Free Republic

“It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning, and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people.” ... he hid as a young woman was raped, and saw Hamas fighters capture another young woman near a car. “She was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her. They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her.” ... many of the women were naked and bleeding from the genitals...they collected 1,000 bodies in 10 days from the festival site and the kibbutzim. “No one saw more than us ... Hamas...

He’s a bad example to the young, an embarrassment to the old, an insult to the institution and America. By Peggy Noonan

The new “West Side Story” is, so far, a box-office flop. Steven Spielberg’s much-anticipated remake of the landmark 1961 musical received rave reviews and has been called a masterpiece. Yet its first weekend theatrical release yielded only $10.5 million, which Variety called “a dismal result for a movie of its scale and scope.” --- It’s not woke, it’s wonderful. “America,” that most American of songs, so knowing but not jaded, is done differently from the original but better, more communally, and it’s just as joyous and comic. The Journal’s Joe Morgenstern used exactly the right word to describe this movie:...

The Real Threats to Our Democracy Electoral shenanigans and the abdication of judicial responsibility are the real threats to our democracy. Let the audits proceed. In the Wall Street Journal of June 10, Peggy Noonan captured the kernel of the crisis of national division that afflicts America: Donald Trump and opposed perceptions of last year’s presidential election. Equitable person though Noonan is, she qualifies as a Trump-hater, whose invective against Trump has only escalated over time. Noonan’s premise today is that any question about the 2016 presidential election is unfounded conspiracism, but that suspicion is growing, spread by “the Trump...

The Democrats think they’ve just had a big triumph. The president’s been impeached. But Republicans see themselves as gaining the upper hand. The House couldn’t lift the event into an air of historical gravity. They dressed in dark clothes and never smiled, as at a wake, but the deceased was making kicking sounds from the casket and appeared to be tweeting, so it was incongruous. There was no “debate” and no one tried to persuade anybody. The revealing moment was when Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the first article had passed and some Democrats apparently began to clap. She threw them...

There is a slight redemptive quality in the helpless, irrational, and often demented fury of the haters. The current safe harbor of the disdainers is to nod smugly to each other on cable news panels while insisting the president and his defenders have failed in their effort to represent the Ukraine allegations as bunk and legally unassailable. Now the administration is left scrambling for excuses and technicalities.This usually leads quite quickly to the idea that everyone knows the president’s “perfect” conversation with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky was “wrong” but that there is some question whether it justified impeachment and genuine...

Three years after outsider Donald Trump blew up the political world with his implausible victory over the consummate insider, Hillary Clinton, many establishment Republicans still don’t get it. From their elite cocoon, they continue to indulge the hauteur that put off ordinary voters who had grown tired of a fossilized political class that serially ignored their interests, and seemed more concerned with their own insider perks and privilege, rather than in repairing the damage that decades of bipartisan progressive technocracy had inflicted on the Constitutional order. The grande dame of the disgruntled NeverTrump Republicans has been the Wall Street Journal’s...

Look, the case has been made. Almost everything in the impeachment hearings this week fleshed out and backed up the charge that President Trump muscled Ukraine for political gain. The pending question is what precisely the House and its Democratic majority will decide to include in the articles of impeachment, what statutes or standards they will assert the president violated.

So many of us with conservative leanings have long respected the prose and insight of Peggy Noonan, now a prominent Wall Street Journal columnist, but initially admired for her work as a Reagan speechwriter. But her recent columns show she’s come to exemplify the ruling class elitism that simply doesn’t grasp the groundswell in the American heart that elected Donald Trump president. I consider myself to be right in the heart of that American heart. Raised in a lower middle-class home in small town America; father with a high school diploma, and mother with a junior college degree earned in...

Things are more fluid than they seem. That’s my impression of Washington right now. There’s something quiet going on, a mood shift. Impeachment of course will happen. The House will support whatever charges are ultimately introduced because most Democrats think the president is not fully sane and at least somewhat criminal. Also they’re Democrats and he’s a Republican. The charges will involve some level of foreign-policy malfeasance. The ultimate outcome depends on the Senate. It takes 67 votes to convict. Republicans control the Senate 53-47, and it is unlikely 20 of them will agree to remove a president of their...

