Free Republic

Donald Trump's Perfect Foil How the real-estate mogul's attacks against Jeb Bush fueled his rise Peter Beinart 9:19 AM ET If Jeb Bush hadn’t run for president, Donald Trump would have had to invent him. The former Florida governor was Trump’s perfect foil. First, because Jeb was prim, proper, and incapable of expressing the rage—especially towards Muslims and Mexicans—that many Republicans currently feel. Second, because Jeb’s candidacy represented the reductio ad absurdum of the campaign finance corruption that Trump, alone among GOP candidates, calls out. ...snip... In a searing column last week, the former Marine J.D. Vance, author of the...

Liberal commentator Peter Beinart offered a harsh critique of all the Democratic candidates’ answers on terrorism during the debate Saturday night, saying they did not offer any tangible solutions to defeating the Islamic State.“I say this as a liberal, I would be concerned as a Democrat about the entire terrorism part of this debate,” Beinart said.The crux of Beinart’s argument is that Republicans offer a clearer, more decisive vision for defeating the Islamic State than all three Democratic candidates.“The Republican line, whatever you think about it, is very clear. It’s that we left Iraq, the terrorists filled a vacuum, we...

Liberal American-Jewish commentator Peter Beinart gave a provocative speech on Wednesday, in which he said Israel essentially deserved the wave of Arab terrorism targeting its citizens. Beinart, who despite his regular attacks on the Jewish state insists he is "pro-Israel", was speaking at "Beth Chayim Chadashim Progressive synagogue in Los Angeles, which was set up as a "gay-friendly" congregation. His comments were recorded approvingly by the anti-Israel Mondoweiss website. "While we condemn Palestinian violence, we must recognize this painful truth: that Israeli policy has encouraged it," Beinart told his audience. "Israel has encouraged it by penalizing Palestinian nonviolence, by responding...

Why the senator’s brand of foreign policy is dangerous. The Republican Party is divided on foreign policy. There are “interventionists” like John McCain and Lindsey Graham who want America to more aggressively wage war—either directly or via proxies—in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and beyond. And there are “isolationists” like Rand Paul who worry that if America tries to fix the world’s problems through the barrel of a gun, we’ll become a bankrupt empire rather than a prosperous republic. Then there’s Ted Cruz, who unites both factions by embodying the worst of each. Take Cruz’s position on ISIS. Like McCain...

Sunday, May 17, 2015 Liberating Our Jerusalem Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog When Jordan's Arab Legion seized half of Jerusalem, ethnically cleansed its Jewish population and annexed the city-- the only entity to recognize the annexation was the United Kingdom which had provided the officers and the training that made the conquest possible. Officers like Colonel Bill Newman, Major Geoffrey Lockett and Major Bob Slade, under Glubb Pasha, better known as General John Bagot Glubb, whose son later converted to Islam, invaded Jerusalem and used the Muslim forces under their command to make the partition and...

Here is Marcia Freedman, in a J-Street panel discussion on Liberal Zionism and sitting next to Peter Beinart, describing how she believes that the Jewish people should not have a state, and that instead they should live as a minority in an Arab Palestine as a “protected minority” – in other words, as dhimmis. I kept all the context (although I accidentally cut out the applause at the end:) Isn’t it interesting that at a conference that claims to be “pro-Israel, pro-peace” and that hammers away at how it wants a two state solution, there is no objection to this...

Three former editors of The New Republic -- Hendrik Hertzberg, Peter Beinart and Andrew Sullivan -- have joined more than a dozen of their fellow TNR veterans in protesting the "destruction" of the magazine at the hands of owner Chris Hughes. "As former editors and writers for The New Republic, we write to express our dismay and sorrow at its destruction in all but name," the editors and their former colleagues wrote in a statement, released Friday evening. "From its founding in 1914, The New Republic has been the flagship and forum of American liberalism. Its reporting and commentary on...

Why so many conservatives have nostalgia for an era that wasn't all that golden. Next January, just in time for a potential presidential bid, Marco Rubio will publish a book. It’s called American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone.Call me a killjoy, but I don’t think Senator Rubio can make good on his subtitle. Creating “economic opportunity for everyone” is hard enough in a country of 316 million. Restoring it is a metaphysical impossibility. To restore something, it must have existed before. And never in its history has America offered “economic opportunity for everyone,” not even in the Edenic days...

The ‘blame Israel’ rhetoric from the mainstream media has shown no signs of slowing down. This time, on the July 15 edition of CNN’s New Day, host Chris Cuomo and CNN contributor Peter Beinart decried the unevenness of the war, citing high casualties on the Palestinian side while pointing to virtually nonexistent casualties on the Israeli side of the conflict. Cuomo naturally led off his interview of Beinart with this statement: “Proportionality is a big part of this story always when there's conflict. Israel obviously has the advantage militarily...Now, on the other side from the Ministry of Health there, close...

