Free Republic

When President Obama entered office, he dreamed that his hope-and-change messaging and his references to his familial Islamic roots would win over the Muslim world. The soon-to-be Nobel Peace Prize laureate would make the U.S. liked in the Middle East. Then, terrorism would decrease. But, as with his approach to racial relations, Obama's remedies proved worse than the original illness. Obama gave his first presidential interview to Al Arabiya, noting that he has Muslims in his family. He implicitly blamed America's strained relations with many Middle Eastern countries on his supposedly insensitive predecessor, George W. Bush. The new message of...

A mother speaking out about her son’s death is “inappropriate” for the RNC, according to The View’s Joy Behar. But will she say the same about the DNC’s speakers? On Tuesday, The View ladies discussed the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. At one point, co-host Whoopi Goldberg asked the panel about an RNC speech delivered by Patricia Smith, “a mom who lost her son in Benghazi [and] still blames Hillary for her son's death.” Fox News analyst Jedediah Bila began by defending Smith: I think she feels that Hillary Clinton – you know, and she said this, wrote...

Boxing promoter Don King at the Republican National Convention, Photo Credit: Tyler O'Neil, PJ MediaIn an interview with PJ Media on the Republican National Convention floor on Tuesday, boxing promoter Don King shared his surprising views of the Black Lives Matter movement. He seemed to be all over the board, hitting on America's history of racism, his friendship with former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and his full-throated support for Donald Trump.When it comes to the Black Lives Matter movement, King admitted that "the natural response would say All Lives Matter, but that's a diversion." He admitted that "my friend"...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Have sound bite 32 standing by because a woman by the name of Meredith McIver has released a statement through the Trump campaign about the Melania Trump speech. She wrote it, Meredith McIver. She's released this statement just recently, last 15 or so minutes, and the Drive-Bys are busy dissecting this, trying to analyze this. What does it really mean, because of course it can't be what it says. There's gotta be something unstated here. There has to be something going on. Is this woman falling on the sword for the Trump campaign? Did she really not...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Grab sound bites number eight and nine at least, because this is more of the same here. This is NBC Special Coverage, Republican National Convention, and the NBC crew is Tom Brokaw, F. Chuck Todd, Nicolle Wallace, and Savannah Guthrie. We're gonna play you audio sound bites of that moment in time when they realize that Trump has changed the rules of politics and that they're covering the wrong things. They're focusing on the wrong things, like the plagiarism. Nobody cares! They think it's a disqualifying thing for Donald Trump that his wife plagiarized Michelle Obama. They've...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: There's just something about it, when you link these people, when you link these people with Satan, they go absolutely bonkers. They go nuts. Like Ben Carson last night, all he did was mention the dedication of Saul Alinsky's book to the devil, and I've got five stories here from the Drive-By Media about how horrible that is, because Ben Carson was linking Hillary Clinton to the devil. I remember one time we called Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader back then, we called him El Diablo here in a parody song. They went nuts. They went...

The United States runs its air operations against ISIS in Iraq from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. The base, used by other NATO forces as well, is not American. It is Turkish, and the U.S. needs government permission to fly from there. Since the 15 July coup attempt in Ankara, U.S. forces at Incirlik are essentially hostages to the Turkish government. The Turkish base commander and his aides have been arrested; U.S. personnel are confined to base; outside power has been cut off; and while the U.S. has been permitted to resume operations over Iraq and Syria, it is working...

All eyes should be on Florida to see the seeds of change in black America. The issue is school choice and the nation's largest private school choice scholarship program, the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, enacted in Florida in 2001 under Gov. Jeb Bush. Students receive scholarships to attend the school of their choice from Scholarship Funding Organizations. The FSOs are funded through donations from businesses that receive tax credits on corporate taxes and insurance premium taxes. It sounds like a no-brainer that this makes all the sense in the world. It's all voluntary; businesses choose to contribute and freedom and...

When FBI Director James Comey came before the press to deliver his bizarre proclamation -- that Hillary Clinton had lied relentlessly about her private email server but shouldn't be prosecuted because no prosecutor would ever dare take her to court (even though prosecutors all over the country rose to say they'd do so immediately) -- many were shocked and angered. One industry was thoroughly embarrassed: the media-elite "fact-checker" websites and projects, from PolitiFact to FactCheck.org to The Washington Post's Fact Checker column. These so-called guardians of truth felt forced to revise and upgrade their "Pinocchio" counts to reflect the fact...

My Fox colleagues are in Cleveland, diligently interviewing Republicans. Next week, they'll interview Democrats. I'm glad they do it -- because I despise most politicians. There are exceptions, of course, but after years of reporting, I've concluded that most politicians have little to say that's interesting, and many are craven opportunists, desperate to rule over others. A few stand out, like former Congressman Anthony Weiner. Like many politicians, he's never held a real job. He's run for office or worked for politicians all his life. Weiner married one of Hillary Clinton's closest advisers, passionately pushed leftists' bad ideas and was...

