Free Republic

I first became aware of politics, in the ordinary sense, during the presidential election of 1948. My parents and their friends belonged to the Democratic Party and had voted for Roosevelt. It was what they called their “mass work”—going to where the people were, in order to lead them to something better. This had been the Party line since the days of the Popular Front, when under orders from Moscow the comrades abandoned their “ultra left” position and stopped calling Roosevelt a fascist. “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism,” the Party leader Earl Browder had said, promoting the spirit of cooperation...

I've been thinking about this Nobel Prize kerfuffle. Is it the racism of low expectations that prompted the Nobel committee to give it to someone who has accomplished nothing so that even he can't figure out why he got, or is just their determination to further discredit a prize that is beneath contempt?

Those irony-deficient "senior fellows" at Media Matters are at it again. Today they're pretending to be outraged by the Washington Time's "fabricated" accusations of "racism" -- which is a little like Vice President Joe Biden accusing someone of plagiarism. "Did the WashTimes fabricate its latest ACORN attack?," they ask readers this morning, helpfully answering: "Yep". Media Matters then does what leftist apologists do when they can't mount a substantial argument: they turn into literal-minded Rain Man types, and try to nit-pick their target to death:

We cannot confront the fallacies of conspiracy thinking in our political culture if we do not understand it. In recent weeks Van Jones, the President's Green Jobs Czar, lost his job because of his embrace of conspiracy thinking. More recently popular talker Glenn Beck has been smeared by his opponents as a conspiracy nut. We can only decipher these issues and win these intellectual fights if we know just what kind of thinking needs to be isolated from political life. Click here for Part IClick here for Part IIClick here for Part III I had not responded to the 9/11...

In Jewish lore there is a legend of the lamed vovniks, the thirty-six just men on whom the existence of the world depends (Sarah would have had something to say about the gender prejudice of that). According to the legend, God had become so disgusted with his creation that he was determined to destroy it. But an angel came to plead with Him and to ask for a reprieve if she could find thirty-six just men in the world. In every generation, so the legend goes, there are always thirty-six just men – the lamed vovniks on whom its...

Today one of our commenters, Ben, posted a link to Media Bistro on David Horowitz's post about the newest installment in the debate with David Frum. Ben did so to demonstrate an interesting point: Glenn Beck did fairly well in a recent public opinion poll. Only 19% of Americans have a negative view of him. Compare that to the 50% who have a negative view of Rush Limbaugh. When it comes to Beck most people are either neutral or ignorant of him. The source of Media Bistro's information was a blog by Nate Silver, the influential polling analyst behind FiveThirtyEight.Com....

For reasons best known to himself, David Frum has decided to suppress my side of the debate on his website. Thus my reply to his latest post (which follows below) doesn't appear on his website. I agree with you David that this dialogue is getting more focused, and I find it much more pleasurable (and hopefully informative) as a result. There are two issues here. One is a remarkable conservative outburst against the broadcaster Glenn Beck which includes you, Mark Levin and Pete Wehner among others, and which collectively wishes for his early self-destruction. The message from the three...

One of the left’s favorite (and lamest) rhetorical tricks is to simply reprint one of their opponent’s statements, verbatim, and without comment. You see, the statement’s idiocy and offensiveness is self-evident, and will surely shock the conscience of any “right thinking” reader. No rebuttal required. It’s a lazy, sophomoric ploy. I suppose the left has been our self-appointed cultural hall monitor for so long they’ve lost the ability, or the need, to offer up sound counterarguments. There’s a classic example of this dopey tactic up at Media Matters today. The Media Matters post is nothing more than a video clip...

If you are among the percentage of the populace that regularly watches the Rachel Maddow show, you know that recently she’s been working herself into a high-pitched, smirking lather over “conservadems”—her pejorative term for Blue Dogs and other Democrats whom Maddow is incensed at for their refusal to roll over and play lapdog for her leftist heroes and their radical agenda. Why, these Democrats have the audacity to actually worry that creating huge new government bureaucracies controlling everything from health care to mortgages, and raising middle-class tax burdens, might not be what this country needs to get out of a...

On Hardball Monday night, Chris Matthews showed he just may be losing it—or at least why he’s been steadily losing his audience for quite some time. For months, Matthews has been playing the race card at every opportunity—or creating his own, even going so far afield as a weird attempt to make Alaskan Sarah Palin some kind of modern Scarlet O’Hara. Wrapping up the show with “The Politics Fix,” with guests syndicated radio host Michael Smerconish and Dominic Carter, Senior Political Reporter from New York 1, Matthews proved there is now no situation where Republicans may have an electoral or...

