Free Republic

Another Republican has hopped on the impeachment train. After the Mueller report detailed President Trump's failure to take what Michael Gerson calls "a criminal plot by a hostile foreign government" to the FBI, the chief speechwriter for former President George W. Bush writes that "House leaders should lay the groundwork for impeachment." This move strays from politics' usual goals of "partisanship" and "endless fundraising," Gerson continues in his Monday op-ed for The Washington Post, but adds that this choice will "echo across the decades."

Keith Weissman and Steven Rosen Are PhDs and Middle East Experts Who Did Some Lobbying. They Thought They Were Doing What Washington Insiders Always Do. Thomas O’Donnell didn’t reveal his job when he phoned Keith Weissman in 2004 and got the policy analyst’s wife. He says he didn’t want to scare her. When Weissman returned the call and found out O’Donnell was an FBI agent, his first reaction was to attempt a joke: “What did I do?” “I’m sure you didn’t do anything,” O’Donnell told him. He wanted to meet that day, for five or ten minutes, and get Weissman’s...

A surefire ideological Kool-Aid test? Those who think Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was wounded during his hearings have heavily imbibed. Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee set out to prove that Kavanaugh is a mendacious political hack with the strategy of acting like mendacious political hacks. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., offered to sacrifice his political career in a move obviously calculated to serve his political career -- boldly releasing "confidential" committee documents that had already been released and that did nothing to prove Kavanaugh's unfitness. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., hinted darkly at the malignant influence of the Federalist Society...

Columnist Michael Gerson and commentator Amy Holmes are teaming to start a conservative-oriented talk show on PBS... The new show, “In Principle,” will air Friday nights starting April 13. PBS will decide after an eight-week run whether to continue. The hosts plan to interview two guests each show, hoping for an in-depth discussion on issues and their formative political experiences. No guests have been announced yet, but Gershon said he’d like to discuss issues like race, gun control and whether conservatism is the right message for the working class.

When former Bush chief speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote a column for The Washington Post headlined “Cancel this reality show,” it sounded like just another anti-Trump column. Or is Gerson calling for a shutdown of conservative talk radio? It's understandable that establishment Republicans would despise the dynamic of conservative radio talkers trying to yank party leaders to the right. But shutting them down? Does that sound like reasonable moderation?

Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” op-ed columnist for The Washington Post Michael Gerson said it’s time to “confront” GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump and his followers.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post. Since the Islamic State attacks in Paris on November 13, we have seen the development of a new, and strange justification for the Obama administration’s insistent refusal to jettison its manifestly failed strategy of contending with IS specifically and with Islamic terrorism generally.

WASHINGTON -- The relatively rare moments of economic analysis and political outreach in the second Republican debate -- Chris Christie talking about income stagnation, or Marco Rubio lamenting the "millions of people in this country living paycheck to paycheck," or Ben Carson admitting the minimum wage might require increasing and fixing, or Jeb Bush setting out the necessary goal of accelerated economic growth, or John Kasich calling for a "sense of hope, a sense of purpose, a sense of unity" -- only served to highlight the opportunity cost of the Trump summer. Let me recall a little ancient history, from...

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson – President George W. Bush’s top speechwriter from 2001 to 2006 – was hired by the Post in 2007 because he would be “a different kind of conservative” and "an independent voice." Translation: he would slash other people on the right as dishonest, dishonorable, unpatriotic people. He has not attacked talk-show hosts on MSNBC or other leftists this way. In his Friday column, Gerson whacked Ron Paul, Rush Limbaugh, and Mark Levin with these harsh attacks. Mark Levin offered NewsBusters his reaction. Gerson began: A number of libertarians and conservative populists have found data collection...

...First, and most important, is focusing on the economic concerns of working-and middle-class Americans, many of whom now regard the Republican Party as beholden to “millionaires and billionaires” and as wholly out of touch with ordinary Americans. This is a durable impression—witness Bill Clinton’s effective deployment of it more than 20 years ago and its continued resonance during the 2012 campaign when Team Obama portrayed Mitt Romney as a plutocrat who delighted in shutting down factories and moving jobs overseas. Sure enough, in November exit polls, 81 percent of voters said that Barack Obama “cared for people like me”; a...

