Free Republic

Unwilling to control its fighters, who fired scores of missiles into Israel at the end of their six-month cease-fire, Hamas gave Israel the provocation it needed to deliver a savage blow to the Palestinian enclave in Gaza. Saturday was the bloodiest day in the history of the Palestinian people since being driven from their homes in the War of 1948. One thousand were killed or wounded as the Israeli Air Force conducted more than a hundred strikes. About Israel's right to defend its border towns, there is no dispute. When Hamas permits Gaza to be used as a launchpad for...

(...) By traditional free-trade theory, a nation should import what it does not produce from the nations that produce it most cheaply. But in 1946, Japan produced almost no steel, no TVs and no cars. Instead of buying them from America, Tokyo subsidized its own steel, TV and auto industries for decades, and protected their market. Now, as Sony did to Philco and Dumont, Toyota, Honda and Nissan are taking down Ford, GM and Chrysler. Were the Japanese foolish to subsidize their industries and protect their market? Were we wise to let our TV industry be taken down, and watch...

"De mortuis nil nisi bonum." Of the dead, nothing but good. So said Dean Acheson of Sen. Joe McCarthy on his death in 1957. "Tailgunner Joe" had bedeviled the secretary of state for his lassitude toward communist penetration of State in President Truman's time. But the passing of Mark Felt, associate director of the FBI in the later Nixon years, lately exposed as "Deep Throat," the source for the Woodward-Bernstein stories, calls forth some rebuttal to the tributes lavished upon Felt as the honest lawman who saved our republic. When the Watergate break-in was traced to the Committee to Reelect...

After losing control of the Senate and 30 House seats in 2006, the GOP is bracing for losses of six to nine in the Senate, and two dozen to three dozen additional seats in the House. If the party "were a dog food," says Rep. Tom Davis, "they would take us off the shelf." Bush's approval is 25 percent. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton left office with ratings more than twice as high. But while John McCain and others have deplored the Bush failures, what, exactly, did he do wrong? What were the policy blunders to which Republicans vehemently objected...

November 7 Syndicated columnist and author Patrick J. Buchanan and radio talk show host Laura Ingraham 

As Americans render what Catholics call temporal judgment on President Bush, are they aware of the radical course correction they are about to make? This center-right country is about to vastly strengthen a liberal Congress whose approval rating is 10 percent and implant in Washington a regime further to the left than any in American history. Consider. As of today, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat, anticipates gains of 15 to 30 seats in the House. Sen. Harry Reid, whose partisanship grates even on many in his own party, may see his caucus expand in the Senate to a...

Bob Barr Implodes: Two weeks ago the Libertarian nominee pulled out of a press conference Ron Paul had called with the four leading third-party candidates (Barr, Baldwin, Nader, McKinney) to highlight their common ground. Barr decided to hold a press conference of his own down the hall. He also sent Paul a snide note — transmitted to Barr's e-mail list as well — suggesting that Paul ought to replace the hapless Wayne Allyn Root as Barr's running mate. This ploy could hardly have been more ham-handed: If Barr wanted to appear generous, he should have offered Paul, obviously by far...

In St. Paul, Palin was told to cancel a meeting with Phyllis Schlafly and pro-life conservatives. McCain's operatives said Palin had to rest for her Wednesday convention speech. Yet, on Tuesday, Palin was behind closed doors with Joe Lieberman and officials of the Israeli lobby AIPAC. There, according to The Washington Post, Palin took and passed her oral exams.

The neocons' Palin project Patrick J. Buchanan, Creators Syndicate, Inc. Monday, September 15, 2008 Will the neocons who tutored President Bush in the ideology he pursued to the ruin of his presidency do the same for GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin? Should they succeed, they will destroy her. Yet, they are moving even now to capture this princess of the right and hope of the party. In St. Paul, Palin was told to cancel a meeting with Phyllis Schlafly and pro-life conservatives. McCain's operatives said Palin had to rest for her Wednesday convention speech. Yet, on Tuesday, Palin was...

One wonders: What did Sarah Palin ever do to inspire the rage and bile that exploded on her selection by John McCain? What is there either in this woman's record or resume to elicit such feline ferocity? What did we know of her when she was introduced? That she was a mother of five who had brought into this world a baby boy with Down syndrome, thus living her Christian beliefs. That she was a small-town conservative who had risen from mayor of Wasilla (Pop. 9,700) to be governor of a state twice the size of Texas. That she was...

