Free Republic

Wednesday at town hall event held at the City Club of Cleveland, when asked what he would have done differently, President Barack Obama said he regretted he did not “more aggressively” warn the American public how long it was going to take for them to recover from President George W. Bush’s failures. Obama said, “I would have told myself to anticipate because the recession was so bad and so tough for so many people, that I was going to have to be more aggressive in explaining to the public how long it was going to take for the recovery to...

Did anyone see Medea Benjamin on O'Reilly tonight? She of course blamed GWB for the Jordanian pilot's execution. She said we never should have gone into Iraq in the first place. Then she said our interventionist policies in Egypt and Libya cause ISIS to act the way they do. I wanted to smack BOR for not pointing out it was OBAMA and his ARAB SPRING interventions that funded and otherwise supported the uprisings in Egypt and Libya.

Ava DuVernay, the director of the Martin Luther King historical movie "Selma", is set to again team up with the film's star David Oyelowo for a new project about Hurricane Katrina. DuVernay and Oyelowo, who were both finalists at this year's Golden Globes, will "develop a new narrative feature film chronicling a sweeping love story and complex murder mystery during the time of Hurricane Katrina," Participant Media said Monday. The project will mark the pair's third collaboration after "Middle of Nowhere" and "Selma", which has been nominated for this year's Academy Award for Best Picture.

"We Blame George W. Bush" is a recurring category in James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today" column at the Wall Street Journal. The meme mocks the penchant of progressives to blame the former president for everything under the sun. The phenomenon was illustrated in an ugly way on last night's Rachel Maddow Show. Dem Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut blamed the existence of the Charlie Hebdo terrorists on, yup, W. Oh, Murphy didn't call 43 out by name. He didn't have to. Instead, Murphy went out of his way to claim that the murderers weren't radicalized by ISIS [which...

The release of the already discredited Senate “torture report” has left liberals in a state of gleeful pearl clutching as they pretended to be shocked by the shocking revelation that enhanced interrogation can mean sleep deprivation and assorted mind games.Meanwhile here’s a little reminder of what real torture looks like as perpetrated by the Taliban. I was one of the Taliban’s torturers: I crucified peopleInstead of just searching for criminals, the night patrols were instructed to seek out people watching videos, playing cards or, bizarrely, keeping caged birds. Men without long enough beards were to be arrested, as was any...

Almost 13 years after the CIA established secret prisons to hold and interrogate detainees, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on the CIA’s programs listing 20 key findings. Click a statement below for a summary of the findings: 1 “not an effective means of acquiring intelligence” “The CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” The Committee finds, based on a review of CIA interrogation records, that the use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of obtaining accurate information or gaining detainee...

The Fed's low interest rates could bring a "scary" 50-60 percent market correction, technical analyst Abigail Doolittle told CNBC on Wednesday. "Unfortunately, I think it could come on a crash similar to what happened in 2007," the founder of Peak Theories Research said on " Squawk Box " a day after the S&P 500 closed above the 2,000 level for the first time ever. "It's tough to know what the exact catalyst will be. But that's the very nature of that kind of selloff. They start slowly and then happen very suddenly." Doolittle pointed to a 20-year chart of the...

Former Vice President Dick Cheney lashed out again at President Barack Obama on Sunday, repeatedly accusing him of projecting "weakness" abroad and "crippling" the U.S. military. The frequent Obama critic told radio show host and GOP megadonor John Catsimatidis that he traces "most" of the problems of Washington to the current administration. "They can't blame George Bush anymore," Cheney quipped on AM 970 The Answer's "The Cats Roundtable." "I think he's been a failure as a president. I think the scandals, wth respect to the Veterans Administration, with respect to the IRS, these are bad situations." Nevertheless, Cheney said there...

Before jetting off for two weeks’ vacation, President Obama laid the blame for the Iraq crisis at the doorstep of the Bush administration. At a brief press conference Saturday on the White House lawn, Obama scoffed at the notion that he might regret not having left a residual American force in Iraq. “Under the previous administration, we had turned over the country to a sovereign democratic Iraqi government,” Obama said. “In order for us to leave troops in Iraq, we needed the invitation of the Iraqi government, … and the Iraqi government, based on its political considerations, in part because...

As militants with the Islamic State launched artillery rounds at Kurdish forces in northern Iraq, the U.S. military on Friday launched airstrikes using fighter jets on the USS George H. W. Bush, Pentagon officials said. It was just the latest involvement in combat for the Bush, which was commissioned in 2009. It was used extensively in 2011 to support combat operations in Afghanistan, and left Norfolk, Va., in February on its second deployment. It arrived in the Middle East in March, and entered the Persian Gulf in June, as the Islamic State took control of vast regions of northern and...

