Free Republic

"The British philosopher Roger Scruton has coined a term to describe this attitude: oikophobia. Xenophobia is fear of the alien; oikophobia is fear of the familiar: "the disposition, in any conflict, to side with 'them' against 'us', and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours.' " What a perfect description of the pro-mosque left. "Scruton was writing in 2004, and his focus was on Britain and Europe, not America. But his warning about the danger of oikophobes--whom he amusingly dubs "oiks"--is very pertinent on this side of the Atlantic today, and it illuminates...

Mayor Michael Bloomberg traveled to Martha’s Vineyard Friday to talk with President Barack Obama about the economy and play golf, officials from the White House and City Hall said. “The president and Mayor Bloomberg took the opportunity to discuss plans for short- and long-term economic growth at a pivotal point in our recovery,” said White House spokesman Reid Cherlin. A person familiar with the meeting said that the conversation between the mayor and president was informal and conducted when the two men were alone in the golf course clubhouse.

Peggy Noonan is at it again . I've commented on her before, and how out of touch she seems to be with the mainstream of America. This latest piece in the Wall Street Journal is another that would have been ignored, except for the fact that Ms Noonan spends so much time concentrating on her perception of a national malaise, that she is forced to conclude without writing anything conclusive, and as such she avoids placing the blame where it should rest. Someone really needs to pull her vision back into focus. Ms. Noonan is right in pointing out that...

ESTEPONA, Spain — Spanish police cleared a section of beach for Michelle Obama and her daughter Sasha to relax by the Mediterranean yesterday after a busy day of sightseeing. As Obama rested inside a canvas hut by the shore, her 9-year-old daughter splashed around in the sea and a security guard swam with her. The Obamas have been showered with gifts, including a typical Spanish fan, a traditional veil known as a mantilla, books on cities they have visited, and an assortment of food, including cheese, olives, wine, and even two legs of salt-cured Spanish ham. It is questionable whether...

Last Friday, after discussing the "tale of two yachts" - owned by Kerry (D-MA) and Green (D-FL) - Mark discusses the hypocritical ruling elite and the destruction they're wreaking on the country. [Edited for commercials, long pauses, and other extraneous content]

According to Maureen Dowd, Barack Obama's latest problem may be because he isn't black enough: "The Obama White House is too white. It has Barack Obama, raised in the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia, and Valerie Jarrett, who spent her early years in Iran. But unlike Bill Clinton, who never needed help fathoming Southern black culture, Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience, ones who understand 'the slave thing,' as a top black Democrat dryly puts it." Dowd continues: "The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only...

So, Barack Obama’s approval rating is falling so quickly that it may soon be journeying to the center of the earth. So, the economy is in such terrible shape that those supposedly untouchable middle class tax cuts may expire. So, Florida happens to have three of the most corrupt politicians in the country running for one of its United States Senate seats. So, what? Instead of my usual weekly analysis of political happenings across the United States, I have decided to take a different approach with today’s article. A few nights ago, I stumbled across a very interesting study conducted...

She was smeared by right-wing media, condemned by the NAACP, and canned by the Obama administration. It wasn't pretty, what was done this week to Shirley Sherrod. And maybe something good can come of it. The thought occurred to me after reading her now-famous speech, which is about the power of grace and the possibility of redemption. Here's a way to get some good. This September, when school begins, we should make the speech required viewing in the nation's high schools.

Contributors discuss Sarah Palin's comments about the Ground Zero mosque in light of her divergence from elite opinion. Brian Katulis, senior fellow, Center for American Progress It’s unfortunate, though unsurprising, that the attention-seeking former half-term governor is carelessly exploiting the Sept. 11 attacks in this way. Suggesting, as Sarah Palin did, that the presence of a mosque near ground zero is a “stab in the heart” of America is insulting to core values that make our country great: tolerance and pluralism. Tom Korologos, former ambassador, Republican strategist Whether the number of Palin supporters is 16 percent of Washington’s elite —...

According to Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor, Americans are just not intelligent enough to understand what Obama was trying to say in his speech Tuesday evening.  He says that Obama speech was written to a 9.8 grade level of understanding.  I guess us hicks in the hinterland just don't git wat Obama were trying to tell us unejacated folk out here.  Despite using slightly less than four sentences per paragraph, Payack says that because Obama used 19.8 words per sentence, that our ability to go comprehend what he was saying went right over our heads. Payack...

