Free Republic

Elbridge “Bridge” Colby is, as Donald Trump might say, straight out of central casting for a member of D.C.’s foreign policy elite. He has degrees from Harvard and Yale, a membership to Washington’s Metropolitan Club and the kind of coiffed hair and clipped accent that you’d expect from an American blue-blood. So pristine is his pedigree — his grandfather was head of the CIA — that a lightly fictionalized version of him appears in the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s memoir of his undergraduate years at Harvard, titled Privilege. But Colby, far from being a deep state darling, is...

Nobody who favored overturning Roe ought to be particularly surprised by the result of the Kansas referendum on abortion. By the margin, maybe — but a Republican state voting to preserve a right to abortion emphasizes what’s always been apparent: With the end of Roe, the pro-life movement now has to adapt to the democratic contest that it sought. Right now, majorities of Americans favor abortion restrictions that were ruled out under Roe, but only slightly over one-third of the country takes the position that abortion should be largely illegal, a number that shrinks if you remove various exceptions. That...

Everyone has a theory about the decline of the Academy Awards, the sinking ratings that have led to endless Oscar reinventions. The show is too long; no, the show is too desperate to pander to short attention spans. The movies are too woke; no, the academy voters aren’t diverse enough. Hollywood makes too many superhero movies; no, the academy doesn’t nominate enough superhero movies. (A querulous voice from the back row: Why can’t they just bring back Billy Crystal?) My favored theory is that the Oscars are declining because the movies they were made to showcase have been slowly disappearing....

There is a school of thought that holds that if Donald Trump sweeps back into power in 2024, or else loses narrowly but then plunges the United States into the kind of constitutional crisis he sought in 2020, the officially nonpartisan news media will have been an accessory to Trumpism. It will have failed to adequately emphasize Trump’s threat to American democracy, chosen a disastrous evenhandedness over moral clarity and covered President Biden (or perhaps Vice President Kamala Harris) like a normal politician instead of the republic’s last best hope.

It should be possible to cover revelations about the Biden family that are neither disinformation nor the greatest scandal of our time.[cut] More specifically, Bobulinski’s story and the email evidence both suggest that Joe Biden took at least enough interest in his son’s dealings to have a meeting during the Trump presidency with his business partners. This isn’t proof that he partnered with Hunter or profited in any way, but it seems like evidence that he wasn’t particularly worried about keeping his son’s sketchy salesmanship at arm’s length. That seems like information worth knowing: not a scandal on a par...

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat should be thankful that most people at his newspaper are now working from home. Otherwise he could risk being surrounded by the Red Guards types there angrily enforcing the prevalent leftist orthodoxy. So what was Douthat's sin? Well, he actually criticized the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story by social media and the mainstream media. Yes, there is a certain very grudging toleration for conservatives in name only such as David Brooks but Douthat might have gone too much over the line for the Times' Red Guardians despite putting in a few obligatory...

Cardinal Burke expresses ‘respect…gratitude’ for man who threw Pachamama ‘idol’ in Tiber November 11, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Cardinal Raymond Burke praised the young man who last month threw Pachamama statues used in rituals connected to the recently concluded Amazon Synod into the Tiber river in Rome, saying he has “respect” for him and has “gratitude” for his “courageous witness to the faith.” In a new interview with The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Cardinal Burke for the first time commented on the Pachamama controversy that took place during the recent October 6-27 Pan-Amazon Synod in Rome. In this...

"Conservative" columnist Ross Douthat of the New York Times sounded like he was committing editorial-page heresy on Saturday for claiming that Michael Cohen's testimony before Congress last week cast doubt upon the validity of the Christopher Steele dossier which has been the main pillar of the quickly dissipating Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory. It seems that Douthat is all alone at the Times for daring to explore the notion that Team Trump might not be evil geniuses in league with Putin just how weak the Steele dossier is based on Cohen's testimony in "The State of Russiagate." They may have been hapless...

On Saturday, Ross Douthat published a column for the New York Times arguing that White House Senior Policy Advisor Stephen Miller should be included in negotiations about immigration policy because he represents the opinions of tens of millions of Americans. Somewhat predictably, the Times’s liberal readership was none too pleased by the idea that proponents of increased restrictions on legal immigration would be given a seat at the table alongside proponents of amnesty, and many took to Twitter to express their displeasure. Some more unhinged commenters labeled the Times a “white supremacist paper,” while others were content with simply suggesting...

