Free Republic

One oft-overlooked aspect of the Constitution’s genius is the Framers’ humility. They had two animating ideals to guide the Republic they designed. The first, of course, was liberty: The United States would be the first Republic in history in which sovereignty was vested in “We the People,” not the central government; in which the central government’s function was to serve rather than rule the people; and in which the citizen’s autonomy over his life and property was presumed—the central government permitted to burden it only in limited and strictly defined ways. The second ideal was separation of powers: The recognition...

To add to Stanley’s sage observations (both today and earlier this week), I argue in this weekend’s column that elections are not democracy and, in fact, that popular elections in a sharia culture that inevitably empower Islamic supremacists are innately anti-democratic – which is why our commentariat ought to stop referring to Mohamed Morsi as Egypt’s “democratically elected” president. He is (or was) the popularly-elected in an anti-democratic society.

Charlotte’s revulsion over Huma Abedin’s calculated “stand by your man” routine is surely right. Still, it is amazing, as we speculate about Ms. Abedin’s political future, that the elephant in the room goes unnoticed, or at least studiously unmentioned. Sorry to interrupt the Best Enabler of a Sociopath Award ceremony but, to recap, Ms. Abedin worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic-supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef ran the Rabita Trust, a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under American law. Ms. Abedin and Naseef overlapped at the Journal of...

As they have from the start, the Free Syrian Army was rolling out the welcome mat for al-Qaeda. “They are welcome to help us fight the regime,” explained Colonel Abdel Rahman Suweis, a member of the FSA’s Supreme Military Council. This is not ancient history. The report from Al Jazeera (which Bill Roggio excerpts at the invaluable Long War Journal) has the FSA commander making these remarks less than two weeks ago. Just a couple of days later came another nugget from the al-Qaeda side of the “rebel” equation: A top leader of one of the terror network’s two major...

The first thing to remember is that, with the Obama administration, there are no coincidences. The attorney general of the United States is engaged in a shocking extrajudicial publicity campaign. Eric Holder is prosecuting George Zimmerman in the court of public opinion because he knows he wouldn't have a prayer of convicting him in a court of law. Worse, in doing so, Holder is quite deliberately stoking resentment and tension - under the guise of leading a "national conversation" about race. At precisely the same time, the United States secretary of health and human services has loathsomely injected race into...

Barack Obama has never been clear on the distinction between sovereign and servant, between the American people and those, including himself, elected to do the people’s business. We saw that yet again this week with the president’s unilateral rewrite of the Bataan Death March known as the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare. For this president, laws are not binding expressions of the popular will, but trifling recommendations to be ignored when expedient. The collapse of law — not just Obamacare but law in general — is the Obama administration’s most egregious scandal. With the IRS here, Benghazi there, and Eric...

The democracy fetish would be worth having if it were about promoting real democracy. Instead, as illustrated by media coverage of the military coup that ousted Egypt’s popularly elected Muslim Brotherhood president, we’re still confusing democratic legitimacy with legitimate democracy. The latter is real — a culture of liberty that safeguards minority rights. Attaining it is a worthy aspiration, but one that requires years of patient, disciplined, and often unpopular work. The former is an illusion — the pretense that if a Muslim country holds popular elections and elects totalitarian Islamists, voila, it has a “democracy,” and progressives the world...

The jihad rages on, but the War on Terror is over. There is no longer a national-security consensus — no longer the political support for wartime defense measures, much less offensive combat operations. While the enemy continues to fight, our will to break the enemy’s will has vanished. After a contentious week, that much is clear. The controversy swirling around shadowy intelligence programs hasn’t gotten to the bottom of those programs, but it tells us everything we need to know about . . . us. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s dog that did not bark is a metaphor worn out by...

The national security of the United States justifies the collection of “metadata.” Seemed reasonable to me. “I want the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of every person in the five boroughs.” I barked the instruction to one of the eager young interns whose job was not to wonder aloud why cranky federal prosecutors made such demands but to produce the goods, pronto.He was new, but not so new that it didn’t seem like a bizarre directive. He wouldn’t say so, but his eyes were pleading, “Is everyone a suspect?”“Never mind,” said I as he started to scurry out the door....

Phone Record Gathering Story Blown Out of Proportion By Andrew C. McCarthy June 6, 2013 10:29 AM Now, we begin to see the wages of having an administration that abuses its awesome powers, then, as night follows day, stonewalls and misleads Congress and the public. Crucial national security measures, which operate on the forgiving assumption that government officials will conduct themselves honorably, are put at risk. The Washington Post publishes a wildly exaggerated report this morning about the government’s collection of telephone records for national security purposes. Mind you, I said collection of telephone records, not wiretapping of telephone conversations,...

