Free Republic

By 207 B.C., Rome and its allies on the Italian peninsula had lost approximately 100,000 soldiers to the invading armies of the great Carthaginian general, Hannibal. To make matters more desperate, the Carthaginians were in the final stages of securing massive reinforcements from Phillip V of Macedon. That year the Roman Senate sent a secret group of provocateurs to Northern Greece who started violent insurrections among PhillipÂ’s disaffected subject peoples to his south. The Macedonian armies never sailed and for next 600 years the course of western civilization would be charted by Rome.Special Forces Will Again Change the WorldAs I...

WASHINGTON - There can be only one response to the barbaric beheading of American journalist James Foley by Islamic State terrorists. We must hunt them down and kill them. President Obama said as much in his brief remarks in the wake of the terrorists' grisly video that showed Foley's execution by a masked jihadist who spoke with a British accent and is believed to be a British citizen. The United States will "do what we must to protect our people," Obama said Wednesday. "We will be vigilant and we will be relentless" in bringing them to justice. No sooner had...

In a bit of dubious cherry-picking, a new Bloomberg article concludes that the Affordable Care Act is losing its effectiveness as a political issue for Republicans and is diminishing as a major issue. How do we know the end is near-ish? Well, so many Americans are "benefiting from the law," theorizes Heidi Przybyla, that political ads are simply not doing the job anymore. This news is somewhat unexpected -- and unpersuasive -- when you consider that a Kaiser Family Foundation poll recently found that only 15 percent of Americans believe Obamacare has directly helped them, whereas 28 percent say it...

Bad actors around the globe keep getting confused about the calendar, and it falls to the Obama administration to set them straight. The Russians, Secretary of State John Kerry protested back in March, have forgotten what century we're living in: "You just don't in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext." Kerry was echoing President Obama's observation that by seizing Crimea, Russian president Putin was putting himself "on the wrong side of history." It's a theme this president sounded in his first inaugural address, warning that "those who cling to power...

The amount of mockery presidents endure usually corresponds with their polling. It applies to Republicans (Nixon, Bush, Bush), but sometimes also to Democrats (Carter). In 2012, the Center for Media and Public Affairs found network late-night shows told twice as many jokes about Mitt Romney as they told about President Obama. Was it because Obama was more popular than Romney? Or did it make Obama more popular than his opponent? Obama isn't running for office again, so there's no need for satirists to go easy on him at the risk of endangering his electability. The last NBC poll put Obama's...

After our ill-advised complete withdraw from Iraq in 2011, President Barack Obama now sends hundreds of "advisors" and orders airstrikes. Let's re-visit. When, in 2002, then-Illinois State Sen. Obama gave his famous anti-Iraq War speech, he argued that America had no business in this "dumb" war. Period. Obama considered Iraq a blunder of epic proportions, a misadventure totally devoid of any national security interest. Obama never doubted the assumption given to then-President George W. Bush by all 16 of our intelligence agencies: that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of WMD, specifically chemical and biological weapons. CIA director George Tenet, who served...

Hillary Clinton’s famous “listening tour” of Upstate New York in 2000 eased her way into the U.S. Senate. She was the first liberal politician in years to discover there was an Upstate New York. Who knew? She then spent eight years in the Senate, the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” during which time she distinguished herself only by voting for the Iraq war. She spent much of the middle years of the decade trying to explain away her vote. Hillary Clinton ran for president in ‘08 against the dovish Sen. Barack Obama. He is credited with the best putdown in the...

U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., claims liberals are waging a "war on whites." If so, Barack Obama must be at war with himself. That's how goofy Brooks' logic sounds. But he's not nuts. It is an old reflex, when cornered in politics, to lash back with the same charge others have leveled at you — or, put another way, to project your own flaws onto other people. What's sad about Brooks' claim is his feeble attempt to play the white victim card, plucking the strings of white nationalism, just to have his way with the nation's immigration policy.

It's astonishing that an ideology which such an unbroken track record of failure has adherents who are so incredibly pleased with themselves. It's like a soda pop executive whose proudest achievement was thinking up New Coke. For the liberals who aren’t liberal solely because someone is handing them checks for plopping onto the couch all day instead of working, liberalism has become less an ideology than an attitude. It’s an attitude of serene superiority over everyone else based upon absolutely nothing more than liberals’ utter certainty of the rightness of their collectivist cause. That history shows that collectivism always leads...

The Islamic militants reportedly expanded their drive near Iraqi Kurdistan Saturday despite two U.S. airstrikes aimed at mortar positions and a seven-vehicle convoy to stop the advance on Kurdish capital of Irbil. The Wall Street Journal reported that the militants appear to have their sights on connecting towns seized along the Kurdish-control territory. The most recent town to be seized was identified as Sheikhan… Kamil Amin, the spokesman for Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry, said hundreds of Yazidi women below the age of 35 are being held in schools in Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul. He said the ministry learned of...

