Free Republic

Conservatives’ expectations for honest and fair movies coming out of Hollywood are understandably low.  For decades now we have been brow-beaten and lectured by clueless celebrities on everything from saving the Spotted Owl to gun control – the latest flavor of the moment.But a breath of fresh air is blowing in from the left coast. The new movie ‘Chappaquiddick,’ from Entertainment Studios and Apex Entertainment, is a brutally honest recounting of one of America’s greatest public tragedies: the death of Mary Jo Kopechne in a car owned and driven by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.)Producer Mark Ciardi has a winner, and...

The Eddie Mush of politics, Bob Shrum, has written an article in the October 19 America magazine attempting to explain how Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election. Among the big reasons Shrum cites was overconfidence to the extent that the Hillary campaign declined to even poll the battleground states in the final weeks of the election.  Shrum rather incompletely attributes her overconfidence to a heavy reliance upon data analytics without mentioning that it was also probably due to almost all media pundits, including a certain someone very familiar to the author, predicting an absolutely certain Hillary victory:

With the appointment of Anthony Scaramucci on July 21 as White House Communications Director, this is a good time to take a walk down memory lane with him to exactly two weeks before the November election when he was subjected to a searing attack by always wrong political consultant Bob Shrum on Bloomberg's With All Due Respect. Starting at the 3:50 mark of the following video, Scaramucci commits a Thought Crime by daring to suggest that "Trump Shaming" might be skewing the polls against him. Shrum responds by shaming Scaramucci as "idiotic" for daring to make such a suggestion. Hey, that's why...

You did it, Bob Shrum! Your perfect track record now extends to 0 for 9 in presidential candidate victories due to your powerful "Shrum Curse."  Your humble correspondent was the first to note how the Shrum Curse doomed Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign the moment he declared certain victory for her on September 2. Here is a gloating Shrum spiking the football and declaring the election basically over that day on With All Due Respect in a video posted by Bloomberg Politics titled "Bob Shrum Says Labor Day Is the End of the Election":

Don't be so modest, Bob. You have an amazing power. Any presidential candidate who you either work for directly or declare to have won before Election Day is doomed to fail. That power that you are so reluctant to brag about is known far and wide within political circles as the "Shrum Curse." We saw the latest demonstration by Bob Shrum of that power on With All Due Respect on September 2 as chronicled by your humble correspondent who anticipated its effects in this Newsbusters article, WADR: Will Shrum Curse Doom Hillary's Campaign?:

This election is over! You got that? Hillary Clinton has already won.  Only one not so little problem. The one making this declaration is none other than the Eddie Mush of politics aka Bob Shrum. This time the extremely unlucky political consultant (0 for 8 in presidential candidate wins) who is infamous for possessing the "Shrum curse" might have cast a pall of misfortune upon the Hillary Clinton campaign with his gloatingly confident prognostication of certain victory for her.In fact, she has pretty much already won according to Shrum who was jubilantly performing an end zone victory dance while speaking to John Heilemann...

Longtime Democratic strategist Bob Shrum said on MSNBC Friday that he “cannot imagine the horror that could’ve unfolded” if churchgoers were armed during the recent massacre in Charleston, South Carolina. Nine people were slaughtered on Wednesday night after suspected gunman Dylann Roof allegedly opened fire in the historically black church. Only three people survived, including a grandmother who played dead and laid on top of her granddaughter to protect her. Roof reportedly had time to reload his gun several times. “I cannot imagine the horror that could’ve occurred if people were sitting around with concealed weapons, this thing started and...

FULL TITLE: Dem Strategist: ‘I Cannot Imagine the Horror That Could’ve Occurred’ if Churchgoers Were Armed During Charleston Massacre Longtime Democratic strategist Bob Shrum said on MSNBC Friday that he “cannot imagine the horror that could’ve unfolded” if churchgoers were armed during the recent massacre in Charleston, South Carolina. ((snip)) “I cannot imagine the horror that could’ve occurred if people were sitting around with concealed weapons, this thing started and you had a full-scale gunfight,” Shrum said Friday. “You might not even have three survivors.”

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- After spending more than 30 years consulting for Democratic candidates, campaign operative Robert Shrum is using his pen to advance his own, liberal views. "The book is about what I have seen the direction of progressive politics take, what happens to it and where I think it ought to go," Shrum told CNN in an interview. The veteran political operative was coy about what else he would say in his book, and Washington insiders were aflutter Wednesday about whether it would include sharp critiques of his clients and colleagues from past campaigns -- particularly the failed presidential...

