Free Republic

President Obama yesterday did his best impression of a high-school soph omore participating in his first Model UN meeting, retailing pious clichés he learned from his pony-tailed social studies teacher. Even Woodrow Wilson might have blanched at the mushy-headed exhortations to world peace and collective action better suited to a college dorm-room bull session or a holiday-season Coca-Cola commercial. "No nation can or should try to dominate another nation," Obama intoned. "No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold."

The first thing we can say about Sarah Palin's speech is that it is exactly the kind of address she should be giving. It's plain-spoken and not exactly ground-breaking, but it's substantive and the kind of thing that is absolutely essential to adding some heft to her political portfolio. She describes her approach as "commonsense conservatism," and it lives up to its billing, falling firmly within the mainstream of conservative thought. In the foreign-policy portion, she voices her support for additional troops in Afghanistan: During the election campaign in the U.S. last year, you might have noticed we had some...

Like Richard Nixon, Barack Obama wants to govern on the strength of a silent majority, although with a twist. Obama wants the majority that opposes or questions his policies to stay silent. Obama’s White House and its allies have unleashed a barrage of criticism and condescension at people daring to show up at town-hall meetings and ask their elected representatives pointed questions. “Fired up and ready to go!” apparently works only one way. If engaged citizens shower Obama with adoration at stage-managed rallies, they are the very stuff of American democracy. If they boo their congressman, they are a scandalous...

A friend just invited me to join a Facebook group called, "Birthers for Intellectual Honesty." This is probably a joke, and he is a friend, so I will not get mad at him. Whatever the circumstances of Obama's birth, they cannot now constitute the basis of an effective political attack. So any further attempt to advance along that line is wasted time or, worse, giving fodder to those who delight in portraying conservatives as kooks. Mitchell Blatt writes: [D]id you know that NBC was planning on asking [Michelle Malkin] if she is a birther conspiracy nut? . . NBC wanted...

Henry Louis Gates Jr. just got the subject for his next PBS series, and it’s not going to be a history of the woeful consequences of yelling at cops. The Harvard scholar was arrested for disorderly conduct at his Cambridge, Mass., home in an incident that has earned the Cambridge police a rebuke from the president of the United States. In a press conference otherwise devoted to trying to save his sinking health-care plan, Barack Obama said the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in arresting Gates, although Obama stipulated twice that he didn’t know all the facts. Obama’s ignorance didn’t keep...

July 21 An Ideologue in a Hurry When the work product is indefensible, deliberation is dangerous. By Rich Lowry When Barack Obama pilfered Martin Luther King Jr.’s line about the “fierce urgency of now,” he wasn’t kidding. The line has come to define his presidency. His legislative strategy moves in two gears — heedlessly fast and recklessly faster. As with the stimulus package, Obama’s health-care plan depends on speed. More important than any given provision, more important than any principle, more important than sound legislating is the urgent imperative to Do It Now. Do it now, before anyone can grasp...

She didn’t do it for Alaska. By Rich Lowry EDITOR’S NOTE: This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate © 2009 by King Features Syndicate

If there were ever a senator a party would want to show the door, it's Arlen Specter. Personally disagreeable, philosophically unmoored and fundamentally self-interested, he represents the worst of the U.S. Senate. So the collective cry of good riddance on the right that greeted his departure from the GOP is understandable. Specter joined the Republican Party in the 1960s for opportunistic reasons, and he left it last week for opportunistic reasons – a primary challenge from the talented conservative Pat Toomey that he probably wouldn't have been able to overcome. A better politician wouldn't have so lost the affection and...

THE calendar says Presi dent Obama took office in 2009, although that's only a technicality. In his own mind, Obama ascended in Year Zero, a time of ritualistic cleansing in preparation for the relaunching of an America free from its past sins. Has a US president ever appeared less vested in his nation's history than Obama? He shrugged off a rancid attack on America by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega at the Summit of the Americas, including a rant on the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961, by saying he was only 3 months old at the time. Nothing to do...

Anyone worried that, once in charge, Democrats wouldn’t be vigilant in protecting our southern border can relax. The grave threat of Mexican long-haul truckers has been shut down. With any luck, Mexicans will never have the temerity to attempt to deliver commercial goods into the United States again. At least such is the fervid hope of the Teamsters, the fiercest adversary the Mexicans have faced since Pres. James Polk sent Winfield Scott south in the Mexican-American War. The union can’t abide Mexican trucks because they represent competition, and so they must be blocked — legal obligations, economic rationality, and diplomatic...

