Free Republic

Liberal American-Jewish commentator Peter Beinart gave a provocative speech on Wednesday, in which he said Israel essentially deserved the wave of Arab terrorism targeting its citizens. Beinart, who despite his regular attacks on the Jewish state insists he is "pro-Israel", was speaking at "Beth Chayim Chadashim Progressive synagogue in Los Angeles, which was set up as a "gay-friendly" congregation. His comments were recorded approvingly by the anti-Israel Mondoweiss website. "While we condemn Palestinian violence, we must recognize this painful truth: that Israeli policy has encouraged it," Beinart told his audience. "Israel has encouraged it by penalizing Palestinian nonviolence, by responding...

If you imagine a scenario in which Donald Trump vanishes from the Republican presidential race, and isn’t replaced by an equally brash panderer—that is, where his supporters scatter to a variety of other second-choice candidates—then you can make the case that behind all the dirt Trump has kicked up, the Republican presidential field is basically healthy. Conservative Bloomberg View columnist Ramesh Ponnuru flirted with that argument at the end of August, by listing all the reasons Trump is unlikely to win the primaries, including the fact that “Republican elected officials would consolidate behind a consensus choice if Trump started winning...

One hundred-fifty presidents, prime ministers, dictators, and other heads of state are coming. Pope Francis is coming. Thousands of journalists, diplomats, and NGO activists are coming. The United Nations Sustainable Development Summit, to be held September 25-27, at the UN headquarters in New York City, is set to become one of the global body’s biggest confabs ever. In addition to promoting global-warming fears and the UN’s Paris Summit on Climate Change in December, as well as global taxation, education, and environmental goals, the upcoming September gathering will undoubtedly be used as a springboard to impose more population control, abortion, and...

“I don't want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.” That was Senator Barack Obama, speaking about Iraq in a 2008 primary debate. For a candidate who had seen his own campaign surge on the strength of his opposition to the Iraq war, it was a near-perfect distillation of the change he hoped to bring to America’s foreign policy discussion, long dominated by hawkish views that were shattering against the bloody reality of Iraq’s civil war. During the 2008 campaign, Obama started—and won—a hugely significant debate...

The left-wing criticism of American Sniper was to be expected. Frankly, it’s not worth responding to the vast majority of these criticisms. Yet, if you have a piece from a left-leaning publication, like the New Republic, where the author admits to not even seeing the film, and then ends it with an analysis about the Iraq War; mockery is justified, albeit for a brief time. Recently, Dennis Jett wrote a piece about American Sniper for the Republic. There’s just one problem; He didn’t see the movie: I have not seen American Sniper. But if the trailer is any indication, Eastwood’s film,...

In a memo to staff yesterday announcing a masthead shake-up, New Republic chief executive Guy Vidra wrote that a reduction in the frequency of the 100-year-old magazine would require a staff “restructuring,” a common euphemism for layoffs. Well, that may not be necessary considering that a whole herd of staffers resigned en masse following the defenestration of top editor Franklin Foer and longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier. Have a look at the departures.... Perhaps the “restructuring” will now come in the form of a hiring spree to fill vacancies created by the newsroom-wide disgust with Foer’s firing. A group of...

Not long after he purchased The New Republic, Chris Hughes had lunch with me, as he was doing with quite a few journalists around Washington. At one point, he asked me who the best editor had been during my 16 years. I had worked for a half dozen editors, several of them great, but it was an easy question. I replied “Frank Foer” so quickly that Hughes appeared startled. I don’t think my answer convinced Hughes to hire Foer as TNR’s editor, because I’m sure anybody else who worked with him said the same, and anyway, Frank Foer was born...

Former President Bill Clinton on Wednesday noted that previous U.S. presidents have issued some type of executive order on immigration, suggesting his Democratic successor was on “pretty firm legal ground.” The former president spoke on the eve of President Barack Obama’s scheduled announcement of executive actions to spare as many as 5 million immigrants from being deported from the U.S. Clinton said during an event honoring the magazine The New Republic that it was part of a larger debate about the nation’s role around the globe. “As far as I can tell, every president in the modern era has issued...

You may not have heard much from Senator Ted Cruz lately, but on Thursday, he came back with a force in blowing up House Republicans’ bill to address the border crisis. Make no mistake, House Speaker John Boehner—and the rest of the Republican establishment—still have a big Ted Cruz problem. And it’s only going to get bigger as the 2016 presidential election approaches. As it stands now, Cruz has successfully persuaded a block of House Republicans to vote against the House GOP’s border bill, forcing Boehner to pull the legislation from the docket. The situation is still fluid. The House...

