Free Republic

What we saw in the lead up to the elections, and what we’ll witness for years to come, is utter contempt for Trump voters and conservatives in general.American satirist Ambrose Bierce defined the presidency as “the greased pig in the field game of American politics.” If ever there was a year in which that is true, surely it is 2020. Most of us, in one way or another, have looked about as foolish and flummoxed as participants in a country pig scramble.Yet if I were to offer a vote for most absurd, it would be those who indulged in sanctimonious...

The morning newsletters say it all. Whether President Trump manages to win, Beltway denizens are waking up to the inescapable reality of their own ignorance. Like 2016, journalists and operatives are flirting with the prospect of introspection, and in almost exactly the same terms.Here’s Politico Playbook: TUESDAY WAS AN ABJECT DISASTER for Democrats in Washington. To imagine the amount of soul searching and explaining the party will have to do after Tuesday is absolutely dizzying. The infighting will be bloody — as it should be. We fielded text after text from Hill Democrats Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning with...

VIDEO Joe Biden is taking a looooong lid in the final week of the campaign and Politico magazine treats this as brilliant strategy. Yup! A great way to earn votes from people by completely taking them for granted in the final stretch of the campaign. Not giving enough of a crap for them to exert yourself by campaigning is a surefire strategy leading to the inevitable landslide ...but not for the candidate following that utterly laughable strategy.

Regardless of age, sex, ethnicity, or political philosophy, the crisis we face demands critical thinking and common-sense in choosing our president. It’s been repeatedly said that 2016 was the election of the Forgotten Man and Woman, due in part to those large sections of the country who felt their interests were neglected. As a result, a Republican candidate was elected president and a slightly larger Republican majority was established in the Senate with a mandate to address this neglect. As things have unfolded over the last four years, it’s clear that if this country is to protect the founding principles...

Democrats are setting up Louis DeJoy and the U.S. Postal Service to be the ‘fall guy’ for 2020 vote-by-mail elections, ignoring much-needed USPS reforms. Democrats have a new prime target in their political sights: U.S. Postal Service and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. On Friday, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold sued USPS and DeJoy for a supposed “attempt at voter suppression that violates the United States Constitution and federal statutes and must be stopped immediately.” This time, the “voter suppression” and “constitutional violation” came in the form of a postcard sent to voters with incomplete information about vote-by-mail.Really? One deficient...

Father Martin's statements — even those covered under the guise of 'objectivity' — appear to be more faithful to a political agenda than to Catholic teaching. In several tweets pertaining to faithful voting for Catholics, the popular Jesuit priest and author Fr. James Martin, S.J., who offered prayers during the 2020 Democratic National Convention, presents a distorted view of Catholic moral teaching about voting while creating unnecessary confusion for the faithful.Among the most misleading impressions Martin promulgates is posting an out-of-context quote from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in which the former head of the CDF (and current pope emeritus) articulated: “When...

Under a Vice President Kamala Harris, Americans shouldn't expect a war on poverty as much Harris to continue her prosecution of the poor. Catholic News Agency recently quoted several prominent Catholics who were positive about Joe Biden’s vice-presidential selection of Kamala Harris. Donna Toliver Grimes, for example, who serves as the assistant director for African American Affairs in the Secretariat of Cultural Diversity at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, expressed her belief that a Biden-Harris ticket would have a “policy that is favorable to people on the margins.”That’s a curious comment, because Harris has spent considerable professional energy...

Democrats may succeed in using the DNC to push a moderate message, but even with a complicit press, it will be difficult to hide the truth much longer. For four days, those tuned into the Democratic National Committee’s virtual convention witnessed a party attempting desperately to masquerade behind a veil of moderation. Standing beneath a figurative banner of “unity,” the DNC paraded across the screen its foremost legacy politicians: former Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter, as well as presidential wannabes John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.The party presented these and their modern equivalents — Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Sens....

The week before I married on my family’s homestead in Alaska, we found out Sarah Palin had been picked to be Sen. John McCain’s vice-presidential running mate. This was big news for Alaska. Nearly everyone we knew was thrilled, even people who weren’t huge Palin fans. At the time, Palin was a popular governor who’d made a name for herself fighting a corrupt good ol’ boys system that had prevailed for too long in state politics. She was a Republican, but seen as a moderate who was willing to work with Democrats and take on powerful special interests, including the...

