Free Republic

If only those pesky Jews would shut up and submit, all would be right with the world. Allah could be praised. Such is the emerging Democratic strategy for making peace in the Middle East. Only this week, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state, and Leon E. Panetta, the secretary of defense, sent reassurances to the region that they’re eager to see Israel brought to heel. Mr. Panetta even employed a little mild profanity, undignified as that may be for a Cabinet officer, to attempt to intimidate the Israelis. Get back to “the damn table” and resume negotiations, he told...

ANALYSIS/OPINION The 2012 presidential marathon is on, and one mainstream pollster (Rasmussen) says a Republican apparition is opening up a lead on President Obama. (Any Republican 46 percent, Barack Obama 42 percent.) A growing number of Democrats figure that whoever can keep his head in the rattle and bang of unexpected events just doesn’t understand the situation. Republicans tempted to indulge in excessive giddiness should remember this is akin to fantasy football. A poll is a snapshot, and snapshots can deceive. Tomorrow is another day, to quote the estimable Mrs. Scarlett O’Hara Butler, and the chickens of ‘12 are not...

Sarah Palin is the hottest act in town, and the critics can only grind their teeth.... Her “secret” bus tour of America is a secret so closely held that she travels in a Greyhound-sized monster decorated with her name and an American flag the size of a barn. The lady who was mocked by the wisenheimers for saying she could see Russia from her backyard in Alaska now sees revenge through the windshield of her bus. The media’s Gaffe Patrol, ever on the scout for mistakes, errors, blunders, slips of the tongue and other erratum the patrollers think they see...

<p>The president, revealing himself to be Barack Obungle, has done what nobody else could have done, not even the spectacularly hapless original New York Mets, who drove Casey Stengel to his famous cry of terminal frustration.</p> <p>The White House converted a picture-perfect military operation into a public-relations disaster that will be cited as what not to do and how not to do it in flackery textbooks for a hundred years. Days after the raid on Osama bin Laden’s “mansion” they still can’t get the “fact pattern,” in the language of the White House, even close to straight.</p>

ANALYSIS/OPINION: "The difference between the Soviet Union and the United States," an elderly Russian woman said to me over a cup of rough black tea on my first visit to Moscow a quarter of a century ago, "is envy. If a Russian sees a new car parked at his neighbor's house, he says, 'I'm going to find out how he got it and turn him in.' "But if an American sees a new car parked in front of his neighbor's house, he says, 'My, that is such a beautiful car. I'm going ask my neighbor how to get one of...

Barack Obama, like all flimflam men, is a master of words. But unlike the best of the flimflam men, he can't keep his stories straight. Here he was on Friday night last, speaking about the ground zero mosque to a dinner at the White House celebrating Ramadan: "Let me be clear: As a citizen and as president I believe that Muslims have the same right … to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan. … This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable." Who argues with that? But...

President Obama rids himself of a particularly clueless general, but his fundamental problem remains. The clueless general is Stanley A. McChrystal. His fundamental problem is himself.

This is the week of decision, the ultimate showdown over Barack Obama's government takeover of health care and a big piece of the American economy. It's only the latest of a series of ultimate showdowns, but eventually one of them will live up to the hype. This could be the one? Nancy Pelosi, the dominatrix of the Democrats, boasts that she has the votes to prevail, but if she does, it's a puzzle why she and the president keep putting off the vote. If she has the votes, why did the president postpone leaving for Guam, Indonesia and Australia to...

You can fool some of the people some of the time, as Abraham Lincoln observed, and you even can fool all the people some of the time. But you can't fool all the people all the time. Al Gore and his friends got so excited about points one and especially point two that they forgot point three. Not everybody is on to the global-warming scam, not yet, but all the people — or enough of them — are getting there. "Global warming," or even "climate change" as Al's marketing men now insist that it be called, is becoming the stuff...

