Free Republic

Washington -- The year 2012 is about to expire. It was a blank in my judgment -- poof and it is gone. We have the same sorry vacuity in the White House, bereft of knowing how to run the government. Just now he is off to Hawaii to loll in the sun, having left behind questions as to how to avoid our "fiscal cliff." Yes, he wants to raise taxes on the top two percent, but how do we reduce the deficit and finish off the tax bill? He has headed for the beach -- and practically no one remarks...

Winston Churchill has his fans on the left. President John F. Kennedy, who was fascinated by his writings, bestowed upon him honorary US citizenship. Churchill was the second person, after the Marquis de Lafayette, to be so honored. Delivering the keynote address honoring the 60th anniversary of Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, admirer Chris Matthews said, “Where other politicians cling to office, he acted as if he were truly prepared to fling it away, to risk popular rejection, which came to him on so many cruel occasions . . . He didn’t worry what his critics thought.” The liberal mind is...

Thus far, we know what the Obama administration won't do in response to the obvious decay of U.S. standing in the Middle East. It won't stop deploring the video for which it originally blamed attacks on our diplomatic facilities in the region, worsened by the murders of our ambassador to Libya and three other Americans. It won't schedule a meeting this week between Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu and the president, who seems to need more time on the campaign trail. And so on. What the administration will do to make its attitudes and responses feared throughout the region isn't likely to...

Letters of Note curator Shaun Usher has pointed out what might be the first known usage of O.M.G., in a September 1917 missive from British admiral John Arbuthnot "Jacky" Fisher (or Lord Fisher) to Sir Winston Churchill. In a letter to Churchill about some "utterly [upsetting]" World War I–era newspaper headlines, Fisher wrote, "I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis — O.M.G (Oh! My! God!)— Shower it on the Admiralty!!" To which we assume Churchill replied, "Oh Dear Fisher! I am laughing heartily out loud!!"

The Obama presidency is fond of issuing apologies for America on the world stage, but very rarely makes them at home to Americans. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer has just issued one to Washington Post columnist and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer, who last week wrote an op-ed berating the Obama administration for removing a bust of Sir Winston Churchill from the Oval Office when it came to power. Pfeiffer had issued a stinging attack on Krauthammer, alleging that his Churchill bust reference was “100 percent false.” Krauthammer was of course 100 percent correct, and the British Embassy in...

Produced by Oscar-winning producer Gerald Molen and directed by conservative journalist Dinesh D’Souza, the controversial documentary “2016: Obama’s America” takes audiences on a journey into President Obama’s roots, painting a disturbing portrait of what it says are his plans for America if elected for a second term. The film has yet to open wide in the U.S., but it has already caused a box office splash in Texas. The documentary opened in a single theater in July in the Lone Star State, grossing almost $32,000 in its opening weekend, with moviegoers waiting as much as 90 minutes to meet the...

As Telegraph readers will recall, one of the earliest actions of the Obama presidency when it came to office in 2009 was to return a bust of Sir Winston Churchill to the British Embassy, an extraordinary move considering the huge admiration for the wartime leader on both sides of the Atlantic. Tim Shipman, The Sunday Telegraph’s Washington correspondent at the time (now Deputy Political Editor at The Daily Mail), was the first to break the story: A bust of the former prime minister once voted the greatest Briton in history, which was loaned to George W Bush from the Government's...

The White House incorrectly claimed that a bust of Winston Churchill was not removed from the White House when President Obama moved in, insisting with emphatic certainty that it had simply been moved to the residence but then retracting the assertion. In a “Fact Check” post added to the White House website Friday, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer scornfully dismissed as “100% false” the “rumor” that Obama had removed the Churchill bust that had presided over the George W. Bush Oval Office and shipped it back to the British. Turns out Pfeiffer’s was the false statement. Picture [snip] Pfeiffer...

David Bahnsen of Newport Beach, California is a Senior Vice President of Morgan Stanley, and also serves on the Board of Advisers of the California Recovery Project with Dr. Arthur Laffer. Bahnsen has abandoned his earlier support of the Ron Paul crusade, and now describes himself as an "economically literate Republican." He is the author of "The Undiscerning and Dangerous Appreciation of Ron Paul." Bahnsen says "It is the ironic that Ron Paul's alleged praiseworthiness comes from his devotion to the Constitution, when in fact, he has emphatically rejected it." Bahnsen has many family and business connections with libertarians. His...

This month the U.S. federal government has officially endorsed America’s fourth “Gay Pride Month” in the last dozen years. President Bill Clinton originally declared June “Gay Pride Month” in June of 2000, and President Barack Obama has continued that tradition ever since June 2009.[1] These declarations foreshadowed his announcement shortly before Mother’s Day last month which made him the first President in the history of the United States to executively communicate moral and political support for changing the historical, common law, statutory and biblical definition of marriage to sanction the ability of two men or two women to marry. But...

