Free Republic

It has taken a long time, but finally the Justice Department is training its guns on what heretofore was unthinkable, unless you are a career civil libertarian. For years the civil libertarians have been warning us that the intelligence community posed a threat to democracy, as we know it in these United States. Every so often they would point to some excess of the FBI or the CIA and tell us that the lights were going out in democratic America. Does not the Washington Post run atop its front page the maudlin line, “Democracy Dies in Darkness”? Well, the darkness...

Liberal opinion is engaged heavily now in belaboring Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh for calling the Prophet Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a racist. The proximate cause for this charge is the following statement by Judge Sotomayor to an audience at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law in 2001: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." Well, possibly the bigotry inhering in that line does not rise to the level of...

As I suggested a few weeks ago, Sen. Barack H. Obama is not going to have an easy time of it. For one thing, Sen. John McCain is a much tougher candidate than has been suspected. Looking over his career, one will note that McCain learned politics before ever entering politics. As a young Navy liaison to the Senate in the 1970s, he worked effectively with Democratic and Republican hawks to reverse the post-Vietnam military decline. He, having managed the largest fighter squadron in the Navy, has management skills of which he can boast, as Sen. Obama cannot -- despite...

Bush Is Back By Emmett Tyrrell Thursday, December 6, 2007 WASHINGTON -- As with the late Abraham Lincoln, so with the present George W. Bush -- once the right general was found and the right strategy adopted, victory was in hand and a beleaguered president's fortunes were restored. Doubtless President Bush is aware of the parallel, and perchance, he will avoid Ford's Theatre. A curious inhibition shared by both Bush 41 and Bush 43 is to downplay their interest in reading. Actually both are hearty readers, certainly as compared with the general public. Earlier this year, I attended a luncheon...

The Clinton administration is going to be the most difficult presidency for historians to record accurately. This is because the Clintons are inveterate liars and frauds. They are not particularly competent — they often get caught. Just the other day, Bill was caught lying about opposing our invasion of Iraq, and before that, his lovely wife, Bruno, was caught lying about a questioner her campaign planted at an Iowa campaign event. However, the Clintons lie so frequently and across such a wide range of matters from the petty (Hillary's lie about the origin of her name) to the serious (Hillary's...

The infallible Washington Times reports that up for sale is one of the most famous scenes of infantilism in the 20th century, "Woodstock." Actually, what is on the block is the late Max Yasgur's New York farm, 38 acres of which were used for the 1969 Woodstock music festival that hagiographers for the "1960s Generation" have ever since boomed as a pivotal event in American history. Such rock singers as Jimi Hendrix and Richie Havens got together before a stupefied crowd of some 500,000 eternal children to sing of peace, and freedom, and mind-numbing substances, even the most feeble of...

I find myself in unusual company, and I am always so careful about the company I keep. Nonetheless, here I am arguing on the same side as Washington Post columnist and ritualistic liberal Richard Cohen and Christopher Hitchens. At least Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate, is an independent man of the left. Yet here I am on their side arguing for leniency for Vice President Richard Cheney's former chief of staff, Scooter Libby. Having been found guilty of lying under oath, he is about to be sent to prison before his appeal is considered. In fact his...

Well, it is a very pleasant time to be in Washington. Senators and representatives alike have vacated the premises. Most have headed off to ply their trade on their constituents. The off-year elections are approaching, and most of our federal legislators want another stint at what the Democrats call "public service." That is a euphemism for what all reasonable observers call the "public trough." The Democrats are in a sunny mood. As they see it, we are losing in Iraq. We are losing the war on terror. And Wal-Mart just posted a quarterly loss. All of this means, so the...

The Hon. Newt Gingrich's recent oracular rumble to a luncheon audience at the Brookings Institution, during which he threatened to seek the Republican presidential nomination if a "vacuum" remains in the Republican field, reminded me of an inescapable insight I suffered sometime in 1998. Mr. Gingrich is the Republicans' Bill Clinton. Being a Republican, Mr. Gingrich is not as hollow as the Arkansas huckster, nor as amusing. In fact, he can be boring. Springing from the same late 1960s jugendkultur as the Boy President, Mr. Gingrich is the career pol, the hustling, self-promoting narcissist, the sempiternal fantasist. When he was...

WASHINGTON (Creators Syndicate) -- It is very reassuring that Republican negotiators in the House and Senate have reached an agreement to extend President George W. Bush's cuts in tax rates on dividends and capital gains. Equally reassuring, the negotiators plan to liberate as many as 15-million middle-income Americans from the impending burden of the alternative minimum income tax. Now the unparalleled economic growth that has characterized the American economy since the early 1980s can proceed. My only question is why? Why did the Republicans extend these tax cuts? Many of them are the same salons who offered the embarrassing quackery...