Barack Obama dropped by the White House press room the other day to stick it to the Republicans in the name of comity and fellowship. He offered to cooperate with the Republicans in the Mafia spirit of making an "offer you can't refuse." "I'm willing to move off some of the preferences of my party in order to meet them halfway," he told the reporters, "but there's got to be some give from their side as well. I also won't hesitate to condemn what I consider obstinacy." The only way Republicans can demonstrate their lack of obstinacy, the president made...

gentlemen of the press (and the ladies, too) are mostly a decent sort, often a bit prideful and sometimes with not very much to be prideful about. They're comfortable only by running in a herd. Trying to think alone gives them a migraine. A fortnight ago, Scott Brown was merely a footnote to the ritual of selecting a successor to Teddy Kennedy, not worth the attention of respectable reporters, pundits or pollsters. Everyone in the herd was sure that "the Kennedy mystique," though tattered and frayed, would produce a suitable substitute to fill Teddy's size twelves. A pundit or pollster...

Rarely has a cowboy castrated himself in public like Ben Nelson, the senator from Nebraska, who becomes an object lesson in how a United States senator easily trades his "convictions" and "principles" for perfectly legal bribes from cynical party leaders. When the inevitable howling erupted in Nebraska, all the senator could come up with was a variation on the oldest excuse in Washington: "I didn't do it, and maybe I won't do it again."

President Obama finally makes it back to familiar and frozen Copenhagen, scene of his earlier success in winning the Olympics for Chicago, trying to figure out a way to make zero plus zero amount to something big. His prospects aren't good. He leaves behind a chaotic debate over his health care "reform," a debate awash in irony, confusion and incredulity. The next stop is farce. ObamaCare, which the president promised would be a simple, thrifty, economical cure-all for the health care system, runs to 2,074 pages that a roomful of Philadelphia lawyers (or worse, Washington lawyers) couldn't parse. But...

Now that every nut in America is equipped with a laptop computer, you're likely to run afoul of a nut on the loose almost anywhere. I observed in this space earlier this week that Barack Obama's curious need to travel the world to make endless apologies for America might stem from his spending the most formative years of his childhood growing up in the Third World. I mentioned two observable facts, neither in any way accusatory or rude, that his father was a Kenyan (Marxist) and the mother who raised him was obviously attracted to men of the Third World,...

A little traveling, like a little learning, can be a dangerous thing. Barack Obama on the loose in a foreign land is enough to frighten protocol officers and embarrass the rest of us. He went off to Asia to tell the Chinese a thing or two about world trade, to prepare the world for a treaty to make the sun change its spots, and of course to pay his respects to assorted heads of state, with particular attention to any royal head (perhaps even including Miss Universe) who crosses his path. So far it's a memorable trip. He established a...

From Article Some of the president's critics are giving him a hard time, and it's true that this president seems never to have studied much American history. Not bowing to foreign potentates was what 1776 was all about. His predecessors learned with no difficulty that the essence of America is that all men stand equal and are entitled to look even a king, maybe particularly a king, straight in the eye. Can anyone imagine George Washington, John Adams or Thomas Jefferson making a similar gesture of servile submission? Or Harry Truman? Or FDR, who famously served the lowly hot dog,...

This is one Mr. Deeds who apparently isn't going to town. The collapse of the Democratic campaign for governor of Virginia speaks volumes about what the body politic is trying to tell Obama's Democrats. They're learning, painfully, that campaigning without George Bush is baffling, frustrating and scary. Worse, it offers a preview of what the congressional campaigning will be like next year. For weeks, The Washington Post, house organ of the national Democratic Party, pounded away at McDonnell, the Republican nominee, for having written politically incorrect term papers in graduate school, as proof that he doesn't like women very much....

Throwing rotten eggs at "them lyin' newspapers" has always been great sport in America, and sometimes even effective politics. But it has to be done with wit and humor, which may be above Barack Obama's pay grade. Thomas Jefferson despised newspapers, with considerable justification. They printed libels and slanders about him that persist to the present day. Yet he famously said that if he had to choose between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, he would cheerfully choose to live in a land with newspapers (even not very good ones) and no government. Harry Truman threatened to demolish the...

