Free Republic

Internal dissension not only blunts the Republican attack; it hands Democrats a convenient stick with which to beat them. No one on the right, whether conservative or Republican, thinks this is a healthy situation. Why, then, is it the case? What is it that unites Democrats that Republicans lack? Anyone who pays attention to politics can see that when Democrats attack, they speak from the same text, and when they vote, they march in lockstep. If one Democrat says the wealthy must pay their “fair share,” all Democrats do — regardless of the merits of the charge. If their leaders...

Some articles have compared him to our current president, both because of his early accomplishments in legal and social arenas and his status as a member of a minority group. Now, having officially given up his dual Canadian-United States citizenship, Ted Cruz announced, on March 23, 2015, he would be running for the presidency. While it’s a welcome sight to see someone other than a Clinton or a Bush in the political limelight, I think most moderates (and — forgive me — most sane, rational human beings) would agree that Ted Cruz is not a promising candidate for the Republican...

Sen. Ted Cruz has been making headlines on his trek to become the Republican nominee for the 2016 presidential election. Cruz’s tactics are abnormally overt for a potential candidate, spreading what can best be described as fire and brimstone political sermonizing across the country. His words and demeanor aren’t just authoritative or passionate, they’re practically ecclesiastical. This approach says a lot about the current dispositions and the potential future of the extreme conservative right. While Cruz’s strategy may seem off-putting and baffling to many, there is a carefully calculated set of tactics backing his words. His politicized, Baptist preacher shtick...

Phil Robertson is an embarrassment, not a hero, and the socially conservative movement needs to distance itself from him immediately. Don’t get me wrong — I agree that our culture is experiencing a terrifying shift towards censorship. People have become so easily offended that it’s almost impossible to say anything without someone getting upset about it; and concepts like trigger warnings, safe spaces, and microaggressions are threatening free speech. But none of this changes the fact that Phil Robertson is an ignorant buffoon, and that many of his comments — despite the fact that he does have every right to...

In the last two days, big-money Republican donors have received information about the benefits they could receive for raising tens of thousands of dollars for the presidential campaign of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Cruz has already raised $500,000 after announcing Monday he is running for president. NBC News reports that 60 percent of his donations have come from large donors, while 40 percent have come from online donations. According to a three-page pamphlet sent out by Cruz for President and obtained by The Daily Caller, voters who raise at least $500,000 for the Texas Republican will be considered a co-chair...

As part of its annual college rankings, The Princeton Review ranks the US colleges with the most conservative students. While a few of the schools on the list are big sports and party schools, 20% of the colleges in the ranking are military schools. Over half of the most conservative colleges on the list also appeared on the Review's lists of the most religious students, students who are stone cold sober, and students who don't smoke. A whopping 17 of the 20 schools were ranked on The Princeton Review's list of future Rotarians and Daughters of the American Revolution. Texas,...

Somewhere along the way, I picked up the notion that when someone announces their candidacy for the Office of President of the United States, they are announcing their intent and desire to be the president of all Americans, irrespective of race, religion or other considerations. As a result of this tradition—and while recognizing that such an announcement does, in the reality of our times, serve as the launching point for the grueling primary gauntlet most candidates will be forced to endure—the moment of tossing one’s hat into the ring has, without exception so far as I can tell, traditionally taken...

Major Japanese network showed the announcement of the presidential run by candidate Ted Cruz, did a great voice over, showed that the field has no clear front runner, and mentioned Cruz's trademark "Courageous Conservatism", in addition to his promised gutting of the unpopular Obamacare. All in all a fair clip.

2016: That sound you hear from Washington is the gnashing of teeth after Sen. Ted Cruz announced that he'll run for president. The irrepressible Texan's principled conservatism makes many nervous — and that's good. As those of us who've interviewed Cruz know, he's hardly the brittle, conservative killjoy that the mainstream media try to portray him. On the contrary, he is charming, funny, scarily smart, a brilliant debater and more than well qualified to lead this nation. He also knows the issues extraordinarily well and has staked out clearly identifiable positions on all of them. Which is why the media,...

Rapper Azealia Banks on Saturday reportedly tweeted a close-up photograph of genitals to The Blaze blogger Matt Walsh and conservative radio host Wayne DuPree after they criticized her for declaring her hatred for “fat white Americans” during a recent Playboy interview. Ms. Banks received the ire of conservatives last week when she told Playboy she hates everything about America and can’t wait to leave. “Like, I hate fat white Americans,” she said. “All the people who are crunched into the middle of America, the real fat and meat of America, are these racist conservative white people who live on their...