The American Right has just died and gone to heaven. Last night's convention address by Sarah Palin here in St. Paul has confirmed the bold decision of John McCain to choose the Alaska governor as his co-pilot and united the Republican Party as it has not been since the second term of Ronald Reagan. A wild enthusiasm for Sarah Palin has brought conservatives home to John McCain, and GOP leaders of all hues — from Fred Thompson to Mitt Romney to Mike Huckabee to Rudy Giuliani — to the rostrum to lacerate the liberal media for their five days of...

The risk John McCain took last Friday is comparable to the 72-year-old ex-fighter pilot knocking back two shots and flying his F-16 under the Golden Gate Bridge. McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his co-pilot was the biggest gamble in presidential history. As of now, it is paying off, big-time. The sensational selection in Dayton, Ohio, stepped all over the big story from Denver – Barack Obama's powerful address to 85,000 cheering folks in Mile High Stadium, and 35 million nationally, a speech that vaulted him from a 2-point deficit early in the week to an 8-point...

In a February interview with MTV, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin lavished praise on maverick Republican presidential contender Ron Paul. She had a few nice things to say about another GOP candidate, Mitt Romney. But Palin made no mention of John McCain. Now that McCain is the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, he has selected Palin as his prospective running-mate for vice president. McCain calls Palin his political "soul-mate." But, in February, at a point when McCain was closing in on the Republican nomination, it sure sounded like she was sweet on Paul. The governor, who sported a Pat Buchanan pin at...

Barack Obama's campaign, perhaps miffed at all the Democrat-is-weak-on-Israel theme, started striking back at John McCain almost as soon as he tapped Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate. Where the Dems are trying to paint McCain as more financially out of touch with people, they're strongly suggesting that his Christian conservative running mate is no friend to the Jews. "Palin was a supporter of [MSNBC analyst] Pat Buchanan, a right-winger or as many Jews call him: a Nazi sympathizer,'' Obama spokesman Mark Bubriski wrote in an email. The campaign also alerted reporters to the fact that Palin...

A meme is developing out there among liberals that Gov. Sarah Palin was a supporter of Pat Buchanan in the 1990s, a charge that the McCain-Palin campaign strongly denies. The evidence is the following, as first noticed by "The Nation": in an Associated Press story from July 17, 1999, titled, "Buchanan takes conservative message to Fairbanks." "Pat Buchanan brought his conservative message of a smaller government and an America First foreign policy to Fairbanks and Wasilla on Friday as he continued a campaign swing through Alaska….In Wasilla, Buchanan took some shots at the "Republican establishment," saying it was willing to...

Alaska- In light of recent media reports attempting to connect Republican VP nominee Gov. Sarah Palin with controversial historian and Nazi sympathizer Pat Buchanan, VIN News has learned that the Alaska governor has demonstrated strong support for Alaska’s Jewish community. In particular, Gov. Palin signed a resolution in June of 2008 recognizing Israel’s 60th anniversary and the unique relationship between Alaska and the Jewish State, especially the fact that Alaska Airlines played a critical role in the rescue of 40,000 Yemenite Jews in 1948 and 1949. Chabad of Anchorage’s Rabbi Yosef Greenberg had this to tell VIN News: “Gov. Palin...

Alaska- In light of recent media reports attempting to connect Republican VP nominee Gov. Sarah Palin with controversial historian and Nazi sympathizer Pat Buchanan, VIN News has learned that the Alaska governor has demonstrated strong support for Alaska’s Jewish community. In particular, Gov. Palin signed a resolution in June of 2008 recognizing Israel’s 60th anniversary and the unique relationship between Alaska and the Jewish State, especially the fact that Alaska Airlines played a critical role in the rescue of 40,000 Yemenite Jews in 1948 and 1949. Chabad of Anchorage’s Rabbi Yosef Greenberg had this to tell VIN News: “Gov. Palin...

