Free Republic

Why can’t Republicans in Congress pass health-care reform? This is the question to ask after the Republican Senate leadership’s plan was stabbed to death by conservative Senate Republicans. The answer is shockingly simple: Republican voters do not actually want health-care reform — and these elected officials are just doing the bidding of their constituents. Those voters could have been led to support the Republican efforts on Capitol Hill by a new president who carefully and conscientiously laid out the fatal problems of ObamaCare and how a new plan would fix what was broken and even create a new path to...

He said, “I love it.” Yes, upon being informed in June 2016 he might soon be in receipt of information from the Russian government damaging to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. responded with the words, “I love it.” He didn’t call the FBI to say he had evidence the Russian government was seeking to interfere with the presidential election of 2016. No, he said, “I love it” — and set up a meeting with the shady Russian lawyer who, he was told, might share dirt with him. He didn’t steer the Trump campaign away to shield it from the stain...

Mr. Podhoretz, the former editor at Commentary magazine, looks back at the fierce, argumentative parties of New York’s intelligentsia.“These parties I mentioned,” Norman Podhoretz said the other day, “everybody gave parties. And there was a lot of drinking. Some visiting literary celebrity would show up, Partisan Review would make a party or I would make a party. Everybody came. And it was a really passionate intellectual life. It’s hard to imagine today, but people actually came to blows over literary disagreements.” It was a cold morning, and Mr. Podhoretz, 87, was recently back from the hospital after minor surgery, recuperating...

So the website BuzzFeed decided to publish a series of memos that have been floating around for months alleging all kinds of terrible things about Donald Trump. Some of those terrible allegations have to do with efforts to influence the American elections and Trump. Some of them have to do with Trump’s personal sexual conduct. Readers of this newspaper know well not to include me among Trump’s supporters. But the scurrilousness of what BuzzFeed has done here is so beyond the bounds of what is even remotely acceptable it should compel even those most outraged by Trump’s political excesses to...

The Republican Party is in the ascendancy. Who could have predicted it? No one. The response of Democrats and liberals since the election has been screaming, crying, and telling tall tales about racist incidents on social media while providing no evidence that they’ve taken place—and, on the activist Left, rioting. That, alas, maybe anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear could have predicted. First, the ascendancy. Among the many things everybody got wrong about this election, including me, was what we were seeing happening on the Right side of the political divide. We looked at the heated primary,...

An hour and 18 minutes into Wednesday night’s debate, Donald Trump effectively acknowledged his coming defeat. “Lotsa luck, Hillary,” he said, after a peroration on the humanitarian disaster in Syria and how it is going to consume much of the next president’s time over the next four years. What will she need luck for if she’s not going to be president? Ten minutes earlier, Trump told moderator Chris Wallace he will let us all know on election night whether he is going to accept the results of the Nov. 8 balloting. It was a shocking and cravenly irresponsible thing to...

People are losing it over Donald Trump. The people I’m talking about are mostly liberals and Democrats who are watching with horror as the election they happily thought Hillary Clinton had put away in August has become a squeaker in September. Their attitude is that any word uttered about the election that doesn’t serve as an open denunciation of Trump is an implicit endorsement of Trump. Let someone mention the bad behavior of the Clinton Foundation and the response is likely to be a shriek of outrage that you didn’t say something worse about the Trump Foundation. Say that Hillary...

Hey, Democrats, where were you? Hey liberals, where were you? The potential train wreck that is the Hillary Clinton candidacy didn’t just become evident last week when ill-chosen words about 25 million “deplorables” and a public near-collapse tanked her polls to make this a tied presidential race. No, Democrats and liberals, the possibility of Hillary crashing and burning was there from the outset of her candidacy. And yet you stood there and let it happen. You Democrats and liberals who did not “feel the Bern” but desperately wanted a Democratic president to succeed Barack Obama — you did nothing to...

Norman Podhoretz, a founder of the neoconservative movement, said that he backs Donald Trump for president. With his endorsement in an interview this week in the Times of Israel, the former editor of Commentary magazine parts ways with the many neoconservatives who say they cannot support the Republican nominee because of his foreign policy views. Podhoretz, 86, said that any concerns he had about Trump are outweighed by his trepidation at a Hillary Clinton presidency. He cites especially her role, as secretary of state in President Barack Obama’s first term, in shaping last year’s deal in which Iran rolled back...