Complete Headline: Principled or know-it-all? GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz is a lightning rod for controversy and a stickler for process [Snip] His father describes Cruz as a “modern Jeremiah,” delivering the final warning before the collapse, sending an unpopular but vital message. His Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz, calls him “off-the-charts brilliant.” Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican and unsuccessful presidential candidate, once dubbed Cruz a “wacko bird.” His own wife says Cruz's supreme certainty had a way of being “irksome.” It is Cruz’s ramrod devotion to principle — or, its flip side, an unyielding insistence on getting his...

A seismic shift? Things will change now that Sen. Ted Cruz has entered the White House race, some say. “Every Republican candidate for president will have to move significantly to the right, starting with Jeb Bush and Scott Walker. They’ll have to define their position on amnesty for illegal aliens, on fighting and winning the war radical Islam has declared on America, on spending, the deficit and the debt, and on repealing Obamacare - against the positions Ted Cruz will talk about and campaign on in the coming months,” predicts longtime conservative maven Richard Viguerie. “They will all have to...

If there is such a thing as being too conservative to be elected president of the United States, Ted Cruz is having none of it. Announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination Monday at Liberty University, the first-term senator from Texas offered himself as the pure essence of conservatism and challenged the tea party and evangelical wings of the Republican Party to rise up behind one of their own and take control of the party and the country. His candidacy is a test of a proposition, one that he has carried across the country for many months. He has argued...

Conservatives often find themselves at odds with the libertarian crowd. However, is that anger really warranted? As President Reagan once said, “If you analyze it, I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.” True conservatives and libertarians, let’s not pretend there aren’t fakers on both side, all agree on the fundamentals: limited government, personal responsibility, and economic freedom. Neither group wants the government interfering in our daily lives and telling us what we can and cannot do. Now there may be slight disagreements on how that plays out in the policy arena, but we should not allow...

Because I'm a Conservative, I believe in a strong separation of church and state. As Eliade wrote in The Sacred and the Profane, "the sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from 'natural' realities." We do a disservice to the truly sacred when we force it into Caesar's world. What is sacred to me is between myself and my Maker--and forcing that into the public square diminishes both of Us. Because I'm a Conservative, I care about the environment. Whether prompted by the Bible or by our own sense of morality (itself a part of...

Governor John Kasich of Ohio, who would like to run for president, is upset when people imply that he's a liberal. Gov. John R. Kasich was sipping coffee in the sun-drenched garden room of his official residence, boasting about his “Ohio story” of economic recovery, when he was told that some Republicans thought a fellow Midwestern governor, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, was more conservative. He bolted upright. “I think I have the right to define what conservatism is,” Mr. Kasich roared, launching into a breathless oration about tax cuts, the mentally ill, prison reform, faith in American culture, unwed motherhood, welfare...

By Yaakov Levi "First Published: 3/19/2015, 9:51 AM In an interview with Arutz Sheva, MK Yariv Levin, chairman of the outgoing Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, lauded his party's victory in Tuesday's elections, and said that it finally gave the Likud a clear mandate to rule Israel in the way the party felt it should be ruled." (snip) Among the issues the Likud needs to tackle is the “one-sided attitude” of the media and the justice system, said Levin. “There need to be changes in the radical leftist rule that shows itself in so many aspects of Israeli society....

"More specifically, Netanyahu's Likud Party won by siphoning voters away from the other right parties who will become its coalition partners. Mainstream Israeli opinion has shifted to the right: to win, Likud didn't need to win over a swath of centrist voters. It needed to jazz up the Right with nasty rhetoric about Palestinians and Arabs." "Meanwhile, Likud is going through a process that some observers have referred to as Tea Party-ization. Younger Israelis tend to be more conservative, increasingly empowering the more right-wing factions inside Likud. That causes center-right voters to defect to centrist parties, pushing the party ever...

Last week, I kvetched about the way the national political press was covering the Hillary Clinton e-mail pseudo-scandal. To me, it was a strikingly clear example of the media succumbing to its worst instincts by allowing itself to become part of the story and engaging in the kind of meta reporting that Paul Krugman has rightly compared to theater criticism. “Instead of telling us what candidates are actually saying,” Krugman wrote, the political journalists guilty of theater criticism “tell us how it went over, and how they think it affects the horse race.” In other words, they answer a question...

Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and a number of right-libertarian groups have joined together with the ACLU and the Center for American Progress to form The Coalition for Public Safety. Headed by Obama’s former associate director of legislative affairs for Drug Control Policy, the Coalition seeks to lower prison populations through ‘soft on crime’ reforms. Its libertarian partners argue that spending on the criminal justice system is out of control and that it’s time to go easy on some criminals. While spending on the criminal justice system is high, this is due to the extreme regulatory burdens created by...