The cruel world is closing in on Barack Obama. Springfield was never like this. The president can only look back with yearning for the days when he was the star of the state legislature, where a legislator's only concern is who's going to pick up the tab for drinks and supper. His dithering time in the big new world is limited by events, which occur to a timetable that mere man, even a minor-league messiah, cannot control. The White House insists that the president is hard at work on what to do about Afghanistan, and whether to send more troops...

Barack Obama is merely following precedent by fleeing Washington and big headaches - the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the deteriorating prospects for health care reform, legislation to cool the globe (or should we worry now about warming the globe?), and various "czars" gone wild. He's in Copenhagen with the missus not on the nation's business, but the business of his cronies in Chicago. [Snip] The White House thought [it was a bad idea to skip town] last week, when the president's men said it was unlikely that the president would go to Denmark when there was so much rotten...

The White House is a risky place for on-the-job training, as Barack Obama and the rest of us are learning. But the president doesn't deserve all the blame for the installation of a handsome but unprepared matinee idol in the toughest job in the world. The adoring cult, the 53 percent of the giddily oblivious electorate that took a flyer on Election Day, deserves most of it. Matinee idols only do what matinee idols do, look pretty and inveigle softly with practiced seductiveness. Trouble arrives when the matinee idol and his public confuse role with reality. Reality arrives with the...

At The Top Of The Televangelist's Game Wesley Pruden. Barack Obama did what he does best. Billy Graham once said Bill Clinton could make a great evangelist, but Bubba's not a patch on this president. Mr. Obama early on mastered the cadence of the black church - dropping his voice on the last word of the sentence to make the listener pay attention - and he understands the power of language. He speaks great prose. He understands that a televangelist concentrates on sales, not substance. The president was on his game Wednesday night, soaring with a promise of partisan geniality...

Master politician that he is, Barack Obama is a lousy calculator. He spectacularly misjudged the American public's appetite for a government nanny. Or maybe he miscalculated the power of his slippery tongue to sell government snake oil. His apparent willingness to abandon the attempt - for now - to nationalize the health-care industry appears to defer the Democratic first step in remaking the home of the brave and the land of the free into Little America, cutting it down to a size incapable of intimidating the likes of Switzerland or Swaziland. But only if the opposition keeps up unremitting pressure....

Recycling is so popular that even our congressmen, unaccustomed as they are to practicing what they preach, do it. They're reaching back into the dark past to recycle contempt. Never waste a crisis, even if you have to manufacture the crisis. Democrats from the cosseted life in the House and Senate, accustomed to getting the deference at home so often denied in Washington, are suddenly having to deal with inconvenient old folks at home. President Obama insists that the War on Terror is over, ended by his ultimate weapon, the Apology Bomb. But to listen to delicate congressmen whose feelings...

The killer disease dispensed by Barack Obama slipped into remission yesterday, and we can be thankful it did. "Remission" is not "cure," but it's a start. Harry Reid, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, led the obsequies for the rush to judgment, though he was not necessarily obsequious about it. "It's better to have a product based on quality and thoughtfulness rather than trying to jam something through." Nary a Republican in Washington could have said it better. The president is trying to make the best of the demise of his promise to get health care "reform" on...

The second stage of this mourning exercise begins with the arrival of the major-league scam artists. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, have landed and even now are erecting competing circus tents. Rev. Al, always on the scout for the racial slight, says, "Michael Jackson made culture accept a person of color way before Tiger Woods, way before Oprah, way before Barack Obama." Mr. Jesse hints at what's coming next. "The family has questions ... There is concern about what happened the last 12 hours of Michael's life ... the doctor did not confer with the family ... he was missing...

