Free Republic

Presidential primaries always require clarifying fine distinctions between the candidates on issues, since as members of the same party, they share a general ideology and a lot of specific ideas. Which of the Republican candidates hates abortion rights the most, or yearns with more desperate fervor to cut the capital gains tax? It's often hard, if not impossible, to tell. Yet on a few issues, there are meaningful, substantive differences. Now that foreign policy is dominating the campaign debate (at least for the moment), we can get a good look at some actual variation in what the candidates believe. Back...

After the conservative movement defeated immigration reform in Congress two years ago, transforming the issue from one of great promise for Marco Rubio to an enduring liability, the Florida senator realized he had a problem with the right. With his signature initiative destined to become one of the world’s largest stockpiles of scrap paper, Rubio returned to the movement orthodoxies that had propelled him to the U.S. Senate in the first place. In 2013, he joined a quixotic campaign, organized by his future presidential-primary rival Ted Cruz, to condition funding for the government on the elimination of the Affordable Care...

A little over a year ago, when Ben Carson was gearing up to run for president, I questioned in this space whether he was ready for what lay ahead. We now have our answer: No. Carson had a great number of things going for him: his amazing life story, charm, professional accomplishments, eloquence and courage. I had only one major concern: "While he speaks eloquently and passionately about the importance of doing homework in his own life and for children everywhere, it's not obvious he's taken those lessons to heart when it comes to politics." It's now obvious that he...

Worried about security, these voters are shifting toward Ted Cruz. SIOUX CITY, Iowa-Hours after terrorists attacked a hotel in Mali and a week after Islamic State fighters struck Paris, Ted Cruz took the floor here to deliver a harsh critique of President Obama's Middle East posture and pledge a hardline approach to Syrian Muslim refugees.It was exactly what this crowd of mostly conservative Christians wanted - and an ominous sign for Iowa's weakened frontrunner, Ben Carson.Across the state and at a major gathering of politically active evangelicals on Friday night, foreign policy was top-of-mind for the voters and state lawmakers...

Behold, the woman who shall soon be crowned Queen of the endlessly self-righteous and self-congratulatory "Reality Based Community:" "Let's be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism." Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 19, 2015 This is pure claptrap. Everyone understands that the West is not at war with Islam broadly, and that an overwhelming percentage of Muslims reject violent extremism.  It's been beaten into our heads by politicians of all stripes since 9/11, and we're generally bright enough to draw the relevant distinction: "These Muslims over here are just peaceful, faithful...

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas argued Monday that one line from President Barack Obama encapsulated both Obama's foreign policy and that of his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.Cruz, a Republican presidential candidate, told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that Obama's statement was a "stunning indictment" of the president's policies after last week's terrorist attacks in Paris.Obama made the remark at a news conference in Turkey earlier in the day:What I'm not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of 'American leadership' or 'America winning,' or whatever other slogans they come up with that has no relationship to...

"Why can't we take out these bastards?" CNN's Jim Acosta bluntly asked President Obama at a Monday press conference at the Group of 20 summit in Turkey. "These bastards," of course, are the Islamic State -- at least for Acosta. As Obama called Friday's attacks in Paris that left at least 129 dead a "sickening setback," he saw no need to reset his Syrian policy. Obama has been in a state of denial about the Islamic State. In 2014, the president famously told The New Yorker that the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and in Arabic, Daesh, was a...

"Wow . . . I'm absolutely surprised by that answer . . . Are you sure? . . . Are we talking about the same person?" That was Mika Brzezinski's stunned response after her attempt to recruit retired General and former CIA Director Michael Hayden into her campaign against Ben Carson blew up in her face on today's Morning Joe. Referring to Carson, Mika asked Hayden "are you concerned that there's a front runner whose foreign policy sensibilities seem to lack, to say the least?" But instead of playing along with Mika's leading question, Hayden, while acknowledging that Carson lacked...

'Kerry's mental age doesn't exceed that of a 12-year-old,' Netanyahu's new media czar wrote The appointment of Ran Baratz as Netanyahu's new media adviser has drawn scrutiny and criticism from the Israeli press. Ran Baratz, the man who has been appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as his top media adviser, once referred to US Secretary of State John Kerry as someone "whose mental age doesn't exceed 12." In a column that he wrote for an online media magazine last year, Baratz offered a scathing critique of Kerry's suggestion that the emergence of Islamic radicalism in the Middle East could...

Many people may share Senator Bernie Sanders' complaint that he was tired of hearing about Hillary Clinton's e-mails. But the controversy is about issues far bigger than e-mails. One issue is the utter disaster created by the Obama administration's foreign policy in Libya, carried out by Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. An even bigger issue is whether high officials of government can ignore the law and refuse to produce evidence when it is subpoenaed. If they can, then the whole separation of powers — the checks and balances in the Constitution — gives way to arbitrary government by corrupt...

