Free Republic

Sean Hannity today Friday 7/21/17 [Buchanan says, "We are right on the road, a familiar one to me, to the Saturday Night Massacre."]

It’s always hard in politics for people to take their opponents’ views seriously, but it has become ever harder in Trump’s America. People are more engaged with politics, but only because they want to beat the other side, not understand it. This means scholars have a greater responsibility than ever to help ordinary citizens understand how the people with whom they disagree think, and what their political opponents are actually doing. Most scholars get this. For example, political scientists and historians, who tend to range from the political center to the left wing, have written extensively about the origins and...

At the G-20 in Hamburg, it is said, President Trump was isolated, without support from the other G-20 members, especially on climate change and trade. Perhaps so. But the crucial question is not whether Trump is alone, but whether he is right. Has Trump read the crisis of the West correctly? Are his warnings valid? Is not the Obama-Merkel vision of a New World Order a utopian fantasy? At the monument to the patriots of the Warsaw Uprising, Trump cited Poland as exemplar of how a great people behaves in a true national crisis. Calling the Polish people "the soul...

On Sept. 1, 1864, Union forces under Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, victorious at Jonesborough, burned Atlanta and began the March to the Sea where Sherman's troops looted and pillaged farms and towns all along the 300-mile road to Savannah. Captured in the Confederate defeat at Jonesborough was William Martin Buchanan of Okolona, Mississippi, who was transferred by rail to the Union POW stockade at Camp Douglas, Illinois. By the standards of modernity, my great-grandfather, fighting to prevent the torching of Georgia's capital, was engaged in a criminal and immoral cause. And "Uncle Billy" Sherman was a liberator. Under President Grant,...

Pat Buchanan says the nonstop uproar following Trump’s firing of former FBI director James Comey is not comparable to Watergate, but he does wonder if the Trump presidency can function with this level of drama. {snip} I knew when Trump got in, he’s going to have to fight for his agenda every day. A part of the Republican Party disagrees with it and a part of the Republican Party will also seek to sabotage and stop it. It’s going to be a long slog. I accept that. Indispensable to the agenda is the president himself. It doesn’t depend as much...

For the World War II generation there was clarity. The attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec 7, 1941, united the nation as it had never been before — in the conviction that Japan must be smashed, no matter how long it took or how many lives it cost. After the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, however, Americans divided. Only with the Berlin Blockade of 1948, the fall of China to Mao and Russia's explosion of an atom bomb in 1949, and North Korea's invasion of the South in 1950, did we unite around the proposition that, for our own...

Wednesday on Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show,” conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan said White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was correct when he said the media was the opposition party. He added that just like they took down President Richard Nixon, they are attempting to “bring down” President Donald Trump. Buchanan said, “There is a cultural left and a political left and a media if you will, are a conglomerate. It’s not a conspiracy but it is collusion, and they were determined to break and bring down Nixon from the day he was nominated. They were determined, tried to...

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein both spoke at the White House Correspondents Dinner last night. Time has posted their speeches in case you were otherwise occupied at the time. They had some advice for President Trump. In part they revisited past glories covering the Watergate scandal and taking down President Nixon. They have a few loose ends to tie up. For example, they still haven’t discovered what Nixon’s guys were looking for inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee. Watergate served its purpose, however, and the boys have moved on. Edward Jay Epstein asked whether the press had uncovered...

"This rhetoric—deployed again during his losing bid for the 1996 GOP nomination, and once more when he ran on the Reform Party ticket in 2000—not only provided a template for Trump’s campaign, but laid the foundation for its eventual success. Dismissed as a fringe character for rejecting Republican orthodoxy on trade and immigration and interventionism, Buchanan effectively weakened the party’s defenses, allowing a more forceful messenger with better timing to finish the insurrection he started back in 1991. All the ideas that seemed original to Trump’s campaign could, in fact, be attributed to Buchanan—from depicting the political class as bumbling...

"Why would I call China a currency manipulator when they are working with us on the North Korean problem?" tweeted President Donald Trump on Easter Sunday. Earlier, after discovering "great chemistry" with Chinese President Xi Jinping over "the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake" at Mar-a-Lago, Trump had confided, "I explained ... that a trade deal with the U.S. will be far better for them if they solve the North Korean problem!" "America First" thus takes a back seat to big-power diplomacy with Beijing. One wonders: How much will Xi end up bilking us for his squeezing of Kim Jong...