You can't blame Democrats for hurrying to enact their hot-air legislation. The public is finally paying attention, recognizing the global warming crisis for what it is, a giant scam that will cost every American plenty...The only "crisis" was what to do with Al Gore. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had invited the ex-veep to Washington to make a last-minute appeal for the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Note there's not a word about "global" or "warming" in the title. Once you stink up perfectly good words, you have to find new ones. (That's why liberals now call themselves "progressives.") Mrs....

Now it's on to Normandy, to apologize to the Germans. It's the least an American president can do after the way the Allied armies left so much of Europe in rubble. There's a lot of groveling to do for what America accomplished in the Pacific, too. This prospect should appeal to Barack Obama, who relishes the role of Apologizer-in-Chief. Apologizing for manifold sins against civilization is not always easy, but it's simple enough: "Blame America First." You just open a vein and let it flow. In Cairo, Mr. Obama opened an artery. America, unlike the president, is guilty of hubris,...

Now it's on to Normandy, to apologize to the Germans. It's the least an American president can do after the way the Allied armies left so much of Europe in rubble. There's a lot of groveling to do for what America accomplished in the Pacific, too. This prospect should appeal to Barack Obama, who relishes the role of Apologizer-in-Chief. Apologizing for manifold sins against civilization is not always easy, but it's simple enough: "Blame America First." You just open a vein and let it flow. In Cairo, Mr. Obama opened an artery. America, unlike the president, is guilty of hubris,...

Two of the peace-loving republics formerly known as the Axis of Evil threw a frightful scare into anyone paying attention Monday, with North Korea exploding a nuclear bomb as powerful as the one that destroyed Hiroshima and Iran telling Barack Obama to get lost (and take his teleprompter with him). Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he wouldn't accept an invitation to freeze work on his own nuclear weapon and he's not interested in talking to Mr. Obama or anyone else about it. But not to worry. The United Nations Security Council postponed its afternoon tea to hold an "emergency session" to consider...

We were all supposed to be in the graveyard by now, done in by AIDS, SARS, bird flu, poisoned peanut butter, Hong Kong flu, killer tomatoes, global warming and strangulation by kudzu. But here we are, proof that there really is life after death. Now we learn that we might freeze before the pigs get us. (The chickens failed.) NASA scientists have observed that the solar wind is the weakest since we began keeping such records, that the magnetic axis of the sun is tilted to an unusual degree, and Ol' Sol is the quietest he has been in a...

Steady descent into third world By Wesley Pruden Friday, April 24, 2009 Opening a can of worms always tempts a mischief-maker, but it's risky business. That can of worms might turn out to be a can of snakes, like Barack Obama's latest gift to the nation. The president's on-again, off-again, maybe-he-will and maybe-he-won't decision to punish someone who loosened tongues of Islamist terrorists at Guantanamo suddenly threatens not only the CIA interrogators and Justice Department lawyers, but even members of Congress. Maybe it won't stop there: if the lawyers who offered legal opinions are at risk of punishment for their...

The president's critics ought to lighten up. We should give him credit for not knowing any better. (He was "finished" and "polished" at Harvard, after all.) Barack Obama is an accident of history, a street hustler from the South Side of Chicago with the gift of gab who landed on the world stage like a whale beached at the whim of a storm, the wrong man at the right time...The masses...eagerly stepped forward to take the pledge of the cult. This wouldn't be one of Dr. Freud's difficult cases. He was born to a mother obsessed with the pursuit of...

Barack Obama may not be the Big Thinker his fans think he is, but his big-time groveling is impressive. We've never seen a presidential performance quite like his Groveling, Toadying and Apple-Polishing Tour of the Olde Countries. If this is Monday, this must be a mosque. The president is understandably eager to see whether his honeyed tongue can tease and tickle the Europeans the way it teases the libido and scratches the itch of the hoi polloi at home, but the early returns show that he gave away a lot more than he got in return, which was nothing. The...

