Free Republic

The Old Right/New Left/Neo-Nazi AllianceBy Steven Zak FrontPageMagazine.com | May 12, 2005 How much difference is there, really, between the far-Left, the far-Right, and overt white supremacists? How do the public stances of Michael Moore, Pat Buchanan, and David Duke compare? Proponents of both extreme views now think and sound so much alike, they sound like soulmates. Somehow these fringe characters have moved so far around the edges that they have arrived at the same territory, spouting identical positions in copycat rhetoric on such issues as Iraq, the broader War on Terror, and the Jewish state of Israel. Their own words...

Likely we will never get to read the email exchanges between Petraeus and Paula Broadwell, but we do have these, accidentally leaked to Mondoweiss, between the celebrated general and Romney the advisor and uberhawk Max Boot. The context is that in 2010 Petraeus submitted a statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee which said that the conflict between Israel and Palestine presented challenges for America’s ability to advance its interests in the Muslim world.

...A political magazine, The American Conservative will presumably comport itself with a bit more dignity than the average tabloid -- or maybe not, given the crew behind it. Executive editor Scott McConnell was formerly editorial page editor of the New York Post, and right-wing fulminator Pat Buchanan will serve as an advisor and contributor. Backed by millionaire New York Press columnist Taki Theodoracopulos, the new biweekly is expected to be more conservative than either The Weekly Standard or the National Review. It launches in September.... (snip)

Wishing away the ghost of a slain predecessor, our president is trying to bury a living law. ********************************************************* Hypocrisy is never a good look. On June 30, our secretary of Education declared that the Supreme Court, by striking down President Biden’s student-debt forgiveness program, had “substituted itself for Congress.” On the very same day, Biden issued his “Memorandum on Certifications Regarding Disclosure of Information in Certain Records Related to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” decreeing that, from now on, executive-branch agencies would adopt the CIA’s “Transparency Plan” for releasing assassination related files they control. The problem: The federal...

A State Department whistleblower has come forward to say the details of a former colleague’s account of the sifting of Benghazi-related documents to identify damaging material “ring true.” The Daily Signal reported Monday on Raymond Maxwell, a former deputy assistant secretary at the State Department who says he observed an unusual after-hours session in a basement operations room of the agency’s headquarters in Washington in October 2012. Maxwell said a State Department office director told him those present were ordered to separate out any documents related to the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on Americans in Benghazi that could prove...

If presidential inaugurations are all about symbolism, what to make of this one? There was no grace present as Trump slunk off early in the morning, an embittered use of Air Force One while he still controlled it. No reports of Downton Abbey-like farewells with the White House staff. No first lady tea ceremony. Hell, it’s not like the Bidens haven’t seen the place before. The Trumps left the White House the way most people leave a hotel: might as well get an early start on it.

It never ceases to amaze me how the populist Right, or what speaks in its name, overestimates its strength both here and in Western Europe. One needn’t be an enemy of these activists to recognize the exaggerated nature of their claims. Those in the media who now demand a border wall insist that the “people” want this goal achieved immediately if not sooner. In fact, according to Ann Coulter, Trump “scammed the American people” by not giving them the wall they’re clamoring for. But according a nationwide poll by The Hill, 51 percent of American voters oppose Trump’s project, while...

TrampZZ/Shutterstock Ross Douthat politely but definitively unloads on the liberal Catholic theologians who griped about his opining in The New York Times, critical of Pope Francis and his allies in attempting to liberalize Catholic teaching on marriage, divorce, and communion. Excerpt: At which point we come to the third argument, which makes an appearance in your letter: You don’t understand, you’re not a theologian. As indeed I am not. But neither is Catholicism supposed to be an esoteric religion, its teachings accessible only to academic adepts. And the impression left by this moving target, I’m afraid, is that some reformers...

The Wall Street Journal profile on Rubio’s amnesty plan makes me want to take piano lessons or learn ice sculpture — because it’s Groundhog Day for immigration policy, and it’s like yesterday never happened. But the specific policies Ned Ryerson.......er...Rubio is selling are just the same old, same old: “earned” amnesty for illegal aliens plus de facto unlimited immigration, in exchange for promises to some day implement E-Verify and build more fencing. Even worse, what makes me want to throw a toaster into the bath tub is the utter lack of awareness that nothing Rubio’s saying is even remotely novel....

