Free Republic

The quintessential question of Watergate was “what did the President know and when did he know it?” Obamagate, the vast scandal that encompasses an entire presidency, offers a preemptive answer. Obama didn’t know anything and he never knew it. At least not until, like smuggling weapons to druglords, bugging journalists, IRSing his political enemies and killing vets, his right hand found out about what his left hand was doing from the morning paper. After skipping 58% of his daily intelligence briefings in Term 1 and 59% of them in Term 2, he went on 60 Minutes and blamed intelligence agencies...

Tuesday, September 30, 2014 Science is for Stupid People Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Every ideology needs to believe in its inevitability. Religions get their inevitability from prophecies; secular ideologies get theirs from the modernist fallacy. The modernist fallacy says that history is moving on an inevitable track toward their ideology. Resistance is futile, you will be liberalized. Marxism predicted the inevitable breakdown of capitalism. Obama keeps talking about being “on the right side of history” as if history, like a university history curriculum, has a right side and a wrong side. All everyone has to...

I have been searching for moderate Islam since September 11 and just like a lost sock in the dryer, it was in the last place I expected it to be. There is no moderate Islam in the mosques or in Mecca. You won’t find it in the Koran or the Hadiths. If you want to find moderate Islam, browse the newspaper editorials after a terrorist attack or take a course on Islamic religion taught by a Unitarian Sociologist wearing fake native jewelry. You can’t find a moderate Islam in Saudi Arabia or Iran, but you can find it in countless...

James Foley was one of a new breed of activists calling themselves journalists. He didn’t travel to report on a story, but to promote an agenda. And the agenda was obvious from his Twitter feed.Any human life lost is tragic, but a moral individual would have much more empathy for the Syrian Christians who suffered at the hands of Foley’s favorite Jihadists than one of their pet propagandists. Foley came to Syria to support the Sunni Islamist rebels against the Syrian government.He cheered on the Sunni Muslim terrorists fighting to ethnically cleanse the Christians of Aleppo. In the conflict...

ISIS marching through Iraq has smashed the media’s taboo against criticizing Obama’s foreign policy. Substantive discussions are taking place about why his foreign policy is such a miserable failure. And they mostly miss the point. Liberal journalists still proceed from the fallacy that there was a foreign policy debate between neo-conservative interventionists and liberal non-interventionists. These are a series of digested Bush era talking points that have no relationship to reality since Bush’s foreign policy on Iraq carried over from Bill Clinton. It’s why Hillary gets so uncomfortable when she has to discuss her vote on Iraq. The liberals weren’t...

Bill Bratton has destroyed his reputation in a short amount of time by becoming a mouthpiece for Bill de Blasio. Taking the job was a poor idea since crime rates had dropped so low that they were bound to rebound, especially under a pro-criminal mayor like De Blasio. All that Bratton had done is set himself up to take the blame and join the ranks of failed NYPD commissioners like Lee Brown who did what a liberal mayor wanted instead of fighting crime. So now it’s time to pander to Islam.

There’s absolutely incomprehensible black-hearted rotten-souled evil. And then a step beneath that, there’s SEIU. Melissa and Kevin Haynes were born with hypertonic cerebral palsy, a severe disability that impaired their cognitive development, leaving them functioning as infants. For more than 30 years, their devoted parents, Robert and Patricia, have cared for them in their home in Macomb Township, Mich. The two disabled adults received Medicaid checks each month, money that went toward their care. But in 2006, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) began collecting 2.75 percent from each of these checks, claiming that Robert and Patricia were employees — not only...

Dear John, Every few years a messiah arrives in Jerusalem, shakes hands, makes demands and promises to make peace in our time. Then when the whole thing blows up in his face, he throws up his hands and flies back blaming the ungrateful Jews for not embracing his vision. So many false messiahs have come before you, squinting against the bright sunshine, pounding the table at meetings, downing martinis and fantasizing about the Nobel Peace Prize that they were sure was waiting for them at the end. And they left with nothing except sunburn and simmering rage. Did you really...

The views in the video aren’t surprising. CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO They’re the views of Ron and Rand Paul and their intellectual milieu which believes that most wars are set up by banks. According to them, the US need not have gotten involved in WW2. “There are times when sanctions have made it worse. I mean, there are times .. leading up to World War II we cut off trade with Japan. That probably caused Japan to react angrily. We also had a blockade on Germany after World War I, which may have encouraged them … some...

