Free Republic

John F. Kennedy believed that being passed over for vice president by the Democratic convention in 1956 saved his political career. That year, Adlai Stevenson, the presidential nominee, had left the selection of his running mate to the convention delegates—the last time a nominee did so. The choice came down to Kennedy and his Senate colleague Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, who had lined up too much early support even for the attractive young war hero to overcome. In the end, Kennedy had it both ways. He benefited from the television exposure and was spared the blame—which as a Catholic, he...

America's mayor calls it as he sees it. That just about sums it up. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani tells Neil Cavuto that moving KSM and his other 9-11 buddies to New York for trial is an unnecessary risk and for that reason he does not hold back. Please make special note of Rudy’s facial expression at the beginning of the interview.

The President of leisure has a pretty slow day Monday, highlighting the point that no pressing business kept him from celebrating the fall of communism 20 years after the Berlin Wall fell. Jim Gerraghty of The Campaign Spot on National Review goes over the official schedule for our leader yesterday: Just look at the man's schedule: He had a 10 a.m. daily briefing from the intelligence community, a 10:30 a.m. economic daily briefing, an 11 a.m. meeting with senior advisers . . . and then, right after that, at 6:45 in the evening, he had to sign an executive...

In the hours following the shooting at Ft. Hood, President Obama demonstrated resolute apathy to the greatest issue of our time. His callous and apathetic beliefs caused some rather unbecoming behavior for a United States President. And worse yet the American people are the one's who will suffer... And they noticed. Roughly two and a half hours after the shooting that took the lives of American service personnel, on American soil, President Obama was scheduled to deliver a speech to a Tribal Nations Conference being sponsored by the U.S. Government. Once the President was told of the Ft. Hood shooting,...

A year after his historic election, President Barack Obama sought to remind Americans on Wednesday the biggest problems he is grappling with -- from the economy to the war in Afghanistan -- are the legacy of his predecessor, George W. Bush....he said his administration was also confronted with a "financial crisis that threatened to plunge our economy into a Great Depression, the worst that we've seen in generations.""We had record deficits, two wars, frayed alliances around the world," Obama added.He said his administration had acted swiftly to save the economy from "imminent collapse." -(http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-43692420091104?sp=true) It seems the Manchild-in-Chief is...

Robert George says Obama didn't wait long after Tuesday's devastating elections to give critics another reason to question his leadership, but this time the subject matter was more grim than a pair of governorships. After news broke out of the shooting at the Fort Hood Army post in Texas, the nation watched in horror as the toll of dead and injured climbed. The White House was notified immediately and by late afternoon, word went out that Obama would speak about the incident prior to a previously scheduled appearance. At about 5 p.m., cable stations went to Obama. The situation called...

More than a third of American youth of military age are unfit for service, mainly because they are too fat or sickly, the Army Times reports, quoting the latest Pentagon figures. Most of the rest are too dumb or have used too many drugs to qualify, the study shows. The report says 35% of the 31 million Americans aged 17 to 24 are unqualified because of physical and medical issues. "The major component of this is obesity," Curt Gilroy, the Pentagon's director of accessions, tells the Times. "We have an obesity crisis in the country. There's no question about it."...

WATCH OBAMA ON YOUTUBE AND HIS SICKENING PERFORMANCE The very first thing he should have done is asked the audience to join him in a moment of silence for the Ft. Hood victims. He went through 2:24 of crap before getting to the most important part.

Wednesday night, October 21, former Vice President Dick Cheney received the Center's Keeper of the Flame Award. He was introduced by Senator Jon Kyl and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld....

WHY LIBERALS ARE INCAPABLE OF DEFENDING AMERICA Behind The Lines By Dr. Jack Wheeler Friday, October 14, 2005 [This is the text of a speech I gave yesterday, October 16, at the Accuracy in Media luncheon in Washington DC. It was taped by C-Span and will be nationally broadcast at various times over the C-Span network – check www.c-span.org for schedules. Video/DVD copies of the speech may be ordered via the C-Span website. I began the speech by holding up an actual shrunken head.] I’d like to show you a concrete example of why liberals cannot defend their country. This...