Changes to the AP stylebook show that we’re blinding ourselves to the connections between Islamic extremism and terrorism. It was a report of the now numbingly familiar sort. Witnesses at the synagogue in Paris recounted that an Iranian immigrant had been screaming “Allahu Akbar!” while he chased the rabbi and his son. When he finally caught up, he slashed away at them with a box-cutter, causing severe lacerations. Nevertheless, the Associated Press assured readers that “[a]n official investigation was underway to determine a possible motive.” Quite a mystery, that. It is necessary to search for some “possible” motive because to...

Two plus two equals five. I mean, I really want it to be five. So let’s just pretend it’s five and, before you know it, it’ll be five. After all, we are the ones (or is it the fives?) we’ve been waiting for. My narrow-minded opponents, stuck in the mathematics of a bygone time, would have us make a false choice between elementary addition and our values. But as James Madison or James Rosen or somebody said, “The arc of arithmetic is long, but it bends toward, um . . . five.” That, it seemed to me, was about what...

What would you be focusing on in the Benghazi investigation?” I spent many years in the investigation biz, so it’s only natural that I’ve been asked that question a lot lately.… So if I were investigating Benghazi, I’d be homing in on that 10 P.M. phone call. That’s the one between President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — the one that’s gotten close to zero attention.... We have heard almost nothing about what Obama was doing that night. Back in February, though, CNS News did manage to pry one grudging disclosure out of White House mendacity mogul Jay...

Andrew McCarthy makes the case that the 10:00 PM phone call on September 11 last year between Hillary Clinton and President Obama may be the conversation that led to the bogus story of an anti-Muslim video setting off "demonstrations" in Benghazi that led to the deaths of Americans. Fraud flows from the top down, not the mid-level up. Mid-level officials in the White House and the State Department do not call the shots -- they carry out orders. They also were not running for reelection in 2012 or positioning themselves for a campaign in 2016. The people doing that were,...

Even in the conservative press, it has become received wisdom that President Obama was AWOL on the night of September 11, after first being informed by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, in the late afternoon, that the State Department facility in Benghazi was under attack. You hear it again and again: While Americans were under attack, the commander-in-chief checked out, leaving subordinates to deal with the crisis while he got his beauty sleep in preparation for a fundraising campaign trip to Vegas. That is not true . . . and the truth, as we’ve come to expect with Obama, is almost...

Clinton and Obama discussed Benghazi. What did they say? ‘What would you be focusing on in the Benghazi investigation?” I spent many years in the investigation biz, so it’s only natural that I’ve been asked that question a lot lately. I had the good fortune to be trained in Rudy Giuliani’s U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. Rudy famously made his mark by making law enforcement reflect what common sense knew: Enterprises take their cues from the top. Criminal enterprises are no different: The capos do not carry out the policy of the button-men — it’s the other way around. So...

With each new revelation, what has always been obvious becomes more pronounced: the State Department’s self-proclaimed final word on the Benghazi Massacre, the risibly named “Accountability Review Board” investigation, is a fraud. Yet, like the rest of the Obama administration’s obstructive wagon-circling, the ARB’s report continues serving its intended purpose: to thwart efforts to hold administration officials accountable. Even on Fox News, which has been admirably dogged covering a scandal the Obamedia has done its best to bury, the refrain is heard: How could the ARB report be a whitewash when its investigation was run by such Washington eminences as...

Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood’s epigrammatic founder, was never at a loss for the chilling turn of phrase. His rally cry, the Brotherhood’s signature pledge that “Jihad is our way” and “Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope,” is the soundtrack of the “Arab Spring.” It speaks for a region over two-thirds of whose putative liberty lovers prefer to kill apostates than to abide freedom of conscience. Their embrace of the very sharia chauvinism that ties together Banna, bin Laden, the Saudi royals, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev explodes the Western myth of the moderate Muslim majority. Yet the...

Strange, isn’t it? We are governed by leftists given to finger-wagging about their commitment to due process and the rule of law — they’re not like those bad old warmongering Bushies. Still, here we are in the post-arrest phase of the civilian prosecution the administration was hell-bent on commencing — the phase when due process obliges government officials to remain mum about non-public investigative information that could taint the jury pool and undermine the defendant’s right to a fair trial — and we’re being inundated with stunning confession evidence. Remember, this is the same crowd that labels the Fort Hood...

One of the central questions surrounding the Boston Marathon bombings is whether they portend a larger wave of terror attacks by homegrown Islamic radicals. The culprits, two brothers of Chechen origin, one of whom was a naturalized U.S. citizen, had both lived in the country for more than a decade.