Free Republic

For months, Donald Trump has led the most successful push back against the Republican Establishment in recent history. For good measure, he has set political correctness back a few decades – and also taught conservatives and Republicans that they need not fear the media. All of which are remarkable and important. All of those are part of the reason for even running the "Rove-Stupid" series of article. Conservatives owe him a debt for all this, even if he were to accomplish nothing else. These wonderful assaults have all come from the right. This is why I would support Trump against...

Straightforward. Awesome. President. These are a handful of phrases participants used to describe Donald J. Trump in Frank Luntz's focus group Wednesday evening, nearly all supporters of the current Republican frontrunner. They were a group filled with emotion. For one man, a changing of the guard from Obama to Trump is the stuff of which political dreams are made. "I want Trump to look at Obama on Election Day and go, 'You're fired.'" But in the wake of Trump's call this week to ban all Muslims from entering the country, which has drawn rebukes from nearly every Republican in Washington,...

The more analysts try to figure out Donald Trump's appeal, the more they sound baffled. Pundits cite Trump's verbal sloppiness and ridiculousness as proof that he must soon implode. But Trump sees his daily bombast as an injection of outrage for a constituency now hooked on someone who finally voices their pent-up anger. The more reckless Trump's doses of scattergun outrageousness, the better the fix for his supporters. Trump's vague "make America great again" was the natural bookend to Barack Obama's even more vacuous "hope and change." The popularity of such empty slogans reflects a culture in which no one...

Liar, liar, pantsuit on fire: Hillary Clinton still insists she didn't tell the grieving families of the Benghazi victims that an anti-Islam video was to blame. Yet family members say she said just that, three days after the attack, at the Sept. 14, 2012, ceremony at Andrews Air Force base. George Stephanopoulos asked her Sunday if she'd told the victims it was about the film. Clinton gave a flat "no." She added: "I said very clearly there had been a terrorist group, uh, that had taken responsibility on Facebook, um ..." At least four family members disagree. Tyrone Woods' father...

Too many Muslim immigrants are angry rather than grateful toward their new country. Why would Ms. Tashfeen Malik, who was born in Pakistan but lived most of her life in Saudi Arabia, want to come to the United States? She obviously hated the United States and its values, at least enough to help stockpile an arsenal and to kill 14 people and wound another 21 in San Bernardino. Or for that matter, why did her husband and co-mass-murderer Syed Rizwan Farook, if he was unhappy with his native America, not return to his parents' Pakistan, where he might, in greater...

President Obama addressed an anxious nation last night in an instantly-forgettable, perfunctory speech that was largely devoid of news and announced no meaningful changes to US policies or military strategy. In an effort to reassure Americans that he's confronting the terrorist threat aggressively (his public approval rating on handling terrorism and ISIS is weak) Obama said, "for seven years, I've confronted this evolving threat each morning in my intelligence briefing." The public learned several years ago that this president skips his in-person briefings far more frequently than his predecessor, though his staff insists that he reads through the written version...

The Left's highly selective application of today's standards to yesterday's heroes. The latest round of condemning the past on the moral criteria of the present started with banning the Confederate flag from public places. Now it is on to airbrushing away progressive old white guy Woodrow Wilson, in Trotskyized fashion, from public commemoration. But do those on the Left realize that they are rapidly becoming captives to the consequences of their own ideology? Their current effort to rewrite the past is doomed to failure for a variety of reasons. Left-Wing Hypocrisy First, this damnation of memory is not a balanced...

How much damage can he do in his last year in office? Insidiously and inadvertently, Barack Obama is alienating the people and moving the country to the right. If he keeps it up, by 2017 it will be a reactionary nation. But, counterintuitive as it seems, that is fine with Obama: Après nous le déluge. By sheer force of his personality, Obama has managed to lose the Democratic Senate and House. State legislatures and governorships are now predominantly Republican. Obama's own favorable ratings rarely top 45 percent. In his mind, great men, whether Socrates or Jesus, were never appreciated in...

WALLACE: Well, love him or hate him, Rush Limbaugh is the king of conservative talk radio. 20 million people listen to him each week on close to 600 stations across the country. He's also written a new children's book called Rush Revere and the Star-Spangled Banner. Rush Limbaugh joins us now from his EIB Studios in Florida. And Rush, welcome back to Fox News Sunday. RUSH: It's great to be with you, Chris, it really is. And by the way, everybody who listens to me loves me. There's no hate. It's a great, great, great misnomer -- WALLACE: I know,...

Over the weekend we learned that at least one of the ISIS terrorists who carried out the worst terror attack in France since World War II came into Europe by posing as a Syrian refugee. Despite this fact, President Obama has no plans to re-evaluate his calls to increase the number of Syrian refugees the United States accepts. "We're still planning on taking in Syrian refugees," White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said on "Fox News Sunday." "We had very robust vetting procedures for those refugees." As a reminder of Obama administration policy on this issue: In an...

