Free Republic

He is alive! Norman Podhoretz is alive, and he agreed to an interview with The Wall Street Journal's very perceptive Barton Swaim this weekend. He says that many of his peers are now deceased but not him, and he certainly did not sound deceased. Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol have given up the ghost, and American political commentary is the poorer for their passing, but Norman is still with us, and at 91 -- almost 92 -- he is full of fire. He went on for almost a full page of the Journal, and I agreed with every word. In...

There was a time—roughly from the mid-1960s to the rise of Donald Trump in 2015—when the American right was more or less definable. No more. Major political parties are always riven by internal disputes, but even during George W. Bush’s second term, at the nadir of the Iraq war, the Republican coalition seemed to hang together better than it has these past six years. Mr. Trump’s candidacy was a sign of that fracturing rather than its cause, but his presidency wasn’t marked by unity in the GOP. Quite the opposite. A significant faction of the party now advocates aggressive industrial...

Behind the Headlines by Justin RaimondoAntiwar.com April 8, 2002 WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA POSTREL?Post-9/11: Who speaks for libertarianism – the Old Right or the Neocon Clones? A note from the author: I apologize, in advance, for the sheer length of this column, but since it addresses the sell-out of basic libertarian principles by people and institutions who purport to speak in its name, I thought it important to address these questions thoroughly, with extensive quotations from those I name. Too bad, in attacking Antiwar.com, these pathetic losers didn't do the same – but then what can one expect from craven...

President Obama's pitch for a military strike in Syria looked so politically clueless that he left supporters and foes alike scratching their heads: What was he thinking? For some, the answer was obvious. Because every conspiracy theory ever concocted about the President — from him being a secret Muslim agent sent from Kenya to take over the government to gay-sex-and-cocaine binges in the backseats of limousines — all make perfect sense if you simply accept the foundational supposition that Obama hates America. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Sunday, Norman Podhoretz argued that Syria showed the swift collapse of...

It is entirely understandable that Barack Obama's way of dealing with Syria in recent weeks should have elicited responses ranging from puzzlement to disgust. Even members of his own party are despairingly echoing in private the public denunciations of him as "incompetent," "bungling," "feckless," "amateurish" and "in over his head" coming from his political opponents on the right. For how else to characterize a president who declares war against what he calls a great evil demanding immediate extirpation and in the next breath announces that he will postpone taking action for at least 10 days—and then goes off to play...

Nothing annoys certain of my fellow conservative intellectuals more than when I remind them, as on occasion I mischievously do, that the derogatory things they say about Sarah Palin are uncannily similar to what many of their forebears once said about Ronald Reagan. It's hard to imagine now, but 31 years ago, when I first announced that I was supporting Reagan in his bid for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, I was routinely asked by friends on the right how I could possibly associate myself with this "airhead," this B movie star, who was not only stupid but incompetent. They...

In Defense of Sarah Palin She understands that the U.S. has been a force for good in the world—which is more than can be said of our president. NORMAN PODHORETZ Nothing annoys certain of my fellow conservative intellectuals more than when I remind them, as on occasion I mischievously do, that the derogatory things they say about Sarah Palin are uncannily similar to what many of their forebears once said about Ronald Reagan. It's hard to imagine now, but 31 years ago, when I first announced that I was supporting Reagan in his bid for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination,...

Quick thank you to those who emailed about Norman Podhoretz's kind mention in today's Wall Street Journal. Oddly enough I met John Podhoretz for drinks last night in Chicago, and neither of us were aware of the piece until right before. Continued

[Ed. note: In what easily ranks as the high point in my blogging career, and the low point of the entire neoconservative movement, I was somehow invited to attend the 80th Birthday Roast of Norman Podhoretz at the Park Plaza in New York last night where I got to rub elbows with, among others, Charles Krauthammer, William Bennett, Lucianne Goldberg, Paul Gigot, Mark Steyn, Henry Kissinger and the whole Podhoretz family. What follows is my small contribution to the roast, an edited version of which was wonderfully performed in character by the great Orson Bean. Many thanks to Commentary editor John Podhoretz for including me in...

Is there a threat to Israel from the United States under Barack Obama? The question itself seems perverse. For in spite of the hostility to Israel in certain American quarters, this country has more often than not been the beleaguered Jewish state’s only friend in the face of threats coming from others. Nor has the young Obama administration been any less fervent than its last two predecessors in declaring an undying commitment to the security and survival of Israel.

