Free Republic

EN ROUTE TO AFGHANISTAN — Dear Gov. Romney, It seems as if every pundit, campaign consultant and professor of political science has been on the air or in print lately, offering advice on how you can "jump-start," "turn around" or "reset" your presidential campaign. Most of them say that your best chance of "regaining momentum" will be during the upcoming presidential debates. Seeing as I will be in Afghanistan keeping company with our American heroes while you're debating their current commander in chief, this seems like a pretty good time to send you some of what I have heard them...

WASHINGTON — Ever since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2012, the Obama White House has sought to lay blame for deadly and destructive anti-American attacks in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and more than two dozen other countries on someone else. The O-Team — and the perpetrators — have had a lot of help from the "useful idiots" in the mainstream media. The disinformation campaign being waged by the Obama administration over the cause of this violence would be comedic but for the fact that six Americans have been killed and dozens have been injured. From the perspective...

WASHINGTON — The storming of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and the brutal murders of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, produced chaos this week in the so-called mainstream media. Instead of asking about how the heck this could happen in the aftermath of the Obama administration's Arab Spring euphoria, "reporters" started looking for scapegoats. The potentates of the press first focused their ire on something few of them even had seen — a puerile Internet video titled "Innocence of Muslims" — and then they turned their guns on Republican presidential...

WASHINGTON — According to the pundits and politicians, this election is all about the economy. We're all supposed to know that — because we're not stupid. That's why the Republicans had a "national debt clock" over their convention floor in Tampa, Fla., and the Democrats didn't have one in Charlotte, N.C. To no one's surprise, the Dems didn't remind anyone in the Charlotte Convention Center that our national debt topped $16 trillion on the opening day of their conclave — a 50 percent increase during the Obama presidency. The so-called mainstream media played along and focused instead on the change...

MY LIVING ROOM COUCH — It was the political convention that almost wasn't. In the run-up to the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., Democrats and their fellow travelers in the so-called mainstream media claimed that the GOP was waging a "war against women," depicted Mitt Romney as a heartless felon responsible for the death of a woman who lost her health insurance and blasted Romney for choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate. They then tried to define Ryan as a heartless ideologue who would eliminate Medicare and throw grandmothers off a cliff. And then a tropical storm-turned-hurricane named...

WASHINGTON — Americans following this year's presidential campaign would never know it from mainstream media coverage, but the commander in chief we hired four years ago has set the United States on a course for unilateral disarmament. The following people hope you won't notice until after Nov. 6: Vladimir Putin, Liang Guanglie, Kim Jong-un, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Sayyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, A.Q. Khan and of course, Barack Obama. The 10 individuals above share a common fascination: nuclear weapons. Vladimir Putin, Russia's modern czar; Liang Guanglie, minister of national defense for...

WASHINGTON — In December 2009, our commander in chief went to West Point and proclaimed that he would withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by 2014. Since then, he has proudly emphasized that "We are on a course to end this war responsibly." Now U.S. and NATO troops and loyal Afghan soldiers and police officers are reaping the bitter harvest of the seeds that Barack Obama planted with those words. Over the last 10 days, in five separate incidents, seven American military personnel were killed in what used to be called "green on blue attacks" — where Afghan soldiers or...

WASHINGTON — According to the pollsters and the so-called mainstream media, as of the dead of summer, the presidential contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is a dead heat. We also are told this race is all about the "economy" or "jobs" or "middle-class taxes" or "repealing Obamacare." Or not. Supposedly, we're turned off by negative campaign ads, but we also want to know whether Romney really caused the death of an unemployed woman a half-dozen years ago — as alleged by a Democratic super PAC commercial. And of course, we all are looking forward to poring over every...

WASHINGTON — This week's revelation about the president's authorizing covert action in Syria should not have come as a surprise to anyone. On Wednesday, Aug. 1, CNN carried a breathless report sourced to "U.S. officials" that our beloved Nobel Peace Prize recipient in the Oval Office "has signed a covert directive authorizing U.S. support for Syrian rebels battling President Bashar al-Assad." According to the story, which was picked up by dozens of other outlets within hours, "The secret order, referred to as an intelligence 'finding,' allows for clandestine support by the CIA and other agencies." Given the torrent of self-adulatory...

GEORGETOWN, S.C. — When Alexander the Great died at the age of 32 in 323 B.C., his once unbeatable army began a 2,900-mile withdrawal from India and headed home to Macedonia. As they retreated, the empire they had created collapsed behind them. To prevent pursuit, Alexander's royal cavalry and infantry dealt viciously with all internal dissent, destroyed cities and burned bridges. The Russians employed a similar scorched-earth tactic against Napoleon in 1812, as did the Red Army when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. It's a maneuver now being employed both domestically and internationally by Barack Obama. The...

