Free Republic

Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives warned colleagues Thursday that promoting and campaigning on a far-left social agenda hurt them badly in 2020. “[If] we are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, socialized medicine, we’re not going to win,” House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, a Democrat from South Carolina said on a leaked Democrat House caucus phone call.A Washington Post congressional reporter receiving leaked information from a source with access tweeted part of the more than two-hour phone call on Thursday afternoon. If we run this race again we will get fucking torn apart again...

The most violence-ridden cities in American are run by Democrats. Why then, should they be trusted to lead an entire nation of more than 330 million people? Democrats have recently joined forces in blaming President Trump of fanning the flames of violence. While this is nothing new, it is concerning evidence of a pattern among the left. More particularly, the party that seeks to lead the nation is unwilling to take responsibility for the misdeeds of its members and is always looking to blame others. Americans should not trust this party to lead them.As reported by The Hill, Rep. Karen...

Did you notice that the standard used to attack Brett Kavanaugh was quickly jettisoned when the accused was Joe Biden? Or that the standard Joe Biden imposed on every male college student in the country suddenly became unfair when it was applied to Biden himself? It makes you wonder whether liberals believe in anything other than getting elected and exercising power. Is there a set of beliefs you could confidently identify as comprising the liberal mind? I’m not so sure. For most of the past four decades there have been very few times when we have even been bothered by...

The election prognosticators at the FiveThirtyEight website estimate that former Vice President Joe Biden is ahead in the Democratic delegate race by about 150 votes -- 935 to 785 for Sen. Bernie Sanders. Doesn't that suggest a close race and a long road ahead? They say no. Bernie is now behind 15% to 20% in the national polls, and "Sanders tends to lose more ground every time a new set of states votes." Democrats, who treat the prospect of President Donald Trump's reelection as a "moral 9/11," much like his first election, want to avoid any long-running Biden-bashing feud. If...

What just happened? The Democratic presidential nomination race, which gave signs of lasting months, is now basically over. Sen. Bernie Sanders won North Dakota and lost Washington after carrying a lead on Wednesday. In Michigan and Missouri, where he won 50% and 49%, respectively, against Hillary Clinton in 2016, he carried 36% and 35% against former Vice President Joe Biden in Tuesday's primaries. He was wiped out even worse in Mississippi and lost in Idaho. It turns out that the apparent similarity between the Republican contest in 2016 and Democrats' contest in 2020 was only apparent. Bernie Sanders is not...

The left's reaction to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's rude exchange with a union worker in Michigan is a case study on liberal hypocrisy and propaganda. You'd have to be living in a cave not to recognize that something is way off with Biden. He's always been strange, but he's getting noticeably worse. His rhetorical recklessness is a feature, not a bug. He has a history of gaffes, especially for someone so prominent. Casual ethnic slurs roll off his tongue like water off a donkey's back. Pandering to an Indian American supporter, he said: "You cannot go to a 7-11...

Look, folks, I have white parents. That’s what my mom, a liberal Democrat mind you, would say jokingly as to why I, for lack of a better term, sucked at math. I’m a bad Asian. I don’t like math or science. Well, I like science—I’m fascinated by stuff that explodes—but I never excelled at it. None of the Vespa kids did well in math.  You could never even say that joke or even kid about Asians and math nowadays because the political correctness police would cancel you faster than you can say Gulag Archipelago. But I do know simple stuff...

On the brink of what could have been an absolute disaster, American Democrats thoroughly rejected socialism on South Carolina Saturday and Super Tuesday by overwhelmingly choosing former Vice President Joe Biden over Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. That was the general media talking point over the next several days after Biden ‘saved the Democratic party,’ and James Carville’s heart, with a dramatic come-from-behind win that almost nobody saw coming. Like the ending of every dumb Marvel movie, however, Biden’s seemingly improbable win wouldn’t have happened without the help of a key cast of characters. Fearing socialism, or perhaps a back-alley...

Before I get to the most important Joe Biden question ... I have breaking news on the Trump economy. More economic numbers came out Friday. The U.S. economy gained a remarkable 273,000 new jobs in February, far more than the 175,000 expected. But even more powerful news: The December jobs report was revised upward by 37,000; the January report was revised up by 48,000. That's 85,000 extra jobs no one knew about. Even in the midst of a coronavirus crisis, the Trump economy is booming. President Donald Trump is like Houdini. By the way, to put icing on the cake,...

You’ve noticed it right? The Democratic leadership of 2020 will not tell you the truth about almost anything. They lie to everyone, at nearly every moment, about almost everything, all the time. They lie to their opponents, to the voters, and of course, they lie to each other. For instance, after clearly naming two associate Supreme Court justices, and pledging that they “would not know what hit” them, the highest-ranking Senate democrat claimed he never said what he in fact said. From the same event, a congresswoman with a straight face, said to reporters that “abortions are safer than the...