US Senator and presidential contender issues scathing rebuke of Obama administration's handling of the Mideast conflict. US Senator Ted Cruz, the conservative Republican firebrand from Texas, is running for president. Up until a few weeks ago, his candidacy was met with indifference as the media and political operatives all dismissed the viability of his candidacy. But that is beginning to change. The voices arguing that Cruz, the favorite of Tea Party fiscal conservatives and Evangelical Christians may have what it takes to win the Republican nomination have multiplied. Since arriving in Washington four years ago, Cruz has arguably been Israel’s...

Let me get this straight. Two weeks ago Donald Trump said we shouldn’t have gone into Afghanistan, that it was a “terrible mistake” and now he says he was misunderstood? Uhuh.Sounds remarkably like the same dude who mixed up Hamas and Hezbollah and claimed he was hearing the word Kurds when Hugh Hewitt was asking him about the Quds force. Or the know-nothing who sloughed off his lack of knowledge of terror leader names because, he insisted, they’d be gone before he took office, when the likes of Hasan Nasrallah have been around for decades. Fool me once, as they...

The most interesting thing about Henry Kissinger’s analysis and rescue plan for American foreign policy, A Path Out of the Middle East Collapse, is the how little hope and optimism it excited. Few appear to regard the article’s recommendations as feasible, and it has been received with the passivity air of a beaten boxer hoping only for a rematch. This fatalism is especially depressing in the light of Kissinger’s diagnosis that Obama has basically unwound every foreign policy achievement of the last 40 years. His considered belief that an outside chance of survival of the American position is still possible...

During an appearance on CNN’s Reliable Sources Sunday, veteran journalist Carl Bernstein trashed the Benghazi committee ahead of Hillary Clinton’s testimony and insisted the Democrat will “murder them because it has been a witch hunt. It has been partisan. It's great opportunity for her.” Bernstein also praised Clinton’s debate performance as “her greatest moment in this campaign which has been a disaster for her up until the debate” but ultimately admitted “I don't think that a reset button was successfully hit. We're still back to these basic questions about her truthfulness about the server, the foundation, about the FBI investigation.”

This past Sunday night I decided to watch some war movies, first “The Thin Red Line” and after that it was “American Sniper.” One of my favorite lines in the movie “American Sniper” is the dinner scene when Daddy Kyle explains that there are three types of people – sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. The statement surrounded a young Chris Kyle coming to the rescue of his younger brother, who was being beaten up by a schoolyard bully. When I think about the three types of people, it relates exactly to the current geopolitical situation we are facing. It is a...

There’s an illness sweeping the country and even the White House has succumbed to it: No coherent identityitis. In the way that the media highlights and frames mass shootings as a sort of ghoulish entertainment and ignores far more serious events, you might have missed the connection between the shootings in Oregon and Obama’s conduct this week. There’s a great deal of commonality between those murders and the disaster in the Middle East that Obama touched off with his ridiculous Arab Spring and Iran deal, a disaster that certainly has resulted in many more deaths and holds out the terrible...

President Obama applies the same principles abroad that he does at home. At home President Obama is well known for his preference for perceived parity over liberty. Most of his domestic agenda — Obamacare, executive-order amnesties, open borders, near-zero interest rates, quantitative easing, the piling up of $9 trillion in new debt, tax hikes, more regulations — is apparently aimed at shifting power and capital away from the upper middle class to the lower classes. From Obama’s first appearance on the national scene, his rhetoric has been directed against those whom he perceives as the inordinately privileged — much more...

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson says Islam is antithetical to the Constitution, and he doesn't believe that a Muslim should be elected president. Carson, a devout Christian, says a president's faith should matter to voters if it runs counter to the values and principles of America. Responding to a question during an interview broadcast Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," he described the Islamic faith as inconsistent with the Constitution. "I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation," Carson said. "I absolutely would not agree with that."[snip] Carson's comments came amid lingering fallout over...

Last night President Obama hosted a dinner of "foreign policy experts" to get advice about his ISIS plans. Among the guests were Sandy Berger, a man who got caught stealing federal documents; Strobe Talbott a man whose employer receives major funding from the terrorist-funding government of Qatar, and Zbigniew Brzezinski a man who was involved in creating both the Islamist state of Iran and the Taliban....Samuel R. Berger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, advised Democratic presidents during foreign crises: Mr. Berger, while Bill Clinton was weighing airstrikes in Bosnia and Kosovo; Mr. Brzezinski, while Jimmy Carter was dealing with the Iran hostage...

Donald Trump found himself briefly cornered during a call-in radio interview on Thursday. The presidential candidate was a guest on the The Hugh Hewitt Show when conservative host Hugh Hewitt began examining the real estate magnate’s foreign policy chops. Trump seemed to know something was coming, as Hewitt has a nose for generating news (most recently by asking Republican candidates if they would attend a gay wedding), but it was not a flattering exchange for Trump, who confessed to gaping holes in his foreign policy understanding. Trump managed to emerge only slightly bloodied from the interview and the damage was...