Ann Coulter vs. Joy Behar on 'Larry King Live': TKO Coulter? Feb 20, 2009, 11:14 AM | by Ken TuckerCategories: Television Ann Coulter appeared on a Joy Behar-hosted edition of Larry King Live last night, and CNN kept superimposing the caption, "Ann Coulter Unleashed!" Boy, was the network, and Behar, just aching for Coulter to scorch up the airwaves. This is why Coulter gets invited on TV shows when she has a book to flog: she can be relied upon to say outrageous things, egged on by her hosts. But last night, Behar was trying too hard. Quoting the conservative...

Is American exceptionalism about to be bundled off on a long trip to the Continent, never to return? Socialism may happen here. Republicans fought an inspired battle against the stimulus bill, holding all but three of their 219 senators and congressmen. And they still lost. Barring a last-minute House-Senate blowup, Pres. Barack Obama will sign a bill spending at least $475 billion in the first major substantive victory of his presidency. Some of that spending will enter the permanent “baseline” of the federal budget, the starting point for all future budgets that, in the immutable law of Washington, always grow...

Barack Obama, a reputed master of the persuasive art, has settled on his central argument for the stimulus bill: I won. That Obama is reduced to this crude appeal is a symptom of the intellectual collapse of the case for his stimulus bill, a congressional spendfest untethered from its stated goal of providing a rapid “jolt” to the economy. As far as political arguments go, “I won” has its power—provided it’s made on behalf of an agenda ratified by the American electorate. But Obama didn’t campaign on a sprawling, nearly $1 trillion new spending plan. If he had pledged in...

I talked to Steve Biegun, the former Bush NSC aid who briefed Sarah Palin on foreign policy, and he considers the leaks against her on the international stuff "absurd." He says there's no way she didn't know Africa was a continent, and whoever is saying she didn't must be distorting "a fumble of words." He talked to her about all manner of issues relating to Africa, from failed states to the Sudan. She was aware from the beginning of the conflict in Darfur, which is followed closely in evangelical churches, and was aware of Clinton's AIDS initiative. That basically makes...

As of 4:19PM 10/31/2008 Ballots Returned by Mail or Early Vote BY PARTY ID ONLY. Statewide Dems 488,575 37.6% Reps 465,869 35.9% Ind 336,511 25.9% There are several third party ballots that make up the difference, but the percentages are calculated based on the inclusion of third party ballots in the total. 61% of requested mail in ballots have been returned at this point. Some key counties and their return breakdowns: Boulder (Univ. of Colorado)- 78394 out of 121503 mail in ballots returned (64.5%) Denver- 101510 out of 194631 mail in ballots returned (52.1%) Arapahoe County (Denver Burbs)- 109756 out...

Buckley Resigns From NR Posted on October 14th, 2008 by Daniel McCarthy Christopher Buckley’s endorsement of Barack Obama in the Daily Beast last week has precipitated his departure from the magazine his father founded. (Buckley had been writing a back-page column for NR over the past few months.) Here’s how Buckley tells it: No one has yet suggested my dear old Mum should have aborted me, but it’s pretty darned angry out there in Right Wing Land. One editor at National Review—a friend of 30 years—emailed me that he thought my opinions “cretinous.” One thoughtful correspondent, who feels that I...

It was just two days short of being an October surprise. A historic House vote on the Paulson bailout plan became historic for a reason no one expected: It went down to defeat, and not by a narrow margin. As the Dow plummeted 777 points, Republicans and Democrats took to the microphones to play the blame game, no holds barred. Superficially, both parties are to blame: 133 Republicans and 95 Democrats voted against, large numbers in both caucuses. But a majority of Democrats voted in favor. Republicans said a harshly partisan speech by Nancy Pelosi turned off about a dozen...

IF it were the plot of a political movie, it'd be too cheesy to watch. An obscure governor of a small state, a working mom of five, is secretly spirited to a political rally four months after giving birth to her latest child and named the running mate on a national ticket as the country watches, agog. But there she was, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, trailing four of her kids (the other is in the Army and about to deploy to Iraq) and her husband - a young, attractive mother hen about to stand next to war hero and elder...

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright has taken Barack Obama's critically acclaimed race speech in Philadelphia, ripped it to bits and tossed it in the air to serve as confetti for his parade through the media... Then cometh the good reverend to step all over the out-of-context defense in a speech at the National Press Club. He defended his "chickens come home to roost" statement about 9/11 in exactly the same terms as in his original sermon: "You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you." He stood by his damnation of America and his...