Very good news from The Nation: >Remember when Pat Buchanan ran a number of hard-right, fringe campaigns for president in the late 1980s, 1990s and 2000? Well, guess who was supporting him: From an AP report in 1999: Pat Buchanan brought his conservative message of a smaller government and an America First foreign policy to Fairbanks and Wasilla on Friday as he continued a campaign swing through Alaska. Buchanan’s strong message championing states rights resonated with the roughly 85 people gathered for an Interior Republican luncheon in Fairbanks. … Among those sporting Buchanan buttons were Wasilla Mayor Sarah Palin and...

Democrats may be blasting Sarah Palin as a doctrinaire conservative, and Republicans may be embracing her for the same reason, but her husband and oldest son are independents. Or, more precisely, their party affiliation is listed as “undeclared” on voter registration records retrieved from the Alaska Division of Elections. Todd Palin, husband of the Alaska governor, hasn’t been affiliated with a party since he first registered to vote while he was in his early 20s, in 1989 — the year after he married Sarah Palin. And Track Palin, their 19-year-old son, registered as undeclared when he became eligible to vote...

DENVER -- After the phony roll call vote was taken here to formally nominate Barack Obama -- a roll call that did not remotely reflect the true delegate strength of Hillary -- the media exploded in an orgy of celebration about the historic character of the moment to which they had just been privileged to be witness. "The first black presidential nominee ever of a major party in history!" was proclaimed. Coming on the 45th anniversary of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, Barack's nomination is being hailed as the last great step forward in the long march to...

http://www.russiatoday.com/guests/video/1484

Who is Randy Scheunemann? He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States. But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role. He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man. From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 -- pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in...

Strategy Who Started Cold War II Posted by Patrick J. Buchanan on August 18, 2008 The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for having spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO. Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where Moscow’s superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis. If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the...

Mikheil Saakashvili's decision to use the opening of the Olympic Games to cover Georgia's invasion of its breakaway province of South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser's decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships. Nasser's blunder cost him the Sinai in the Six-Day War. Saakashvili's blunder probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. After shelling and attacking what he claims is his own country, killing scores of his own Ossetian citizens and sending tens of thousands fleeing into Russia, Saakashvili's army was whipped back into Georgia in 48 hours. Vladimir Putin took the...

1992 Republican National Convention Speech Houston, Texas by Patrick J. Buchanan August 17, 1992 Well, we took the long way home, but we finally got here. And I want to congratulate President Bush, and remove any doubt about where we stand: The primaries are over, the heart is strong again, and the Buchanan brigades are enlisted--all the way to a great comeback victory in November. Like many of you last month, I watched that giant masquerade ball at Madison Square Garden--where 20,000 radicals and liberals came dressed up as moderates and centrists--in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American...

In his 1937 "Great Contemporaries," Winston Churchill wrote, "Whatever else may be thought about (Hitler's) exploits, they are among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world." Churchill was referring not only to Hitler's political triumphs -- the return of the Saar and reoccupation of the Rhineland -- but his economic achievements. By his fourth year in power, Hitler had pulled Germany out of the Depression, cut unemployment from 6 million to 1 million, grown the GNP 37 percent and increased auto production from 45,000 vehicles a year to 250,000. City and provincial deficits had vanished. ... "Eighty-six...

Today and on Friday, Rush will not be seated in the prestigious Attila-the-Hun chair at the Limbaugh Institute of Advanced Conservative Studies. He will be away from the golden EIB microphone to attend the funeral of the late, great Tony Snow. Jed Babbin, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for George H. W. Bush and editor of Human Events (which publishes Pat Buchanan's nonsense), will host today. Mark Davis will host on Friday.

That’s right; Pat Buchanan, who is a frequent guest on both Fox News and MSNBC, appeared recently on an infamous “white nationalist” radio show to promote his revisionist World War II book

With 68 percent of Americans believing George Bush has done a poor job, and 82 percent saying the country is on the wrong track, the election of 2008 will turn on one issue: Barack Obama. If Sen. Obama can convince the people he is “one of us,” and not some snooty radical liberal from Chicago’s Hyde Park, who looks down upon white America as a fever swamp of racism and reaction, a la the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the senator will be the next president. The election of 2008 thus mirrors the election of 1980. Then, the country wanted Jimmy Carter...