Muslims say that Mohammed was the original feminist. And by feminist, they mean he told his followers to beat and rape women. An Arizona Muhammad has followed in his prophet’s footsteps, as so many Mohammeds, Muhammads and Mahmouds have before him. Police say a valley man threatened to kill his wife, telling his victim “Islamic Law” gave him the right to kill her. Ansar Muhammad sexually assaulted the victim, held her against her will while threatening to kill her, punched and strangulated her, causing physical injuries at their home. His wife told police the incidents were sparked after Muhammad had...

Big lies don’t always start out big. They don’t even always start out as lies. They only grow big in the cover-up when the truth has to be beaten off with a stick made out of even bigger lies. A brief read of the daily newspapers, a quick flick through the cable news networks and an ear cocked to the drive time news minute might give you the idea that Israel is isolated and besieged. Israel is indeed a small country. It’s always been isolated in a Muslim region that is willing to kill even fellow Arab Christians and fellow...

Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives have expressed bewilderment over CBS’s abandonment of the “American Heartland” by choosing Colbert to replace Letterman. Ed Driscoll has contrasted the pick with the Letterman and Leno succession battle. But the real lesson of that battle is that while Leno won on performance, beating Letterman in the ratings, Letterman won on image, retiring as an honored figure, despite his abusive behavior, while Leno was booed out the door Leno is no conservative, but he left with the baffled bewilderment familiar to many on the right of being the better man who is despised for his...

For only ten dollars a day or a month you can feed all the starving children in Africa. For only the price of a cup of coffee a year, you can make sure that no one in Kansas City ever goes hungry again. For just a third of your paycheck, you can subsidize a vast bureaucracy that will conduct studies on the best way to save the world and then come up with proposals that will only cost you half your paycheck. This misplaced philanthropic confidence is the idiot stepchild of a free enterprise society where anything can be accomplished...

Naval Base Bombed, Shinto Worshipers Fear Backlash - New York Times - December 8 1941 ------------------- A day after planes passed over their peaceful village on the way to attack the Naval Station at Pearl Harbor, local fishermen are still picking up the pieces. "I don't know what any of this is about," a man who would only give his name as Paji said, holding the remains of a net which he had used to earn a living. "All I know is that the killing has to stop." In Washington, government officials urged the public to stay calm and not...

October 29, 2013 Obama Didn’t Lie About ObamaCare, If You Exclude All His Lies Daniel Greenfield “I did not have sex with that health plan.�The hot new liberal talking point about Obama’s “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan� lie is that it’s actually true of the plans you can keep, but not of the plans you can’t keep.When Obama repeatedly said that, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan�… he apparently meant only the “good� health care plans that he approves of, but not the bad ones.Somehow this is...

Our technocracy is detached it is from competence. It's not the technocracy of engineers, but of "thinkers" who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance. These are the people who love Freakonomics, who enjoy all sorts of mental puzzles, who like to see an idea turned on its head, but who couldn't fix a toaster. The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have no idea what anything costs or...

It’s not amnesty. It’s just a bill that legalizes illegal aliens and puts them on a path to citizenship. No amnesty to see here. Issa’s forthcoming legislation takes elements from similar legislation he introduced in December 2003, the Alien Accountability Act. The six-year period is intended to whittle down the undocumented immigrant population into several categories, such as immigrants with family ties to U.S. citizens or immigrants who want to participate in a guest-worker program. -snip- “If somebody has a nexus that would reasonably allow them to become permanent residents and American citizen, we should allow them to do that,”...

Thursday, October 10, 2013 The Obama Blockade Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog In the spring of ’48, the collision of wills between the free world and the red slave empire of the east came to a head in Berlin. The Communist strategy had been to push forward, to violate the spirit of the agreements and then the letter of the agreements while always claiming to be the aggrieved party. The Allies had treated the Soviet Union as if it were a credible partner that wanted to work together with them on rebuilding Europe. The Soviet Union...

China doesn’t have the same record of killing foreign enemies overseas that Russia does. But it has a large enough overseas network and piles of cash that it could get the job done if it needed to. Just ask Naw Kham what happened after the Mekong River Massacre. The bodies of the Chinese, the crew of two cargo boats, were found badly mutilated on the Thai side of the river in early October 2011. The killings, the worst slaughter of Chinese citizens abroad in recent memory, angered the Chinese public. Chinese investigators insist that Mr. Naw Kham was the mastermind...

Suffice it to say that apparently Netanyahu and the Israeli military have a plan to take out Iran’s nuclear program. And the man blocking the exit is Barack Hussein Obama, who wants to bomb Syria over WMDs, but doesn’t want to let Israel do what it has to in Iran.