A fiendishly clever theory from Peter Beinart. Remember “Operation Chaos”? That was Rush Limbaugh’s plan to have GOP voters wreak havoc on the Democratic nominating process in 2008. With McCain’s nomination already all but assured and Obama clinging to an apparently insurmountable lead over Hillary, Rush encouraged Republicans in states with open primaries (i.e. states where you don’t have to be registered as a party member to vote in that party’s primary) to cross over and vote for Hillary in the Democratic primary instead. The idea was to drag the primary process out for Democrats as long as possible, forcing...

Don't laugh. He has built-in advantages in Iowa and New Hampshire, a party moving in his direction, and formidable fundraising potential. If Chris Christie was ever the frontrunner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, he isn’t anymore. All along, the theory behind his candidacy was that he could overcome his lack of conservative bona fides with a combination of personality, competence, electability, and money. Bridgegate undermines all four. In the minds of many voters, Christie’s personality has morphed from brash to bully. It’s harder to look competent when your top aides egregiously abused power under your nose. Christie’s supposed electability...

Subtitle: Fathers and sons have bonded over football games for generations, but today it's harder for parents to ignore the growing concerns surrounding the sport. Excerpt: My son, unfamiliar with the NFL’s pieties, assumed that hurting the other team’s players was the goal. To his untutored eye, the violence that guilt-ridden fans like myself decry was a feature, not a bug. He didn’t cheer the injuries; he’s too sweet for that. But despite my insistence to the contrary, I suspect the message he took from the experience was: The only thing you need to know about the large man writhing...

So what was accomplished by the government shutdown? Peter Beinart declares that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the resolution of the shutdown was a Republican victory because their "surrender" consisted of perpetuating federal spending at sequester levels. But I think what was accomplished was bigger. What was accomplished was that the conservative base communicated how serious it really is about reducing the size of government. The usual game in which the Democrats try to grab for as much as they can get, and Republicans fight back by giving them only half of it—and the result is that government still keeps growing,...

The consensus (more or less) among political analysts was that the GOP was likely to lose in the shutdown showdown, but was unlikely to suffer serious electoral consequences. The first prediction appears to be the case (but see Peter Beinart's smart contrarian take). How about the second one? It is early, but what evidence we have seems consistent with the idea that the GOP didn’t take on much electoral water from this loss. This isn’t to say that there isn’t any evidence that the shutdown hurt Republicans, but the idea that their prospects were seriously jeopardized is thin. Start with...

The Republicans are desperately losing the government shutdown battle and they’re embarrassing themselves by continuing to fight. It begs many questions, but most importantly, why does the GOP continue to fight a battle with no clear goal at the expense of not just their party, but the fate of then entire U.S. government? Maybe it’s because they’re actually winning. Though the media has largely painted the GOP as the reckless, kamikaze caucus, Peter Beinart argues in a column for The Daily Beast that Republicans are not only in perfect control of the government shutdown fight, but that they’ll win in...

The New Republic has quietly dropped at least five prominent Jewish writers from its masthead in a move that may signal the publication’s continued drift away from a staunchly pro-Israel standpoint. The magazine has launched an aggressive new editorial direction under the ownership of wealthy socialite Chris Hughes, who is best known for sharing a room with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University. The names of several prominent Jewish writers from both the left and right of the political spectrum were dropped from TNR’s masthead in the latest issue. They include: Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake, longtime TNR columnist...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com - Where’s the Flotilla to Syria?Posted By Ronn Torossian On June 4, 2012 @ 12:07 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 12 Comments Israel lives in a tough neighborhood – just recently in Syria security forces shot and killed 12 factory workers returning home from work in a bus near the town of Qusayr, marking the third massacre reported from Syria in the last week — including the execution-style murder of 13 men near the eastern city of Deir Elzour and the house-to-house killings of 108 people, mostly children and women, in the township of Houla...

THE DEAD BABY MEDIA If the text on that one is too small for you, it's a CNN piece headlined, "Why the Syrian regime is killing babies." There's not much to add to that. The Syrian regime may be killing babies, but CNN killed journalism. With some help from the New York Times, the Washington Post and the BBC. Anyone who has spent time in the Middle East knows quite well that parading around dead bodies is part of the Muslim ceremony of rallying for the next attack. These aren't funerals, these are corpse parades and the corpses are often...

President Obama sat down yesterday with a cadre of far-left foreign policy writers, several of whom regularly lambast the state of Israel, to get advice on a range of critical foreign policy issues, among them Afghanistan, Israel, and NATO, according to press accounts. The group of nine included several writers who promulgate fringe views about the state of Israel, advocate in favor of divestment from Israel, and describe the Jewish State as an “apartheid” state—views that are also endorsed by the most extreme anti-Israel advocates. Liberal author Peter Beinart—who has compared Israel to the segregated South and advocates boycotting areas

I am prepared to make a 6 figure donation to J Street and/or Peter Beinart. My $100,000 gift comes with a simple condition – they have to speak to Arabs as they do to the Jewish community. Among my objections to these misguided peace-seekers is that they preach almost exclusively to the Jewish community and Western audiences about peace in the Middle East – and are ignoring the need to address Arab communities in their countries, whose participation is of course necessary to achieve the peace that they so clamor for. I was inspired to make this offer after reading...