A group of anti-Israel activists and journalists are engaged in a coordinated campaign to stifle criticism of controversial secretary of defense nominee Chuck Hagel by attacking the former Republican senator’s critics, according to emails obtained by the Free Beacon. Fenton communications chief executive officer David Fenton, the Atlantic’s national correspondent James Fallows, former diplomat Charles ‘Chas’ Freeman, Just Foreign Policy director Robert Naiman, and American Conservative founding editor Scott McConnell participated in a recent email exchange dedicated to silencing Hagel’s critics, the emails reveal. The emailers targeted recent comments made by Elliott Abrams, a former Bush administration National Security Council...

Push to blame the Iraq war on "Jewish influence" sounds a familiar theme http://www.jewishworldreview.com | A few months ago, a great deal of tut-tutting and dignified outrage emanated from much of the civilized world over the broadcast of a series on Egyptian television which sought to dramatize the "truth" of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But, as the debate over President Bush's rightful determination to pursue war against the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein heats up, it looks like the dimwitted propagandists who write scripts for Egyptian potboilers have been sharing sources with prominent Washington pundits, leftist anti-war...

So why consider Obama? For one reason only: because this liberal Democrat has promised to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq. . . . [Because we want history to render a negative verdict on Iraq to discredit the doctrine of preventive war.]

Snip In the aftermath of 9/11, when President Bush ordered the U.S. military to remove the Taliban, who had given sanctuary to al-Qaeda and Osama, America was with him. When he identified Saddam as an integral part of an Axis of Evil hell-bent on America’s destruction, the nation supported him. Now America is not so sure. Preventive war as the antidote to terror seems, now that Anbar province has become the world’s newest base camp of terror, to have failed us. Democracy as the surest guarantee of U.S. security, now that Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Moqtada al-Sadr are...

Inside the neo-con PentagonOfficer reveals how Bush appointees suppressed facts and twisted truth to drive America to war with Iraq . In July of last year, after just over 20 years of service, I retired as a lieutenant-colonel in the U.S. Air Force. My career started in 1978 with the smooth seduction of a full four-year ROTC scholarship. It ended with 10 months of duty in a strange new country, observing up close and personal a process of decision-making for war not sanctioned by the Constitution. ~snip~ The education I would receive there was intense, fascinating and frightening. While the...

My book The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History has received far more attention than I ever expected. Once the book hit number eight on the New York Times bestseller list, the Times’ editorial page condemned it without actually showing where its arguments were mistaken; several weeks later, to my surprise, the Times published a favorable profile of me. The controversy surrounding the book has reached at least two other continents: Brazil’s Folha de S. Paulo, with the highest circulation of any newspaper in Latin America, published a full interview with me, as did a major Catholic newspaper in Ireland....

I've been reading National Review for a while now, and thoroughly enjoying it--save for a few writers whom I cannot stand (*coughDavidFrumcough*). But I'm beginning to think that I really ought to get a good Paleoconservative magazine to balance it out and diversify my thought. What would you all recommend? I know Chronicles is kind of the "flagship" mag for Paleocons, but I've heard good things about The American Conservative, as well. What are some of the differences between the two, and which would you prefer? Or is there a third magazine that would be better still?

Normally, I would have gotten it sometime early this week. I haven't. I did get an unsolicited copy of the Claremont Review of Books, which has a lot of stuff from NR writers (not that I minded; it was a good read). I could just log on to NRO and read the issue there, but I like having the 'zine in front of me to read (since I read so much on the internet). Anyone else have this problem--or is it just me?

<p>By WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.</p> <p>When in 1955 I set out to publish a journal devoted to the interests of U.S. conservatism, I stressed in a preliminary circular pretty much what one would have expected on the subject. It was necessary then, and would be necessary for most of the balance of the millennium, to confront directly the challenge of Soviet-based communism; to explain, and to plead, that whatever the pains and dangers of resisting it, these were worth undergoing. In retrospect, it appears obvious that the effort was worthwhile, but it was less than obvious at crisis points, among them Hungary, Berlin, Cuba and Vietnam. History will document that the high cost of nuclear-stakes resistance dismayed more merely than U.S. Catholic bishops. Resistance a outrance engendered flesh and blood perspectives. It came down to: Is it really worth it? What do we end up having in hand, by developing and redeveloping and updating a nuclear inventory and the hardware to deliver nuclear strikes, whether pre-emptively or punitively?</p>