Free Republic

The White House is writing off an ally to appease an enemy. The situation in Ukraine has become very grave. On December 17, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin sent U.S. president Joe Biden an ultimatum, effectively demanding that NATO abandon Eastern Europe or face military action. Biden agreed to a phone conversation with Putin to talk it over, giving the Kremlin what it sought: The affected countries were now on the table instead of at the table. When the two then talked on December 30, according to the White House, Biden rejected the ultimatum and informed Putin that if he proceeded...

The ideological trajectory followed by the first generation of neoconservatives, from their early fascination with Marxism during the Great Depression to their embrace of Cold War anti-communism and subsequent takeover of the Conservative movement, is by now a well-known chapter in American political history. The life and career of James Burnham followed a similar trajectory, provoking British academic Binoy Kampmark to label Burnham as “the first neoconservative.” Burnham, however, was a thinker who bore only an incidental resemblance to the neoconservatives. Indeed, Burnham was something of an enigmatic figure within the wider spectrum of the American Right. Most importantly, it...

LET'S GET READY TO RUMBLLLLEEEEEE! Michael sits down with lawyer and publisher of Human Events, Will Chamberlain to discuss their shared goals, their different approaches to reaching those goals, and whether or not there is an effective way to regulate social media (or anything). Have you forgotten what two people disagreeing amicably sounds like? Then this is the episode for you.

It appears that most of the teenagers in this video are from a Catholic high school near Covington, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. They mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ. “Bullying” is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here. For some of us, the gospel stories of Jesus’s passion and death are so familiar we no longer hear them. The evangelists are terse in their descriptions of the humiliations heaped on Jesus in the final hours before his...

Dr. Ben Carson has just made a hypocrite of himself and done great damage to the country by endorsing the moral monster, Donald Trump.

The Unwashed have, however, read enough to know that Democrats never do this — never attack their own voters like NRO and the rest of the Establishment have this year. But maybe — just maybe — because they spend all their time in the Real World and not hiding inside NRO’s erudite reading list, the Unwashed also intuitively understand that what NRO and the Establishment have been peddling for five presidential cycles is pure undiluted, self-serving bull shit. The Unwashed might not have read Shakespeare, but they can read a paycheck. The Unwashed might not have read Capitalism and Freedom,...

Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer. I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, “Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, or any one of his “Straggler” columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative. His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our...

We fear that to nominate former Speaker Newt Gingrich would be to blow the opportunity to win the White House next year. —The Editors

Mitt Romney refused to criticize his Massachusetts health-care program tonight, saying he would prefer to lose the primary rather than renounce it. “I’m standing by what I did in Massachusetts,” Romney said on Fox News Channel’s Special Report with Bret Baier. “I’m not trying to dust it aside. I’m absolutely firm that it was the right thing for our state. I’ll defend that and I understand it has political implications. And if it keeps me from winning a primary, so be it. But that happens to be the truth.” “It’s by far, the biggest challenge I have in the primary...

The Tea Party’s limited-government, constitutional heart is in the right place. But it needs much better guidance about how the Constitution works in wartime. The defense-authorization bill currently under congressional consideration contains some unremarkable, largely redundant provisions about the treatment of enemy combatants. Naturally, the now-familiar alliance of leftists and libertarian extremists — self-proclaimed “constitutionalists” all — attacked with their signature “sky is falling” equanimity. On Wednesday, my column addressed some of the more hysterical arguments posited by Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano. The real action, however, was taking place on the Senate floor, where Tea Party favorite Rand Paul...

RAMESH PONNURU DECEMBER 2, 2011 Romney’s the One Even though nobody has yet cast a vote in the primaries, Republicans are increasingly resigned to Gov. Mitt Romney’s winning the party’s presidential nomination. Every week he gets a few more endorsements from Republican officeholders. He has never had a commanding lead in the polls, but one by one the other candidates who have occupied the top tier with him — first Rep. Michele Bachmann, then Gov. Rick Perry, then Herman Cain — have fallen back out of it. The current surge for Newt Gingrich looks like one last fling before Republicans...

NOVEMBER 18, 2011 Cain’s Knowledge-Deficit Disorder He is running for president knowing little about major matters of public import. Poor Rick Perry. His “brain freeze” is indelible, otherwise it would forever be eclipsed by Herman Cain’s more cringe-inducing meanderings on Libya. At a meeting with the editors of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Cain was asked whether he agreed with Pres. Barack Obama’s handling of Libya. You would think he had been asked who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan, Cain’s joshing description of a prototypical gotcha foreign-policy question. What ensued was the longest five minutes of an editorial-board meeting ever. Cain...

A reminder about the totalitarian temptationThe Washington Post’s culture critic, Philip Kennicott, recently took to the pages of his paper to note the “cognitive dissonance” between ingrained “habits of homophobia” in American culture, on the one hand, and a recognition that “overt bigotry is no longer acceptable in the public square,” on the other. As an example of those who resolve this dissonance by holding fast to their homophobic prejudices, Kennicott cited Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, who had remarked on the similarities between the Empire State’s recent re-definition of marriage and the kind of human engineering attempted by...

Long before he became one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate — and the target of Congressman Pat Toomey's GOP primary challenge — Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania demonstrated a knack for notoriety. In 1964, as a member of the Warren Commission, he invented the "single-bullet theory" to explain how Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy. Conspiracy junkies have obsessed over him ever since. (In Oliver Stone's movie JFK, Kevin Costner's character labels Specter "an ambitious junior counselor" behind "one of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people.") Between serving on the Warren Commission and becoming a...

The Magazine's Credenda Among our convictions: It is the job of centralized government (in peacetime) to protect its citizens' lives, liberty and property. All other activities of government tend to diminish freedom and hamper progress. The growth of government(the dominant social feature of this century) must be fought relentlessly. In this great social conflict of the era, we are, without reservations, on the libertarian side. The profound crisis of our era is, in essence, the conflict between the Social Engineers, who seek to adjust mankind to conform with scientific utopias, and the disciples of Truth, who defend the organic moral...

Full disclosure: Rush Limbaugh is a friend and benefactor of this magazine, as he was a friend of its founder. He has sometimes written for us. That friendship has, however, never prevented him from expressing disagreement with our writers when he felt it appropriate, or vice versa. The controversies of recent weeks, largely ginned up by Democrats, provide us with another opportunity to express both our friendship and our occasional disagreement. The Democrats are trying to place Republicans in a bind by giving them a false choice: They can “kowtow” to Limbaugh, or they can denounce him as outside the...

Continuing its long tradition of welcoming talented immigrants, National Review has just landed my brilliant compatriot, Mark Steyn. He will be replacing me as the author of the backpage column in the dead-tree edition. I wish I could say he has some big shoes to fill--the truth of the matter is that shoving his feet into my footware will require him to pinch his toes. I'm going to continue blogging in this space, but otherwise will be taking a bit of a rest, pending the publication in January of the book Richard Perle & I have co-authored, AN END TO...

NPR just reported on the fake ossuary of St. James in Toronto--but with a spin that it had been purported to the ossuary "of a brother of Jesus"--thus putting their rather non-orthodox spin on things (i.e., questioning the Virgin Birth, etc.) Nice work again from our government's radio network. NPR--an affront not only to all Christians but to all Americans.