During the Trump era, CNN's "Reliable Sources" has featured a roster of those whom the network calls "legendary journalists" to exhort the media masses and drive President Donald Trump out of the White House. The words "legendary journalist" are put on screen, and even in CNN transcripts. That would include PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers, Watergate welterweight Carl Bernstein, disgraced Dan Rather and the long-yelling former ABC anchor Sam Donaldson. The more aggressively liberal (and less professional) you are, the more "legendary" you become in the eyes of CNN. On Valentine's Day, CNN's Anderson Cooper brought on Donaldson to announce he...

After Super Tuesday, all the headlines are heralding former Vice President Joe Biden's remarkable "comeback" from dead in the water to front-runner and presumptive Democratic nominee. The New York Times' Frank Bruni called it "some kind of miracle." Please. It was anything but. It was a calculated, collaborative, last-ditch, no-holds-barred effort by the Democratic National Committee to take the wind out of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders' sails. Conveniently, for Biden's "miracle," other contenders former Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (who had potentially diluted votes for Biden in earlier primaries) dropped out the two days before the Super Tuesday...

On Super Tuesday, the Democratic Party came to its senses -- at least, to a point. Through the first three primaries, Democratic voters seemed sanguine about the possibility of a lifelong communist fellow traveler taking their presidential nomination. Conventional wisdom -- including, I admit, my own -- suggested that Sen. Bernie Sanders', I-Vt., early primary victories had put former Vice President Joe Biden on the road to ruin. After all, no presidential candidate of the last several election cycles has won after declaring a firewall, from Rudy Giuliani's Florida firewall in 2008 to Hillary Clinton's 2016 blue wall. But something...

In politics, it's often not who you want to vote for but who you don't want to vote for, and while policies are important, personality drives a lot of the decision-making. Often pollsters ask, "Does the candidate care about people like me?" Now they ask, "Does the candidate care about the same people I care about?" The ability to connect with and care about others is vitally important for candidates and has fueled former Vice President Joe Biden's surge in the Democratic primary process. Voters care if you are competent, but they also care if you are warm. Incompetent and...

Yes, Democrats are divided over Bernie Sanders' revolution versus Joe Biden's restoration of status quo Obama. Yes, they are divided over what that means in terms of policy, like Sanders' Medicare for All versus Biden's tweaked Obamacare. But there is a deeper cultural gap behind the Bernie-Biden battle. And it will not be resolved by the primary fight, and perhaps not even by November's election. Some small indicators: Biden rallies often begin with the Pledge of Allegiance. It's a brief ritual that seems so basic it might not stand out in anyone's memory. But it's not done at Sanders events....

And then there were two…and a couple of stragglers. As of this writing, the remaining Democrats running for president are Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Tulsi Gabbard. That’s it, that’s the best one of the two major political parties in the United States in 2020 could come up with. Of course, the only criteria Democrats have for their candidate is “someone who can beat Donald Trump.” That’s an interesting bar for people who claim to care about the country. They don’t give a damn who their candidate is, what they want to do, or even if they have...

A win in California would be an electoral wipeout for Democrats in 2020. Is it possible? The last time a Republican won the state was back in 1988 when Bush walloped Dukakis, but it was by a razor-thin margin. Given the Golden State’s deeply entrenched Democratic bastions, is it even possible that this state is in play? I mean what could cause Democrats to cross the aisle here. What could state Democrats possibly do to create a pathway for a hated man like Trump to a run to flip the state? Oh, could it be their nonsensical freelance law—AB5—that...

There is occasionally good sense in just standing back and watching the grand spectacle known as democracy. The presidential tryouts, known as the primaries, have been a strong prop of that reasoning. People who want, or say they want, to be president step on the stage and tell us why. They strut their stuff, for better or worse. They talk (almost interminably) about their challenging childhoods, the sacrifices their parents made on their behalf, the flash of inspiration that led them to the political trade. They lay out their strategic plans for the first 100 days after the inauguration. And...

During his speech to supporters following the primary results in South Carolina on Saturday, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg bragged about the amount of money he's "investing" to oust President Donald Trump from the White House come November. "Some of you may remember back in Philadelphia in 2016, I spoke at the Democratic Convention and warned that Donald Trump was not fit for office. In 2018, I worked to help hold him accountable by supporting candidates who flipped 21 seats in the House," he explained. "That made Nancy Pelosi speaker and allowed us to begin holding Donald Trump...

You hear it said and see it written that Bernie Sanders will be another George McGovern -- that is, a left-wing nominee who lost a presidential election in a landslide. I'm here to tell you that's wrong. Because the times are different. And because Sen. Sanders is, or ought to be, a scarier candidate and a further departure from historic American norms than George McGovern ever was. I speak perhaps from a position of prejudice. I supported George McGovern in 1972, in the primaries and in the general election. And though my views on issues have changed since then --...