Free Republic

My wife saw Pat Bucahanan's recent book on Nixon for sale at Dollar Tree in hardback for $1. If you like Buchanan as an author, or respect him as an authority on Nixon, that's a hard bargain to pass up.

As tens of thousands marched in the streets of Tehran on Wednesday in support of the regime, the head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps assured Iranians the "sedition" had been defeated. Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari is whistling past the graveyard. The protests that broke out a week ago and spread and became riots are a fire bell in the night for the Islamic Republic. The protesters denounced President Hassan Rouhani, re-elected last year with 57 percent of the vote, for failing to curb inflation or deliver the benefits he promised when Iran signed the nuclear deal. Supreme Leader Ayatollah...

What caused the FBI to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in July 2016, which evolved into the criminal investigation that is said today to imperil the Trump presidency? As James Comey's FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller have, for 18 months, failed to prove Donald Trump's "collusion" with the Kremlin, what was it, in mid-2016, that justified starting this investigation? What was the basis for the belief Trump was colluding, that he was the Manchurian candidate of Vladimir Putin? What evidence did the FBI cite to get FISA court warrants to surveil and wiretap Trump's team? Republican...

The original question the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign was to answer was a simple one: Did he do it? Did Trump, or officials with his knowledge, collude with Vladimir Putin's Russia to hack the emails of John Podesta and the DNC, and leak the contents to damage Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump? A year and a half into the investigation, and, still, no "collusion" has been found. Yet the investigation goes on, at the demand of the never-Trump media and Beltway establishment. Hence, and understandably, suspicions have arisen. Are the investigators after the truth, or are they...

President Trump, every Republican senator, and the GOP majority in Speaker Paul Ryan's House just put the future of their party on the line. By enacting the largest tax cut since the Reagan administration, the heart of which is cutting the corporate rate from 35 to 21 percent, Republicans have boldly bet the farm. They have rewritten America's tax code to reflect their belief that cutting taxes on the private sector will produce the prosperity they have promised. If it happens, the GOP will reap the rewards, if not by 2018, then in 2020. Democrats, as the Party of Government,...

Why did Gen. Mike Flynn lie to the FBI about his December 2016 conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak? Why did he not tell the FBI the truth? As national security adviser to the president-elect, Flynn had called the ambassador. Message: Tell President Putin not to overreact to President Obama's expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats. Trump will be president in three weeks, and we are committed to a new relationship. Not only was this initiative defensible, it proved successful. Putin accepted the loss of his diplomats and country houses on Long lsland and the Eastern Shore. Rather than expel U.S....

Why would Christian conservatives in good conscience go to the polls Dec. 12 and vote for Judge Roy Moore, despite the charges of sexual misconduct with teenagers leveled against him? Answer: That Alabama Senate race could determine whether Roe v. Wade is overturned. The lives of millions of unborn may be the stakes. Republicans now hold 52 Senate seats. If Democrats pick up the Alabama seat, they need only two more to recapture the Senate, and with it the power to kill any conservative court nominee, as they killed Robert Bork. Today, the GOP, holding Congress and the White House,...

Why would Christian conservatives in good conscience go to the polls Dec. 12 and vote for Judge Roy Moore, despite the charges of sexual misconduct with teenagers leveled against him? Answer: That Alabama Senate race could determine whether Roe v. Wade is overturned. The lives of millions of unborn may be the stakes. Republicans now hold 52 Senate seats. If Democrats pick up the Alabama seat, they need only two more to recapture the Senate, and with it the power to kill any conservative court nominee, as they killed Robert Bork. Today, the GOP, holding Congress and the White House,...

How stands John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” this Thanksgiving? How stands the country that was to be “a light unto the nations”? To those who look to cable TV for news, the answer must at the least be ambiguous. For consider the issues that have lately convulsed the public discourse of the American republic. Today’s great question seems to be whether our 45th president is as serious a sexual predator as our 42nd was proven to be, and whether the confessed sins of Sen. Al Franken are as great as the alleged sins of Judge Roy Moore. On both...

Sean Hannity today Friday 7/21/17 [Buchanan says, "We are right on the road, a familiar one to me, to the Saturday Night Massacre."]

It’s always hard in politics for people to take their opponents’ views seriously, but it has become ever harder in Trump’s America. People are more engaged with politics, but only because they want to beat the other side, not understand it. This means scholars have a greater responsibility than ever to help ordinary citizens understand how the people with whom they disagree think, and what their political opponents are actually doing. Most scholars get this. For example, political scientists and historians, who tend to range from the political center to the left wing, have written extensively about the origins and...

