Free Republic

Weigel responds to the Levi-Bristol break-up by shaming the media: "Why assume that [Sarah] Palin was behind [the Levi-Bristol engagement], cleaning up a problem before a possible 2012 run? It’s because the alternative, truer explanation is dull. Palin as tabloid joke is a story for 2008. The story for 2010 is that she’s a master plotter, a recruiter of grizzlies, whose book sales and TV deals prove that she’s outsmarted everyone. This theory doesn’t have many takers inside of Alaska, where Palin’s celebrity and national designs are frowned upon by people who wanted her to serve out her term. But...

Ezra Klein's attempt to pass off JournoList as just a water-cooler confab seems pretty much exploded by this latest Daily Caller piece. I mean: what is the point of putting out an email with the subject line "The Line On Palin" if there isn't an actual line? And what is this if not organizing a media narrative: “Okay, let’s get deadly serious, folks. Grating voice or not, ‘inexperienced’ or not, Sarah Palin’s just been introduced to the country as a brave, above-party, oil-company-bashing, pork-hating maverick ‘outsider’,” Kilgore said, “What we can do is to expose her ideology.” What you mean...

Guest blogging for lunatic Andrew Sullivan, disgraced former WaPo blogger David Weigel tries to talk some sense into Sully: Trig Palin is Sarah Palin's son and it's irresponsible to suggest otherwise. [...] All of the evidence indicates that Trig Palin is Sarah's son, and none of it suggests otherwise. I paid close enough attention to this in 2008, and realized pretty quickly that the countervailing theories made no sense. Too many people watched Palin announce the pregnancy and saw her come along until she went into labor, prematurely, while attending a National Governors Association event in Texas. Here in Alaska,...

(VIDEO AT LINK) Chris Matthews sees Palin inflicting an "early knockout" in the primaries. Larison, still betting against her, argues that the GOP establishment will quash her candidacy: Palin and Mondale are alike in that they represent the face of the party as it was when it was defeated, but they are quite different in their sources of support. Mondale was the candidate of the party establishment and important interest groups, and Palin has made a point of aligning herself with every possible anti-establishment, insurgent campaign she can find. Contra Kornacki, Bernstein finds the comparison off: Yes, Mondale got clobbered...

Here is just one example of how Andrew Sullivan propped up Levi Johnston as the obvious truth-teller within the extended Palin clan. Out of all of them only Levi deserved to be taken seriously. According to Andy, Johnston was the real rogue of 2009. ... His story deserves to be taken more seriously as a real account of what Palin really is. Until Wallace and Schmidt screw their courage to the sticking place, he's the best we've got.Johnston's account for the reasons for Palin's bizarre resignation are also more convincing than Palin's classic insistence that she was quitting....Now, comes today...

I try not to comment about hypocrisy in politics because switching sides on issues of “principle” is such a routine part of partisan game-playing that commenting about it would be like writing a post declaring that water is wet, that Death Valley is hot, and that Perez Hilton is annoying. But very occasionally, an incident comes along that is so glaring in its clueless exposure of the seedy underbelly of political debate that it requires a moment of stunned observation, sort of like watching a guy immolating himself while giving a lecture on fire safety. The recent complaint by Andrew...

Andrew Breitbart’s $100,000 offer for the full archives of the now-defunct liberal listserve Journolist has prompted a fight between himself and Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan. Breitbart has not yet had any takers for the offer – assuming such a complete archive of the e-mail list founded by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein even exists – but Sullivan contends the offer alone has crossed a new line. “Every blogger or writer who has ever offered an opinion is now on warning,” Sullivan wrote. “Your opponents will not just argue against you, they will do all they can to ransack your private...

[SNIP] I needn’t be lectured by a so-called “conservative” who has aided and abetted in this perversion of the American political experiment. Sullivan’s disgusting, ends-justify-the-means obsession with the personal family life of Sarah Palin breached every ethical and journalistic boundary known to the cosmos. Between airing Palin’s hacked private emails and making a cottage industry out of challenging the maternity of her son, Trig, sometimes the word “irony” or “hypocrisy” is not descriptive enough. To highlight the absurdity of Sullivan’s outrage, perhaps his submission entitled “The Palin Emails” can grant you insight into a demented mind. Before divulging them in...