Since arriving in the Senate in 2011, Rand Paul has been probing here and there for issues of populist resonance. Audit the secretive, sinister Federal Reserve. Rein in those TSA screeners patting down little girls. In each instance, Paul (R-Ky.) has evoked the fear of oppressive government without tipping over into the paranoia of his father’s most dedicated supporters. It has been a diluted, domesticated, decaffeinated version of the ideology that motivated Ron Paul’s presidential races.

WASHINGTON -- When President John Kennedy visited Dallas in November 1963, he was greeted by a full-page newspaper ad accusing him of being a communist fellow traveler. To his wife he observed, "Oh, you know, we're headed into nut country today." The city, according to historian William Manchester, was a "mecca" for "the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry societies." In the hours following Kennedy's assassination, aides assumed a right-wing radical was responsible. When Robert Kennedy informed Jacqueline about Lee Harvey Oswald's leftist background, she felt sick. "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights,"...

When I was a Senate staffer more than a decade ago, Republicans hit on a tactic to advance school choice. They kept narrowing the eligibility standard to cover poorer and poorer families with children in only the most spectacularly failing schools, daring Democrats to vote against the most sympathetic possible group of students. I remember one liberal senator saying in exasperation, "Someday, you are going to make this impossible to oppose." . . .

At their new political high-water mark, Republicans have plenty of reasons to celebrate - and at least one large cause for worry. On Election Day, voters shattered the Obama agenda of expanded public benefits and increased income tax progressivity, leaving the president to reassemble his goals with glue and tape. During this midterm cycle, Republicans became reacquainted with estranged friends: independents, seniors, college-educated voters, working-class voters, rural voters and suburban voters. The Republican Party will benefit from the infusion of diverse, attractive new leaders, including some, such as Florida Sen.-elect Marco Rubio, with Tea Party pedigrees...

For many Republicans, the bright, golden haze of Election Day is marred by a thunderhead on the horizon -- the increasingly erratic political interventions of Sarah Palin. In the past, Palin embodied the populist style of the Tea Party movement while espousing a fairly mainstream Republican ideology. On economic, social and foreign policy, Palin seldom strayed from a simplified, popularized Reaganism. The mama grizzly may have been ferocious, but her talking points came from the Heritage Foundation instead of from darker corners of the right. But this election season has called that perception into question. Palin's endorsement of Christine O'Donnell...

After a series of ineffective public messages -- leaving the political landscape dotted with dry rhetorical wells -- President Obama has hit upon a closing argument. "Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now," he recently told a group of Democratic donors in Massachusetts, "and facts and science and argument (do) not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country is scared." Let's unpack these remarks. Though there is plenty of competition, these are some of the most arrogant words...

WASHINGTON -- Christopher Hitchens -- bald from cancer treatments, speaking between doctor's appointments -- has a special disdain for deathbed religious conversions. Appearing before a group of journalists organized by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public life, he criticized the pressures put on Tom Paine to embrace Christianity and the malicious rumors of faith that followed Charles Darwin's demise. "I've already thought about this a great deal, thanks all the same," he explained. The idea "that you may be terrified" is no reason to "abandon the principles of a lifetime." At this event -- a joint appearance with his...

Former top Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson is a Washington Post columnist, and there is never a better time for right-leaning columnists to lean left than in the last weeks of an election season. (See George Will trashing Sen. George Allen in the last weeks of 2006.) His rant also may have granted Gerson a seat on CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday. Gerson not only denounced Christine O'Donnell as a wacky candidate like Alan Keyes, he denounced "the childish political thought of the Tea Party." He insisted conservatives were like Bolsheviks. Bloggers like Michelle Malkin and talk show hosts like...

With his recent criticisms of Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell on Fox News, Karl Rove kicked up a controversy. His critique of O'Donnell was granular and well-informed. Having worked with Karl for a number of years, I know that he is nothing if not detail-oriented. Rove has taken O'Donnell to task for her checkered financial past, her history of litigiousness and paranoia,...

So the "summer of recovery" swelters on, with Democrats sun-blistered, pestered by bottle flies, sand in their swimsuits, water in their ears. Jobless claims increase, Republicans lead the generic congressional ballot, and George W. Bush is six points more popular than President Obama in "front-line" Democratic districts that are most vulnerable to a Republican takeover. Still, Democrats hug the hope that Obama is really the liberal Ronald Reagan -- but without wit, humor, an explainable ideology or an effective economic plan. Other than that, the resemblance is uncanny. Yet the Republican Party suffers its own difficulty -- an untested ideology...