Free Republic

He’s the liberal Bob Dole, the looser Mitt Romney, the supposedly safe bet who’s owed a shot. It didn’t come to me right away, but finally I recognized the model for Joe Biden’s unusual campaign, the former president whose pitch Biden’s most closely resembles: George W. Bush. I’m referring to Bush’s first presidential bid, in 2000, which is remembered mostly for its surreal climax: the seesawing returns on election night, the Florida recount, the Supreme Court ruling that effectively decided the contest in his favor. To the limited extent that political junkies recall his slogans and stump speeches, the phrase...

Whatever his wobbles, Joe Biden has, from the start of his presidential campaign, got one thing exactly right: The 2020 election is a battle for the soul of America. That’s not just a pretty slogan. It’s the stomach-knotting truth — and it’s the frame he should use for choosing his running mate. It’s why he should pick Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois. She’s a paragon of the values that Donald Trump, for all his practice as a performer, can’t even pantomime. She’s best described by words that are musty relics in his venal and vainglorious circle: “sacrifice,” “honour,” “humility.” More...

Curtis Sittenfeld likes to imagine the sex lives of presidents.(snip) She does it again in “Rodham,” her new novel, to be published on May 19. I won’t soon forget the scene in which Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham distract themselves while driving through Arkansas in a way that redefines “joy ride.” “Please don’t get pulled over,” Hillary cautions him. Did this happen? Who knows? The fascination of the first third of “Rodham” is its weave of history and hypothesis as it chronicles the initial meeting of Bill and Hillary at Yale Law School, their courtship and her migration to Arkansas...

Stop talking so much about the America that he’s destroying. Save your breath for the America you want to create. Surprise, surprise: Donald Trump has no bottom. Just when you think he has sunk as low as he can, he stages a rally like that atrocity in North Carolina on Wednesday night and sinks lower. But the key takeaway isn’t that he’s a demagogue or a racist: These were facts put into evidence long ago. It’s that Democrats can’t afford to take unnecessary risks, dream deferrable dreams and engage in avoidable distractions as they set about the urgent work of...

Pete and Chasten Buttigieg celebrated their first wedding anniversary on Sunday. You know this if you’re among Pete’s roughly 1.1 million Twitter followers or Chasten’s 340,000, because they traded sweetly effusive missives, as they frequently do. Pete gushed: “One year ago I married the love of my life. I’m so thankful I found you, Chasten, and can’t wait to spend the rest of our life together.” Chasten posted pictures of the two of them with their arms around each other, which he introduced by writing that he was on his way “to find this cute guy on the trail. Can’t...

Once again we have a member of the arrogant elite media promoting the idea that President Donald Trump is some sort of simpleton. This idea continues to be promoted despite the fact that he had the smarts to not only win the GOP nomination in 2016 against a crowded field but also beat that genius Hillary Clinton in the general election despite the big-brained press constantly repeating that Trump had no path to 270 electoral votes. The latest iteration of Trump-as-idiot came to us on CNN's New Day. On Wednesday, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni claimed that Trump does...

A decision about whether to prosecute Mr. Craig, who was White House counsel for President Barack Obama during his first year in office, is expected in the coming weeks, people familiar with the case said. The investigation centers on whether Mr. Craig should have disclosed work he did in 2012 — while he was a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom — on behalf of the Russia-aligned government of Viktor F. Yanukovych, then the president of Ukraine. The work was steered to Mr. Craig by Paul Manafort, who was then a political consultant collecting millions of dollars from...

The college admissions scandal: finally, a big story which the MSM can't pin to President Trump. But not so fast, my friend! Where there's a will to trash Trump, there's a way. And so it was that this morning, CNN, with a big assist from New York Times columnist and CNN contributor Frank Bruni, found a way to tie the Trump family to the admissions scandal. On New Day, Bruni suggested that a donation to Harvard made by Jared Kushner's father was not "morally different" from the crimes committed in the college admissions scandal. Right. Other than the Kushner donation...

Ina Garten plans to cook up something special, should she ever have the opportunity to host some of Washington's top politicians. The Food Network's "Barefoot Contessa" star was asked by New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni what she would serve political figures. For Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, Garten would prepare lobster macaroni and cheese. For Senate hopeful Rep. Beto O'Rourke, D-Texas, an avowed BBQ lover, she would serve pulled pork shoulder with maple beans, cornbread, and a kale salad. Former Vice President Joe Biden would receive "something fun, like a lobster and clambake," Garten said. And President Trump? "A...

His fight for Brett Kavanaugh completed his transformation into Donald Trump’s slobbering manservant. The battle over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was an especially ugly episode of a reality-show presidency that degrades almost everyone swept up in it, and many characters stagger away from it looking worse than ever. That’s Senator Lindsey Graham you see at the head of the pack. That’s Graham you hear talking and talking and talking some more, in committee rooms and on stages and before the television cameras that he rushes to the way a toddler chases soap bubbles. His words are whichever...