Watching faith healers is fun, if you can overlook the pain and desperation in the eyes of the supplicants, and cheerfully endure the mosquitoes, gnats and other night bugs flying in tight formation through gaps in the tent flaps. You have to ignore reality and just enjoy the show. But the next morning, with the sound of the singing and the scent of the sawdust lingering on the cool air, the sick, the halt and the infirm are well advised to call the doctor. Barack Obama conducted the picture-perfect campaign with the skill and bombast that any smooth-talking piney-woods charlatan...

ANALYSIS/OPINION: Now we're about to see who Barack Obama really is. We won't any longer have to rely on parsing his speeches, looking for clues and deciphering the contradictions. We'll still get speeches - he delivers good ones - but presidents don't get to vote "present" when the question on the table is what to do about a collapsing economy or terrorists plotting mayhem on New York City. We'll learn exactly what he means by "change." So far his administration looks more like a Clinton Restoration than anything anticipated by the embittered cult on the far fringes of the nutcake...

With only 26 days left to harangue, mock and bash President Bush, some of our colleagues in the media aren't wasting a day. Bashing ex-presidents, except for the ex-presidents with shrill prominent wives, isn't nearly as much fun as bashing while he's still the real thing. There's method in the gladness at the New York Times, which relieved itself at the beginning of Christmas week with an umpity-thousand word accusation - beginning on Page One and continuing across several acres of newsprint inside - that George W. Bush invented the meltdown of the subprime housing market, which in turn has...

With only 26 days left to harangue, mock and bash President Bush, some of our colleagues in the media aren't wasting a day. Bashing ex-presidents, except for the ex-presidents with shrill prominent wives, isn't nearly as much fun as bashing while he's still the real thing. There's method in the gladness at the New York Times, which relieved itself at the beginning of Christmas week with an umpity-thousand word accusation - beginning on Page One and continuing across several acres of newsprint inside - that George W. Bush invented the meltdown of the subprime housing market, which in turn has...

The Democrats are having a hard time selling the bailout of General Motors because nearly everyone has suffered the agony of buying a car. That's how the "used-car salesman," fair or not, became the American icon of deception, fraud and thievery. Maybe it's true that GM is "too big to fail," though from all the available evidence GM is succeeding spectacularly at failure. What the pols and their lobbyist buddies really mean with their used-car salesman's spiel is that GM is "too big for Joe Sixpack to let fail."

If your toilet is stopped up by something really big and smells really bad, you'll probably need a plumber. Joe the Plumber, as it turns out, diagnosed the trouble, and yesterday we learned what it was. It smells really bad. Karl Marx The tape recording of an interview that Barack Obama gave to Radio Station WBEZ in Chicago in 2001 surfaced, and in that interview Mr. Obama, then a law professor and a state senator, lays out how he would redistribute the wealth. He sounds like a man with a plan. The interview explains a lot, beginning with the attempt,...

The tape recording of an interview that Barack Obama gave to Radio Station WBEZ in Chicago in 2001 surfaced, and in that interview Mr. Obama, then a law professor and a state senator, lays out how he would redistribute the wealth. He sounds like a man with a plan. .... Mr. Obama doesn't think much of the Constitution, or even of the Supreme Court justices who have rewritten it over the years to accommodate notions of "social justice." The Warren Court, which wrote finis to public-school segregation with its unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, has been...

But nobody is stalked like Barack Obama. He's terrorized every time Joe Biden opens his mouth, which is often. Even good old Joe can't wait to see what he'll say next. We were supposed to be worrying about the innocence and inexperience of Sarah Palin, but while she's drawing enormous crowds and staying resolutely on the message laid out by John McCain, like a good running mate should, there's good old Joe, who was recruited to give Mr. Obama heft and gravitas in foreign affairs, up in Seattle predicting catastrophe once the Obama administration is fixed firmly in place. Joe...

