Free Republic

Deep into the seventh year of his tenure, Barack Obama is thinking about his post-presidential legacy. We know this because he’s telling us so. In an interview this week with The Atlantic about the potential deal with Iran regarding its nuclear program, the president sought to use the fact of his relative youth and his consciousness about how history might judge him to his advantage: “Look, 20 years from now, I’m still going to be around, God willing. If Iran has a nuclear weapon, it’s my name on this. I think it’s fair to say that in addition to our...

The fascinating issue of America's character arose in a "Ricochet Podcast" featuring the sagacious Norman Podhoretz. Hosts Peter Robinson, Rob Long and James Lileks interviewed Podhoretz on a range of issues, but primarily American foreign policy. Long lamented that President Obama has been making a consummate mess of America's foreign policy, most recently in Syria, yet polls don't seem to reflect that Americans are as atuned to Obama's incompetence as one might expect -- and hope. Nor do Americans seem to be bothered by Russian President Vladimir Putin's denunciation of the United States in an op-ed for The New York...

The news this morning is, quite simply, catastrophic for the president. Economic growth in the second quarter slowed to 1.5 percent annualized from 2 percent in the first quarter. The economy is weakening as the election approaches. No one has ever won reelection in such circumstances. No one. (Harry Truman: 4.4 percent growth in Q2, 1948. Ike: 2 percent growth in 1956 Q2 after negative growth in Q1. Nixon, Q2, 1972: 5.3 percent. Clinton: 3.5 percent. GW Bush: 3.4 percent.) Granted, things aren’t as bad for Obama as they were for Jimmy Carter; in the second quarter of 1980, the...

Andrew Breitbart — my dear wild friend, who died yesterday at the heartbreakingly young age of 43 — could have become a mainstream media mogul, perhaps the first true mogul of the Internet era. There was a moment, a few years ago, when the size of his role in the Great Media Disruption that was the Internet suddenly came clear to the world, and every magazine of note and every newspaper of importance was chronicling him. If he’d been a man of conventional ambitions, he would’ve taken up the offers to introduce him to hedge-fund guys, raise a pile of...

<p>Perplexing but true: Mitt Romney is on the glide path to the most easily secured nomination a Republican presidential candidate has ever had — while being one of the weakest major candidates either party has ever seen.</p> <p>Paul will certainly stay in it with Romney all the way. Somebody has to. And that is not good news for the Republican Party, which will have to reckon with possibly ill-behaved Paul delegates at the convention in Tampa in August — delegates who might heckle Romney from the floor and otherwise disrupt his coronation.</p>

To be sure, no white candidate who had close associations with an outspoken hater of America like Jeremiah Wright and an unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers would have lasted a single day. But because Mr. Obama was black, and therefore entitled in the eyes of liberaldom to have hung out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were a bit extreme, he was given a pass. And in any case, what did such ancient history matter when he was also articulate and elegant and (as he himself had said) "non-threatening," all of which gave him a fighting chance...

Authors from several publications– the Atlantic, Commentary and the Washington Post have finally caught up on the political history of the past 5+ years–Governor Palin had an excellent record during her tenure. For some reason, the Atlantic writer, Joshua Green, finally realized in May of 2011 what Governor Palin accomplished as an oil and gas commissioner in 2003-2004 and as Governor 2006-2009. She took on the corruption in her own party in both roles. She revamped the oil taxation plan in Alaska by cleaning up the corruption of her predecessor and helping leave Alaska with what is currently a $12...

Japan may be on the verge of an unprecedented catastrophe. Saudi Arabia is all but colonizing Bahrain. Qaddafi is close to retaking Libya, with bloodbath to follow. And, as Jim Geraghty notes, the president of the United States is going on ESPN to talk about the NCAA and delivering speeches today on his rather dull plan to replace No Child Left Behind with No Teenager Left Behind, or something like that. It’s hard to overstate how poorly Barack Obama is doing in the face of these crises — and I don’t even mean how he’s doing substantively, which is a...

For months now, Republicans have turned to each other and said, "Who's the candidate?" President Obama is vulnerable in 2012, clearly, but you can't beat something with nothing, and right now, the GOP field looks pretty much like . . . nothing. Who'll have the stature to compete? Thanks to those Democratic lawmakers fleeing Wisconsin and Indiana to frustrate the democratic process they swore an oath to uphold, we may have an answer. They, and the demonstrators screaming about the governors seeking cuts in the absurdly generous benefits granted to public-sector workers, have created a national stage on which a...