A really satisfying, engaging intellectual discussion is like a symphony. Each participant in a debate brings a different sound to an important project. One person puts forth an elegant flute rift, then another chimes in with some deeper notes on the tuba, then a third contributes on the clarinet. Each instrument is akin to a different ideological approach, life experience, or a new set of key facts. These different sounds all contribute to something far greater than the sum of their parts. All except for one: the screeching, electric guitar feedback of those who blast ad hominem assaults into intellectual...

Ever since the Tea Party phenomenon exploded onto the political scene a few months back, the Left has been up in arms over the inflammatory and offensive rhetoric featured on some of the signs and placards displayed by those in attendance. Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow, among others, have fumed repeatedly about the bad taste exhibited by many of those expressing their displeasure with the President and his policies. The Huffington Post ran a feature on this subject, titled “10 Most Offensive Tea Party Signs,” which singled out, among others, the following winners -- or perhaps “losers” is...

The debate over Glenn Beck continues at FrontPage in a discussion coordinated by my colleague Jamie Glazov. If you've enjoyed what we've had so far, then you're going to love this new installment.

Fox News's "Special Report" on Friday featured Secretary of State Hillary Clinton outlining the Obama administration's Iran policy, and she may as well have begun, "Stop me if you've heard this one before...." Her speech could have been culled from any official statement on the topic for at least three years. "Our message will be clear," said Hillary. "We are serious, and we will soon see if the Iranians are serious. This is not about process for the sake of process.... We have no appetite for talks without action." Discerning whether Iran is "serious" has been the official, do-nothing euphemism...

One of Democracy Now!’s featured headline stories yesterday centered on the Government Accountability Office audit which claims that the fence being built along the US Border with Mexico is years behind schedule and has run billions of dollars over initial cost projections. Auditors claim that the completed fence will cost an additional $6.5 billion in maintenance expenses, but more importantly, there will be “no mechanisms to gauge its actual impact.” There are two points, then, to consider when it comes to the border fence: 1) Is it worth it? and 2) Will it work? Naturally, Democracy Now!’s host Amy Goodman...

Watching Bret Baier's report on the United Nations' umpteenth Orwellian condemnation of Israel posing as a report on the Gaza War, should remind everyone of what a perilous and depraved world we live in. It's as if Hitler and Mussolini ran the League of Nations in the inter-war period, and I mean that literally, absolutely literally. Hamas Nazis fired rockets into Israeli schoolyards for 2 and a half years. Israel struck back. Hamas placed its military headquarters under hospitals and apartment buildings, and fired its rockets from civilian neighborhoods and the Israelis finally -- and belatedly -- struck back. And...

Even if Sean Hannity's FOX News show isn't on your regular viewing schedule, you may want to tune in tonight, or set the TiVo. The FOX "promos" promise an episode that's practically designed with NewsReal readers in mind. Called "The President's Top 10," the show is a one-hour special examining the people "who the president has picked to shape our country" -- that is, the various czars and other insiders we've been raising the alarm about at NewsReal for months now. From the looks of the graphic (above), Hannity's targets include:

Jameel Jaffer, pictured above, is a litigator for the American Civil Liberties Union and Director of the ACLU's National Security Project. He is a darling of the far left who has litigated cases against the United States in support of terrorist rights. He has also fought in favor of allowing radical Islamists such as Tariq Ramadan into the U.S.; Ramadan has been barred from entering our country since 2004 because of his alleged financial contributions to two Palestinian groups designated by the U.S. Treasury as fundraising agencies for Hamas. Remember this picture, because Jameel Jaffer could become a regular fixture...

As Jimmy Carter portrays conservatives as violent racists, it's worth remembering Carter's own history of racial demagoguery. Carter campaigned for governor of Georgia as a self-proclaimed “redneck,” in an era when that word had pronounced racial connotations. His campaign distributed a photo of his gubernatorial opponent Carl Sanders being embraced by black basketball players to a Ku Klux Klan rally. Carter pledged to invite Alabama's infamous segregationist governor George Wallace to Georgia if elected. He once said he was “proud” to have the equally segregationist Lester Maddox as his lieutenant governor following the 1970 election, calling Governor Axe-handle “the essence...

Every day brings news of a fresh new scandal at the radical activist group ACORN, whose ties to President Obama go way back. Tuesday on his TV show, Glenn Beck produced a fourth undercover video showing an ACORN employee condoning or encouraging illegal behavior. The latest video shows a woman in ACORN's San Bernardino, California, office -- claiming to have close ties to various politicians -- acknowledge that she used to be in the prostitution business and that she had murdered her own husband. (I couldn't make this stuff up!) The video appeared earlier in the day at Andrew Breitbart's...