Free Republic

Credit: NBCWell, here’s an interesting way to respond to the Benghazi scandal, back in the spotlight again this week as whistle-blowers prepare to testify before Congress that the government always knew the assault on the consulate in Libya was a planned terror attack and not a spontaneous protest in response to an anti-Muslim video posted on YouTube. Alex Seitz-Wald at Salon is pre-blaming conservatives should the scandal fail to take off: The charges seem potentially damaging and the accusers credible, but those trying to fan flames of scandal have so embarrassed and discredited themselves by pushing bogus story lines on...

During the 2012 election cycle I occasionally ran stories declaring that various Republicans being touted as White House material “will never be president.” Sarah Palin after her narcissistic Gabby Giffords meltdown; Newt Gingrich early in his race-baiting campaign; Mitt Romney after his British Olympics screw-up. I batted 1.000 for that cycle, but it was easy. In 2016, Republicans won’t be facing a Democratic incumbent, so somebody has a shot. I recently wrote that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will never be president, due to his out-of-control anger issues, but candidly, I think that’s my riskiest one yet. I feel no...

Here is a good analysis from Heresy Today: A European Bulletin of Hidden News and Dissident Views: Chechen refugees from the war torn region of the Caucasus, one in receipt of an Ivy League scholarship to MIT. Somewhere in the United States, David "let's hope the Boston bomber is white and not Muslim" Sirota's head, over at Salon, has just gone into meltdown. The perpetrators of the Boston bombing, and the subsequent attacks against law enforcement, were actually successfully identified to the FBI by the double amputee victim, shown in the most striking photograph from Monday's attack. The most useful...

Media Bias: There's palpable dismay at outlets such as MSNBC and Salon that the Boston Marathon bombers were radicalized young men from Chechnya and not angry white males from the vast right-wing conspiracy. Shortly after Monday's tragedy in Boston, David Sirota of Salon Magazine penned a piece titled "Let's hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American." His hopes were dashed when the suspects turned out to be Muslim brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose family origins are in Chechnya, the rebellious Russian region that is a breeding ground for terrorists. In 2002, about 40 armed Chechen separatists took...

One of the curious, but also most predictable, responses to the Boston Marathon bombings from the Left has been the fervent expression — amounting nearly to a prayer — that the perpetrator or perpetrators of this act of mass murder be “homegrown,” preferably white, male, Christian, and conservative. Why? Why does the Left prefer to have its terrorism served up by Timothy McVeigh rather than Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad? It’s an interesting question. That the Left exhibits this prejudice is, like Falstaff’s dishonesty, “gross as a mountain, open, palpable.” David Sirota, writing at Salon, gives almost comic expression to the...

As NewsBusters reported earlier, unabashedly liberal commentator David Sirota published an article at Salon Tuesday with the disgusting title, "Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American." As a result of all the negative attention he's gotten due to this piece, rather than doing the right thing by apologizing, Sirota on Wednesday actually doubled down with a new article titled "I Still Hope the Bomber Is a White American."Sirota began by claiming that Fox News's Bill O'Reilly "effectively agreed" with his Tuesday article. "As O’Reilly put it," he wrote, "'If this is an international terror attack, the repercussions...

The co-author of a book on partisan science recently examined by Pacific Standard argues that our reviewer was a little too partisan himself. Any book that touches upon politics almost automatically angers half of the American public, regardless of what is written inside of it. It takes a special person—an objective, open-minded and self-critical one—to read and learn from a science book that criticizes people with whom the reader likes and agrees with politically.Recently, Pacific Standard published a review (“Red Science, Blue Science,” January/February 2013) by Wray Herbert, a pop psychology writer,of political writer Chris Mooney’s book The Republican Brain...

People often ask me why Leftists are so eager to collaborate with Islamic supremacists, as they find it curious that they would enable those who would destroy them for their moral transgressions under Sharia. There are many answers, including a shared taste for authoritarianism, and that may be what is in play here, since Chris Stedman openly avows that he is trying to silence us, trying to intimidate the fundraising site Indiegogo into shutting down our fundraiser. Certainly both Leftists and Islamic supremacists are enemies of the freedom of speech. "Stop trying to split gays and Muslims," by Chris Stedman...

Presented as a curiosity. Don't bother reading the article. It just calls for Obama to stand up to the GOP. But many Comments were interesting. I was rather surprised by some of the hatred (and I mean hatred) expressed for Obama there.

