Free Republic

Why is Barack Obama so comfortable around people who so despise America and its allies? Maybe it’s because they’re so comfortable around him. He presents as the transcendent agent of “change.” Sounds platitudinous, but it’s really quite strategically vaporous. Sen. Obama is loath to get into the details of how we should change, and, as the media’s Chosen One, he hasn’t had to. But he’s not, as some hopefully dismiss him, a charismatic lightweight with a gift for sparkling the same old vapid cant. Judging from the company he chooses to keep, Obama’s change would radically alter this country. He...

On the morning of February 26, 1993, Islamic militants steered a nondescript Ryder van through the winding darkness of the parking garage under the World Trade Center. They had spent years planning this moment in secret meetings at mosques and jailhouses, in rural outposts that served as paramilitary camps, and in safehouses where explosive compounds were mixed in makeshift labs. Loaded into the van’s rear compartment was a 1,400-pound chemical bomb. The explosive detonated at a few minutes after noon. The hyper-intensive shockwave bored a six-story canyon into the bowels of the complex. Seven people were killed (one of the...

Are John McCain’s supporters trying to drive conservatives away from their candidate? Senator McCain is the inevitable Republican presidential nominee. He is headed, though, for a defeat of McGovernite dimensions if he can’t sway conservatives to get behind his candidacy. For their part, conservatives don’t want McCain, but even less do they want to spend the next four-to-eight years saying “President Obama,” let alone reliving history with another President Clinton. In short, there are the makings here for a modus vivendi, however grudging. Yet, McCain’s admirers appear to think belittling the senator’s good-faith opponents is the way to go. Theirs...

Jonathan Turley has penned an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times claiming that Michael Mukasey, President Bush’s nominee to become the next attorney general, should be disqualified for failing to condemn waterboarding as torture. According to Turley, Judge Mukasey’s confirmation-hearing testimony was evasive, and the nominee flatly lied to the committee when he said he did not to know what was involved in the technique called “waterboarding.” The accusation about lying is noxious and what passes for legal reasoning in Turley’s piece is especially shameful for a George Washington University law professor. To begin with, interrogation tactics used in top-secret...

The spin about the inspector general’s report is belied by what is in the inspector general’s report. A report by the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general is the occasion for the latest offensive by champions of Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos, the former Border Patrol agents currently serving lengthy sentences for assault and obstruction of justice in connection with their 2005 shooting of an unarmed, fleeing drug dealer. I say the report is the occasion rather than the grist for the offensive because, quite obviously, the agents’ apologists would prefer that people not actually read the report. DHS has made...

Rudy & the Social Right [Andy McCarthy] FWIW, I have to agree with Ramesh, Rich and Kathryn on this one. I don't think the Right neatly divides into social and national-security conservatives. There's too much mutual cross-over to fix a hard line. I find myself in that blur, solid on the national-security side and in sync most of the time, but not all, on the social side. Having watched the dynamic for a while, my sense is that it's the socials that drive the movement. We national-security types tend to be so confident we are right about what needs to...

Posted 03/26/2007 ET We often disagree with Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a former prosecutor and now the Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee. But one thing is for certain: there isn’t a dumb bone in his body. That’s why it’s so infuriating to witness the theater he has allowed (indeed, induced) his committee to become over what is now an MSM-dubbed “scandal” .. forged by the explosive combination of top-tier Justice Department incompetence and shrewd opportunism in the Democrat-controlled Congress .. over the Bush Administration’s firing of eight United States attorneys. On Thursday, following the previous day’s lead...

The Border-Patrol Two Deserve Jail Law enforcement defends its honor, despite the “hero” propaganda By Andrew C. McCarthy “Texans aren’t whiners,” Johnny Sutton told me. Still, forgive him if he sounds a bit frustrated. Sutton is the top federal law-enforcement officer in one of the nation’s most notorious border badlands. Day in and day out, while no one was paying much attention to the dusty Rio Grande towns outside El Paso, he has been the U.S. Border Patrol’s staunchest ally. A solid law-and-order conservative, Sutton’s position, United States Attorney for the Western District of Texas, is a unique perch from...

Neither corner of the ring has distinguished itself. In one, leading Democrats and some Republicans are evidently shocked to learn that many of the nation’s ports are managed by foreigners. Indeed, even as they railed against the prospect of this buy-out by UAE’s Dubai Ports World, Inc., they skipped past the inconvenient fact that the seller, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, is a British concern. Naturally, they prefer to cast the issue as one of foreign port-terminal management because they lack the gumption to state that the problem is Islamic participation in what is a gaping soft-spot in...

Washington’s scandal du jour involves a wartime surveillance program President Bush directed the National Security Agency to carry out after al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001. The idea that there is anything truly scandalous about this program is absurd. But the outcry against it is valuable, highlighting as it does the mistaken assumption that criminal-justice solutions are applicable to national-security challenges. The intelligence community has identified thousands of al-Qaeda operatives and sympathizers throughout the world. After Congress overwhelmingly authorized the use of military force immediately following the 9/11 attacks, the president, as part of the war effort,...

President George W. Bush forcefully explained last night — some of us would say finally forcefully explained last night after too long a lull — why our military operations in Iraq are crucial to success in the war on terror. It was good to hear the commander-in-chief remind people that this is still the war against terror. Specifically, against Islamo-fascists who slaughtered 3000 Americans on September 11, 2001. Who spent the eight years before those atrocities murdering and promising to murder Americans — as their leader put it in 1998, all Americans, including civilians, anywhere in the world where they...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Print Version E.J. Dionne, Matt Lauer, and the rest f the mainstream media vanguard are in high dudgeon. The autopsy report is finally out on Terri Schiavo, and they want to know: Where is the apology? A better question would be: Are they kidding? Let’s review the state of play at the time of Terri’s death, even as these revisionists reshape the history, as victors — no matter how inglorious their victories — surely get to do. There were two questions of critical import: Was Terri Schiavo in a persistent vegetative state...

The Washington Post's Tuesday editorial on, as the editors there call it, "Mr. Ashcroft's Smear," is a transparent effort to help close ranks around beleaguered Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, the former Clinton-administration deputy attorney general whose conflict of interest has riven the 9/11 Commission. For the most part, it adopts wholesale the talking points Gorelick herself ran with in an op-ed that the Post published on Sunday. Though disingenuous, even taken at face value, the editorial actually supports the case for recusal. With knee-jerk predictability, the Post finds that the real culprit in this drama is not Gorelick but rather the...

The grandstanding Richard Clarke having made apologies all the rage, one should expect that President Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice will be getting one in the next day or two. Something like this: Dear Mr. President and Dr. Rice: Very sorry about all that high dudgeon a couple of weeks ago. You remember, when we couldn't pass a microphone, a pencil, or a camera without perorations about the vital need to have the President waive executive privilege and ignore scads of history so Dr. Rice could be permitted to testify under oath and publicly (and improve our Nielson...

The grandstanding Richard Clarke having made apologies all the rage, one should expect that President Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice will be getting one in the next day or two. Something like this: Dear Mr. President and Dr. Rice: Very sorry about all that high dudgeon a couple of weeks ago. You remember, when we couldn't pass a microphone, a pencil, or a camera without perorations about the vital need to have the President waive executive privilege and ignore scads of history so Dr. Rice could be permitted to testify under oath and publicly (and improve our...