he stands accused of running drugs. Honduran Foreign Minister Enrique Ortez told the press, "Every night, three...

Susana Martinez Republican, Governor of New MexicoNew Mexico has some major ethics hurdles to overcome. For this, voters can thank the state’s Democratic Party, which has plagued politics in New Mexico, most recently with a slew of arrests and convictions on a range of corruption charges that included an investigation into Bill Richardson’s involvement in a pay-to-play scheme (which led to his January withdrawal from consideration to be Obama’s Secretary of Commerce). FOX & Friends hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade spoke earlier this year with Seton Motley of the Media Research Center on the Democrat-led scandals that have...

The O'Reilly Factor went after the John Adams Project tonight. Kudos to O'Reilly for doing this. The project is to follow CIA officials around and photograph them and show the photographs to Guantanamo terrorists. O'Reilly condemned this exposure of America's defenders to America's enemies as disgusting. And he zeroed in on the olympic hypocrisy of liberals who pretended to be concerned over the exposure of Valerie Plame's covert identity but think nothing of exposing other CIA officials (who don't share Plame's leftwing agendas). Yes, but hypocrisy is second nature to radicals because they are on a mission from their god...

As if NewsReal hasn't stumbled into enough debates already, now we have John Nolte, Editor-In-Chief of the essential conservative pop culture blog Big Hollywood challenging us. On September 1 Chris Yogerst (who also writes for Big Hollywood and Parcbench in addition to NewsReal) wrote a post here jumping into the debate about "Inglourious Basterds" and why Hollywood often employs politically correct villains: With the politics surrounding Hollywood, one thing people have to understand is that not every filmmaker thinks he or she is a politician. They don’t all want to make political statements with their films. Quentin Tarantino is one...

David Horowitz's recent appearance on Glenn Beck and the subsequent resignation of former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones has brought a renewed interest in understanding the nature of the political Left. I got an email yesterday from Robert, one of our readers: I am an avid reader and have followed David Horowitz for some time. Just finishing Liberal Fascism, I would like input into what you might consider to be the best 10-12 books an individual could read to best understand the progressive movement. Could you forward some recommendations? I promised Robert a post in which I made my recommendations....