Sen. Rand Paul had his best night in Tuesday's Republican primary debate, but it won't be enough to alter his fortunes, Charles Krauthammer said tonight on Fox News's Special Report. "I give him points for courage and candor," Krauthammer said. "I mean his sort of isolationism is not a popular strain, but he went with it." Nonetheless, "I don't think anybody really changes his or her fortunes."Instead, he predicted how things will shake out from here: "If you look at the stage, you saw the two wings, you had Rand Paul and you had Kasich, who you could just see...

We live in a weary age of fable. The latest Hollywood mythology is entitled "Truth." But the film is actually a fictionalized story about how CBS News super-anchor Dan Rather and his "60 Minutes" producer supposedly were railroaded by corporate and right-wing interests into resigning. In reality, an internal investigation by CBS found that Rather and his "60 Minutes" team -- just weeks before the 2004 election -- had failed to properly vet documents of dubious authenticity asserting that a young George W. Bush had shirked his duty as a Texas Air National Guard pilot. The fabulist movie comes on...

Bringing government spending under control. At the last Republican presidential debate, I presented the Simple Flat Tax - which, for a family of four, exempts the first $36,000 from all income tax, and above that amount collects one low rate of 10 percent for all Americans. It eliminates the death tax, the payroll tax, the corporate income tax, and the Obamacare taxes; ends the corporate carve-outs and loopholes; and requires every business to pay the same simple business flat tax of 16 percent. That plan will unleash unprecedented growth, create millions of new jobs, raise after-tax incomes for all income...

Truck drivers, trappers, farmers don't rate in the eyes of our elites. A recent study published by the National Academy of Sciences, co-authored by a Nobel laureate, revealed a spiraling death rate since 1999 of Americans described as middle-aged (45 to 54), middle/working-class (without a college degree) whites (apparently self-identified as such). That is not supposed to happen to sizable demographic groups in our postmodern societies. The regression to shortened lifespans is more akin to the trend in the old Soviet Union than in the United States. The supposed culprits are inordinate use of alcohol and drugs (both legal and...

The current presidential campaign is blowing up lots of political myths. For years, the conventional lament was that the "wrong" Bush had run for president in 2000. George W. Bush was supposedly tongue-tied. He was said to be polarizing. He was derided as too much the twangy, conservative Texas Christian. If only his younger, softer-spoken brother, then–Florida governor Jeb Bush, had run instead! So the myth went. Jeb was said to be far more bipartisan and judicious. Jeb, not W., was deemed by many to be the more likable and more competent descendent of their father, former president George H....

Last night's off-year elections produced a number of noteworthy outcomes, none larger than Republican Matt Bevin's upset victory in Kentucky's gubernatorial race. Bevin ran as a hard-charging outsider conservative, warts and all. Public polls gave his opponent, Democrat Jack Conway, a modest but stable lead throughout the race's home stretch, averaging out to a three-point Conway advantage in a three-way contest. They were off by double digits. Bevin won handily:DailyKos tweet at link ... Bevin, boosted by a massive investment from national Republicans and help from his former nemisis Mitch McConnell, nationalized the race, tying Conway to President Obama at...

The establishment needs to stop patronizing the grass-roots and listen to their concerns. Republicans should be upbeat. They control by large margins the state legislatures and governorships. The Supreme Court is a bit more conservative than liberal. The House and Senate are both run by Republicans. President Obama, after veritably wrecking his party, has for some time scarcely polled above 45 percent in approval ratings - even after borrowing $8 trillion to spread the wealth, pandering to special interests, echoing nonstop the assertions of his iconic status, and blaming all his failures on his predecessors and opponents. In addition, parties...

A soul-crushing society, led by a click-happy media and finger-wagging president, that has demanded our country and culture change everything from its football-team names to its campus speech policies, has gone largely unchecked for the past seven or so years. Today, the shirt a scientist wears is more important than his first-in-human-history accomplishments, and the jokes we tell on Twitter lead to angry mobs waiting for us at the airport. Random YouTube comments are held up as paramount examples of our society as savagely sexist, racist, or whatever other kind of "ist" the shame media can think of. The Gawkerization...

According to Lord Christopher Monckton, Thomas R. Karl's much-feted paper refuting "the Pause," the inexplicable 19-year standstill in the earth's average global surface temperature, has a small problem: To disappear the warming hiatus as Karl and his co-authors purport to do, you have to repeal the laws of thermodynamics. (Not even the current president can do that.) Karl and his colleagues, whose work appeared in the June issue of Science, "updated" previous data sets used to assess changes in surface temperatures, which supporters maintain is merely Science being self-critical and Scientific. Others - a lot of others - say different....

Prior to February 19, 2009, CNBC was an obscure niche network watched mainly inside Merrill Lynch offices ... At the same point, in February 2009, the term tea party was only a vague memory out of middle school history - with no particular relevance to politics today - with the exception of a few mentions by Ron Paul that never resonated widely. Meanwhile, crony capitalism (or crony socialism or cronyism if you prefer) was a problem, but it ... was kind of practiced in the dark and certainly not celebrated openly. That all started to change shortly after 9 am...