Free Republic

It is remarkable that Theodore Roosevelt (TR to his friends), who has been beloved as an iconic patriot and president, would become a controversial figure today. This unusual development is largely due to the rise of Glenn Beck. Glenn has been right on many issues and his views are resonating with Main Street. But he is wrong on one big issue: Theodore Roosevelt is not, as he claims, the root cause of President Obama’s intrusive, “big government” policies. It is no accident that TR’s face is chiseled into Mount Rushmore along with those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham...

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate...

First the liberals destroyed the value of our money - principally through the policies of Roosevelt, Johnson and Carter, which led to hyper-inflation. This is happening again under Obama. Then the liberals destroyed our culture, glorifying the use of abortion as a birth-control method, and glorifying the use of drugs and casual sex. The result of this glorification of abortion, drugs and hook-up sex can be seen all around us as our civilization crumbles. Our movies and television programs reflect this crumbling. Then the liberals destroyed our schools and our colleges, dumbing down the curricula and substituting the study of...

Today, the facts about Katyn are not in doubt. In the spring of 1940, 22,000 Polish prisoners of war—most of them army officers, but also thousands of leading members of the Polish intelligentsia—were systematically murdered by the Soviet secret police on direct orders from Joseph Stalin. ...In one of history's richer ironies, the massacre was first discovered and publicized by the Nazis in 1943. That made it that much easier for the Soviets to dismiss the revelation as German propaganda to cover up a German crime, a line the U.S. and Britain were only too happy to adopt to propitiate...

Two critical things happened in American history today: the first is that today marks the 149th anniversary of the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, SC, which began the Civil War in 1861. Seven states had already seceded and four others were about to go as well, leading to the largest trauma in our nation’s history. The other is the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945. Long regarded as one of the best presidents in our history, a sober look at his record shows that Roosevelt caused much harm to this country. At best he was an able and...

Like many of you, I'm more than casually interested in American history, and more than a casual viewer of the Hitler channels documentation of our past. That the History Channel's "Beltway Unbuckled" would yield new information about FDR, then, is illustrative of how media selectively protects the image of patron Liberals, while targeting what were once called mainstream Americans. FDR mistress Daisy Suckley's diary, which was discovered under her bed in 1991, isn't a secret, as I discovered by searching the term. But, it sure as hell has not been been publicly aired. I'm talking about FDR telling Ms. Suckley...

Something else in President Obama's speech on Friday... This isn't the first time this point of drivel has come up in the current debate on healthcare, but here's another item President Obama has used in the past and repeated again at George Mason University to buttress his case: THE PRESIDENT: A few miles from here, Congress is in the final stages of a fateful debate about the future of health insurance in America. (Applause.) It's a debate that's raged not just for the past year but for the past century. One thing when you're in the White House, you've got...

If one goes by the Pentagon’s recent report on the Ft. Hood terrorist attack, the Pentagon’s PC putzes wouldn’t recognize a Muslim terrorist if one jumped up and bit them on the butt. So in the interest of national security, I have collected some statements made by folks over the years, which might point the Pentagon in the right direction. One lives in hope—the poor dears are awfully slow on the uptake though. “Ever since the religion of Islam appeared in the world, the espousers of it…have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all...

Some 65 years ago, as World War II raged in Europe and the Pacific, the American people faced an unprecedented constitutional crisis of which they were completely unaware — and which has remained a secret ever since. It has long been known that President Franklin D. Roosevelt, during the last year of his life, was gravely ill with serious cardiac problems: He'd been diagnosed with acute heart failure in March 1944 and suffered from astronomically high blood pressure and arteriosclerosis. But what the public did not know was that four years earlier, while still in the second of his four...

WASHINGTON -- The spirit of Christmas seems to have escaped Congress, maybe even the country. Have you ever encountered such mean spiritedness and political conniving as are now on display on Capitol Hill? In the past, we have had great philosophical divisions in the struggle for civil rights, especially when southern legislators ran the show. In praise of democracy, fortunately they lost. And of course there also was the "red scare" fomented by Sen. Joe McCarthy, R-Wis., in the 1950s when he led the commie-hunting movement that ended up victimizing government officials, academia and Hollywood. We recovered from that, too....

In 1941, the Roosevelt administration commissioned a radio special, “We Hold these Truths,” to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Listen to it here. The producer and writer was Norman Corwin (an ardent New Dealer who is still going strong at age 99). It featured an all-star cast including Orson Welles, James Stewart, Walter Brennan, and Edward G. Robinson, and closed with a speech by Roosevelt. Broadcast only a week after Pearl Harbor, it still holds the ratings record for any dramatic show. About half the American population tuned in. The actors, especially Stewart and Welles, give...