WASHINGTON -- The legal concept of the Public Nuisance has for long been recognized throughout all the civilized countries of the world. Basically, and unadorned by the tortured language of the legal profession, a public nuisance is one who uses property to annoy or damage an individual or the general public. Occasionally the annoyance or damage is sufficiently grievous for the public nuisance to suffer some sort of penalty.

    The Rise of BoltenismBy R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Published 3/30/2006 12:09:14 AM WASHINGTON -- Did you catch Senator Harry Reid's reaction to President George W. Bush's replacement of Chief of Staff Andy Card with Budget Director Joshua Bolten? Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, called Bolten a "failure." It could have been worse. He might have inveighed against Bolten's terrible temper. In fact, the Democrats still might sound the alarm over reports of Bolten's terrible temper. Reid called Bolten a failure the same day that the Conference Board's consumer index showed consumer confidence climbing to a near four-year...

p>The Talk Shows Sunday, March 26th, 2006 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Gary Schroen, former CIA agent; Democratic strategist James Carville, Republican strategist Mary Matalin. FACE THE NATION (CBS): Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and national security adviser Stephen Hadley. THIS WEEK (ABC): Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo.; Gov. Brian Schweitzer, D-Mont.; Harvey Mansfield, author of "Manliness," and author Naomi Wolf. LATE EDITION (CNN) : Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and...

WASHINGTON -- Those gruesome news reports from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony the other night remind me of a conclusion I came to a few years back. Rock and Roll is dead. Rest in peace. Through the years the peace of the grave has crept up on a lot of rockers, usually years before they arrived at the average life expectancy of almost any type of adult human being, including skydivers and inebriated jaywalkers. Given how preachy the average rocker became by the late 1960s, this is ironic. In their warbles they lectured ordinary Americans on what...

So we hear this week President Bush is taking delight in the spread of the "alternative press" (read conservatives on the Internet, in talk radio, in print and at Fox) and the gentle detumesence of "mainstream media" (read liberal media, or more precisely Democratic media). I join him in his satisfaction. I have spent much of my life with journalists, beginning in competitive swimming and moving on to politics and culture. Usually, even in covering sports, the journalists have been liberal Democrats. I recall a Sports Illustrated writer who used to come out to Indiana to cover my world champion...

WASHINGTON - A long-awaited report detailing an independent counsel investigation of a former secretary of housing and urban development, Henry Cisneros, outlines a coordinated effort by Clinton administration officials to first block and then limit the probe as a way of taking pressure off an administration that was already beset by scandals. The report, by independent counsel David Barrett, is scheduled for release on January 19. Details of it have been disclosed to The New York Sun by persons familiar with its contents. The release of the report coincides with the end of an investigation that began in 1995 with...

The Washington Timeswww.washingtontimes.com Cisneros probe side effectsBy R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.Published January 6, 2006 Advertisement In a very clever year-end column the venerable William Safire writing in the New York Times asks whether "special prosecutor David Barrett's 400-page exposé of political influence within the Internal Revenue Service and the Clinton Justice Department" will be the government report "most likely to resist investigative reporting" this year. I certainly hope not.     The misuse of the IRS and Justice Department has a long record going back to Richard Nixon and Watergate and before that to Franklin Roosevelt and his harassment of former...

    Dingy DemocratsBy R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Published 12/29/2005 12:08:26 AM WASHINGTON -- 'Tis the end of 2005 and time to look back. In politics what do I see? Well, I see the Republican Party struggling against high seas. In the media the party is depicted as being in danger of losing to the Democrats in the off-year elections next fall. That probably will be the case, unless the Republicans have to run against the Democrats. Against the Democrats they could win with Warren Harding in the White House. The reason for this is that the Democratic leadership is fractured...

    The Good News Is GoodBy R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Published 12/8/2005 12:09:57 AM WASHINGTON -- The President is out on the hustings. He is exhorting steadfastness on the war. He is booming the economy. He will be getting hoarse quite soon. The reason is simple. He is trying to reason with the unreasonable. On the matter of the war his opponents' rejection of reason is demented. There is no alternative to facing down the terrorists and the nihilists in the Middle East. They attacked us here and will do so again and again unless they are defeated -- and...

It is now becomes ever clearer the 20th century's last decade could go down in history as the Decade of Illusion. There was the tech bubble whose detumescence was predicted by some of the same engineering geniuses who had created the technological marvels it was based on -- for instance, Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and a major force in creating the Internet. He predicted the bubble's burst almost to the day. Another illusion of the 1990s was that, with the fall of communism, barbarism vanished. The world would be safe. Our military budget could be trimmed. All we needed...