Friedersdorf wants the issue left alone: I assume Trig Palin is Sarah Palin’s son, and that I don’t think we should go down the road of demanding hard evidence on these sorts of questions (even if it meant never finding out the truth in an individual case) — it sets a precedent that would mire future elections in ever more absurd accusations and counter-accusations, all of them focusing attention on the personal history of candidates rather than their professional qualifications and policy positions, a road we’ve gone too far down already, and that benefits the least qualified seekers of office...

David Petraeus is the real Pope of counter-insurgency and if he decides that he needs more troops and more time and more resources in Afghanistan next year, who is going to be able to gainsay him? That's Thomas P. Barnett's shrewd assessment. Obama's pledge to start withdrawing troops in 2011 is now kaput... It really is Vietnam -- along with the crazier and crazier rationales for continuing it. But it is now re-starting in earnest ten years in, dwarfing Vietnam in scope and longevity. One suspects there is simply no stopping this war machine, just as there is no stopping...

We all know former Vice President Al Gore has a sycophantic media supporting him on his pet cause of global warming. But this might be a little over the top, or it could very well explain a lot. In December 2007, when Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, The Washington Post's Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan argued the former vice president had won the Nobel Prize for "sexy." Well, apparently this is an inside-the-beltway notion that has existed for years. On HBO's June 4 broadcast of "Real Time with Bill Maher," film producer, director, and screenwriter Judd Apatow harkened back...

The nominee to be the next justice of the Supreme Court has no opinion on anything. Well, that’s not entirely true. She did believe in providing free coffee for students when she was dean of Harvard Law School. She once publicly protested against the ban on honest homosexuals serving in the US military — but that is genuinely the only controversial statement she has ever made in public. How do such people exist? Well, the truth is they have existed on the career ladder for the US Supreme Court since Robert Bork was crucified by the Senate when Ronald Reagan...

It is no more of an empirical question than whether she is Jewish. We know she is Jewish, and it is a fact simply and rightly put in the public square. If she were to hide her Jewishness, it would seem rightly odd, bizarre, anachronistic, even arguably self-critical or self-loathing. And yet we have been told by many that she is gay ... and no one will ask directly if this is true and no one in the administration will tell us definitively. In a word, this is preposterous - a function of liberal cowardice and conservative discomfort. It should...

A quote for the ages from uber-swish Andrew: Here's a revealing glimpse into how a delusional, incompetent, pathological liar has managed never to hold a real press conference and yet remains a credible public figure. He's off on one of his Sarah Palin jags. Again. And it's still only 2010.

Here's a revealing glimpse into how a delusional, incompetent, pathological liar has managed never to hold a real press conference and yet remains a credible public figure. She avoids the filters - i.e. skeptical journalists - and deploys one simple propaganda tool: (Requests to interview Palin for this article, specifically about her experiences in the 2008 campaign, were turned down. Her former communications aide Meghan Stapleton explained that "with her Fox exclusivity, we are denying requests for articles and stories right now.") The reason I banged on and on about Palin's bizarre story about her fifth campaign prop during the...

The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan caught wind of one of my posts today and, without delay, honored me as a Hewitt Award nominee on his blog, The Daily Dish.

Honestly, I did now weigh in on the controversy about Andrew Sullivan and Anti-Semitism, I do not believe that the guy is a Jew-hater, I believe that he is either suffering from Dementia or he is just plain stupid. How else could he get so many facts wrong. Last month it was the City if Hebron. When Israel put the Cave of the Patriarch on the Heritage Site list, Sullivan objected because of the horrible 1994 incident where one lone demented Israeli went to the Cave and began shooting, killing 29 Arab worshipers. He called a massacre (and it was)....

Andrew Sullivan used to be an interesting commentator. Long ago, he looked at both sides of the issues and provided intelligent insights. Now he's a one-trick pony: a gay liberal masquerading as a conservative. Mainly, he's obsessed with torture, a topic about which he has become the Liza Minelli of the internet (see Forbidden Broadway for the reference). Today alone, he has four posts dealing with torture either in whole or in passing. To read more, click here.

Watch the VIDEO.

Is Andrew Sullivan an anti-Semite or just a famous clueless? Posted by SHMUEL ROSNER Is star-blogger, Israel-basher, Andrew Sullivan an anti-Semite?Leon Wieseltier says yes, in this long and very controversial TNR piece. I think the most interesting thing here is Wieseltier's definition of anti-Semitism as it relates to Sullivan's writings. Here I will post two paragraphs that do not come one right after the other in the original article:Consider some squibs that Sullivan recently posted on his blog. "Most American Jews, of course, retain a respect for learning, compassion for the other, and support for minorities (Jews, for example, are...