Free Republic

"The worst human being ever to enter the presidency, and I include all the slaveholders."

CBS’s Face the Nation led off 2017 with a political panel where everyone was completely disgusted by President-elect Trump. The two Bush White House veterans – speechwriters Michael Gerson and David Frum – talked in dark terms about an election stolen by Russia and a forthcoming “constitutional crisis.” On the Left were Jeffrey Goldberg, the Obama-polishing editor of The Atlantic magazine, and former NPR anchor Michele Norris, who left the taxpayer-funded network when her husband took a job in the Obama White House. Norris declared that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan clearly had a racial component, since America was...

Five Questions About Russia's Election Hacking As the culpability of Putin’s government becomes more clear, a host of other issues remain unresolved. David Frum The evidence to support the CIA’s conclusion that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump remains mostly secret. But the outline of the case is no mystery. Both Democratic and Republican Party servers were reportedly hacked by foreign agents, yet the Moscow-friendly folks at Wikileaks somehow only obtained the contents of Democratic servers. Meanwhile, Donald Trump ran a campaign that sometimes seemed almost designed to please Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump lavishly praised...

But (Hillary Clinton) is a patriot. She will uphold the sovereignty and independence of the United States. She will defend allies. She will execute the laws with reasonable impartiality. She may bend some rules for her own and her supporters’ advantage. She will not outright defy legality altogether. Above all, she can govern herself; the first indispensable qualification for governing others. So I will vote for the candidate who rejects my preferences and offends my opinions. (In fact, I already have voted for her.)

Former Bush Regime Official Predicts Coming Stalinist Blood Purge of Trump Supporters October 29, 2016| by Donn Marten A former speechwriter for President George W. Bush has made a chilling prediction that conjures up images of Stalinist Russia. David Frum who helped to coin the slogan “Axis of Evil” has openly stated that once the election is over that Trump supporters will be subjected to harsh “recriminations” that begin with exile from the Republican party and end up in very dark territory. The calls for punishment of those who are putting America first and exercising their right to participate in...

White Middle Americans express heavy mistrust of every institution in American society: not only government, but corporations, unions, even the political party they typically vote for—the Republican Party of Romney, Ryan, and McConnell, which they despise as a sad crew of weaklings and sellouts... And when Donald Trump came along, they were the people who told the pollsters, “That’s my guy.” They aren’t necessarily superconservative. They often don’t think in ideological terms at all. But they do strongly feel that life in this country used to be better for people like them—and they want that older country back. ...People like...

DAVID FRUM: When you ask the question, do you think you will be better off in 10 years than you are today, do you think your children will have a better life than you, the most pessimistic group in America are whites without a college degree. And the second most pessimistic group in America are whites with a college degree. JUDY WOODRUFF: So, into this situation steps New York billionaire Donald Trump. What happens? DAVID FRUM: Donald Trump is one of America's great marketing geniuses. And Trump has, as great marketers do, an intuitive understanding of what the customer wants....

Robert Novak wrote Prince of Darkness (according to his publicity materials) to vindicate himself and to settle scores. Among those scores are one with former diplomat Joe Wilson, and another with me. Even from Novak’s own point of view, however, it would have been better if he had left those scores unsettled and this book unpublished. I am not sure I have ever read a memoir that so artlessly presents so damning a self-portrait. The title is unintentionally unironic: The man revealed in these pages is indeed a dark soul. I’ll leave my own part in this story to the...

Here’s another demonstration, says David Frum, that Bush is never more passionate than when he’s talking about immigration and biculturalism. The Trump/Bush debate over whether it’s appropriate to address Latino voters in Spanish is like the Christie/Paul argument over the NSA and civil liberties: Each man’s position on the issue speaks directly to what it is his fans like most about him. Trump’s the guy who’s demanding assimilation, Jeb’s more comfortable with multiculturalism, at least as Spanish speakers transition to their new culture. He also says Trump “doesn’t believe in tolerance,” which means … what, exactly? If cracking down...

When the proceeds of growth are not widely shared, the consensus in favor of pro-growth measures cracks. A decade and a half ago, I filled my days writing speeches urging Congress to grant President George W. Bush fast-track trade authority. If memory serves, I wrote more speeches on that one subject than on any other. Obviously, I didn’t earn my pay: Despite Republican majorities in both Houses, Congress balked. This past year, President Obama has worked as hard for fast-track authority as President Bush ever did. It now seems that his efforts will prove as unavailing. This time, if anything,...