Ronald Ernest Paul, the nation's last best hope for internet gambling and the gold standard, responded to the murder of a Navy SEAL by saying, "He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword." But the question is whose sword is it? To the anti-war movement, all conflicts between the free world and the world of slaves are reduced to a pithy formula of moral equivalence. America lifted the sword and has gone on swinging it. It never puts the sword down and therefore it dies by it. Chris Kyle becomes a metaphor for the great beast of war,...

The Ecotality case wasn’t the biggest payoff, but it was particularly outrageous because it got stimulus money when it was already under SEC investigation.The company received a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission in October of 2010.The president of Ecotality North America Don Karner was sent an additional subpoena in December of 2011, which specifically asks for any and all documentation surrounding the public announcement of the first Department of Energy grant to the company for $99.8 million on August 5, 2009.Ecotality was awarded $99 million in 2009 and an additional $26 million in October 2011. Since the beginning...

We spend a great deal of time talking about the Muslim Brotherhood’s networks, its agents of influence and the structural elements of its infrastructure. But it may be worth exploring a more basic question. What is its appeal? This isn’t an inquiry about the appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood and its varied front groups to the educated and wealthy Muslims who make up its key demographic. The Brotherhood promises the Sunni Arab elites that they can stay on top while beating the West by making Islam into as compelling a method of national and international governance as the freedom and...

One empire falls and another rises in its place. It’s an old story and it is what we are seeing in the Middle East. The Islamist resurgence was fed by the collapse of two world powers, the USSR and the US. The fall of the Soviet Union robbed the Arab Socialist dictatorships of their support. The last of these, Syria, is now under siege, by Sunni Islamist militias. Egypt’s Sadat had made the move to the American camp early enough to avoid the fate of Syria or Iraq, but instead his successor, Mubarak, encountered the fate of the Shah of...

Friday, May 24, 2013 Friday Afternoon Roundup - Orwell Lives Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 0 Comments ORWELL LIVES Witnesses claim it took London police 20 minutes to show up and stop the two Muslim killers. But when it comes to something truly serious, like protecting Muslims from elderly British women, then the coppers were on the case. “An 85-year-old woman has this afternoon been arrested after abuse was hurled at Muslims outside Gillingham Mosque. The pensioner was handcuffed and taken away in a van by officers attending the Canterbury Street mosque for Friday prayers." Note...

The United States has become a tool of Muslim Brotherhood expansionism. Obama helped the Brotherhood overthrow governments by political means, but now the Brotherhood is demanding military intervention to help a Brotherhood/Al Qaeda coalition take over Syria. And if Obama goes along with it, he will have turned the United States military into the mercenaries of the Muslim Brotherhood. Americans have died because of Obama’s dirty deal with the Muslim Brotherhood. The question now is whether Obama will send American soldiers and pilots to die for the Brotherhood. In the spring of 2009, Obama went down to Cairo. Obama had...

Tuesday, May 14, 2013 #FreeJahar and the Media's #FreeJihad Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 0 Comments The media, in one of its bursts of manufactured moral panic, has turned its eye on the teenage girls tweeting and tumblring away in support of Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Serial killers have always had their fan clubs. Before the Boston Marathon bombings spawned the #FreeJahar crowd, there were the Holmies, who adored James Holmes, who murdered 12 people at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises. Even if Adam Lanza hadn't committed suicide, it's doubtful that he would...

Sunday, May 12, 2013 Put Not Your Trust in Politicians Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 4 Comments The most obvious lessons of the defeat of gun control and the push for illegal alien amnesty is that politicians don't matter. People do. The Tea Party invested its energy into electing the right people, but as Rick Scott and Marco Rubio showed us, there may be no such thing as the right people. Politicians are in the business of selling out. The difference between Marco Rubio and Charlie Crist was that Rubio hadn't really been tested. But that...

Thursday, May 09, 2013 The Playgrounds of War Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 0 Comments America is becoming a more tolerant nation, we are told. Each new thing that we learn to tolerate makes us more progressive. But tolerance is a relative thing. For every new thing we learn to tolerate, there is a thing that we must stop tolerating. Tolerance does not usher in some tolerant anarchy in which we learn to tolerate all things. Rather tolerance is a finite substance. It can only be allocated to so many places. While a society changes, human...

Tuesday, May 07, 2013 The Road to Nowhere Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog The Heritage Institute report estimates that under amnesty the average legalized illegal household will take in $43,900 in benefits while paying a little over a third of that in taxes. Those numbers are grim from the standpoint of a tottering economy being asked to take on an even bigger pile of debt and they reveal an even grimmer view of the future. Set aside the political debates, the tensions over multiculturalism, entitlements and the great political divide, and those numbers reek of a...