Fredheads for Romney Well, at least two of them. A little while ago, I was at a small Romney rally in a parking lot in Tampa. About 150 Romney fans gathered for a brief pep talk from Romney, in a crisp white dress shirt, with his sleeves rolled up. Afterwards, I talked to an older woman who said immigration was one of her top issues and that she and her brother—also at the rally—swung to Romney as of yesterday, after their original candidate, Fred Thompson, dropped out. In what can only be interpreted as a shameless bid for the Fred...

The conventional wisdom about Fred Thompson is that he might have waited too long to get into the presidential race, even though by the standard of past election cycles he’s right on schedule. The best question for the Thompson campaign doesn’t have to do with timing, but with rationale; it isn’t about “When?” but “Why?” The Republican presidential field doesn’t obviously lack for a former senator with an unremarkable public record and a career as a character actor. Excitement built around him earlier this year as the default candidate, the “someone else” when underwhelmed Republican primary voters were looking for...

From a distance of nearly 50 years, the liberalism of 1960 is hardly recognizable. It was comfortable with the use of American power abroad, unabashedly patriotic, and forward-looking. But that was before The Fall. In his eye-opening new book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, Jim Piereson argues The Fall was the assassination of President Kennedy. It represented more than the tragic death of a young president, but the descent of liberalism from an optimistic creed focused on pragmatic improvements in the American condition to a darker philosophy obsessed with America's sins. Echoes of the assassination -- and the meaning attributed...

On Fox News Sunday night we were distressed to hear Senator Feinstein aver that she "would be looking into the 'Fairness Doctrine'", the most misnamed of the all the liberal, thought-control ideas we have to fend off constantly. Unfortunately, at her side was the normally conservative, but not always perceptive, Senator Lott.

Before the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, al Qaeda targeted another U.S. destroyer. It wanted to hit the USS The Sullivans. But as recounted in Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Looming Tower, the terror operatives overloaded their skiff with C-4 explosives, causing it to sink harmlessly into the surf.They had to shoo away Yemeni locals who discovered the boat and started throwing the C-4 bricks around. Anyone discovering the operatives at that moment would have concluded that they were buffoons whose ambition to sink an American ship of war far exceeded their capabilities. Of course, nine months...

Debating the War And The Media With Rich Lowry Posted by Terry Trippany on December 20, 2006 - 14:12. Richard Lowry wrote an article that takes conservatives to task for attacking the mainstream media over its coverage of the war in Iraq. Ed Morrissey over at Captains Quarters agrees with Lowry for the most part, adding some advice for bloggers not to become so paranoid that they fail to discriminate between biased news and good reporting.I agree with both articles on many points. Not all coverage of the war is biased and the media certainly shouldn't ignore bad news on...

When it comes to the border, we're all Neanderthals now. When the amateur border guards, the Minutemen, first set up with their lawn chairs and binoculars at the U.S.-Mexico border and started talking about the need to build a fence, polite opinion scoffed. Now, the fence almost represents a consensus position, embraced by the left and right alike, from likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to the rabble-rousing pro-enforcement conservative Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado. Sixty-four Democrats just voted with Republicans in the House to pass legislation authorizing 700 miles of double-layered fence along the border. The Senate recently voted...

It was raining in Washington last week, and vendors selling $5 and $10 umbrellas appeared on the streets.They had Hispanic accents, and were undoubtedly some of the unskilled immigrants that Steven Malanga referred to in his recent City Journal article, "How Unskilled Immigrants Hurt Our Economy." I already had an umbrella. But the many purchasers of the umbrellas did not seem to notice that the economy was being hurt. Rather, they were glad of the opportunity to stay dry before their important meetings. The City Journal article is worth a look because it reflects an attitude becoming more common these...

Who says you can’t cut taxes, increase spending, and reduce the federal budget deficit all at the same time? That’s what the Bush administration has managed to do. Two decades after then-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush characterized Ronald Reagan’s idea that tax cuts would spur revenue-generating economic growth as “voodoo economics,” the witch doctor is again at work. When President Bush pledged in 2004 to cut the deficit in half by 2009, critics guffawed. The Boston Globe headlined a story, “Bush’s plan to halve federal deficit seen as unlikely; higher spending, lower taxes don’t mix, analysts say.” “Fanciful,” “laughable” and...

by Mark Finkelstein May 28, 2006 Could there be a new sheriff on the block at Fox News Watch? Brash lefty Neal Gabler often manages to get the last word, but on last evening's show he was soundly put in his place by National Review editor Rich Lowry, substituting for Cal Thomas. The topic was the recent press leaks that have compromised a number of highly-classified anti-terrorism programs including the secret prisons for Al-Qaeda members, the monitoring of Al-Qaeda related phone calls and the gathering of phone calling patterns. Predictably, Gabler was highly critical of the prospect of the government...