I’m sorry, there’s a lot I admire about Barack Obama, but he doesn’t deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Not while he’s waging a war in Afghanistan, which he’s already escalated, and may be about to escalate again. Not while he still hasn’t pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq, nor while he’s going to keep tens of thousands of private military contractors there indefinitely. Not while he endorses Bush’s heinous policy of “extraordinary renditions.” Not while asserts the right to indefinitely detain people without habeas corpus rights at Bagram Air Base. Not while he fails to successfully prod Israel to give...

President Barack Obama is still just a lost boy at his age, and he searches for a world he wished existed. His insistence upon living in his world, though attractive to the uneducated, neglected, and naive, is dangerously heaping hot coals of consequence on the heads of those who know better... ...President Obama believes his good press far too often, trusts his advisors' agreement as a sign of genuine critical analysis, and believes the American people are too unenlightened to truly understand his methods. All three realities push the President further into an altered state of worldview that are having...

Omitted from the “not done” checklist here: Stopping Iran, resisting the urge to nationalize giant car companies, and keeping deficit projections for the next decade under a trillion dollars annually. But those are all concerns of the right and, needless to say, that’s not where this skit is coming from, a point worth bearing in mind amid the grim enjoyment you’ll feel at seeing The One spoofed on national TV. Mainstream comedy has actually reached the point where their big goof on Barack Obama is that he’s not liberal enough.Memo to Lorne Michaels: This impersonation, if it can even be...

The latest Fox News/Opinion Dymanic poll is chock-full of bad news for the president. But on foreign policy, the results are nothing short of stunning. On who they trust more to decide the next steps in Afghanistan. 66 percent say military commanders, while only 20 percent say the president. Even Democrats have more faith in the military commanders (by a 45 to 37 percent margin). On Iran, 69 percent say Obama has not been tough enough, including 55 percent of Democrats. Sixty-one percent favor a U.S. military action, if needed, to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Fifty-one percent think...

There has been a growing narrative taking hold about Barack Obama’s presidency in recent weeks: that he is loved by many, but feared by none; that he is full of lofty vision, but is actually achieving nothing with his grandiloquence. Chicago’s dismal showing today, after Mr Obama’s personal, impassioned last-minute pitch, is a stunning humiliation for this President. It cannot be emphasised enough how this will feed the perception that on the world stage he looks good — but carries no heft.

During his appearance at the United Nations, Barack Obama envisioned a world without nuclear weapons. We think we found this imaginary world and where it came from, as shown in the animation (http://www.stentorian.com/cartoons/2008/obama_movie.gif, Barack Obama's Amazing Acid Trip to a World Without Nuclear Weapons). Meanwhile, with due credit to Jefferson Airplane for the original, The red pill makes you larger And the blue pill makes you small And the pain pill that Barry will give you Won’t do anything at all Go ask Barry When he’s ten feet tall And if you want nuclear disarmament And you know anything at...

We now know that Barack Obama has sat for almost a year on the information regarding Iran's "secret" nuclear plant. His hand was forced yesterday by the Iranians who were the ones that went public with the information when it appeared to them that their security had been breached. This led to Barack Obama disclosing the previously withheld information regarding the plant. The Iranians kept the plant secret and Obama aided them by his silence. So much for the transparency promise.

Czechs are used to betrayal by their Western allies. It was at Munich in 1938 that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sealed their doom in exchange for a piece of paper promising "peace in our time." The fact that this further gutting of missile defense came on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland on Sept. 17, 1939, is an eerie coincidence. "Just after midnight I was informed in a telephone call by President Barack Obama that (his) administration had decided to pull out from the planned missile defense shield installations" in the Czech Republic and Poland, the...

On Sept. 16, ex-president Jimmy Carter excoriated opponents of President Barack Obama as racists. "I think people who [attack] Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African-American," Carter blathered. Obama's spokespeople quickly backed away from Carter's statements; Obama went so far as to remind David Letterman that he was black before the presidential election, and that the American public had elected him anyway. The fact is this: the American public is not racist. In fact, we're downright evenhanded -- we elect incompetents of all color...

Vicenza, Italy. President Obama’s decision to cancel our European ground-based missile defense system will prove to be very costly and his public rationale -- changed intelligence and improved technologies -- is far from the whole truth. This is a geopolitical disaster and risks our security as well. Last year, President Bush said “Iran is pursuing technology that could be used to produce nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles of increasing range that could deliver them.” His administration successfully negotiated with Poland and the Czech Republic to install a ground-based anti-missile defense system in those countries to counter the accelerating Iranian threat.