Free Republic

We’ve recently brought to your attention two instances of nebulous language: the comments of retired General Wesley Clark about putting extremists in internment camps, and the new order making parts of our immigration naturalization oath optional for certain “religious” groups. Words have meaning, and when they’re not specific, they’re left to interpretation. The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has demonstrated such by redefining the taxing authority of the Congress, as well as what a State means when it comes to the Affordable Care Act. And now we have yet another example of dangerously nebulous language emanating from Capitol...

On Monday, President Obama spoke about his new strategy to take on the terrorist entity Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In doing so, he explained that the battle against that terrorist group — a group he had once termed "JV" — would amount to a "generational struggle." Why would defeating a ragtag army of primitives take generations? Because, Obama explained, "This is not simply a military effort. Ideologies are not defeated by guns. They're defeated with better ideas." To cap off this airsickness bag of gobbledygook, Obama then concluded, "We will never be at war with Islam." So let's...

I started the day on Bill Bennett's radio show, which is always fun. Jonah Goldberg was on before me, and advanced the proposition, after the Supreme Court's almighty constitutional bender last week, that it wasn't so bad; conservatives who just pottered around in their own world and tended to their families would still be able to lead lives largely unbattered by the forces of "progress". A few minutes later, one of Bill's listeners, Claudine, came on and said that's what Germans reckoned in the 1930s: just keep your head down and the storm will pass. How'd that work out? Claudine...

If Governor Nikki Haley thinks that removing a flag from a capitol building will do anything to alleviate the racial hatred fomented by Barack Obama over the past several years, and the Left throughout the country's history, she is sadly mistaken. Not only Governor Haley, but every conservative thinker who follows her lead have fallen into the web of deceit that the Left always uses to entrap the gullible. I recall over the years having seen white supremacists with American flags flying. Their position is that America is being taken away from them by foreigners and people who had no...

Scott Walker, in hot pursuit of the Republican nomination for president, knows no fear of sacred cows. He is attempting to reform the concept of permanent faculty appointments at Wisconsin’s publicly financed universities. The governor wants to repeat his earlier surprising victory in which a conservative chief executive in a very blue state took on the increasingly powerful and increasingly political teachers’ unions, and trimmed their empty sails. Mr. Walker’s successful campaign to put a rein on the teachers’ unions — to eliminate the obvious corruption of unions contributing to politicians’ campaigns and getting in return raises in salaries —...

This month, Air Force, the Royal Australian Air Force News magazine, celebrates the daring role of Operation Jericho by its valiant air force personnel during WWII. Mosquito aircrafts were dispatched despite bad weather in order to breach walls of a Nazi prison allowing French resistance to escape. Compromised British Intelligence officers were amongst the prisoners urging accordingly. On their return home, several pilots were shot down by the Luftwaffe, while many of those escaping were killed. These are the histories of bravery clashing with ideologies the like of Hitler. Nowadays “liberation theologies” competing for recognition against historical record for political...

London (AFP) - British Prime Minister David Cameron was to announce new laws to combat "poisonous Islamist ideology" Wednesday in his first major policy announcement since winning last week's general election. His centre-right Conservative government is to include a new law to "defeat extremism" in its legislative programme which will be announced to parliament by Queen Elizabeth II on May 27. Britain's strategy on Islamist extremism has been in the spotlight for months since Islamic State (IS) executioner "Jihadi John" was identified as Mohammed Emwazi from London and a string of young people left Britain to fight for the IS...

Sen. Ted Cruz, who recently announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential ticket, thinks, like many conservatives, global warming isn’t happening. As he said on Seth Meyers’ talk show on March 16, “Satellite data demonstrate for the last 17 years there’s been zero warming, none whatsoever.” It’s no surprise that Cruz picked that figure: 17 years ago was 1998, an “El Nino” year, when global temperatures were artificially elevated after which they returned to their normal gradually increasing rate. When you look at all the data published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (not just the cherry-picked data that...

Leftism [including all forms of collectivism] is a juvenile mentality in which the adherents want what they want and cannot be troubled with limitations and consequences. They think that their unworkable ideas will work if everyone believes in them. Given that it is essentially a belief system that is not amenable to logic, reason or evidence, it is necessarily dogmatic. Those who disagree are a threat; the mere existence of contrary thoughts cannot be tolerated and must be quashed at all costs. And, oddly enough, is a closely related cadre of religious dogmatists who, in their infantile mentality, blasphemously posits...

Wednesday, April 01, 2015 This Culture War We're In Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog How are wars won? To win a war you don't need to kill every soldier on the other side. What you need to do is destroy the other army as an organized force. You destroy the ability of the officers to command and the morale of the men. You destroy their perception of the worth of their side and of their own self-worth. All wars are culture wars. To win you must destroy the values of the other side. (That is one...