Annd it came to pass that the earth turned and another campaign season spun into view and the liberal commentariat rose from its siesta to begin its usual moping about the perverse political powers wielded by the Fox News Channel. This time, the sentinel waking the commentariat to the alleged Fox menace is not a liberal but a self-described conservative, Bruce Bartlett. Bartlett, a prolific writer on politics and economics who has worked for congressional Republicans (Ron Paul and Jack Kemp), Republican presidents, (Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush) and conservative and libertarian policy shops, broke with his party a...

Following a brief feint in which the White House masterfully exploited the servility of congressional Republicans to create the impression that Barack Obama was still firmly in command of the country’s destiny, the revolt of liberal lawmakers over a proposed free trade has made it clear that the president is very much a lame duck. The internecine fight among Democrats over the Trans-Pacific Partnership has elevated Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to the status as chief liberal opponent of a Democratic White House. “The government doesn’t want you to read this massive new trade agreement. It’s top secret,” Warren said...

President Obama’s executive action last week is only an interim step. More amnesty is coming, much more. It must. More amnesty is coming, first, because the president’s action creates an unsustainable status quo. Millions of people are about to obtain work permits and Social Security numbers—but not (or so the president says) any right to health coverage or other social benefits. What happens if they get sick? What if they lose their jobs? Suffer a debilitating injury at work? According to Obama, these people are “as American as Sasha and Malia” except for the small technical complication of lacking “the...

DAVID FRUM, The Atlantic September 28, 2014If there has been one consistent theme to the Obama administration’s foreign policy, it has been the yearning for some kind of deal with the ruling Iranian regime. President Obama reportedly sent a sequence of messages to Iran’s supreme ruler, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the early months of 2009. The U.S. president held his tongue during the first 10 days of violently repressed protests against the falsified Iranian presidential election of 2009. Obama resisted the tough Kirk-Menendez sanctions against Iran’s central bank until the Senate approved them on a vote of 100-0. When...

What’s that, Daily Beast? “How Ted Cruz Can Win in 2016″? Oh, you are still around, and still doing this sort of thing? That’s great. Let’s take the bait, I guess. Our dutiful “hot take” artist today is David Frum, the famous apostate Republican who has dedicated the last few years to building a new Republican Party that is more moderate, more rational and less dedicated to taking dead-ender stands on cultural issues. He is not, in other words, the sort of Republican Ted Cruz appeals to. Frum has devoted more words to Cruz’s savvy than to his worldview, but...

Via RCP. Wait, wait, wait — before you start shaking your first at him, isn’t his point here oddly simpatico with what tea partiers say every day about Beltway squishes like King himself? It all depends on what benchmark you use to define “Republican.” The Republican establishment of the past 10 years has been fiercely interventionist, willing to bend on civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism, and happy to back new entitlement programs like Medicare Part D so long as their guy’s in the White House. Rand Paul, by contrast, tilts towards isolationism, wants to sue the NSA...

As Americans ran from gunfire at the Navy Yard in Washington DC, commentator David Frum took to Twitter to talk gun control and suggest that gun control opponents were to blame for the shooting:

Paul needled him last night on Hannity’s show for taking a “gimme, gimme, gimme” attitude towards federal spending on Sandy relief. Here’s Christie needling him back by accusing Paul and his home state of Kentucky of being a couple of deadbeats: “I find it interesting that Sen. Paul is accusing us of having a ‘gimme, gimme, gimme’ attitude towards federal spending when in fact New Jersey is a donor state and we get 61 cents back on every dollar we send to Washington,” Christie said. “And interestingly, Kentucky gets $1.51 on every dollar they send to Washington. So if Sen....

TWENTY YEARS ago the leaders of Europe agreed on a bold step: a new currency called the euro. They promised that the euro would improve life for everybody—and denounced all opposition as ignorant, xenophobic, and backward. Their words gained extra plausibility because many of the opponents of the euro really were ignorant, xenophobic, and backward. Yet the backward critics were right, and the enlightened proponents were wrong. And so it is with the immigration debate in the United States. Nothing unifies the American elite like immigration. From Barack Obama to Paul Ryan, from the editorial board of The New York...

The most arresting idea in Adam Winkler's impressively learned study of US gun law, Gunfight, is the suggestion that contemporary American gun culture was more or less invented by the Black Panthers. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the party founders, had studied law and discovered California allowed the carrying in public of loaded rifles and shotguns, provided that the guns were not pointed at anyone. They seized on this law to stage theatrical confrontations with an Oakland police force they deemed hostile and oppressive - and then, most dramatically, in May 1967, to walk armed into the chamber of the...