Professor and political activist Cornel West declared President Barack Obama a “war criminal,” arguing that his support of Israel and his drone policy make him complicit in the deaths of innocent people. The controversial activist made the comments at a pro-Palestinian rally in Washington, DC on Saturday, according to Talking Points Memo. West began his speech by pointing to the deteriorating situation in Gaza, where more than 1,800 Palestinians and more than 60 Israelis have been killed, criticizing Israel’s offensive in the region in front of a “Free Palestine” banner. His comments regarding President Obama begin at around the three-minute...

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama has been saying that Americans are doing a lot better than they were before he was sworn into office in 2009. It's a claim he's been repeating everywhere he goes, at party fundraising events and in nearly every interview he's had in recent months. "There's almost no economic measure by which we are not better off now than we were when I took office," he told Democrats earlier this month at a campaign fundraiser in Dallas. "We are indisputably better than when I was elected," he says. It's a fundamentally specious, slippery and exaggerated claim that...

The Obama administration often denies any responsibility for the current global chaos or claims that it erupted spontaneously. Yet most of the mess was caused by, or made worse by, growing U.S. indifference and paralysis. Over the last five and a half years, America has had lots of clear choices, but the administration usually took the path of least short-term trouble, which has ensured long-term hardship. There was no need to "reset" the relatively mild punishments that the George W. Bush administration had accorded Vladimir Putin's Russia for invading Georgia in 2008. By unilaterally normalizing relations with Russia and trashing...

Barack Obama's foreign policy disasters are about what one might expect from a leftist community organizer elected to be leader of the free world. So many of the countries this administration has touched -- Ukraine, Libya, Iraq -- have descended into acute civil war on Obama's watch. It's worth asking why, exactly, this has been the case. It's not quite as simple as "the left sucks at war." French Socialist President Francois Hollande, for example, isn't too bad at it. He's been successfully running a series of ongoing foreign interventions in Africa. So what does a French Socialist have that...

Shortly before the market crash in 2008, when oil prices were at all-time highs, Harry Reid, Democrat Senate Majority Leader, sold his investments in the energy industry-- according to his public filings-- and bought the healthcare industry instead. Thanks to the ensuing banking panic caused by skyrocketing oil prices and their subsequent crash, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. Obama, history now tells us, made one of his first tasks to enrich Wall Street and healthcare companies through the fundamental transformation of healthcare into a government owned subsidiary. And now you know, in a thumbnail sketch,...

I have to claim responsibility for the newest parody that’s now starring as president of the United States on TVs everywhere. If ever there were a Steven Colbert character assigned to play a faux president, Obama would get the nod. You see: he’s been nominated for an Emmy now. In a comedy, playing himself, in a tragedy. Seriously. His own incompetence has led to an Emmy nomination. And it’s my fault. When Obama visited Cooperstown’s Baseball Hall of Fame in May, ostensibly to promote tourism, I suggested with mock fawning that they should induct him into the HOF as the...

“We have your back,” President Obama told Israelis when he visited that embattled country recently. Way back, apparently. Mr. Obama’s administration famously claimed to “lead from behind” in overthrowing Libya’s strongman, Khaddafi. Young Sergeant Benjamin Anthony spoke to the Christians United for Israel (CUFI) Washington Summit this week. Sgt. Anthony described a different vision of leadership. Ahalai he gave as the Hebrew word for “after me.” Officers in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) they should lead from the front. That used to be America’s idea of leadership, too. You cannot say Secretary John Kerry isn’t alert to his opportunities. He...

Attention, illegal immigrant children, gang members and drug smugglers who are still pouring over the border into Texas: If you’re looking for a place to stay while President Obama figures out a way to turn you all into welfare-dependent Democrats, I have just the place. Actually, several. First, head for San Francisco. It’s beautiful this time of year. House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-California) recently proclaimed in Texas that not only was the border between Mexico and the United States meaningless (“It’s a community with a border running through it”) but that she wishes she could take all...

The illegal immigrant situation at our southern border is more than just a national crisis. It’s part of the greatest conspiracy in world history—a purposeful attempt to create catastrophe, overwhelm the system, and force the American people to make a dreadfully wrong decision under duress. Obama wants our good-hearted Christian nation to see women, children, and families begging for help, begging to live the “American Dream.” He wants immigrants to be in the worst possible shape after a long journey from Central America—starving, injured, diseased—in such terrible shape our hearts break and we agree to take them all in....

Presidents are supposed to be exemplars. Why else do we build monuments to them? They're supposed to be superhuman and represent the power and virtue of democracy, the iron resolve of a nation before a world of howling enemies, the compassion of a powerful virtue that inspires the fidelity of liberty loving peoples across the globe. Presidents aren't supposed to be shabby. When they are, they diminish the body politic in its teaming millions. We're all affected, admittedly or not. President Barack Obama is shabby and his legacy is composed of a long train of scandal. Nixon's impeachable offense seems...