At the G-20 in Hamburg, it is said, President Trump was isolated, without support from the other G-20 members, especially on climate change and trade. Perhaps so. But the crucial question is not whether Trump is alone, but whether he is right. Has Trump read the crisis of the West correctly? Are his warnings valid? Is not the Obama-Merkel vision of a New World Order a utopian fantasy? At the monument to the patriots of the Warsaw Uprising, Trump cited Poland as exemplar of how a great people behaves in a true national crisis. Calling the Polish people "the soul...

On Sept. 1, 1864, Union forces under Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, victorious at Jonesborough, burned Atlanta and began the March to the Sea where Sherman's troops looted and pillaged farms and towns all along the 300-mile road to Savannah. Captured in the Confederate defeat at Jonesborough was William Martin Buchanan of Okolona, Mississippi, who was transferred by rail to the Union POW stockade at Camp Douglas, Illinois. By the standards of modernity, my great-grandfather, fighting to prevent the torching of Georgia's capital, was engaged in a criminal and immoral cause. And "Uncle Billy" Sherman was a liberator. Under President Grant,...

Pat Buchanan says the nonstop uproar following Trump’s firing of former FBI director James Comey is not comparable to Watergate, but he does wonder if the Trump presidency can function with this level of drama. {snip} I knew when Trump got in, he’s going to have to fight for his agenda every day. A part of the Republican Party disagrees with it and a part of the Republican Party will also seek to sabotage and stop it. It’s going to be a long slog. I accept that. Indispensable to the agenda is the president himself. It doesn’t depend as much...

For the World War II generation there was clarity. The attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec 7, 1941, united the nation as it had never been before — in the conviction that Japan must be smashed, no matter how long it took or how many lives it cost. After the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, however, Americans divided. Only with the Berlin Blockade of 1948, the fall of China to Mao and Russia's explosion of an atom bomb in 1949, and North Korea's invasion of the South in 1950, did we unite around the proposition that, for our own...

Wednesday on Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show,” conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan said White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was correct when he said the media was the opposition party. He added that just like they took down President Richard Nixon, they are attempting to “bring down” President Donald Trump. Buchanan said, “There is a cultural left and a political left and a media if you will, are a conglomerate. It’s not a conspiracy but it is collusion, and they were determined to break and bring down Nixon from the day he was nominated. They were determined, tried to...

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein both spoke at the White House Correspondents Dinner last night. Time has posted their speeches in case you were otherwise occupied at the time. They had some advice for President Trump. In part they revisited past glories covering the Watergate scandal and taking down President Nixon. They have a few loose ends to tie up. For example, they still haven’t discovered what Nixon’s guys were looking for inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee. Watergate served its purpose, however, and the boys have moved on. Edward Jay Epstein asked whether the press had uncovered...

"This rhetoric—deployed again during his losing bid for the 1996 GOP nomination, and once more when he ran on the Reform Party ticket in 2000—not only provided a template for Trump’s campaign, but laid the foundation for its eventual success. Dismissed as a fringe character for rejecting Republican orthodoxy on trade and immigration and interventionism, Buchanan effectively weakened the party’s defenses, allowing a more forceful messenger with better timing to finish the insurrection he started back in 1991. All the ideas that seemed original to Trump’s campaign could, in fact, be attributed to Buchanan—from depicting the political class as bumbling...

"Why would I call China a currency manipulator when they are working with us on the North Korean problem?" tweeted President Donald Trump on Easter Sunday. Earlier, after discovering "great chemistry" with Chinese President Xi Jinping over "the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake" at Mar-a-Lago, Trump had confided, "I explained ... that a trade deal with the U.S. will be far better for them if they solve the North Korean problem!" "America First" thus takes a back seat to big-power diplomacy with Beijing. One wonders: How much will Xi end up bilking us for his squeezing of Kim Jong...

“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?)” Those are among Jesus’ last words on the Cross that first Good Friday. It was a cry of agony, but not despair. The dying Christ, to rise again in three days, was repeating the first words of the 22nd Psalm. And today, in lands where Christ lived and taught and beyond where the Christian faith was born and nourished, the words echo. For it is in the birthplace of Christianity that Christians face the greatest of persecutions and martyrdoms since the time of Vladimir Lenin and Josef...