Next time someone comes after me with a gun, or tries to invade my property, never mind dialing 911. Who needs law enforcement officers who are always ready to take a bullet for any one of us? I'm calling whatever number there is for pacifists. They're sure to come to the rescue. IS there a Pacifist Hot Line? We need the number. A bumper sticker running along Bleecker Street defined the 1960s: "Need Help? Call A Hippie." I'm responding here to Nicholson Baker's book, "Human Smoke," which has been getting all the buzz. Baker is a pacifist and argues that,...

Of the Axis-of-Evil nations named in his State of the Union in 2002, President Bush has often said, "The United States will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." He failed with North Korea. Will he accept failure in Iran, though there is no hard evidence Iran has an active nuclear weapons program? William Kristol of The Weekly Standard said Sunday a U.S. attack on Iran after the election is more likely should Barack Obama win. Presumably, Bush would trust John McCain to keep Iran nuclear free. Yet, to start a...

Did Hitler's crimes justify the Allies' terror-bombing of Germany? Indeed they did, answers Christopher Hitchens in his Newsweek response to my new book, "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War": "The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities." Atheist, Trotskyite and newborn neocon, Hitchens embraces the morality of lex talionis: an eye for an eye. If Germans murdered women and children, the British were morally justified in killing German women and children. According to British historians, however, Churchill ordered the initial bombing of...

Jewish Prisoners Executed at the Babi Yar RavineYesterday, I posted a thread here regarding Patrick J. Buchanan’s new book, the controversy surrounding it and included a photo taken at Babi Yar near the city of Kiev, Ukraine.  This was the site of a horrific slaughter by Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen officers of 34,000 Jewish men, women and children in September of 1941.  Accompanying my text was a photograph I mistakenly described as a mass of corpses.  On further research this morning, spurred by commenter Bantam, I discovered the photo had been miscaptioned at the site where it was originally found.  The photo...

Ravine at Babi Yar, Kiev, Ukraine - September, 1941 That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. “Mein Kampf� is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table.That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll. The quote above is...

Patrick J. Buchanan's new contribution to the flourishing genre of World War II revisionism, should appear in the same season as Nicholson Baker's "Human Smoke." Never has there been such a clear demonstration of the way ideological extremes tend to converge. Messrs. Baker and Buchanan probably could not stand to be in the same room for five minutes. The former is to the left of most Democrats, the latter to the right of most Republicans. When they look back to the 1930s, Mr. Baker's role models are the Quakers and pacifists who believed it was better to lie down for...

I'm finishing up Buchanan's book and am looking for people who have read it who: 1) Argue in detail with any of his points. 2) Recommend essays from experts who challenge some of Buchanan's contentions. Just going on what I read in the book, what he says makes sense.

Europe, the Mother Continent of Western Man, is today aging and dying, unable to sustain the birth rates needed to keep her alive, or to resist conquest by an immigrant invasion from the Third World. What happened to the nations that only a century ago ruled the world? In “Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World,” published today, this writer will argue that it was colossal blunders of British statesmen, Winston Churchill foremost among them, that turned two European wars into world wars that may yet prove the mortal wounds...

Last week we noted the bizarre arguments of Seattle Times editorial writer Bruce Ramsey, who tried so hard to defend Barack Obama against President Bush’s “appeasement” speech that he actually ended up defending Hitler for annexing Austria. His exact words were: “What Hitler was demanding was not unreasonable.” If you think that’s an ahistorical pretzel of monumental proportions, though, you ain’t seen nothin’ — because here comes Pat Buchanan. According to old Pat, not only was the Anchluss not a problem, Hitler’s invasion of Poland was also perfectly understandable, given the Poles’ refusal to negotiate. Those darned stubborn Poles were...

"This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper," wrote T.S. Eliot in the closing couplet of "The Hollow Men." ................ Some saw it as the whimper of a man facing the executioner's ax. Others say Eliot was referring to the middle-aged protagonist of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," who had "measured out my life with coffee spoons" and soon would "wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." Recent reports suggest God has another end in store for us. .......... More arresting is that the white population is shrinking not only in relative but...

The neocons may yet get their war on Iran. Ever since President Nouri al-Maliki ordered the attacks in Basra on the Mahdi Army, Gen. David Petraeus has been laying the predicate for U.S. air strikes on Iran and a wider war in the Middle East. Iran, Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee, has "fueled the recent violence in a particularly damaging way through its lethal support of the special groups." These "special groups" are "funded, trained, armed and directed by Iran's Quds Force with help from Lebanese Hezbollah. It was these groups that launched Iranian rockets and mortar rounds...