Saturday, May 11, 2013 With Blood on Their Hands Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Lady Macbeth may have been one of literature's most famous villains, but at least she had the guilty conscience to eventually try and wash the blood off her hands. Even if by then it was much too late. via American Digest It is doubtful that Hillary Rodham Clinton will start hallucinating bloody spots on her palms during the book tour for her upcoming 14-million-dollar book or compulsively washing her hands during the 2016 campaign. If she does make it into the White...

The best evidence of the unlamented death of the Arab Spring (2010-2013) was the nervous response in Washington D.C. to the Syrian crossing of the Red Line. The Red Line had been set up so that Assad would eventually run afoul of it, whether by using chemical weapons or by taking the blame for chemical weapons use by the rebels; as the UN alleges happened. Once the Red Line was crossed, the Liberators of Libya would use the opportunity to enforce the will of the people; at least those people with Qatari RPGs and Turkish machine guns. But instead of...

Tuesday, May 14, 2013 The Post-Obama Democratic Party Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 0 Comments Two elections ago, the Democratic Party was on the verge of being torn to shreds. After a long series of dirty tricks and one stolen election later, there was an uncomfortable coming together. Obama and his cronies kept most of the important positions, while the Clintonites got a few pieces of the foreign policy apparatus. The arrangement satisfied no one, but it kept ticking along until the Benghazi attacks happened. By the time Benghazi happened, Clinton and Obama needed each other...

Sometimes poetic justice is very poetic. Other times it’s ironic. And sometimes it’s a teachable moment about the folly of appeasement. Not that Dr. Christopher Stone will have learned anything from his experience. Leftist academics are not very educable. Not even when their Muslim teachers are stabbing them in the neck. (via Debbie Schlussel) A man stabbed in the neck near the US Embassy in Cairo on Thursday has been identified as Chris Stone, an American academic. Stone is associate professor of Arabic and head of the Arabic Programme at City University.

The First Rule of Illegal Immigration is No One Talks About Illegal Immigration May 5, 2013 By Daniel Greenfield 2  Print This Post Liberals love euphemisms the way that goats love eating rotten apples. But the problem with euphemisms is that they eventually take on the derogatory meaning of the thing they were trying to slowly back away from. Retarded started out as a euphemism to replace slow which was a euphemism started to replace moron which was also… you get the idea. Liberals insisted that we use illegal immigrant to replace illegal alien which replaced more insulting terms. Now...

Friday, May 03, 2013 "The Golden Apple" - A Socialist Fairy Tale Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 0 Comments Once upon a time there was a street fair. It had striped awnings and bright colors and from far and near, farmers came with wagons full of produce to sell at the street fair. The produce was plentiful and cheap and the crowds it drew were huge which created all sorts of concerns for the government. So the government created a Ministry of Street Fairs which it funded by taxing the produce sold at the fair. At...

Tuesday, April 30, 2013 The Best Minds of My Generation Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog The one thing that gave me hope for my generation was our cynicism. We might not believe in anything, but at least we wouldn't believe in everything. We might be apathetic, but that just meant it was harder to enlist us in causes. We didn't just march to the beat of our own drummer, we questioned the need for having a drummer and a beat. We were burnt out on everything and done with it all. Of course it wasn't really...

Monday, April 29, 2013 The Big Fat Red Line Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Someone chalked a long red line along the street outside my building. The line is sloppy, it turns, wavers and meanders. Car tires have already rubbed it pink in places and dogs have done to it what large four-legged animals do naturally when taken out of the confines of narrow apartments. The line turns a corner and dives inside a pothole near an exposed sewer grate. And then it is gone. Obama's red line is more famous than my red line. It...

The left has a clearly defined set of responses to a terrorist attack. After all the hopes for a properly right wing terrorist have come to naught, it begins the long slow process of rolling back the laws and emotional attitudes stemming from the attack. For it, terrorism, like anything else, either fits into its narrative or conflict with it. The narrative defines the world, past, present and future, in terms of the political agenda of the left. An event that clashes with the agenda must have its meaning changed so that the power of the narrative is restored. Most...

Means, opportunity and motive are the three crucial elements of investigating a crime and establishing the guilt of its perpetrator. Many crimes cannot be narrowed down by motive until a suspect is on the scene; but acts of terrorism can be. Almost anyone might be responsible for a random killing; but political killings are carried out by those who subscribe to common beliefs. Eliminate motive from terrorism and it becomes no different than investigating a random killing. If investigators are not allowed to profile potential terrorists based on shared beliefs rooted in violence, that makes it harder to catch terrorists...

