Free Republic

Former President Trump called Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) a “piece of sh*t” during an interview with New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman for her forthcoming book. The Atlantic published an excerpt of Haberman’s book on Sunday, including Trump’s criticisms of the top Senate Republican, whose relationship with the former president soured over their disagreements on the 2020 election. Trump has since nicknamed McConnell “The Old Crow.” “The Old Crow’s a piece of sh*t,” Trump told Haberman during an interview at Mar-a-Lago, according to the excerpt. Haberman’s book, titled “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking...

September 2021 marked the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It was a somber occasion, as millions of Americans looked back on one of the worst atrocities in American history, and that calamitous foreign policy America embarked on in response to it. Revolver writes “one of” the worst atrocities, because there are deeds that killed far more Americans than 9/11 did. In fact, America is living through one of those atrocities right now. Newly-released FBI numbers confirm something that has been apparent for the last year: The Black Lives Matter movement is the deadliest entirely-preventable atrocity inflicted on the American...

When Rudy Giuliani accused President Obama of not loving America, was he expressing a form of racism? If not, what was Giuliani saying? I have argued, controversially to some on the left, that it is important to grapple with ideas on their own terms before merely analyzing their motivations. American conservatism is historically intertwined with white racism in such a way that nearly any conservative idea could plausibly be understood as an appeal to racism, but most of those ideas can be expressed and justified in non-racial terms, and deserve to be taken at face value. The trouble with Giuliani’s...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoZjXDP7LHs

It’s an article of faith among many Republicans that Mitt Romney is the most electable candidate in the GOP field. But it’s not clear that this assertion is actually true. In fact, if one were going to design a Republican opponent tailor-made to President Obama’s liking, that opponent would be uniquely vulnerable to Obama’s main rhetorical thrust (making class-warfare arguments), uniquely unsuited to take clear aim at Obama’s least popular action as president (spearheading the passage of Obamacare), and uniquely strong in states that are unlikely to matter in the general election race. In all three of these ways, Romney...

Recollections On a New Age BegunThink of the hope and change of just the last six months that have changed all our lives. It was, I remember, around the beginning of February when the understandable liberal angst about the Bush deficit simply disappeared. Gone. Vanished. No more haranguing about red ink and shorting our grandchildren.For the last eight years, I had some admiration-albeit along with plenty of bewilderment-at the newly fiscally mature Congressional Democrats and their impassioned attacks on Bush’s fiscal irresponsibility.But then suddenly their principled opposition paid off. Deficits disappeared-at least the multibillion species. Yes, borrowing was replaced by...

“This Dubai port deal has unleashed a kind of collective mania we haven’t seen in decades ... a xenophobic tsunami,” wails a keening David Brooks, “a nativist, isolationist mass hysteria is ... here.” The New York Times columnist obviously regards the nation’s splenetic response to news that control of our East Coast ports had been sold to Arab sheiks as wildly irrational. In witness whereof he quotes Philip Damas of Drewry Shipping Consultants, “The location of a company in the age of globalism is irrelevant.” But irrelevant to whom? Why is it irrelevant, in a war against Arab and Islamic...

First, this is NOT an April Fool's joke. I am leaving Free Republic. Over the past two years, civility and thoughtful discourse has vanished from this site, replaced with demands for ideological conformity that are straight out of Stalinist Russia or China's Great Cultural Revolution, and unrelenting uncivility if said conformance is not forthcoming. This trend began with the California recall election, where certain posters were allowed to flame the living beejezus out of those who didn't wholeheartedly support Tom McClintock, or thought that he wasn't running a campaign capable of winning. It extended into the Keyes campaign last year,...

Has any generation in history ever banged on about itself more and with less merit than the baby boomers? Oh good, another 1960s retrospective. And another. And another. You can't move for celebrations of "the decade that changed the world forever". Tate Britain is honouring the art of the swinging decade in an exhibition starting at the end of the month. BBC Four is a week into its Summer in the Sixties season, while the Sunday Times magazine is devoting acres to the 10 years that shook the planet. Why this surge of interest? Has a milestone passed? Or is...

Democrats Clueless About Clinton Curse October 8, 2003 This California election dealt a huge defeat to Bill Clinton, Gray Davis' top behind-the-scenes advisor. Gray's the latest jinxee in a long line of them from Algore nationally to state races in Hawaii, Minnesota, Maryland and more. When Clinton took office, the Democrats controlled the House and Senate, plus the lion's share of governorships and state legislatures. Now, the GOP holds the whip hand in all of those categories. The Democrat Party can't win elections if it continues to be the plaything of Bill, Hillary and their handpicked DNC chair Terry McAuliffe....

<p>So it shouldn't be shocking or disturbing that another one of those global opinion polls from Washington's Pew Center reports that many foreign Arabs and Muslims hold unfavorable views of America - and that the war in Iraq has made America less popular than it was six months ago, especially in places like France and Russia.</p>

Not for the first time we have a President of the United States who enjoys an extraordinary and sustained level of support from the American public but is misunderstood and mistrusted on our side of the Atlantic. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was often derided in British and European opinion as being no more than a B-movie actor who was not up to the job intellectually. Even when he turned out to be an immensely successful president who pursued his goals on taxation, defence and international relations with great clarity and success a huge proportion of otherwise well-informed people in...