SIXTY-EIGHT years ago tomorrow, Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. In the brutal Pacific war that would follow, millions of soldiers and civilians were killed. My father — one of the famous flag raisers on Iwo Jima — was among the young men who went off to the Pacific to fight for his country. So the war naturally fascinated me. But I always wondered, why did we fight in the Pacific? Yes, there was Pearl Harbor, but why did the Japanese attack us in the first place? ... The one who had the greater effect on Japan’s...

In 1909, in the great state of Illinois, school teachers one February day were directed to spend at least half the school day in public exercises, patriotic music, and recitations of sayings, verses, and speeches to mark the centennial birthday of a great hero. At the end of it all, they were to have their students face in the direction of Springfield and chant in unison the following: “A blend of mirth and sadness, smiles and tears; “A quaint knight errant of the pioneers; “A homely hero, born of star and sod; “A Peasant Prince, a masterpiece of God.” Who...

Much has already been made of Landesman’s comparisons of Obama to Julius Caesar. As a teacher and lifelong student of history, I find that comparison amusing on various levels. Caesar was an accomplished military leader whose campaign through Gaul was the subject of his major literary work, still available in your local Barnes and Noble. Barack Obama is an indecisive teleprompter reader whose book will certainly be long forgotten 2,000 years from now. Julius Caesar’s actions as leader of Rome turned the Republic into a dictatorial empire that later spawned such rulers as Nero and Caligula. Might the Messiah, who,...

Writing in the NYR Blog, Jonathan Freedland notes that Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was awarded by a committee of five liberal politicians from a country whose population is half the size of London, reflecting a “Norwegian consensus” that “favors multilateralism, yearns for nuclear disarmament, and believes in international institutions, revering the United Nations above all.” The speculation in Oslo is that what clinched the award for Obama was chairing a UN meeting and “using that body as the vehicle for his disarmament ambitions.” READ THE REST AT COMMENTARYMAGAZINE.COM

Below are all the American Presidents and Vice Presidents who have received the Nobel Peace Prize, in order from first to most recent. It was an educational experience to review all the awards since the first was given in 1901. That bears on whether the Prize just awarded to President Obama is a positive or negative thing with respect to international war and peace. 1906 - (President) Theodore Roosevelt who “drew up the 1905 peace treaty between Russia and Japan.” This was an actual shooting war, which ended with the Treaty which Roosevelt negotiated. 1919 - (President) T. Woodrow Wilson...

During his current media bombardment, President Obama is wisely downplaying the charges of racism his allies have been making. He told CNN’s John King that race wasn’t “the overriding issue” for the opponents of his health care plan. Not exactly an exoneration of his critics’ racial attitudes, but at least an acknowledgment that there is more than bigotry at work. What Obama says is really driving the negative response to his policies is fear. Fear of “big changes.” Fear of “uncertainty.” The president likes to equate the resistance he’s facing with that met by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.

NEW YORK – A government that is constitutionally required to offer each citizen a "useful" job in the farms or industries of the nation. A country whose leadership intercedes to ensure every farmer can sell his product for a good return. A nation that has the power to act against "unfair competition" and monopolies in business. This is not a description of Cuba, communist China, or the USSR until 1991. It's the vision of the future of the U.S, as mandated by a radical new "bill of rights" drawn up and pushed by President Obama's newly confirmed regulatory czar, Cass...

You owe your life — and everything else — to the sovereign. The rights of subjects are not natural rights, but merely grants from the sovereign. There is no right even to complain about the actions of the sovereign, except insofar as the sovereign allows the subject to complain. These are the principles of unlimited, arbitrary, and absolute power, the principles of such rulers as Louis XIV. Intellectuals have assiduously promoted them; think of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. A new intellectual champion of absolutism has now emerged. Mild-mannered University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has been advancing the...

An economist is saying that President Hoover set the stage to worsen The Great Depression because of his pro-labor union stance. Pro-labor policies pushed by President Herbert Hoover after the stock market crash of 1929 accounted for close to two-thirds of the drop in the nation's gross domestic product over the two years that followed, causing what might otherwise have been a bad recession to slip into the Great Depression, a UCLA economist concludes in a new study. Lee E. Ohanian, a UCLA professor of economics, lays the worst of the Depression at the feet of Hoover who, in his...