WASHINGTON -- Norman Podhoretz, the former longtime editor of Commentary Magazine, is no longer an Inadvertent Conservative for Hillary, or ICH. He is voting for Donald Trump for president. The prospect of Clinton in the White House is too grisly for Podhoretz. It probably also is for his wife, Midge Decter, the gifted essayist. Both are reasonable neoconservatives, which is to say erstwhile liberals who moved over to conservatism sometime in the 1970s. I have known them for years. In the late 1970s they made a similar calculation. They were two of only four neoconservatives to attend a dinner I...

Well, Hillary Clinton took the stage after four days of Democratic triumph — the party staged what was even to these conservative eyes and ears the best, tightest, most interesting convention of our time — and pretty much stunk up the joint.

FBI Director James Comey stood before the nation and issued a list of Hillary Clinton’s astounding wrongdoings Tuesday as regards America’s national security — and then said he was not recommending prosecution because, in essence, what Mrs. Clinton did was “extremely careless” but not criminal. As he spoke, I recalled F. Scott Fitzgerald’s peerless description in “The Great Gatsby” of a feckless wealthy couple: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into . . . their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean...

Omar Mateen called the cops to pledge his fealty to ISIS as he was carrying out his mass murderer in Orlando early Sunday morning. Twelve hours later, the president of the United States declared that “we have no definitive assessment on the motivation” of Omar Mateen but that “we know he was a person filled with hate.”

Congratulations, liberals of the Washington press corps and elite organizations: You’re a bunch of suckers. We all know this because the Obama White House just told us so. In an astounding New York Times piece by David Samuels, senior White House officials gleefully confess they use friendly reporters and nonprofits as public relations tools in the selling of President Obama’s foreign policy — and can do it almost at will because these tools are ignorant, will believe what they’re told, will essentially take dictation and are happy to be used just to get the information necessary for a tweet or...

Neoconservative figure and “Commentary” editor John Podhoretz admitted Sunday that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.

Hillary Clinton lost her temper the other day. She said she was “sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me.” It’s hard to believe that this is what she’s sick of — since Sanders is, without question, the gentlest opposition candidate any front-runner has faced in the history of American politics. The truth is likely this: She’s sick, all right — sick of having to run against Sanders. Look, she had it in the bag, guys, she had it in the bag. Before she declared her candidacy she made like Don Corleone of “The Godfather” and put all the politicians...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Going back to this John Podhoretz commentary and his attempt... This was actually from yesterday. It's a piece in Commentary magazine, and it's a very lengthy piece, and I'm just synthesizing it down to its bare essence as he attempts to explain the Trump phenomenon. I mean, many people that are not for Trump are puzzled beyond their ability to express it, why people support Trump. Some people are getting mad. Some people are taking the rejection of themselves and their ideas personally. Some people say it just doesn't make any sense no matter how they look...

Donald Trump was so awful, so horrible, so disgusting in the latest Republican debate — his lies, his distortions, his deceits, and his libels thicker and fouler than they’ve yet been—that he’s done us all a favor. If he wins easily in South Carolina after his monstrous turn, he’ll be going straight to the Republican nomination. Such a victory in a classically conservative state like South Carolina after his romp in idiosyncratic New Hampshire will prove Trump’s repellent personality is the real key to his success. You want me to delineate his dishonesties? That would be like asking me to...

It’s rare for people to celebrate getting 41 percent of anything. If you score 41 percent on a test, you get an F. If you win 41 percent of the vote in a two-person race, you lose. If your tax rate is 41 percent, you’re likely to feel ripped off. In the matter of his Iran deal, resident Obama and his team have spent two months working relentlessly to secure 41 percent — and now they’re claiming an enormous victory even though by any other standards what they’ve achieved is nothing but a feat of unconstitutional trickery. ... Under the...

The summer has not been kind to Hillary Clinton. The drip-drip-drip of revelations about her possible misuse and mishandling of classified information threatens to become a deluge in the fall. They have taken a serious toll on her reputation — and even more notably, her treatment by liberal media figures who surely would rather she be elected even if the Risen Christ were to be the Republican nominee. Democrats are worried — so worried five donors who raised millions for President Obama as well as Obama’s chief Florida strategist have both sworn off Hillary and joined an effort to draft...