Could the contrast have been more stark? President Obama was, to borrow John Podhoretz's phrase, "pitch perfect" in his speech at the Memorial "service" in Tucson, Arizona. He focused on those whose lives were cut short, those whose lives were shattered, what we might learn from this searing atrocity and why it's important that we do so. The President rose to the moment with dignity and grace. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, chose to respond to the atrocity by proclaiming that she was the victim of a "blood libel," attacked by evil meanies on the television set, when there...

Benyamin Korn's op-ed response to my recent blog on polls suggesting former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is lagging with more educated voters is something rare in political discourse these days – which is to say, civil. He made his points, he didn't hurl invectives, he wasn't nasty. But he was also wrong on a few counts, it seems to me. This was the main gist of his argument: “Pundits made similar assumptions about Ronald Reagan when he was a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980. Reagan also had considerable appeal among the less educated and the less affluent;...

President Obama sounded a bizarre note upon his return home on Sunday when asked about upcoming ne gotiations with Republicans in Congress: "They're still flush with victory, having run a strategy that was all about saying no," he said. The thing is it doesn't matter what the GOP strategy was in the election's run-up. What matters is what the voters said by the way they cast their votes. It was the voters who said no. A remarkably original analysis of election results by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research makes this not just an assertion but a matter of...

As the electoral wave ap proaches, pundits and news analysts have morphed into meteorologists, reading the complex undercurrents that will merge and swamp Democratic politicians nationwide on Tuesday. They're all concentrating on the Republicans. One group says the motive force is a school of rich Republican sharks swimming together in secret even though everybody knows who they are. Another says a conservative sleeping giant has been roused like Poseidon from the depths to which it had fallen in despair in 2008. A third says disgruntled moderates are directing the tides, and so Tea Partiers better sit down and stop rocking...

In a week, Americans go to the polls. But it might as well be happening today. For -- barring major news events or extraordinarily damaging revelations about individual candidates that cause probable voters to rethink their choices in unprecedented fashion -- the 2010 cake is baked, it's out of the oven and it's cooling in an undisclosed location. You wouldn't know this from the hyperactive political press, which now screams minute by minute at readers and viewers from multiple outlets, from traditional perches to Facebook to Twitter. Any spin, no matter how ludicrous, can get 10 or 15 seconds' attention...

On Oct. 24, 1996, Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole got up at a campaign rally and promptly lost it: "I wonder sometimes what people are thinking about, or if people are thinking at all," he shouted. "Wake up, America!" Those words -- an unmistakable harbinger of the humiliation Dole would experience by losing to Bill Clinton in a landslide 12 days later -- seemed to echo painfully like Taylor Swift singing without the benefit of an auto-tune machine in the bewildering comments made over the last couple of days by President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. It's odd, to...

The Fox News Opinion Dynamics poll in Delaware has parlous news for Republican senatorial nominee Christine O'Donnell -- she's 14 points behind, her opponent is well over 50 percent, and 60 percent of those polled say she is not fit to be a senator. Ninety-one percent of Delaware's voters say their minds are made up. If this number is anywhere near right, O'Donnell needs a startling turnaround in her fortunes to win the race. Much of this, one presumes, is the fallout not only from the revelations of various irregularities in the week before the primary but also the media...

The real story of the Ground Zero mosque is that the project only became feasible because of the appalling and astonishing fecklessness of the officials who were charged with the reconstruction of the site and the neighborhood all the way back in 2001.

Over the past decade, “neocon” has become an all-purpose term of abuse among critics of the right. Yet few of these critics appear to realize that from the beginning there have been two very different branches of neoconservative thinking. The first aimed to bring sober, dispassionate analysis and a skeptical temper to questions of domestic policy; the second specialized in devising cogent, often highly polemical arguments in favor of a militarily aggressive foreign policy. The first exercised its greatest political influence during the 1990s with Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s crime-fighting policies and the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. The second peaked...

New York Governor David Paterson attempted to suppress an investigation into an aide’s alleged beating of said aide’s girlfriend, and lied to an ethics panel about the free tickets he scored to the World Series. In this, he follows Eliot Spitzer, whom he succeeded after Spitzer attempted to convince a banker to contravene federal banking laws (that is actually why he had to resign, not because he hired a prostitute, but since prosecutors decided for unclear reasons not to indict him, that part is forgotten). Paterson, in his sure-to-fail attempt to hold on to power for a few more months,...

In my new book, "Why Are Jews Liberals?", I argue that it no longer makes any sense for so many of my fellow Jews to go on aligning themselves with the forces of the Left. I also try to show that our interests and our ideals, both as Americans and as Jews, have come in recent decades to be better served by the forces of the Right. In the course of describing and agreeing with the book the other day, Rush Limbaugh cited a few of the numerous reasons for the widespread puzzlement over the persistence of liberalism within the...