ISN'T IT GREAT to know that the Republican candidates for president are all hopped up about moral values? In presentations to conservative voters in Florida at the "Value Voter Summit," major presidential hopefuls Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani each sought to outscore their opponents on those matters that so exercise the hearts and minds of the evangelicals. It's intriguing to see how these anxious social conservatives (and their candidates on that day) define values. Their big four issues are abortion, gay rights, religious liberalism and gun control. These "no, no, no, no" positions that stress the...

As part of her job at an influential national security think tank, Julianne Smith brings politicians and senior policy-makers from all over Europe to Washington for candid closed-door meetings with the policy advisers to the candidates vying to replace President George W. Bush. The Europeans usually arrive eager to discuss the coming era that some are dubbing "AB" — "After Bush." That is the highly anticipated period beginning on Jan. 20, 2009, in which a newly sworn-in American president, chastened by the troubles in Iraq and by the scorn of allies who say the Bush White House flouted international law,...

The Giuliani candidacy has polarized politically conservative Christians and Jews — perhaps less over Rudy’s position on abortion than, more subtly, over a question of emphasis. Who’s right? The Jewish “neoconservatives,” who make up more than half of Giuliani’s star foreign-policy advisory team (Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes, Michael Rubin, Martin Kramer, and David Frum)? Or Christians, like Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, who would not rule out supporting a third party candidate if Giuliani gets the nomination? To adjudicate the dispute, I propose an appeal to the part of the Bible on whose authority Jews (like myself) and Christians...

Today, Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism becomes available at bookstores everywhere. Drawing on Podhoretz’s seminal essays in COMMENTARY, World War IV addresses the most serious topic of our time—the battle against global Islamist terror—with its author’s customary force, wit, clarity, and courage. See below for our interview with Podhoretz about his book. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/contentions/index.php/peach/909

Likewise, those 9/11 families should know that, if you want your child's death that morning to have meaning, what matters is not whether you hound Boeing into admitting liability but whether you insist that the movement that murdered your daughter is hunted down and the sustaining ideological virus that led thousands of others to dance up and down in the streets cheering her death is expunged from the earth. In his pugnacious new book, Norman Podhoretz calls for redesignating this conflict as World War IV. Certainly, it would have been easier politically to frame the Iraq campaign as being a...

“You don’t roll out a new product in August,” said President Bush’s aide, Andrew Card, apropos Iraq in the summer of 2002. But in this seventh September of a no longer new war a somewhat battered product is in need of a rebranding. It was launched in the days after 9/11 as a “war on terror,” an artful evasion deemed necessary on the grounds that a war on any enemy beginning with “Islamist,” “Islamo-,” or “Islamic” might give the impression we had some, ah, issues with Islam itself and only complicate things further with various “friends” like Mubarak and the...

Some set the matter aside as being nothing more than verbal play for the benefit of word-men. What term properly designates what we are doing, and what we are enduring, in many parts of the world, the symbolic center of which is the Twin Towers site in Manhattan? Sometimes the words chosen can mean the justification of an additional measure of military power. Always they calibrate the public mood and the public perception of what is going on. I am informed that French pacifists, ensconced in the French Academy in 1939 and determined to understate Nazi military exercises (even...

Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani is packing his campaign staff with Middle East Hawks – including one who urges a U.S. military strike on Iran. Giuliani recently announced he had assembled a "team of foreign policy advisers featuring several prominent neoconservatives, including one of the movement’s founders, Norman Podhoretz,” the Jewish publication Forward reported. Giuliani’s advisory panel also includes several figures with experience in Israeli affairs, Forward noted. His chief foreign policy adviser is Charles Hill, who once served as political counselor to the American Embassy in Tel Aviv. On the panel as well is Martin Kramer, an expert on Islam...

I got a press release the other day from Republican presidential contender Rudy Giuliani. He was announcing a photo opportunity. It seems a UFO will be landing soon to take him back to his home planet. Photographers are invited. Actually the press release didn't say that. What it really said is that Giuliani has appointed Norman Podhoretz as a foreign policy advisor. But the effect is the same. Only a visitor from another planet could think that the way to win the presidency of the United States is by taking foreign policy advice from the nuttiest man on Earth. That's...

Tuesday, Rudy Giuliani announced the line-up of his foreign policy team, addressing a key area of concern of many voters going into November 2008, a brief analysis might lend some insight into Rudy's perspective regarding the challenges ahead and how he would plan to deal with them as President. Giuliani's campaign has been buffeted by worries that his less conservative views on social issues (abortion, gun control, gay rights) and his own marital history might cost him the support of the more conservative members of the Republican Party. While the early GOP primaries are occurring in delegate-rich states that are...