President Bush has a bold new approach to immigration enforcement: He wants to police the Mexican border with symbolism. That's the point of his proposal to send the National Guard to our border with Mexico. This represents Bush's final, desperate descent into Clintonian sleight of hand. He wants to distract enough of his supporters with the razzle-dazzle of "National Guard to the Border!" headlines that they won't notice he is pushing through Congress a proposal that essentially legalizes all the population influx from Latin America that has occurred in the past 10 years and any that might occur in the...

It's difficult to know which is worse: When Congress disgraces itself by throwing federal dollars at indefensible parochial projects like the notorious ''bridge to nowhere,'' or when it tries to grapple with serious issues facing the nation. The debate over the Patriot Act, the most important counterterrorism tool passed by Congress since Sept. 11, has revolved around absurd trivia, distorted and hyped by some members of Congress who either don't know better or are deliberately dishonest. Janet Reno has endorsed the Patriot Act. The 9/11 Commission has called it a vital tool in the War on Terror. The Justice Department...

Last week, the House of Representatives voted to establish a dictatorship in the United States and to prevent hopeless citizens from escaping it. That, at least, is what the casual listener might have concluded from the rhetoric mustered in opposition to the building of a better security fence on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Invariably, whenever columnists like myself write in support of the Iraq War without having served in the military there, letters flood in deriding us as "chicken hawks." How can writers support the war without fighting in it themselves? these letter-writers ask, although usually not so politely.

If Jefferson Davis could reach from the grave to co-sponsor congressional legislation, he would presumably want to plug the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act. He would love the idea of creating a new government separate and distinct from the federal government — without firing a shot. That the enterprise is premised on a blatant racialism might please him too.

Priscilla Owen, 50, is one of the more talented women of her generation. She finished third in her class at Baylor Law School. She had the best score in the state on the Texas bar exam when she took it in 1977. Her performance as a judge on the Texas Supreme Court has earned her the highest rating from the American Bar Association. It's the sort of career that liberals promoting the advancement of women should swoon over. But Senate Democrats are blocking her nomination to a federal appeals court, not just because she is supposedly too conservative, but because...

Last year, then-Sen. Zell Miller, a Georgia Democrat, wrote a scathing critique of the Democratic Party called "A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat." A quick quiz -- in the book, Miller said which of the following things:    a) "We have to be more aware that issues like abortion, like guns, like gay rights, have two sides, and that we need to address people who feel deeply about those issues and show a willingness to compromise";     b) "We gave up on the South. And as Churchill said, 'Wars are not won by evacuation; they are...

Here is how one GOP insider sees the state of play (in other words, not necessarily my take on things). Rudy Guiliani wasn't fundamentally hurt by the Kerik flap. Its ultimately Kerik's problem, not Giuliani's. The former mayor is loved by GOP crowds and has great all-around political skills. He has something of George W. Bush's ability to connect with individuals in a crowded room. He was a wonderful surrogate for Bush last year. But his problem on gays, guns, and abortion is probably insurmountable. It is likely he can't fix it short of totally revising his positions, and that...

PREMATURE 2008 PUNDITRY [Rich Lowry ] Here is how one GOP insider sees the state of play (in other words, not necessarily my take on things). Rudy Guiliani wasn't fundamentally hurt by the Kerik flap. Its ultimately Kerik's problem, not Giuliani's. The former mayor is loved by GOP crowds and has great all-around political skills. He has something of George W. Bush's ability to connect with individuals in a crowded room. He was a wonderful surrogate for Bush last year. But his problem on gays, guns, and abortion is probably insurmountable. It is likely he can't fix it short of...

In a spectacular murder case in Missouri, Lisa Montgomery strangled to death Bobbie Jo Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant. Montgomery cut open Stinnett's womb and kidnapped her child. This is a horrific crime that, like the Scott Peterson case, opens an uncomfortable window into our culture's tortured reasoning on anything related to unborn life. During the coverage of the crime, the status of the Bobbie Jo Stinnett's unborn girl steadily changed. All at once on AOL News during the weekend, there were headlines tracking events in the case: "Woman Slain, Fetus Stolen"; "Woman Arrested, Baby Returned in Bizarre Murder";...