With its cover story [1] on Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, The New Republic has hit an all-time low. Written by TNR Senior Editor Alec Macgillis, it reads as a commissioned hit job meant to lessen Walker’s chances of entering the GOP presidential race.Let’s start with the cover: superimposed over a photo of the governor standing by his desk is the title: “Scott Walker is So Hot Right Now: Too bad he owes his success to a toxic strain of Racial Politics.” Inside the issue, the title becomes: “The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker: A Journey Through the Poisonous,...

The results of India's election, which are rapidly appearing today, seem to show a huge win for the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). A victory had been expected, but this looks like a massive landslide. The next prime minister is almost certain to be Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, a state in western India. He is known for his economic agenda, which is seen to be relatively business-friendly (expect stocks to react very positively to the news), and his controversial brand of Hinduism. Modi's ideology is certainly going to be important over the next several years, but his...

've been having an argument with a friend of mine, a veteran Washington journalist, about whether it can really be true that where I live (an apartment building on the Upper West Side of New York, all of whose residents are Columbia faculty members), people arenÂ’t talking about This Town. My friend thinks IÂ’m playing the country bumpkin, but I swear it! This Town has a powerful infinity-of-mirrors quality: itÂ’s proudly, defiantly obsessed with a particular Washington subculture, which it persuasively portrays as being self-obsessed, and the subculture obsesses over This Town right back, because the book plays into the...

President Obama recently told the New Republic magazine, "Up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time." Today, after some suggested the president's claim might not be true, the New Republic tweeted a picture supposedly proving that Obama has gone skeet shooting:

The New Republic has quietly dropped at least five prominent Jewish writers from its masthead in a move that may signal the publication’s continued drift away from a staunchly pro-Israel standpoint. The magazine has launched an aggressive new editorial direction under the ownership of wealthy socialite Chris Hughes, who is best known for sharing a room with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University. The names of several prominent Jewish writers from both the left and right of the political spectrum were dropped from TNR’s masthead in the latest issue. They include: Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake, longtime TNR columnist...

"...What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? There is no moral difference between them. Why should I be moral? Because it makes you feel better than being immoral. Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don’t like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory? Anything goes. What is love, and how can I find it? Love is the solution to a strategic interaction problem. Don’t look for it; it will find you when you need it. Does history have any meaning or purpose?It’s full of sound and fury, but signifies nothing.” I take...

Actually, no one has shown that a single serious demonstration against Muslims and Arabs, against their beliefs and behavior can be raised in this country. And, if you think Glenn Beck's rally at the Lincoln Memorial was its equivalent please quote to me sounds of hatred directed from the platform. There has not been a single rally or demonstration in America aimed at Muslim or Arab interests or more likely, to foreign insurgencies and, yes, quite alien philosophies. I suggest that this is largely the case because Americans are so fearful of being accused of bias. Muslims and Arabs do...

One mini-saga of the past decade in American politics has been the flirtation—with talk of a deeper partnership—between progressives and libertarians. These two groups were driven together, in the main, by common hostility to huge chunks of the Bush administration's agenda: endless, pointless wars; assaults on civil liberties; cynical vote-buying with federal dollars; and statist panders to the Christian right. This cooperation reached its height during the 2006 election, in which, according to a new study by David Kirby and David Boaz, nearly half of libertarian voters supported Democratic congressional candidates—more than doubling the support levels from the previous midterm...

How does this president handle a crisis? Thus far, the answer is not at all encouraging. The current crisis is the election in Massachusetts of Scott Brown, now the forty-first Republican senator. His arrival in Washington has sent Democrats into panic mode--fearful that they too will be swallowed by a seething electorate--and caused many of them to flee in the other direction from health care reform. In short, Barack Obama faces a moment where his presidency just might collapse or, rather, risks heading into a wilderness where it would accomplish next to none of its ambitious goals. For generations, health...

The New Republic is well-known for its quirky, thought-provoking articles. (See this clever defense of Jay Leno). But at other times articles can read as though their writers have taken leave of their senses. Despite reports that Democrats are looking for a way to drop health care and move on to something else, TNR Senior Editor Jonathan Chait argues the bill is still in good shape: In my opinion, the issue is in a similar place as last summer, when the national media was also declaring reform dead, or on life support.

Democrats in Congress have a lot to juggle in the year ahead. If they want to avoid a slaughter at the polls, they’ll need to boost job growth. Not only that, but Wall Street remains poorly regulated, and key allies are growing impatient for labor-law and immigration reform. So it’s hardly a shock to hear that some Dems would prefer to set aside tackling climate change--especially so soon after a grueling health care fight. “We need to deal with the phenomena of global warming,” Indiana Senator Evan Bayh recently groused, “but I think it’s very difficult in the economic circumstances...