A friend sent me a link to a newspaper column celebrating the supposed ascendance of libertarianism among the hoi polloi. “It is clear,” the author wrote, “that there are certain areas where an increasing portion of Americans are adapting more libertarian views and simply want the government to leave them alone and allow them to freely live their lives.” He cited as examples same-sex marriage and drug legalization. “People have generally come to the conclusion,” he asserted, “that they don’t really care to whom one is attracted or what consenting adults do behind closed doors.” He also predicted that “the...

So I was watching Glee the other day (yes I watch Glee, okay?!), and man has that show jumped the shark. It’s frustrating, because Glee went down in flames the way a lot of good shows do: it got too busy constructing a leftist fantasyland to tell a decent story. It’s another victim of what I like to call “liberal backslide.”Bear with me here for a second. I realize Glee was never an elegant allegory of fiscal conservatism. And no one could claim that it ever had an ironclad grip on reality. The show takes place in an underfunded Ohio...

I am no longer a Republican. John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and their Democrat-lite, RINO Republican establishment have seen to that. They have betrayed their own constituents. They have actively turned against the American people – the very voters who granted them power to do good. Even before the gavel has sounded on the Republican-led 114th Congress, these treacherous cowards shamelessly, eagerly, it seems, squandered perhaps the one opportunity they had to stop, in his tracks, America's first cultural Marxist, anti-American, palpably evil president. If ever there were, there can no longer be any doubt. Barack Obama is bent on turning...

How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a...

By savagely attacking and murdering writers and cartoonists as well as Jewish shoppers, French Islamists clarified something that many in the West have deceived themselves about: that the war we are engaged in is a war of ideas. Islamists have once again reminded us that freedom itself is their target. This discomfits the left. They prefer to pretend that Islamist violence (when they acknowledge it at all) springs from unemployment, poverty or, most frequently, colonial oppression. Most leftists, and some on the libertarian right, believe that American responses to Islamists' attacks -- ranging from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan...

Howard Dean, who is thought to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, told reporters the other day that he supports our policy of using drones to kill people (and all those who happen to be near them) without warning. He also has no objection to the National Security Agency listening to his phone calls and monitoring his email.Donny Deutsch, the reliable voice of the left on "Morning Joe," told TV viewers that he supports the CIA’s torture activities – recently revealed in a Senate committee report.These views are very different from what one typically finds in the unsigned...

All the news that fits the desired narrative, and none other, shall be reported by the legitimate "news" media.On February 11, 2013 Vice President Biden said that he and Obama are "counting on...legitimate news media" to help in their gun control efforts. He said he knew people would continue to "misrepresent" the positions taken by himself and Obama, but that "legitimate news media" would cover them in a way that's helpful to the administration. In this post, I use the term "legitimate 'news' media" in the same sense that Biden apparently did. I have been reading Sharyl Attkisson's November 2014 book Stonewalled. Its thesis...

Barack Obama had a choice between liberalism and the Democratic Party. He chose the latter and it cost him dearly. Liberalism, as an ideology, insists that government can do good and great things for the people and the world, if the people running the government are smart liberals. The Democratic Party says the exact same thing. But liberalism is an ideal, while the Democratic Party is that ideal's representative here in the real world, and in the real world political parties disappoint. Just to be clear -- and to avoid a lot of "Oh, yeah? What about Republicans?!" responses --...

Lauren Squires, a sociolinguistic professor at OSU, is distressed by the success of the "Word Crimes" parody from Weird Al Yankovic. Professor Squires tut-tutted, “Many linguists are shaking their heads and feeling a little hopeless about what the public enthusiasm about it represents: a society where largely trivial, largely arbitrary standards of linguistic correctness are heavily privileged, and people feel justified in attacking those who don’t do things the ‘correct’ way.” In his highly entertaining video, Weird Al does not hesitate to insult people who use bad grammar. The professor thinks that Weird Al’s attitude “raises deep and long-standing questions...

Palestinian-Jordanian politician Muhammad Bayoudh Al-Tamimi recently defended ISIS, saying that its doctrine "stems from the Quran and the Sunna." The Syrian soldiers recently killed at the Tabqa airbase "deserved to be slaughtered 100,000 times over," said Al-Tamimi, a member of the Jordanian Umma movement. According to Internet reports, the show was not broadcast by the Jordanian ANB TV channel that had produced it, but it was posted on the Internet by ANB TV on August 31, 2014. Interviewer: What is our position, here in Jordan, with regard to ISIS and the ISIS ideology? [...] Muhammad Bayoudh Al-Tamimi: I reject the...