The neocons may yet get their war on Iran. Ever since President Nouri al-Maliki ordered the attacks in Basra on the Mahdi Army, Gen. David Petraeus has been laying the predicate for U.S. air strikes on Iran and a wider war in the Middle East. Iran, Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee, has "fueled the recent violence in a particularly damaging way through its lethal support of the special groups." These "special groups" are "funded, trained, armed and directed by Iran's Quds Force with help from Lebanese Hezbollah. It was these groups that launched Iranian rockets and mortar rounds...

"Yes, it was a good war," writes Richard Cohen in his column challenging the thesis of pacifist Nicholson Baker in his new book, "Human Smoke," that World War II produced more evil than good. Baker's compelling work, which uses press clips and quotes of Axis and Allied leaders as they plunged into the great cataclysm, is a virtual diary of the days leading up to World War II. Riveting to this writer was that Baker uses some of the same episodes, sources and quotes as this author in my own book out in May, "Churchill, Hitler and 'The Unnecessary War.'"...

In his Philadelphia address on race, Sen. Obama identified as a root cause of white resentment affirmative action -- the punishing of white working- and middle-class folks for sins they did not commit: "Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race," said Barack. "As far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything. ... So when they ... hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed ... resentment builds...

On reading George Bush’s discourse to the New York Economic Club last week, Cicero’s insight came to mind: “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.” With Iraq entering its sixth year, the dollar sinking to peso levels, the economy careening into recession, and 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens roosting here, Bush alerted us to what really worries him: “I’m troubled by isolationism and protectionism … (and) another ‘ism,’ and that’s nativism. And that’s what happened throughout our history. And probably the most grim reminder of what can happen to...

Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America. Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to. Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American. Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the '60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American...

Bay Buchanan, former U.S. treasurer under President Reagan, argued that the United States must secure its borders. Buchanan addressed the growing negative sentiment towards the immigration issue. "Never even in the time of Nixon have I seen a populace as angry as they are today," she said. Buchanan directly linked this anger with America's unsecured borders. "Now it's a complete sieve again," she said. She noted that American small-business owners cannot compete with businesses that hire Hispanics and pay them lower wages. Buchanan went on to highlight overcrowding in schools and hoapitals as consequences. She cited gang-controlled trafficking of drugs...

In Africa last week, President Bush deplored the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s, defended his refusal to send U.S. troops to Darfur and decried the ethnic slaughter in Kenya. Following a fraudulent election, the Kikyu, the dominant tribe in Kenya, have been subjected to merciless assault. People are separating from one another and butchering one another along lines of blood and soil. According to a compelling lead article in the new Foreign Affairs, "Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism," we may be witnessing in the Third World a re-enactment of the ethnic wars that tore Europe...

John McCain just shoved his whole stack into the middle of the table and put his credibility and candidacy on the line. He just threw down the gauntlet to the New York Times by flatly denying every point of a front-page story that implied McCain had an affair nine years ago with a 31-year-old Washington lobbyist, then used his influence as a committee chair to promote the interests of her client. The Times' front-page story of the alleged romance was based on two anonymous sources the Times identified as former aides to the senator. The Washington Post quoted John Weaver,...

Presidents Day has taken a deep back seat these days on our holiday calendar to the point that not only do schools go on as scheduled, but so do many state and government offices. This is not surprising in 2008, and many revel in it. Presidents Day now celebrates all presidents, not just our greatest. That being the case, let's "celebrate," or at least recall, the three worst presidents in our country's otherwise proud history. All 43 had their faults, and though mainstream media sources may not agree with my choices, many who understand history will, as a recurring theme...

..."I didn't major in math," said the Baptist preacher, "I majored in miracles." Good for Huck. Why should he drop out? For too long conservatives have suppressed their convictions or meekly submitted, so as not to oppose a Republican president or get out of step with the party leadership.... ...For his party's and his country's sake, as well as his own, Mike Huckabee should keep the conversation going. Because right now, his party is looking at Hillary, Obama -- or Bush's third term.