Free Republic

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insists she does not "hate" President Donald Trump. Responding to a reporter's question after she directed the Democratic House Committee chairmen to draft articles of impeachment, Pelosi said: "As a Catholic, I resent your using the word 'hate' in a sentence that addresses me. I don't hate anyone. I was raised in a way that is a heart full of love and always pray for the president. And I still pray for the president. I pray for the president all the time. So don't mess with me when it comes to words like that." Yet,...

RUSH: So McConnell “doesn’t have the votes,” eh? He “doesn’t have the votes” to stop any witnesses, “doesn’t have the votes.” That was the big news that broke late yesterday afternoon; everybody ran with it. When what McConnell said was he didn’t have the votes…yet. Of course, Senator McConnell is very sly, very crafty, and I think it’s maybe a bit of misdirection. Time will tell. Of course, there continues to be this mad dash, quasi-panic about whether or not John Bolton should be called to testify. You know, one of the ways of looking at this — and there...

RUSH: Yesterday — toward the end of the day, last night — around 6 p.m., somehow the news leaked that Mitch McConnell said that he does not have the votes, as of now, to prevent witnesses. It was right there on the Drudge Report, and every Drive-By news outlet ran with it. But in truth, nothing had changed. All that the Turtle had said was he didn’t “have the votes yet.” The potential or prospective Jeff Flakes all want to decide at the last minute to garner maximum attention. There’s four of these Republicans, and they know the attention is...

RUSH: Since the impeachment and Ukraine stuff got going here in October… Do you realize how long this had been going on? The House Intelligence Committee, not Judiciary — Schiff and his underground basement room where he called 18 witnesses… Schiff called 18 witnesses, not 17. We just haven’t seen anything released from the 18th witness. You know who the 18th witness is? The whistleblower. Schiff called 18 witnesses, depositions and so forth. Republicans zero. Zero witnesses in Schiff’s underground SCIF where he was conducting these depositions and interviews and orchestrating public testimony based on what these people said during...

For three years, Democrats accused the president of having stolen the 2016 election. Now, they maintain, he is trying to steal the 2020 election. In reality, it was Hillary and members of the Obama administration (and probably Obama himself) who tried to steal the 2016 election and it is Pelosi, Schiff, and Nadler who are trying to steal 2020. Pelosi, Schiff, and Nadler are using the power of their offices to erase the 2016 election, steal the 2020 Presidential Election, and damage Republican senators in purple states enough to flip the upper chamber to Democratic Party control. Running on the...

RUSH: There’s gonna be a lot of focus on the audio sound bites today because there are some really great pieces of gold in it, and I want to start with something that happened. It’s audio sound bite number 1, Mister Broadcast Engineer. I, and many others, have opined over the years that it’s not really Trump that the Washington establishment and the Never Trumpers hate. It’s you — you who voted for him, you who continue to support him, you who cannot be persuaded to abandon him. It is you they really hate. It is you they really despise....

It was only last October that I diagnosed the Democrats as suffering from “prophetic failure.” That’s what happens when the prophecies of a religious cult fail to turn up on cue. And why most politicians are sensible enough to say “we have only ten years to act” before the end of the world. I said back then, “the world was supposed to be all tucked up in progressive heaven by now.” The arc of history was bending towards justice. Then we got Trump. In When Prophecy Fails, according to Leon Festinger et al., the believers don’t just throw up their...

In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act that had been enacted by Congress over his veto in 1867. Defying the law, Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, without getting Senate approval, as the act required him to do. In his 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, John F. Kennedy made Edmund Ross one of the Senate's "Profiles in Courage" for his decisive and heroic vote not to convict and remove Johnson. Repealed in 1887, the Tenure of Office Act was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But while the act was the lethal...

In the middle of a muddle, there's minimal sense in predicting outcomes. In other words, is the president's former national security advisor speeding the president toward removal from office? (I strongly doubt whether John Bolton's version of President Donald Trump's Ukrainian diplomacy -- so to call it-- will slow down the necessary process of Senate acquittal on vastly overblown impeachment charges. But what does some hack journalist understand? Beyond the reality of how much trouble even a president can get in by talking before thinking?) A more vital matter practically shrieks at us as we ponder how much Trump did...

When you have a record of the radical Democrat Party caucus clamoring for impeachment of President Trump immediately after the election and continuing to the present day (and even warning that they will impeach him again and again), it's sort of hard to take them seriously. Yet here we are. Adam Schiff promised he had irrefutable evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 election. Trump-haters were waiting breathlessly for the Mueller report so impeachment could finally proceed. But even after Mueller's impartial team of Hillary-supporters "issued more than 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search warrants and...