GEORGETOWN, S.C. — Taking a dozen grandchildren on vacation means that we buy cereal by the ton and milk in multiple gallons. I was in the cereal aisle, squinting at the list of ingredients on a brightly colored box of "high-fiber multigrain something," when a fellow shopper put the question to me: "So, Col. North, what's the 'October surprise' for this election?" I almost said, "High-fructose corn syrup" — the ingredient I had been instructed to avoid — but settled instead for this: "Syria. Bashar Assad is likely to go down before we go to the polls, and that will...

GEORGETOWN, S.C. — Here in the Carolina Lowcountry, there are few things lower in the esteem of American citizens than the United Nations. While filling the tank of my SUV this morning, I noted the following about the pickup truck at the pump ahead of me: a South Carolina license plate, a U.S. Marine Corps decal, a National Rifle Association decal, a gun rack in the rear window, a sticker reading "Armed Infidel" and another that said "Get US Out of the UN" on it. The owner, it turned out, was a medical doctor on his way to visit a...

PURCELLVILLE, Va. — As is our custom, millions of Americans celebrated Independence Day this year with family, friends and neighbors. Here in Purcellville, there was an old-fashioned parade down Main Street, followed by a barbecue, a church service to pray for our nation — and fireworks. For many here in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, it was also day five without electricity — and very hot. The hardships caused by last week's powerful storms and power outages are real. More than a dozen of our countrymen have died. The oppressive temperatures remind me that nearly halfway around...

WASHINGTON — It's been a week of big decisions in our nation's capital. The Supreme Court's 5-4 verdict on Obamacare was the biggest story for politicians, pundits and the so-called mainstream media. That the justices reaffirmed the constitutional authority of Congress to levy taxes — even when the tax is called a "mandate" — should not have surprised anyone. The second-place decision of the week was the unprecedented 255-67 vote in the U.S. House of Representatives to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for his unwillingness to respond to congressional subpoenas for information on the Obama...

WASHINGTON — According to press reports from sycophants in the mainstream media, Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin had a productive, 2-hour, private meeting of the minds during this week's G-20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico. Don't believe it. The Obama-Putin meeting did indeed last two hours. And when it was over, the two leaders actually stood on the same platform where they read from prepared statements — and parted with the obligatory handshake after just 11 minutes — without taking questions from reporters. It's the shortest U.S.-Russian bilateral press availability since Mikhail Gorbachev walked out on Ronald Reagan in...

WASHINGTON — Senior members of Congress — both Republicans and Democrats — are reacting with shock and awe at the tsunami of national security leaks emanating from the Obama administration. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Greta Van Susteren on Fox News Channel that the unauthorized disclosures of classified information are "the most egregious breach of national security" he ever has seen. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told reporters this week, "The accelerating pace of such disclosures, the sensitivity of the matters in question and...

MANAGUA, Nicaragua — The classical definition of a hero is a person who puts himself at risk for the benefit of others. That certainly describes Adolfo Calero, who died June 2 at the age of 80. The obituaries of this remarkable man hardly do justice to his courage, perseverance, faithfulness and humility. Here is the Adolfo Calero I knew, admired and called a friend for nearly three decades: A graduate of Holy Cross High School in New Orleans and the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., he was a devout Roman Catholic and educated to be a...

WASHINGTON — The once highly touted Arab Spring has become the Arab Summer — scorching hot, unbearably dry and very brutal and bloody. Last weekend, as Americans prepared to celebrate Memorial Day and commemorated the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War, Bashar Assad unleashed tanks, artillery and his Quds force-trained shabiha militia to kill more than 100 Syrian civilians — most of them women and children. Though the atrocities and carnage in Syria continue, little but bluff and bluster is produced by the United Nations and the Obama administration. In the aftermath of the May 25 massacre, 11 nations...

Second Honeymoon. The sword Oliver North used to cut his wedding cake with wife Betsy has been returned after it went missing for 32 years. It’s the simplest of weapons, but for retired Lt. Col. Oliver North, the dress sword presented to him at his 1968 Naval Academy graduation symbolized the complexity of the life he was entering. North’s treasured sword was part of his Marine Corps uniform that demonstrated his commitment to fight in the Vietnam War, this year logging its 50th anniversary, where he would earn the Silver Star, Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts. He used...

WASHINGTON — My old American Heritage Dictionary defines the word "theater," inter alia, as "a large geographic area in which military operations are coordinated." Throughout World War II, official dispatches and press reports described military action and events in the European, Pacific and China-Burma-India "theaters of war." We now have a new definition, courtesy of our present commander in chief: a place to remind everyone that Osama bin Laden is still dead. On the anniversary of bin Laden's demise at the hands of U.S. special operators, the Barack Obama re-election campaign made a "surprise" middle-of-the-night visit to Kabul, Afghanistan....