“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?)” Those are among Jesus’ last words on the Cross that first Good Friday. It was a cry of agony, but not despair. The dying Christ, to rise again in three days, was repeating the first words of the 22nd Psalm. And today, in lands where Christ lived and taught and beyond where the Christian faith was born and nourished, the words echo. For it is in the birthplace of Christianity that Christians face the greatest of persecutions and martyrdoms since the time of Vladimir Lenin and Josef...

Monday on Laura Ingraham’s nationally syndicated radio show, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan discussed the possibility of the United States escalating its involvement in the Syrian civil war days after President Donald Trump launched a military strike on a Syrian airbase in responding to the Syrian government’s alleged use of chemical weapons. Buchanan noted the biggest cheerleaders of Trump’s action were Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Marco Rubio (R-FL), which he deemed to be “the war party.” However, argued that they would not “get the war they want” from Trump. “It’s McCain and Graham and Marco Rubio —...

Not long ago, a democratizing Turkey, with the second-largest army in NATO, appeared on track to join the European Union. That's not likely now, or perhaps ever. Last week, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan compared Angela Merkel's Germany to Hitler's, said the Netherlands was full of "Nazi remnants" and "fascists," and suggested the Dutch ambassador go home. What precipitated Erdogan's outbursts? City officials in Germany refused to let him campaign in Turkish immigrant communities on behalf of an April 16 referendum proposal to augment his powers. When the Netherlands denied Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu landing rights, he exploded, saying: "The...

To back up Defense Secretary “Mad Dog” Mattis’ warning last month, that the U.S. “remains steadfast in its commitment” to its allies, President Donald Trump is sending B-1 and B-52 bombers to Korea. Some 300,000 South Korean and 15,000 U.S. troops have begun their annual Foal Eagle joint war exercises that run through April. “The two sides are like two accelerating trains coming toward each other with neither side willing to give way,” says Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, “Are (they) really ready for a head-on collision?” So it would seem. It is Kim Jong Un – 33-year-old grandson of...

Via Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org At Mar-a-Lago this weekend President Donald Trump was filled “with fury” says The Washington Post, “mad — steaming, raging, mad.” Early Saturday the fuming president exploded with this tweet: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” The president has reason to be enraged. For what is afoot is a loose but broad conspiracy to break and bring him down, abort his populist agenda, and overturn the results of the 2016 election. At its heart is the “deep state” — agents...

When Gen. Michael Flynn was forced to resign as national security adviser, Bill Kristol purred his satisfaction, "If it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state." To Kristol, the permanent regime, not the elected president and his government, is the real defender and rightful repository of our liberties. Yet it was this regime, the deep state, that carried out what Eli Lake of Bloomberg calls "The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn." And what were Flynn's offenses? In December, when Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats, Flynn spoke to the Russian ambassador. He apparently counseled the...

As for Trump’s disparagement of the judges, only someone ignorant of history can view that as frightening. Thomas Jefferson not only refused to enforce the Alien & Sedition Acts of President John Adams, his party impeached Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, who had presided over one of the trials. Jackson defied Chief Justice John Marshall’s prohibition against moving the Cherokees out of Georgia to west of the Mississippi, where, according to the Harvard resume of Sen. Warren, one of them bundled fruitfully with one of her ancestors, making her part Cherokee. When Chief Justice Roger Taney declared that President Abraham...

As the patriotic pageantry of Inauguration Day gave way to the demonstrations of defiance Saturday, our new America came into view. We are two nations now, two peoples. Though bracing, President Trump's inaugural address was rooted in cold truths, as he dispensed with the customary idealism of inaugurals that are forgotten within a fortnight of the president being sworn in. Trump's inaugural was Jacksonian. He was speaking to and for the forgotten Americans whose hopes he embodies, pledging to be their champion against those who abandon them in pursuit of higher, grander, nobler causes. Declared Trump: "For too long,...

Since World War II, the two men who have most terrified this city by winning the presidency are Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.And they have much in common.Both came out of the popular culture, Reagan out of Hollywood, Trump out of a successful reality TV show. Both possessed the gifts of showmen — extraordinarily valuable political assets in a television age that deals cruelly with the uncharismatic.Both became instruments of insurgencies out to overthrow the establishment of the party whose nomination they were seeking.Reagan emerged as the champion of the postwar conservatism that had captured the Republican Party with Barry...

Wednesday on Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show,” conservative political commentator and former staffer for Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan Pat Buchanan said President Barack Obama was acting with “bitterness” when today at a meeting on Capitol Hill he told Democrats to resist helping Republicans replace his signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act. Buchanan said, “I think what you are seeing here — If that is an accurate report of what he said — Here is a guy who really feels he’s been rejected and repudiated. I’m astonished he’s letting it show like this. As a departing president I...