New York Times resident conservative columnist Ross Douthat, who was a “NeverTrump” pundit during the 2016 election, has acknowledged President Donald Trump’s success in defeating the so-called “Islamic State” — and says Trump deserves credit for his foreign policy overall. In a column titled “The War Trump Won,” Douthat writes that “if you had told me in late 2016 that almost a year into the Trump era the caliphate would be all-but-beaten without something far worse happening in the Middle East, I would have been surprised and gratified.” Last October, with Election Day looming, Douthat had written that “the risks...

Imagine: even the New York Times’ Ross Douthat now thinks that Bill Clinton should have stepped down over the Monica Lewinsky affair. Douthat's mea culpa op-ed in this past weekend’s paper, in which he confesses that he and others may have been wrong to dismiss Bill Clinton’s indefensible behavior, will serve as the official political obituary for Clinton, Inc. Hillary Clinton is done, finished, kaput. Dogged by scandals old and new, out of step politically, her excess baggage has morphed into an entire baggage train, dragging her towards political oblivion. While it is refreshing to consider the landscape unadorned by...

It was far from the most egregious case of workplace sexual misconduct in American history. But it was unusually high-profile, the facts were not in dispute, the perpetrator had a lot of nominal feminist ideological commitments, and political leaders who shared those commitments had the power to force him from office. Had he resigned in shame, we all might have made a collective cultural and political decision that a person caught leveraging power over women in inappropriate ways ought to be fired. Instead, we lost nearly two decades.

But a moment of reassessment is a good time to reassess things for yourself, so I spent this week reading about the lost world of the 1990s. I skimmed the Starr Report. I leafed through books by George Stephanopoulos and Joe Klein and Michael Isikoff. I dug into Troopergate and Whitewater and other first-term scandals. I reacquainted myself with Gennifer Flowers and Webb Hubbell, James Riady and Marc Rich. After doing all this reading, I’m not sure my reasonable middle ground is actually reasonable. It may be that the conservatives of the 1990s were simply right about Clinton, that once...

The one thing that all New York Times house "conservatives" are united on is their hatred of President Donald Trump. In fact, it is pretty much a job requirement. The New York Times will barely tolerate their slightly conservative (on a few topics) views but only if they express complete hostility towards Trump. Political diversity at the Times on the subject of Trump is absolutely taboo.Sometimes this Trump derangement on the part of their house "conservatives" can take an unintended humorous turn as it did this week when David Brooks and his Mini-Me, Ross Douthat, sounded remarkably alike when writing on the...

Ross Douthat, the "conservative" David Brooks mini-me at the New York Times, wants President Donald Trump removed from office pronto. Although Douthat admits in his May 16 column that Trump has probably not done anything actually impeachable, he still wants him out of office because his supposed "childishness" offends him.  Since Trump's very presence in the White House offends poor Douthat's delicate urbane sensibilities, he childishly places his belief in The 25th Amendment Solution for Removing Trump:

The New York Times version of political diversity is that even if you are a scorned "conservative" you can still be tolerated on their pages but ONLY if you are resolutely anti-Trump. A supposed conservative was recently hired by the Times but read this description about him in the very first sentence of this April 12 Politico story:

The New York Times and the Washington Post are chock full of "conservative" columnists who reflect the lack of political diversity in their newsrooms by being united in their opposition to Donald Trump. However, of all these "conservatives," there is one with the saving grace of at least being comically entertaining in that he consistently provides hilariously wrong predictions about Trump. He is Ross Douthat who is sort of a monastic Mini-Me version of his Times colleague David Brooks. So just how wrong are Douthat's predictions? Let's just say they are in the category of Bob Shrum "Curse" wrong. And the...

A New York Times columnist tweeted a joke about assassinating GOP front-runner Donald Trump -- and then deleted the message and apologized. The 1983 Paramount Pictures film "The Dead Zone" Ross Douthat tweeted Wednesday night, "Good news guys I've figured out how the Trump campaign ends" along with a clip from a little-known movie, "The Dead Zone."In the 1983 flick, Christopher Walken plays a man who can see the future and knows that a US Senate candidate, portrayed by Martin Sheen, will eventually become president and start a nuclear war....

EVERY New Year's, in a spirit of self-examination, I try to catalog my worst blunders from the preceding year. But this year, like almost every pundit in America, I have one mistake that overshadows all the others, one confession that makes my other faults seem venial by comparison. I underestimated Donald Trump.

Ross Douthat of the NYT really got under the skin of a whole raft of libs who, in typical lib fashion, reacted badly and are now trying silence him. Douthat wrote about how the libs lost at the Synod, how they did not get their Church and doctrine changing agenda through. HERE – go read it now. That made liberal heads explode. They signed on to a group letter whining to the Editor of Hell’s Bible that that sort of thing shouldn’t be permitted. After all, they sneered, Douthat doesn’t have a theology degree. So the libs wrote a letter....