Concerning Obama’s Hampton University speech, just one observation. I don’t care so much about the down-home accent and style. Lots of people slip into different skins, for different purposes. It isn’t necessarily hypocritical or wrong. (That said, I’m not eager to hear Hillary Clinton’s “black voice” again. Will we be treated to it when she runs in 2016?)What is damnable about Obama’s Hampton speech is this: It perpetrates a racial lie. It furthers racial grievance and alienation. It hardens division in our society. It increases bitterness and mistrust.The charge that President Bush and Republicans generally were indifferent to black...

Friendship has its claims; so does fairness. And in the wake of the bankruptcy of brokerage firm MF Global, the media's portrayal of Jon Corzine, MF's ex-CEO and a former Democratic senator and governor in New Jersey, strikes me as profoundly unfair — and not just because he's a friend.

Be kind to Bob Shrum. Perhaps the 68-year old is suffering from the not-so-early-onset of some dread memory-loss syndrome. How else to explain his suggestion on Al Sharpton's MSNBC show this evening that the National Restaurant Association's settlement for a relatively modest sum, in today's litigious world, proves that Herman Cain must have done something wrong? Does the failed presidential campaign consultant's support of Bill Clinton, despite his much larger, $850,000 settlement with Paula Jones while "adamantly denying" her claims, fire any synapses in Shrum's cerebrum? View the video here.

Of the early potential Democratic contenders, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley says he supports gay marriage but stopped short of making a major push for the legislation earlier in the year, while Virginia Sen. Mark Warner is opposed. Hillary Clinton, if she runs, would still have her commitment to civil unions but not gay marriage from the 2008 race hanging over her — and at least until the end of next year, when she’s said she’ll be done at the State Department, she won’t be able to make any new comments on the issue. “It gives him an authenticity and a...

I have lived in Washington for over forty years. Between us, my husband and I have worked for the federal government, in private practice, in the House, in the Senate, and for nonprofits. In those years, we've learned a fair amount about the workings of this city. But there are some things I never will understand. The first of these is the utility of relying on political consultants. I am sure there must be some good ones, but I seem never to have met them. The ones I have met seem to be largely glad-handlers, purveyors of conventional pieties,...

If elections have consequences, so do strategies of opportunism that hitch a ride on popular paranoia. From the day this president was inaugurated, the GOP has fed off the forces that coalesced into the angry astringency of the Tea Party movement. First the GOP maintained lockstep opposition to the stimulus, despite support from Republican economists. Republicans then proliferated lies about health reform — from the chimera of rationing to the nonexistent death panels. They next stoked the fires by pretending that the legislation to crack down on Wall Street was instead a giveaway to Wall Street. Shrunken and narrowed, the...

MODERN CIVIL RIGHTS: COCKFIGHTING AND SAME-SEX PROMSMay 26, 2010 Watching TV this week, at first I thought Republican Senate nominee Rand Paul had flown a commercial jet into the World Trade Center. But then it turned out that he had only said there ought to be discussion about whether federal civil rights laws should be applied to private businesses. This allowed the mainstream media to accuse Paul of being a racist. Twisting a conservative's words in order to accuse him of racism was evidently more urgent news than the fact that the attorney general of the United States admitted last...

Boortz: "Where do you people come up with that nonsense? There you go, and with that Shrum, you lost every ounce of credibility you have this evening, you might as well take off your microphone and go home right now"

Joe Scarborough has expressed serious doubts as to his Republican affiliation, and made clear that House GOP whip Eric Cantor "is not my friend." But caution to those who assume Joe has gone left: he has clarified to this NewsBuster that his critique of the GOP comes from the right . . . Scarborough's stunning comments came on today's Morning Joe in response to Dem Bob Shrum's taunting of Joe over his ostensible GOP membership, in the context of Pres. Obama's attempt to rescue Martha Coakley from the rubble of her campaign. View video here.

Here is video of Democratic strategist Bob Shrum praising Obama's "achievements." (Video)Shrum said that "we're going to look back on this year as the historic first year of a Presidency that changes the direction of the country" and said the passing of the "economic stimulus package" and "health care bill" will be "historic change" and is an "amazing set of achievements." Shrum said that Obama has "restored America's respect in the world."

October 9, 2009 Young Hamlet’s Agony Will he listen to Emanuel and Biden or Petraeus and McChrystal? Charles Krauthammer. The genius of democracy is the rotation of power, which forces the opposition to be serious — particularly about things like war, about which until January 20 of this year Democrats were decidedly unserious. When the Iraq War (which a majority of Senate Democrats voted for) ran into trouble and casualties began to mount, Democrats followed the shifting winds of public opinion and turned decidedly anti-war. But needing political cover because of their post-Vietnam reputation for weakness on national defense, they...