Barack Obama is talking landslide, but the polls are getting tighter. Not by much, but a little. Despite the big talk, the issue is still in doubt. The kindling is available to light a fire to burn down the messiah's barn, if John McCain can find the match. So why the jitters among certain followers of the tree-tall and thistle-thin messiah from Chicago's Hyde Park, where everyone has an IQ of 500 (just ask any of them), a Prius in the garage and a radical in the parlor? Are the Obama campaign's internal polls telling him something he doesn't want...

Something odd is going on. The Obama campaign boasts of a landslide in the making even as his polling lead slips a point or two, and there's anger bordering on rage when John McCain and Sarah Palin raise questions about Barack Obama's judgment in his unexplored past in Chicago. An investigation of ACORN, a cabal of "political activists" hired to register voters in the neighborhoods where few friends of John McCain abide has now spread to 10 states. Investigators discovered that the entire offensive line of the Dallas Cowboys had signed up to vote in Las Vegas, unless it turns...

It's October and time to start throwing the kitchen sink. Throwing the kitchen sink is fun because it makes a lot of noise when it shatters against an opponent's head, particularly when the sink is full of dirty dishes. The dirty dishes this year are mostly from the Obama's Good Time Diner on Chicago's always interesting South Side. However, you're not supposed to criticize Sen. Barack Obama, because only racists do that. Good citizenship requires keeping some dirty dishes segregated. But somebody forgot to tell Gov. Sarah Palin, the Wasilla housewife who knows about sinks and stones and stacks of...

It's a little early to play the race card, but the Obama partisans, if not Barack Obama himself, are scared. They don't know what else to do to get their expectations, so carefully nurtured over spring and summer, in line with reality. The mainstream media's ganging up on a pregnant 17-year-old girl didn't work. Neither did the candidate's calling her mother a pig. After Mr. Obama became the inevitable president, dispatching Hillary Clinton, the inevitable nominee, his cult thought it was going to be a downhill coast to a left turn into Pennsylvania Avenue. Alas, the slam dunk - the...

It's a little early to play the race card, but the Obama partisans, if not Barack Obama himself, are scared. They don't know what else to do to get their expectations, so carefully nurtured over spring and summer, in line with reality. The mainstream media's ganging up on a pregnant 17-year-old girl didn't work. Neither did the candidate's calling her mother a pig. After Mr. Obama became the inevitable president, dispatching Hillary Clinton, the inevitable nominee, his cult thought it was going to be a downhill coast to a left turn into Pennsylvania Avenue. Alas, the slam dunk - the...

The rap on Joe Biden is that he's bright, well-meaning and amiable, and when he opens his mouth you never know what's likely to fly out. But sometimes he comes up with interesting ideas. Joe thinks that Barack Obama, clearly rattled by the Sarah surge, should find a skirt to get behind as the runners finally make the clubhouse turn and head down the homestretch. Whose skirt is wider than Hillary Clinton's? Changing running mates in mid-campaign, for no other reason than the first running mate was a big mistake, would invite disbelief and bipartisan hilarity. George McGovern kicked...

How mean, how low can a partisan stoop? Mean enough to humiliate a 17-year-old girl at the time she needs sympathy and understanding. Low enough to bruise the broken heart of a girl's mother and to mock a father's affection. Within minutes after John McCain introduced Sarah Palin as his running mate, the blog sites on the sleaziest margins of the Democratic left went to work on the deconstruction of the lady of the far north.....[ snip ] But resentment from the left boiled into rage when they learned that not only did Mrs. Palin oppose abortion as a matter...

Al Gore picked a bad day to tout his global-warming scam. Just as he was telling an easily conned columnist for the Associated Press that Earthlings have just 10 years to get in line behind him to save the world from the frying pan, a consortium of 50,000 physicists conceded that maybe Al's evidence of man-made warming isn't so hot, after all. Al, who confuses the hot air of flatulent cows, forgetting to turn out the lights and fumes from cars and trucks with the hot air he contributes himself, now wants to abandon coal-fired generation of electricity and turn...