RUSH: We have this sham of an impeachment designed to do what? This is something that I have been giving considerable thought to, because none of this makes any sense if you look at it from the perimeters of conventional wisdom. By this I mean they’re never going to get a conviction. See, to me, this is, the overriding reality of this, that makes me question what the real motivations are. And then with what Round Mound of the Gavel did yesterday by accusing the very senators of being part of a cover-up. They supposedly want to change their minds...

Picture a neighborhood composed of low and middle income families, each with two parents, no homeless people, no street drugs, safe to walk the streets at night. Is this the figment of an overactive imagination? Well, it is in fact a peek at a neighborhood in New York City where the son of immigrant parents read The New York Times every morning in high school, before orchestra rehearsal. Me. The principal, strongly authoritarian and well loved, opened a weekly assembly of highly diverse youngsters by reading a psalm from the Bible. Tough-as-nails, yet tenderhearted teachers passed on a tradition of...

Having recently returned from several days in Cuba, I watched the Democrats debate last week and wondered why they don’t just hop on a plane and move to Havana, the Cuban capital that has been languishing in the 1950’s thanks to Fidel Castro’s revolution. Sure, the old cars are pretty cool to drive around in but most of them are dirty, loud, and don’t come close to meeting Obama’s emissions standards. The reason why they remain on the roads is not so much because of the U.S. embargo (the newer automobiles are Russian for the most part) but because the...

I don't know about you, but I'm a little tired of Rep. Adam Schiff and the Democratic horde's portraying every charge against President Donald Trump as Trump's effort to interfere with this or that election. In his opening statement at the Senate impeachment trial, Lead House Impeachment Manager Schiff, puffed up with false indignation, did it again. President Trump made an "attempt to use the powers of the presidency to cheat in an election," said Schiff, and he must be impeached. He's claiming that the 2020 election, which won't happen until November, will be illegitimate because of Trump's dastardly telephone...

The media keep suggesting it's Republicans who might switch sides, but here are some Democrats who might not want to side with Adam Schiff's weak impeachment effort. Last week, CNN’s Manu Raju asked Sen. Martha McSally whether she would acquiesce to Democratic demands for more witnesses and evidence in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. The Republican from Arizona declined to answer the question, calling him a “liberal hack.” Raju, who published articles promoting the Russia collusion hoax and other Democratic efforts, was vociferously defended by his colleagues. Jake Tapper said Raju was reasonably asking the “question of the...

What underlies the rage of the Democrat Party and of the leftist Democrat Establishment vis-à-vis President Donald Trump? Over forty years ago, during my high school years in Iran, my father and I had a conversation. He was an avid Republican, even though he lived on the other side of the world. Right before I prepared to leave Iran for the U.S., he gave me some fatherly advice. He explained why the Democrat Party was bad for America, bad for Iran, and bad for the world. He advised me that if I ever became a US citizen, I should never...

Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and their jackal pack are already howling that a Senate trial dismissal vote or a trial without witnesses amounts to a "cover-up." We don't care what they think. But we must care very seriously about what Americans think, and Americans have not heard the president's defense against the bogus charges because the House Democrats forbade this basic fairness. The Senate trial is his perfect chance to destroy the Democrats' sham impeachment. If most Americans knew about the vicious covert war waged by anti-Trump officials at the highest levels of our revered security agencies to usurp the...

Democrats conspired with foreign agents, lied, cheated, and denied due process to Donald Trump. If they were willing to do that to a duly elected president in order to obtain power, what should Americans expect them to do to them should they refuse attempts to be disarmed? Democrats understand that an armed America can say, “No!” And they can’t have that. If they want to radically change the America extant for more than two centuries, they need to first disarm Americans. And they realize asking nicely is not going to accomplish this. Therefore, the ever-equable Democrats have suffered a recrudescence...

RUSH: Now, you know I have always believed that the Democrats have known that Trump was not gonna be convicted in an impeachment trial in the Senate. So why do this? What’s the purpose? The worst thing that could happen is for Trump to be acquitted. I mean, here they’ve got this three-year investment into Trump being a traitor and a Russian spy, a Russian agent, whatever else they have said he is. With all of it, they don’t have an impeachable offense. They’ve got these two really pathetic articles of impeachment — and in order to keep the base...

RUSH: Hey, folks, how’s everybody? I’m great, and it’s great to be back, and I really apologize for missing last week, but it’s actually not that big a deal. I mean, it seemed like it was a big deal at the time. I didn’t want to be out, but I had no choice. I had to be out. It was unexpected. It was unannounced. So I apologize for it. But I’m looking back and a lot seems to have happened in the past week. But not really. I mean, how much can really happen when I’m a here? Especially when...