Folks.  Ross Perot was lambasted for using the term.  Now the president uses it as often as the “you can keep…” and “period” verbiage.  As always and forevermore, it is not what is said, but who says it. Folks.  As if those who went through enhanced interrogations were snatched from a Norman Rockwell scene and placed on a waterboard.  Hardly.  The president, and the attorney general, still seem bent on proving that the Bush administration engaged in “torture.”  We seem to forget the moment in history in which the procedures in question were conducted.  Did Obama and Holder see the...

While speaking out on the House floor yesterday against the House GOP lawsuit against President Obama, Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee said the move is a “veil for impeachment.” Jackson Lee also took the opportunity to point out that “We [Democrats] did not seek an impeachment of President Bush” when he was in office. Really? Not only did some Democrats seek an impeachment of President Bush, but Rep. Jackson Lee co-sponsored the bill? Classic!

Remember back in April, 2007, when then-CIA director George Tenet appeared on 60 Minutes, angrily telling the program host, "we don't torture people"? Remember a few months later, in October, President George W. Bush saying, "this government does not torture people"? We knew then it was not true because we had already seen the photos of Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib prison four years earlier. Still the US administration denied that torture was torture, preferring to call it "enhanced interrogation" and claiming that it had disrupted so many terrorist plots. Of course, we later found out that the CIA...

An ongoing lawsuit has pried loose new records linked to a family of Sarasota Saudis who left home in a hurry just before 9/11. It was Halloween night, 2001. The horrors of 9/11 were still fresh on the the minds of Americans. At a time when everyone was on edge, the sight of a man disposing documents in a dumpster behind a Bradenton storage facility aroused suspicion. Summoned to the scene, Manatee County sheriff’s deputies confronted the man, who had a Tunisian passport. According to FBI records, authorities searched the dumpster and found “a self-printed manual on terrorism and Jihad,...

Believe it or not, it was 10 years ago this month that Barack Obama, then a candidate for the U.S. Senate, introduced himself to America with a speech that shook the Fleet Center in Boston. The main theme of that Democratic convention was the litany of George W. Bush's failures — an unpopular and unending war in Iraq, a faltering image abroad, a stagnating middle class. Obama gave eloquent voice to those frustrations, arguing that all of them could be addressed if only we reunited the electorate. Probably Obama himself would not have guessed then that he would ascend to...

Walid Shoebat says that quagmire that is going on in Iraq is just going to increase and there isn’t much America can do about it at this point. But when it comes to what started this quagmire in Iraq, Walid blames the US for ‘aiding and abetting’ the Free Syrian Army in Syria, which we all know is a terrorist group: We’re indirectly aiding and abetting an Al-Qaeda like operation, when it comes to Syria, and that’s what started the quagmire. Our aiding and abetting the Free Syrian Army — which is a terrorist group and we’ve been showing this...

1) In 2011, President Barack Obama pronounced Iraq "self-reliant and democratic," and "a country in which people from different religious sects and ethnicities can resolve their differences peacefully through the democratic process." In 2010, Vice President Joe Biden called Iraq "one of the great achievements of this administration." Obama ignored pleas by top generals who advised against pulling out without leaving a residual force. 2) Nearly everybody assumed Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Of the newspaper editorials that opposed the war, not one challenged the assumption that Iraq possessed stockpiles of WMD. President George W. Bush...

President Barack Obama, on Dec. 12, 2011, called Iraq "self-reliant and democratic." He praised that country, calling it a "new Iraq that's determining its own destiny -- a country in which people from different religious sects and ethnicities can resolve their differences peacefully through the democratic process." Obama said, "I have no doubt that Iraq can succeed." He campaigned to end the war in Iraq. He did -- at least he ended America's military involvement in the war. He pulled out all the troops, without leaving a residual force behind as we did, for example, in South Korea, where we...

President Obama’s instincts about Iraq and Syria have been sound from the beginning: Greater U.S. engagement probably cannot make things better but certainly can make them worse, both for the people of the region and for our national interests. Obama’s only mistake was to buy, for a time, the notion that Bush’s troop surge had miraculously healed ancient divisions and made the dream of a pluralist democracy still possible. There are aspects of Obama’s foreign policy that I question. His heavy reliance on drone strikes may create as many terrorists as it eliminates. He should have realized that the National...

Well, gee, $1 trillion or so just doesn’t buy what it used to. Take Iraq, for example. Or, should I say: Take Iraq, please, someone — and fix it. Fend off the nasty Islamic fighters of ISIS and keep that miserable sinkhole for American lives and money from coming back to bite us — again. Do you understand now, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Bolton and all you neocon nutjobs, why the invasion of Iraq in 2003 wasn’t a very good idea? President Obama sure does. Because now he’s neck deep in another crisis in this place, a country...