Mary Eberstadt’s Home Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs. and Other Parent Substitutes is a culture-changing book. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to The Economist: “Eberstadt’s passionate attack on the damage caused by the absence of parents suggests that we may be approaching some sort of turning point in social attitudes, where assumptions about family life and maternal employment start to change. It has happened before — it could happen again.” Rich Lowry has already done a great job of recounting some of the core claims of Home Alone America. I want to...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version November 19, 2004, 10:47 a.m. They're Home AloneKids want to know: "Mom, Dad — where are you?" Mary Eberstadt has written an unwelcome book. That doesn't make it any less important or less necessary. But many people will want to look the other way. In Home-Alone America, Eberstadt confronts us with the consequences of a revolution in American parenting that has left children increasingly deprived of time — or any relationship at all — with their mothers and fathers. This revolution has two causes: "The...

The shocked liberals who are desperately seeking conspiracy theories to explain how Bush could have won should also be here to watch and listen. They might understand where those 59 million people come from, and how they manage to stumble through life without minders. They would be astounded, I believe, at how literate and informed this band of brothers and sisters are. I’ve dined with teachers and doctors, with NASA scientists, and octogenarians who write columns for local papers. Dinner conversations revolve around such simplistic themes as whether Sen. Arlen Specter was correct in his classification of Judge Bork’s view...

Sorry to post a vanity...but I haven't found ANY other Freepers yet on the National Review cruise here in the Caribbean...any of you have friends or family present? If so drop me a line, I'd love to meet them. As for the cruise itself, it's been quite fun - there are around 400 mostly rabid Republicans here, plus several of the staff & contributors of National Review and a few other notables like Ed Gillespie, Dick Morris, Michelle Malkin, & Stephen Moore. Today they gave seminars on how Bush won, and thoughts on who the Repub. candidate might be for...

It is difficult yet to have much perspective on Bush's freshly minted reelection victory, but it may well rank among the most extraordinary Republican campaigns ever. Confronting bad news almost daily, a ferocious attack by a united Left, and a hostile press corps, Bush won a resounding victory. His campaign was strategically brilliant and technically proficient, correctly assessing the nature of the electorate and election from the beginning and acting on its knowledge with great tactical verve. It built a grassroots force that, had it been marshaled on behalf of a liberal, would be celebrated as a great "people's army."...

Here is what one smart Republican insider thinks at the moment (quoting roughly): “It’s close. My sense was that we were up by 4 or 5. Now it’s down to a 0 to 1 or 2-point lead. If the election were held today Bush would still win, but it would be a long night. The first debate, people were willing to cut him a break. We’re seeing a cumulative effect of the two debates. The second debate, in particular, changed the dynamic among women. They thought he was too aggressive. The guys loved it, women were not quite as enthused....

Can't Rich Lowry debate? David Corn is creaming him. Get with it Rich!!!!

Dan Rather has famously based a "60 Minutes II" report criticizing President Bush's National Guard service on what nearly everyone agrees are forged documents. Rather has yet to explain adequately his conduct. He can start by answering these questions: You say you want to be the first to "break the story" if the documents are forgeries. Has it occurred to you that perhaps that story has already been broken? Two of the experts consulted by CBS warned that the documents might be fake. CBS executives complain that these dubious experts didn't make their concerns starkly enough. So, for you to...

By rights, the second Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad should be more devastating than the first. The new ad focuses on John Kerry's 1971 antiwar congressional testimony. If the content of the first ad, questioning the circumstances in which Kerry won his medals and Purple Hearts, inevitably becomes a "he said-he said," the second ad is an inarguable "he said it." Look it up in the Congressional Record, Thursday, April 22, 1971, Pages 179-210. One of the prisoners of war featured in the new ad, Paul Galanti, spent nearly seven years in captivity in Vietnam. "John Kerry gave the...

TROOPERGATE FLASHBACK [Rich Lowry] I haven't yet been able to delve into the Swift Boat stuff in great detail, but here is one thought. These guys have to worry about getting discredited like the Arkansas state troopers. Remember, the troopers were basically right. And the Clinton team still managed to beat them, based on a little wobble and a few character attacks. The Clinton effort was aided, of course, by a media hostile to the troopers. That condition applies very much to the Swift Boat guys today. They need to gird themselves, and be very smart and tough in the...

Anger has been the chief characteristic of the Democrats all year long. But now another emotion is seeming to come into play — they're happy. Why? Because they think they're going to win and this convention is going to help them do it. Why? Well, to find out I talked to a smart Democrat or two. What follows is the analysis I heard from them. First of all, Kerry is obviously very sensitive to the liberal charge and you're not ever going to hear him refer to himself as one. This means he is determined to avoid the Dukakis trap,...