Free Republic

New Hampshire's uber-popular Republican governor Chris Sununu put it plainly on NBC's Meet the Press: "Donald Trump is a loser." Before that, Sununu had rightly rebuked all the pundits who say the GOP presidential nomination for 2024 is a done deal. "Most folks don’t decide who they are voting for until about three weeks before the election," he said. And he is right. At this time, a year before the 2008 election, Hillary Clinton was the odds-on favorite to be the Democratic nominee. She lost to Barack Obama. At this time, 28 months before the 2016 election, polls showed the...

Herschel Walker’s 100,000-vote loss in Georgia puts the exclamation point on the “Donald Trump is electoral poison” narrative. If the former president had deliberately attempted to sabotage the Republicans' chances ever since November 2020, he could not have been more destructive than he actually was. In the Senate, the Trump effect meant Republicans lost chances at a whopping 10 seats (one of them two times!) they either should have won or in which they might have been competitive. In the House, Trump’s harm was more diffused, but almost equally baleful. On Jan. 5, 2021, Republicans lost two Senate seats in...

As former Vice President Mike Pence positions himself for a possible presidential race, he is setting a great example of substance of the sort that the public should demand from all White House aspirants. On Thursday, Pence’s Advancing American Freedom organization launched a “Freedom Agenda” featuring what, by modern standards, is a remarkable amount of depth and specificity. Readers may also be struck by how much its tone sounds Reaganesque, more focused on what the group (and thus Pence) is for than what it opposes. The agenda is divided into three sections: American culture, American opportunity, and American leadership. Each...

...As a conservative, I hope other conservatives join me in complaining about Trump’s golf costs. And I make the same complaint as an avid golfer. The problem isn’t that Trump likes golf, or that he finds at least some time to play it. Rogan is right that presidents need relief from the stresses of the job, and golf is a salutary diversion. And the problem isn’t that presidential golf costs more than golf by anybody else, because of course security and other considerations make it so by necessity. snip The president is not a potentate. The presidency does not carry...

One can spend several days trying not to overreact to President Trump’s latest, unprovoked tweetstorm against the late Sen. John McCain R-Ariz., yet still conclude that there is something sick and twisted about Trump’s obsession with the singular American hero Trump disparages. Tom Rogan already in these pages has eloquently explained why, fake heel spurs or no fake heel spurs, Trump could never be fit to wear McCain’s discarded shoes. And lawyer George Conway, husband of top Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, has presented a persuasive case that Trump’s fulminations about McCain and other bizarre eruptions are signs of a personality...

Memo to President Trump: Shut up and govern. Memo to congressional leaders, Cabinet members, and senior White House staff: If President Trump orders the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller, mass “honor” resignations by Cabinet officials and staff should follow, and an impeachment inquiry should immediately commence. Important clarification: An impeachment inquiry is just that — an open investigation, not a show trial with a predetermined outcome.

Mike Huckabee Complains of ‘Trashy’ Women at Fox News By ADAM B. LERNER 1/27/15 Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said in a recent radio appearance that while in New York for his Fox News show, he experienced significant culture shock from all the “trashy” women swearing in a professional setting. “In the South, or in the Midwest, there in Iowa, you would not have people who would just throw the F-bomb or use gratuitous profanity in a professional setting,” Huckabee told host Jan Mickelson in a Friday appearance on Des Moines’ “Mickelson in the Morning.”

JANUARY 26, 2015 Reality Check on Huckabee There’s no hiding his highly problematic record in Arkansas. By Quin Hillyer Late last week, a nasty little scuffle of the premature 2016 presidential campaign reminded us why both Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee should be kept miles away from the Republican presidential nomination. It also reminded us that Huckabee thinks he can sell snake oil even to water moccasins. Neither the moccasins nor Republican voters should buy what he’s selling.

He aims to make the jump from writing about Congress to serving in it.Alabama GOP representative Jo Bonner announced in May that he was resigning to take a vice-chancellor’s job at the University of Alabama System in Tuscaloosa. Among the first to announce interest in his seat was Quin Hillyer, a senior editor at The American Spectator magazine and past contributor to National Review. Hillyer spoke to NRO’s Jim Geraghty Friday. Jim GERAGHTY: Quin, here’s the question that has nagged at me since the moment I heard you were running: Why on earth would anyone want to give up the...

PJ Media first reported on the anti-Semite, anti-white bigot Louis Farrakhan ‘s participation in a series of Democrat-sponsored rallies across Alabama in support of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The case of Shelby v. Holder will be decided by the Supreme Court this month and may strike down the requirement that 15 states submit all election-law changes to the federal government for approval. This requirement has been used to block a variety of state laws designed to protect election integrity, including Texas voter ID and Georgia citizenship-verification requirements to vote. In support of this “preclearance” requirement, a group...

There is something way off balance in the character of Barack Obama. Something in the realm of zealotry, with a touch of megalomania, and perhaps an authoritarian impulse too. He combines Alinskyite tactics and outlook with an air of self-assumed moral superiority in a way that fails to respect the usual, small 'r' republican limits on American presidents.

Conservatives want Thermopylae. Congressional Republican leaders instead imitate the Confederate defense of Atlanta -- the one that led a local editor to write that General Joseph E. Johnston's reputation had "grown with every backward step." [Snip] In the battle over health-care policy (and in most other big fights in recent years), Senate Republicans likewise have maintained unity, have arrayed themselves on favorable ground, have performed every technical maneuver with flawless precision -- and have yet to win a single major battle about which conservatives care deeply. And like the local Atlanta editor in 1864 praising Gen. Johnston's retreats, the McClatchy...

Knowing that many, many conservatives will absolutely dump on me for saying this, I can't help myself: Sarah Palin's resignation is an appalling dereliction of duty and a highly cynical move to set herself up for a presidental run for which she is manifestly unqualified.

With the traditional media admitting they find it hard to curb their enthusiasm for Barack Obama, John McCain demonstrated again today that he is reaching out to the new media, giving blogging critics from the right and left the opportunity to participate in the blogger conference calls he has been regularly conducting. The Washington Times noted the phenomenon in an article of May 16, McCain widens dialogue on blogs, reporting that three of the seven questions in the May 15 conference call were posed by liberal-leaning bloggers. Of the half-dozen or so questions McCain took in today's blogger call [in...

On economic matters, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson stand above the rest of the Republican field both on substance and on refusal to pander to populist myths. Of the two, Giuliani is the more engaging, the more memorable, and the more clear -- but Thompson wasn’t bad at all. That’s the quick-response reaction to Tuesday’s Michigan presidential debate on economic matters. The truth is, when social issues are off the table, Giuliani is as solidly a Reaganite conservative as there is, and Thompson is not far behind. On the other hand, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is about as economically...

One of the worst decisions I ever made was after Bush 41 broke his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge. Like millions of other outraged conservatives, I sat on my hands, gave Bush no money, and offered no help whatsoever in his campaign for reelection. Although he only got a minority of the votes cast, because of this and because of the entry of Perot, we got Clinton, a debased White House and 9/11. Again in 2006, many conservatives stayed home or voted to send a message to Washington because of the failures of the Republican majority in Congress...