Dear Robert De Niro, Samantha Bee and other Trump haters: I get that you’re angry. I’m angry, too. But anger isn’t a strategy. Sometimes it’s a trap. When you find yourself spewing four-letter words, you’ve fallen into it. You’ve chosen cheap theatrics over the long game, catharsis over cunning. You think you’re raising your fist when you’re really raising a white flag. You’re right that Donald Trump is a dangerous and deeply offensive man, and that restraining and containing him are urgent business. You’re wrong about how to go about doing that, or at least you’re letting your emotions get...

Imagine for a moment that Robert Mueller was never pressed into service as a special counsel and wasn’t a household name. Imagine that there had never been any prompt for his investigation — that Donald Trump hadn’t blown all those kisses at Vladimir Putin, that the stooges and grifters around Trump hadn’t swooned at the prospect of sucking on Mother Russia’s teat, or that there’d been no offer of milk in the first place. What would we be focusing on right now? Maybe the just-published Politico report of Trump’s deliberate, cavalier use of a cellphone that doesn’t have strict security...

The national media’s relationship with White House press secretary Sarah Sanders has taken on a new tension over the last month, as journalists and news commentators have grown more and more personal in their hostility toward the Trump administration’s top spokeswoman.Several high-profile columnists and writers have torn into Sanders over the last few weeks to mock her appearance, the way she talks, and most recently, an alleged disdain she showed the press by asking them at a briefing this week to say why they are thankful this holiday season. “Sanders’s sudden shift from press secretary to minister’s daughter a few...

Frank Drebin would be so proud of his namesake . . . It was one of those classic “nothing to see here, move along” moments. On today’s Morning Joe, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, saying that there was no new terrain broached in FBI Director James Comey’s letter of this past Friday, claimed “it won’t move people away from” voting for Hillary Clinton. Bruni also praised the “incredibly rapid and thorough mobilization of the Clinton campaign and their allies” in getting headlines to mention Comey as much as Clinton, and to question whether the FBI Director did the right...

Was New York Times columnist Frank Bruni suggesting there could be civil unrest if Donald Trump loses big and bitterly? That seemed a likely implication of his comments on today’s Morning Joe. Bruni said his “fear” is: “what if he goes down big and goes down bitterly? I really worry about the aftermath. I worry about November 9th and forward in terms of what’s been stirred up.” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson tried to soothe poor Frank’s fears: “We survived Bush-Gore 2000, we made it through that just fine and I think we’ll make it through post-Trump just fine, too.”...

We reported yesterday on Joe Scarborough’s statement that Republicans, conservatives and so-called right-wing bloggers had been contacting him to ask about Donald Trump’s “mental health.” Scarborough himself called Trump “unhinged.” Joe took things a significant step farther on today’s Morning Joe, saying that Republicans have been contacting him, asking themselves “is Donald Trump a sociopath?” Scarborough was careful to state “I didn’t say this, but this is what everybody is saying.” Scarborough dropped the s-word in the context of hammering Ari Fleischer, former press secretary to President George W., over his lesser-of-two-evils support of Trump. View the video here.

IF your very candidacy and identity rest on your supposed talent for victory, can you survive a defeat? Can you continue to call yourself a winner if you’ve been a loser — and if “loser” is your favorite way of closing the book on someone, your final word, the workhorse in your brimming lexicon of slurs, exiting your mouth so reflexively that it’s essentially your exhalation, your carbon dioxide: “loser,” “loser,” “loser.” Donald Trump has a problem that the other candidates for the Republican nomination don’t. He’s put an obstacle in his path that they haven’t. He doesn’t merely assert...

MATH was never my strongest subject, so maybe I'm just not crunching the numbers right. But the more I stare at them, the less sense Marco Rubio makes. Rubio as the front-runner, I mean. As the probable Republican nominee. According to odds makers and prediction markets, he's the best bet. According to many commentators, too....

Political endorsements don’t matter like they used to. In the age of twitter, cable news, and the blogs, people depend less and less on other so-called thought leaders to tell them what to think. Less and less does anyone really care what leading figures – even those with huge and recent impacts on GOP history like George W. Bush – think about who they should vote for.There’s a different kind of endorsement that matters quite a lot, however, and that is the kind of unintentional endorsement that Congressional leaders have given Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). Republican voters are angry...

Death of a Salesman's Willy Loman was a guy "out there in the blue riding on a smile and a shoeshine." President Obama sees ISIS as Willy's bad mirror image, dismissing the terror group as guys with "conventional weapons and good social media." On today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough blasted Obama's dangerous insouciance, calling it "staggering to our allies. It is staggering to people like Frank Bruni, a liberal columnist. It is staggering to Diane Feinstein, liberal Democrats. It is staggering to the world. The president's in a bubble by himself, saying that these are just bad guys with guns...