It is one of life's great mysteries that so many liberal people are so callous when it comes to aborting fetuses. I mean, the Democratic convention last summer was almost a pro-abortion pep rally, as a variety of pro-choice speakers, including the self-proclaimed "Catholic woman" Caroline Kennedy, knelt at the altar of "reproductive rights." Recently, another woman who calls herself a Catholic, Mary Elizabeth Williams, wrote a shocking article for Salon. Entitled "So What if Abortion Ends Life?" Williams starkly states: "I believe that life starts at conception. And it's never stopped me from being pro-choice." In the body...

Salon staff writer Mary Elizabeth Williams ROME, January 24, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An item came to my attention today in my daily inspection of the internet, asking a very pertinent question. And though I’m sure it was meant rhetorically, I thought I’d have a go at answering it. A short piece, clearly published in answer to the hundreds of thousands gathered this week on the Washington Mall demanding an end to the slaughter of children, asks, “So what if abortion ends life?” Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote yesterday on the “progressive” online magazine Salon, “I believe that life starts at...

I had an odd moment today reading this Salon piece because within it is a paragraph or two I could have written and probably have said a dozen times: I have friends who have referred to their abortions in terms of “scraping out a bunch of cells” and then a few years later were exultant over the pregnancies that they unhesitatingly described in terms of “the baby” and “this kid.” I know women who have been relieved at their abortions and grieved over their miscarriages. Why can’t we agree that how they felt about their pregnancies was vastly different, but...

This week, people were shocked when the Drudge Report posted a giant picture of Hitler over a headline speculating that the White House will proceed with executive orders to limit access to firearms. The proposed orders are exceedingly tame, but Drudge’s reaction is actually a common conservative response to any invocation of gun control. The NRA, Fox News, Fox News (again), Alex Jones, email chains, Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, Gun Owners of America, etc., all agree that gun control was critical to Hitler’s rise to power. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (“America’s most aggressive defender of firearms ownership”)...

Explaining voter fraud, Benghazi and the fiscal cliff to Fox-watching family members..“The Holidays” are now officially here, and all Americans will soon have to face their extended families and listen to them talk. For many young Americans — specifically young Americans related to old white Americans — Thanksgiving and our various Winter Holidays are extra stressful, because young Americans are largely a liberal, Obama-voting bunch, and old white Americans are mostly not. Unfortunately, old white Americans spend a lot of their time being lied to by conservatives on TV, the radio and the Internet, and while that is not their...

The left's war on traditional marriage took a truly disgraceful turn Monday. The folks at Salon actually published a piece entitled "Gay Couples Have Happier Kids." The sub-headline read, "Studies show that the traditional nuclear family is not better. It's a dying model -- and that's a good thing": If you want what’s best for your kids, one surefire way to provide them with a healthy, happy home is to make sure they have lesbian parents. In the longest-running study of lesbian families to date, zero percent of children reported physical or sexual abuse—not a one. In the general population,...

Each year, 24/7 Wall St. identifies 10 important American brands that we predict will to disappear within a year. This year’s list reflects the brutally competitive nature of certain industries and the reason why companies cannot afford to fall behind in efficiency, innovation or financing. American Airlines will disappear in 2013 because of its inefficiency. It was the premier carrier in the United States for almost 30 years — even surviving through periods when most other carriers went bankrupt. However, it lost its critical advantage of scale when Northwest merged with Delta (NYSE: DAL) and Continental merged with United (NYSE:...

Bush’s mere due-process-free eavesdropping on and detention of American citizens caused such liberal outrage, while Obama’s due-process-free execution of them has not. Beyond that, Obama has used drones to kill Muslim children and innocent adults by the hundreds. He has refused to disclose his legal arguments for why he can do this or to justify the attacks in any way. He has even had rescuers and funeral mourners deliberately targeted. As Hayden said: ”Right now, there isn’t a government on the planet that agrees with our legal rationale for these operations, except for Afghanistan and maybe Israel.” But that is...

Rove is very much in a “do I have to do everything myself” mode these days, which is why he’s also running the GOP’s congressional campaign as an independently funded venture. Here he is practically acting as a Romney surrogate on Fox and attacking Herman Cain, because actual Romney surrogates seem unable to.

GOP cultists occupy a metaphysical netherworld where basic arithmetic is scorned as an elitist tool. As I write, it's impossible to guess how the latest made-for-TV partisan crisis in Washington will end. We've reached the point where the president of the United States felt he needed to deliver a prime-time speech essentially defending the post-Enlightenment values of reason, evidence and compromise against an obscurantist movement more like a religious cult than a political party. But has President Obama got the guts to deal with the reality facing him? Signs are not encouraging. The standoff has two major components: the adolescent...