In an Oval Office interview with The Federalist's Ben Domenech, President Trump calls on Republicans to stand strong and unite against lawlessness. In a wide-ranging interview in the Oval Office Friday, President Donald J. Trump said that the country is in the midst of “a political war … where the left will use anything to win, including the culture.” The president said that to restore order and win in 2020, his Republican allies “need to be stronger” in standing up to rioters and those who would tear down statues. “They’ve got to get much tougher,” Trump said, drawing comparisons to...

link only due to paywall

Writing in the New York Times, Linda Hirshman says she believes Tara Reade but she’ll vote for Joe Biden anyway because of Donald Trump. Yesterday in a New York Times column Linda Hirshman said she believes Tara Reade, but she’s going to vote for Joe Biden anyway because anything is better than Donald Trump. That is to say, she believes Biden sexually assaulted Reade in a locker room when Reade worked on his Senate staff years ago. It’s nonsense at this point to try to discount or denigrate every new corroborating witness who comes forward to bolster Reade’s claim, Hirshman...

Someone needs to explain to Joe Biden that he's the presumptive Democratic nominee, not the presumptive next president. The Democratic candidate is reportedly assembling a White House transition team with over six months to go before the general election. During a virtual fundraising event, Biden announced his campaign has already begun building a transition team, and the candidate would not rule out announcing cabinet nominees before November's election. "Sounds presumptuous," Biden acknowledged. "I don't want to say we started thinking about it a month ago -- we did -- because that sounds like I was certain this was going to...

He’s with her? Mike Bloomberg could team up with Hillary Clinton to try to take down President Trump in November — by making her his running mate. Bloomberg’s internal polling has found the combo “would be a formidable force,” campaign sources told the Drudge ReportSaturday. Clinton, who lost her 2016 White House bid to Trump despite winning the popular vote, said last week that she would “probably” not accept an offer to run as another Democrat’s veep. “I never say never because I believe in serving my country,” she told talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. “But it’s never going to happen.” But the...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager is providing free and discounted cybersecurity services for political candidates ahead of 2020 elections . . . DDC is intended to help protect campaigns against phishing, as well as provide them with secure websites and mobile app security, among other services. Matt Rhoades, GOP Utah Sen. Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign manager, co-founded the venture alongside Mook

The Democratic debates tonight and tomorrow will likely stick to the familiar script from the first ones, with candidates tripping over each other to see who can promise the biggest tax-spend-and-regulate agenda. This doesn't make for compelling television. President Trump nailed the description of the first round with his one-word tweet, "BORING!" To make the debates more exciting to watch and to provide voters with a glimpse of reality into Democrats' fantasy-world policy proposals, the CNN moderators must press the candidates on the consequences of their proposals. A good place to start is by challenging their uniform support of the...

President Donald J. Trump was not only open about it — he aggressively campaigned on the need for conservative, Constitution-abiding judges to serve on our nation’s federal courts and the United States Supreme Court. And voters enthusiastically embraced Trump’s pledge with exit polling confirming the president was elected in large part due to his bold promise to appoint judges who would uphold the Constitution and the rule of law.“The freedoms we cherish and the constitutional values and principles our country was founded on are in jeopardy,” President Trump said in a statement released prior to his election. “I will appoint justices...

An epidemic of false identities, massaged resumes, and warped ancestries has broken out among the current Democratic presidential primary candidates. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for years claimed Native American ancestry. An embattled Warren ironically took a DNA test that only proved her critics' contention that she was no more of Native American heritage than the vast majority of Americans. Another Democratic candidate, Robert Francis O'Rourke, is a rich white male who grew up in affluence. O'Rourke some time ago adopted the name "Beto," an abbreviation for the Spanish "Roberto." The Spanish-speaking, Irish-American O'Rourke, with a wink and nod, has assumed...

Presidential candidates from both parties usually sound hard-core in the primaries to appeal to their progressive or conservative bases. But for the general election, the nominees move to the center to pick off swing voters and centrist independents. Voters put up with the scripted tactic as long as a candidate had not gone too extreme in the primaries and endorsed positions too far out of the mainstream. A good example of this successful ploy was Barack Obama's 2008 campaign. In the primary against Hillary Clinton, Obama ran to her left. But he was still careful not to get caught on...

This week marks the official kickoff of the prime-time Democratic presidential primary process. Two debates in Miami will include the top 20 contenders -- yes, top 20. Ten contenders will participate in each of the two-hour debates, to be held Wednesday and Thursday night during prime time. The debates will be televised live on NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo. There are five in this series of debates: Jose Diaz-Balart of Telemundo and NBC, Savannah Guthrie of "Today," Lester Holt of "Nightly News," Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and Chuck Todd of "Meet the Press." They and their staffs will have worked hard...