...For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, European leisure travelers made endless romantic speculations about the “secrets of the harems,” writes Judy Mabor in Veiled Half-Truths. They filled their fantasies with erotic scenes of dark-eyed women, but kept their distance; even as they fantasized, they pitied the poor, backwards Arab women, Mabor writes. In later years, however, Westerners began to feel guilty about these one-sided Orientalist fantasies. In Muriel Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate, Hideous Kinky, and Sheltering Sky, the Western woman sleeps with an Arab man. The experience turns the tables on the usual fantasy. Now it’s the...

Where professors rule, life is cruel. That is the bottom line for the average American in this, the transformative age of the president the New York Times and Washington Post has called "Professor" Obama, who "schools" the ignorant at home and abroad. Never before have so many with so little humility gathered together in our government, each believing he "is the smartest guy in the room." This is an administration stuffed with academics. And not just any academic: These are educators from elite universities, the kind of experts prized by a political and media elite seeking confirmation of a worldview...

Like a lot of progressives, I've been puzzling over the Tea Party phenomenon. Many on the left choose to believe that the hundreds and sometimes thousands who attend the group's rallies are the same old extreme rightwingers who always have been around — usually content to remain isolated individuals or small groups in the shadows but this time encouraged out in the open by incitement from the FarRight media. While no doubt, there's a large truth in that observation, I think it's a mistake to interpret the Tea Party phenomenon mainly in that reductive, generic way. There are, it appears,...

A New Elite would have their way with the nation's laws, with rule-making, with the Constitution itself. So predicted a prescient book titled The Uncivil War: How a New Elite Is Destroying Our Democracy in 2004.Our futures are at stake. Our very future as a relatively free republic hangs in the balance. So it seems nowadays, what with all the "changes" afoot and hard-edged, power-crazy political shenanigans going on. We are on the verge, at least until November elections, of being overrun by a class of smug, self-satisfied, "superior," pushy individuals who think that they are far smarter than the...

The top US naval officer has vowed to stop people lighting up in submarines, where the confined atmosphere has serious passive smoking implications, a report said Monday. "We are going to stop smoking on submarines," Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead told a recent meeting of senior submariners, according to the Navy Times magazine. Navy spokesman Lieutenant Commander Mark Jones confirmed a ban could be in the pipeline, telling AFP: "We are currently looking at changing the policy, but we have not changed the policy." At present, smoking on US submarines is up to the commanding officer's discretion and...

Health Care Plan Gains Favor," insists the White House message, echoed incessantly by the me-too media and passed off as news across the land. After all, they had to kick through the door and pass the bill so we can see the beauty within it. And it was a great and stirring "victory" for the wunderkind Obama -- a victory over the American people. "For Obama it was transformative," intoned the scribe, as he readied the white robes and royal scepter. And as Obama so disingenuously put it last week in his Iowa propaganda pitch: "So after I signed the...

President Obama declared that the new health care law "is going to be affecting every American family." Except his own, of course. The new health care law exempts the president from having to participate in it. Leadership and committee staffers in the House and Senate who wrote the bill are exempted as well. A weasel-worded definition of "staff" includes only the members' personal staff in the new system; the committee staff that drafted the legislation opted themselves out. Because they were more familiar with the contents of the law than anyone in the country, it says a lot that they...

This concept of self-government was in contrast to the established "divine right" of kings; something which many statists and elitists seem to now embrace - at least in the abstract - as long as it is they who are the "kings." They are, unwittingly, "conservatives" as opposed to true classical liberalism in that they think only they have the right to rule the rest of us due, not to their blood lines as kings, but to their ostensibly superior intelligence. . .

The headline on the e-mail I get daily from TNR put it more succinctly and reflects the elitist mindset of those who call themselves liberals or progressives these days: “Americans Aren’t Enthused About Obama’s Agenda. Screw ‘em.” They toned it down in the headline they actually put on the article, but not much. It’s an acknowledgment that a solid majority of Americans oppose ObamaCare, whether the House version, the Senate version, or the 11-page outline the White House put forward. But what do the poor rubes know? We wise elite rulers know what’s good for them much better than they...

After a year and a half of non-stop from-the-gutter slurs on Sarah Palin, her character and her family, liberals have opened up a new avenue of attack. Not that they intend to abandon their old ways of sliming Sarah. They're just adding a "thoughtful liberal" approach, not unlike the "good cop, bad cop" gambit used by some police departments. Expect to see an increasing number of "thoughtful liberal, deranged liberal" assaults on the former governor of Alaska. Charles M. Madigan -- who describes himself as "liberal leaning" -- demonstrates the "thoughtful liberal" approach with his op-ed in the Sunday edition...