Sunday, during the roundtable portion of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan warned the Hunter Biden side of the Trump impeachment story, which she called “the story of the swamp,” puts the younger Biden on the wrong side of the American people. Partial transcript as follows: CHUCK TODD: Peggy, it is — the Biden campaign has been trying to find that balance between trying to mitigate the damage that they think Trump’s doing and at the same time not letting Trump dictate the message. But Trump’s been dictating the message. NOONAN: Yes, Trump is the...

Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan said President Donald Trump’s style of “harum-scarum” was exhausting the America people. Noonan said, “Do you remember on the Ed Sullivan show when we were little children? There was a guy who came and balanced plates. There would be a stick, put a plate up, get it going, get another and then he would run back and forth just trying to keep them all up. Balancing plates is part of the tone of this administration and of this president.”

Off the premise of "keep your friends close and your enemies closer"… Here is Peggy Noonan at her worst… Full of intellectual snobbery and seething hatred towards Pres. Trump....she is such a joke. ""It was four years ago this week, June 16, 2015, and a great professional gift was given me. I had just watched Donald Trump’s announcement speech and was pondering its impact. This guy isn’t going to be president; we’ve been reading about his tabloid antics for 30 years. But he’ll have some impact, some support. Who? How much? At this point my phone rang. It was my...

“How did things ever get so far? I don’t know. It was so unfortunate, so unnecessary.” —Don Corleone, “The Godfather” I keep thinking about the dynamics the past few years between the president and what used to be called official Washington. That relationship is ugly and broken, but it could have been otherwise. he old ambassadors were willing to give him a chance. He destabilized the whole town instead. “How did things ever get so far? I don’t know. It was so unfortunate, so unnecessary.” —Don Corleone, “The Godfather” I keep thinking about the dynamics the past few years between...

The opener started with a Meet the Press panel featuring Peggy Noonan (as played by Cecily Strong), Donna Brazile (Leslie Jones) and Eugene Robinson (Keenan Thompson). “You’re all highly-respected journalists, so when all is said and done, what do you think Jeff Bezos’ penis is gonna look like?” SNL’s Chuck Todd (Kyle Mooney) asked. “I know normally high-minded journalists wouldn’t talk about something like this, but it does involve the richest man in America and the president of the United States.” “As a journalist, this is not something I ever thought I’d have to cover, but as a human, I’m...

... Democrats really and sincerely see the threat of violent words and actions as coming from the right. It’s Mr. Trump—he’s hateful and has no respect and it sets a tone. He encourages fights at his rallies; he said the other night that a congressman who pushed around a reporter was his kind of guy. He calls the press the enemy of the people. He widens all divisions, mindlessly yet opportunistically. No surprise his adversaries are being sent bombs. Republicans and the right truly, deeply see the threat as coming from the left. Rep. Maxine Waters and Sen. Cory Booker...

From Saudi arms sales to ‘Horseface,’ the weirdness of the Trump presidency never seems to let up. This may seem small, but I don’t think it is. I know it will seem old-fashioned. It has to do with a great nation’s sense of its own stature on the world stage. In the days after the apparent murder of the Saudi activist and writer Jamal Khashoggi, President Trump was repeatedly pressed about the potential U.S. response if it turned out, as seemed likely, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the killing. Mr. Trump made it clear his first consideration was...

Peggy Noonan: I Did Not Call Trump a Neanderthal — ‘That Would Not Be Fair’ to Neanderthals Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan said she did not call President Donald Trump a “Neanderthal” as he claimed at a rally on Saturday because “that would not be fair” to Neanderthals who had a “certain artistic complexity.” More at link above:

When it was first announced last Thursday that President Trump was to personally meet with North Korea Dictator Kim Jong-un for negotiations, the media’s response varied from optimistic to seething anger. But with some time, it appears as though their consensus is now to denounce the idea as was blatantly obvious on Sunday’s Meet the Press. The entire panel up in arms and fretting that Trump was either going to hand North Korea a victory or blow a gasket at the meeting and start a war. Moderator Chuck Todd, still bitter because Trump called him a “sleeping son of a...

There is inspiration in the Alabama outcome. American political standards made a comeback. Roy Moore’s loss was not a setback for the GOP; it was a setback for freakishness,an assertion of prudential judgment by the electorate, and came as a relief. A friend landed at JFK on election night. As the plane taxied to the gate, the pilot came on the PA and announced that Doug Jones was in the lead. The entire plane, back to front, burst into applause. “A big broad nerve was hit in this thing,” said the friend. Primary voters should absorb what happened after they...