Free Republic

Sometimes in politics, which currently saturates everything, worse is better. When a political craze based on a bad idea achieves a critical mass, one wants it to be undone by ridiculous excess. Consider the movement to scrub from the English language and the rest of life everything that anyone might consider harmful or otherwise retrograde. Worse really is better in today’s America (if you will pardon that noun; some at Stanford University will not; read on) as the fever of foolishness denoted by the word “woke” now defies satire. At Stanford, a full-service, broad-spectrum educational institution, an “Elimination of Harmful...

MSNBC political commentator and author George Will said Friday on “Andrea Mitchell Reports” that former president Donald Trump demonstrated how rapidly one man with a “lack of conscience” can change the entire tone of public life for the worse. Mitchell said, “In your new book, you write that it has been well said that the United States is the only nation founded on a good idea, the proposition that people should be free to pursue happiness as they define it. In recent years, however, happiness has been elusive for this nation in which too many people think and act as...

“In one of contemporary history’s intriguing caroms, European politics just now is a story of how one decision by a pastor’s dutiful daughter has made life miserable for a vicar’s dutiful daughter. Two of the world’s most important conservative parties are involved in an unintended tutorial on a cardinal tenet of conservatism, the law of unintended consequences, which is that the unintended consequences of decisions in complex social situations are often larger than, and contrary to, those intended.” That’s the elephantine lead of George Will’s recent column, headlined “Today’s Germany is the best Germany the world has seen.” The real...

Conservative columnist George Will is making the argument to vote against Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections. In a piece published Friday in the Washington Post, Will says that President Trump's "zero tolerance" policy at the border was "the most telegenic example of misrule" and it provided “fresh if redundant evidence for the principle by which” independents and moderate Republicans should vote. That principle he says is that the number of Republicans in office must be “substantially reduced.” "The principle: The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of...

En route to fight one of his many duels, French politician Georges Clemenceau bought a one-way train ticket. Was he pessimistic? "Not at all. I always use my opponent's return ticket for the trip back." Some Hillary Clinton advisors, although not that serene, think her victory is probable and can be assured. Her challenge is analogous to Ronald Reagan's in 1980, when voters were even more intensely dissatisfied than they now are. There were hostages in Iran and stagflation's "misery index" (the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates) was 21.98. By August 1979, 84% of Americans said the country...

Conservative columnist George Will told PJM he has officially left the Republican Party and urged conservatives not to support presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump even if it leads to a Democratic victory in the 2016 presidential election. Will, who writes for the Washington Post, acknowledged it is a “little too late” for the Republican Party to find a replacement for Trump but had a message for Republican voters. “Make sure he loses. Grit their teeth for four years and win the White House,” Will said during an interview after his speech at a Federalist Society luncheon. Will said he changed...

WASHINGTON -- Every sulfurous belch from the molten interior of the volcanic Trump phenomenon injures the chances of a Republican presidency. After Donald Trump finishes plastering a snarling face on conservatism, any Republican nominee will face a dauntingly steep climb to reach even the paltry numbers that doomed Mitt Romney. It is perhaps quixotic to try to distract Trump's supporters with facts, which their leader, who is no stickler for dignity, considers beneath him. Still, consider these: The white percentage of the electorate has been shrinking for decades and will be about 2 points smaller in 2016 than in 2012....