Winston Churchill wrote a memoir about World War 2 , the personalities, circumstances and events leading to the outbreak of the war. His review of these events in "The Gathering Storm" begins after the end of World War 1 and the Treaty of Versailles, under which the Allies and the League of Nations forced draconian war debt reparations on Germany. The post-war naivety of the victorious Allies with respect to their place in the world and their responsibility to maintain the peace, as history shows, resulted in a downward spiral of denial and political pandering, both domestically and on foreign...

TWO of America’s Republican candidates – Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul – have dared to toy with the idea of bringing back the gold standard. Their remarks have in turn triggered a fusillade of indignant replies, from pundits and professional economists alike, the general theme of which is that no one fit to be America’s Commander-in-Chief can possibly have a good word to say about gold. Of all the reasons usually given for condemning the gold standard, perhaps the most common is the claim that it was to blame for the Great Depression. What responsible politician, gold’s critics ask rhetorically,...

Within days of the defeat of Germany in World War II, Winston Churchill ordered his war cabinet to draw up contingency plans for an offensive against Stalin that would lead to ``the elimination of Russia'', according to top secret British documents. The resulting battle plan included the use of up to 100,000 German troops to back up half a million British and American soldiers attacking through northern Germany. It assumed that Stalin would invade Turkey, Greece, Norway and the oilfields of Iraq and Iran in retaliation and launch extensive sabotage operations in France and the Low Countries. A 29-page report, ...

H.L. Mencken called his colleagues of the fourth estate “a gang of peck sniffs.” Some conservative commentators have become pundit sniffs, turning up their elitist noses at whoever the frontrunner for the Republican nomination happens to be. You’d think we didn’t have other pressing business – like saving the Republic from the mega-Marxist in the White House. Now, it’s former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s turn for an colonoscopy. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan, a CINO (conservative in name only), frets that Gingrich is “a trouble magnet, a starter of fights that need not be fought.” (It’s called...

While candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Perry battled it out in the CNN Western Republican Presidential Debate, Sarah Palin said she thought Newt Gingrich took home the winner's belt. "Everybody could learn from Newt Gingrich and the way - his calm, cool, collected manner," Palin said Tuesday in an interview on Fox News. "He's kind of seen it all before in this political game, if you will." Palin said the former House Speaker, often described as the most professor-like among the pool of candidates, would "clobber Barack Obama in any debate, any forum that had to do with substance."

’ve spent a perfectly delightful Friday working on a writing project that has required me to nose around a lot of old material on Franklin Roosevelt, and at some point it was inevitable that I would re-read for the hundredth time Winston Churchill’s fine essay on FDR in Great Contemporaries. Churchill was an admirer of FDR’s (meeting FDR was like taking your first sip of champagne, Churchill wrote), and generally a fan of the New Deal. There’s one passage, though, that seems freshly salient in the time of Obama and Occupy Wall Street: A second danger to President Roosevelt’s valiant...

The only reason anybody even knows who Chris Matthews is today, is that his show, Hardball, became appointment viewing during the Clinton/Lewinski scandal. Matthews was interesting because he was a voice from the Left who was willing to speak the truth and pierce the spin and dissembling of the Clintonistas. How times have changed. Now, with a “Special Hardball Documetary: Bill Clinton, President of the Wolrd” (no, I’m not kidding) Matthews atones for his previous attempt at independent thinking. Eager to erase his non-orthodox past (which even earned him a stint guest hosting for Rush Limbaugh) Matthews gushes that the...

Mara Liasson, the national political correspondent for National Public Radio, appeared on Fox News Sunday and compared Nancy Pelosi to Winston Churchill. She said, “Nancy Pelosi did two things for which she will go down in history; she was an incredibly effective Majority Leader- and speaker- when there was an opposition president, she helped make a majority, and when she was in the majority she was the hammer that got through President Obama’s agenda and sent it to the Senate. However, that is a completely different role from what she wants to do now for which, I think, she’s kind...

Under a slate grey sky, the words of Winston Churchill rang defiantly around Westminster: 'Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.' It may be 70 years old, but the resounding call to arms during the Battle of Britain still stiffened the sinew bringing pride and not a few tears yesterday. Churchill's famous address was delivered by actor Robert Hardy at 3.52pm  -  exactly the time they were originally spoken in Parliament by the wartime Prime Minister on August 20, 1940.   Former fighter pilots, Churchill's daughter Lady Soames and...

Its been said that life often imitates art. However, I never imagined that the satirical airbrushing campaign undertaken by the rabid anti-smoking lobby at the end of “Thank You For Smoking” would ever actually be replicated in real life. Apparently, as the Daily Mail reports, I was wrong (h/t Adam S Baldwin): It seems the man who steered Britain through the most dangerous period of its recent history may have fallen victim to the modern curse of political correctness. (pictures within link)