Wednesday, April 24, 2013 Terrorism Without a Motive Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 2 Comments Means, opportunity and motive are the three crucial elements of investigating a crime and establishing the guilt of its perpetrator. Means and opportunity tell us how the crime could have been committed while motive tells us why it was committed. Many crimes cannot be narrowed down by motive until a suspect is on the scene; but acts of terrorism can be. Almost anyone might be responsible for a random killing; but political killings are carried out by those who subscribe to...

Monday, April 22, 2013 A Tribal War in Boston Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 10 Comments Terrorism, like urban crime, is one of those things that you're not supposed to think about too much. It's fine to talk about your emotions after a bombing or a mugging. You can even share stories and eventually learn to laugh about it. What you cannot do is talk about where it comes from except in the vaguest terms of social conditions. Like pollution from industry or corruption from government, it's one of those toxic spinoffs of our modern society....

On September 12, 2012, Obama stepped out into the Rose Garden and told the millions of Americans watching at home, “We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.” More than half a year has passed since then and justice is nowhere in sight. The perpetrators of the attack openly walk the streets of Benghazi long after the FBI team sent there has gone home. It may well be a coincidence that the first major successful terrorist attack comes as the administration plots a...

Saturday, April 20, 2013 Refusing to be Terrorized Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 2 out of 3 governments agree that dealing with terrorism is all about having the right attitude. That, "Yes, we've been bombed, but we're ready to pick ourselves up and get on with our lives without drawing any conclusions from what happened" attitude that politicians patriotically advocate as soon as the carnage is over.  "Americans refuse to be terrorized. Ultimately, that's what we'll remember from this week," Obama said in his radio address. But of course Americans were terrorized. Obama's message is that...

Motive still a giant incomprehensible mystery. But there are suspicions that he was one of those Tea Party NRA type of people. Certainly his peaceful tolerant religion notorious for its love of kites, puppies, infidels and women had nothing to do with it. NPR has done some background on Tamerlan Tsarnaev who, it turns out, was surprisingly Muslim. (Not that NPR can say so.) His Islamic attitudes extended to his treatment of American women. LAURA SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Well, these women were close friends and roommates of Tamerlan’s girlfriend, Katherine Russell, and they knew him for several years while they...

“One of the Chechen terrorists who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings could have been deported years ago after a criminal conviction and the other was granted American citizenship on the 11th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. “Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old killed in a wild shootout with police, was a legal U.S. resident who nevertheless could have been removed from the country after a 2009 domestic violence conviction, according to a Judicial Watch source. That means the Obama administration missed an opportunity to deport Tsarnaev but evidently didn’t feel he represented a big enough threat.”

Now that we know who the bombers are and one of them is dead, and that they are Chechen Muslims, the media has gone into “Palestinian” mode insisting that we need to talk about the conflict in Chechnya. We can talk about Chechnya, but the issue there and everywhere else is Islamic nationalism or Islamism. The bombers could have been from Chechnya or Mali or Bosnia or Iraq or Egypt or Afghanistan or any Muslim country where Islamists are active. And that’s most Muslim countries, especially after the Arab Spring. There is a conflict in Chechnya and Iraq and Pakistan...

Sleeper? Every believer in Islam is potentially a sleeper, ready to undergo what the experts call “radicalization”. But radicalization is largely a misnomer. The proper term is religiosity...

Tuesday, April 16, 2013 Tears Don't Protect Against Murder Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 6 Comments After serving a few years in prison for his role in the Munich Massacre, Willi Pohl moved to Beirut. The brief sentence was a slap in the wrist, but Pohl had still served more time in prison than the Muslim gunmen who had murdered eleven Israeli athletes and coaches during the 1972 Summer Olympics. Mohammed Safady and the Al-Gashey cousins were released after a few months by the German authorities. They went back to Lebanon and so did he.

In The Republic, Plato argued that philosophers must be made kings for the ideal city-state to be born. In the pages of The New Republic, Cass Sunstein argues for the benevolent paternalism of the nanny state and its philosopher-kings. It’s an old Sunstein theme and the one that brought him to the attention of politicians who dearly love to imagine themselves in the roles of those philosopher-kings. One of those politicians, Barack Obama, even made Sunstein his Regulatory Czar. Sunstein debuted as the philosopher-king of the technocrats with his book Nudge. Now having left his D.C. Czardom, Sunstein is back...