Turkey’s failed coup, combined with the disastrous disunity and polarization in the United States thanks to Barack Obama, have gotten people talking about whether it could happen here. For example, part-time law professor and full-time Instapundit Glenn Reynold has recently taken some serious looks at the issue of coups within the context of the American system of checks and balances. So what if next January Obama and his barely post-puberty band of juice box screw-ups in the West Wing decide they don’t want to leave? And the issue is even more pressing with Donald Trump sneaking up in the...

I'd fire him. If somebody derailed my convention and embarrassed my wife, I'd fire him. Not the speechwriter. The campaign manager. This situation in which Melania Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention included two plagiarized sections is so needless and destructive, it is such a self-inflicted wound, that you almost wonder if it was sabotage. It is easier to imagine someone wanting to torpedo the Trump campaign than it is to think that anyone getting paid to write would be so stupid and unethical as to steal someone else's words. Also, to be honest, it's astounding to think that...

My 12-year-old son couldn't remember the phrase "take a walk down memory lane" last week, instead describing a stroll through "nostalgia road." I knew it would come in handy. Put on your hiking boots and join me for an educational trip down good ol' nostalgia road. It seems like yesterday when Champion of Wimmin Maureen Dowd, bemoaning the lack of sympathy for anti-war mom Cindy Sheehan, declared in The New York Times that "the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute." No ifs, ands or other hedging qualifiers. Absolutely absolute. And it was just a...

They stood between the #BlackLivesMatter lynch mob and the police. Once again, Judge Barry G. Williams handed the Freddie Gray lynch mob a decisive defeat, shredding the prosecution’s case against Lt. Brian Rice, the highest ranking police officer targeted by the mob. Judge Williams stated firmly that, the court “cannot be swayed by sympathy, prejudice or public opinion.” Instead he insisted that it had to follow the law. Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby, who became a national figure by heading the Freddie Gray lynch mob, did not even bother to show up. She knew what was coming. And she had...

NOTE: I wrote the following immediately after Melania Trump's speech last night but pulled it from publication when I learned of the allegations of plagiarism by her (and/or her writer) from passages in Michelle Obama's 2008 speech. As a professional writer for decades, plagiarism does not sit well with me to say the least, even though I realize many -- including Joe Biden (more than once) and Obama himself -- have done it. This was a bush league play and does not speak well of the vetting process within the Trump campaign. Something's seriously amiss that should be investigated thoroughly....

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: So I just got a sound bite here from Carl Bernstein, famous for being a part of Woodward and Bernstein, who are accredited and acclaimed for destroying Richard Nixon. Carl Bernstein was on CNN's Newsroom this afternoon with Brooke Baldwin, and they were talking about the first night of the Republican convention. Now, Bernstein is a connected leftist. I mean, he's a joke to many of us, but to them, this guy is the Guru. I mean, he goes way, way back, and his take on things is seen as representative of what the deep, dark left...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Folks, I don't want to make things about me. I never, ever, try to make it about me, but sometimes sharing personal anecdotes is a way to convey an opinion. Now you know, in case you ever wondered, why I do not listen to other people on the radio. I never have because I don't want to inadvertently hear something I think is clever and then inadvertently use it and then inadvertently be accused of copying somebody. So I don't listen to other people, and it's why I don't watch a lot of television anymore. It's why...

The prospects for a better future are nearly hopeless for roughly 20 percent of black people — those who reside in big-city crime-infested and dysfunctional neighborhoods. There is virtually nothing that can be done about it without a major rebuilding of the black community from within. Let's examine some of the aspects of the problem and the dismal prognosis, given the status quo. The most important social unit is the family. Many talk about the "breakdown" in the black family when a far more accurate description is that the family doesn't form in the first place. About 73 percent of...

Lies have ways of being ground to dust by cruel realities. The liars, when it comes to the jihad against us, principally, are Democrats, though they have some enablers among the Republican establishment. Paul Ryan needs to zip his lip about compassion for Syrian refugees. The blood of innocents just spilled in Nice -- and in Orlando, San Bernardino, and Paris -- all within the span of less than a year -- tells a horrific tale. The killers do so for Allah. Misfits some of the killers may be, but misfits of a certain faith and similar cultural backgrounds, they...

Leading from behind is a business concept where leaders steer their organizations much as shepherds guiding their flocks, from behind. It is contingent on a basic reality, “One can lead from behind only if one knows what lies ahead and what it will take to get there.” President Obama’s foreign policy style has been described as “leading from behind” particularly in the Middle East. Another view of Obama’s style: “A foreign policy of hesitation, delay and indecision.” One look at the current Middle East shows how that is working out. Shifting from foreign to domestic affairs, how has the President’s...