Free Republic

Sure, Obama probably didn’t order the IRS to discriminate. But he set the tone. By Jonah Goldberg Of course the president deserves some of the blame. Yes, it’s extremely unlikely he ordered the IRS to discriminate against tea-party, pro-life, or Jewish groups opposed to his agenda (though why anyone should take his word for it is beyond me). And his outrage now — however convenient — is appreciated. But when people he views as his “enemies” complained about a politicized IRS, what did he do? Nothing.

Bad Faith and Benghazi: Hillary Clinton’s “whatever” defense falls flat. By Jonah Goldberg Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?” That was how then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously brushed off the question of when she knew that the attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11 that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were, in fact, a terrorist assault and not a “protest” of an anti-Islam video that...

If abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell is found guilty of homicide, he will be unique among murderers-for-hire: He set his fees based on weight. "The bigger the baby, the more he charged," a grand jury explained. It recommended he be charged with eight counts of murder -- one patient, seven babies. Despite what amounted to a blackout at many media outlets until last week, you've probably now heard at least some of the details. According to the grand jury report, Gosnell's Philadelphia "clinic" was a filthy abattoir. It stunk of urine. Flea-ridden cats defecated freely, including in procedure rooms. Fetuses...

"What we've learned through the course of this program is that this is really not a sensible way for the healthcare system to be run." That was Gary Cohen, director of the Department of Health and Human Services' Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, talking. He was specifically responding to the apparently surprising need to halt enrollments in a program designed as a temporary bridge for people with preexisting conditions who couldn't wait until the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) fully kicks in next year. The program was allocated $5 billion, but some estimate it will take $40 billion...

I’ve been out of pocket, so I missed most of the hullabaloo about Reverend Luis León’s indefensible Easter sermon at St. John’s Episcopal Church in front of the Obama family. Among his comments he said the “religious Right” wants “blacks to be back in the back of the bus, for women to be back in the kitchen, for gays to be in the closet, and for immigrants to be on their side of the border.” Once you get beyond the nasty, clichéd and divisive insinuations about conservatives being racists and the basic inappropriateness of the whole spectacle, it seems to...

Just because things can be put on the same list doesn't mean they are necessarily similar. My attic contains within it thousands of comic books, an inflatable bed, some jigsaw puzzles, some family pictures and a "Frampton Comes Alive!" album. These things are, roughly speaking, in the same location, but they're hardly of equal value, importance or function. I bring this up for the simple reason that we're hearing a lot about how the GOP must deal with "abortion and gay marriage" as if they are almost the same issue. Well, in my house, I hear about my dog and...

A lot of people in Washington apparently forgot how good Hillary Clinton is at not telling the truth. Wednesday, in her testimony before the Senate and, later, the House, Clinton brilliantly fudged, dodged, and filibustered. Of course, she’s a pro. Clinton was slow-walking depositions, lawyering up, and shifting blame when many of her questioners were still civilians down on the farm. Aided by a ridiculous format, she outfoxed most of the Republicans with ease. Meanwhile, the Democrats, almost uniformly, seemed singularly interested in celebrating Mrs. Clinton as a global diva who somehow manages to carry the burden of her awesomeness...

In the scramble to make the GOP more diverse, a lot of people are looking at Asian Americans, whom many believe are a natural constituency for the party. I would love it if Asian Americans converted en masse to the Republican Party, but the challenge for Republicans is harder than many appreciate. President Obama did spectacularly well with Asian Americans, garnering nearly three-quarters of their vote. This runs counter to a lot of conventional wisdom on both the left and the right. On average, Asian American family income is higher and poverty is lower than it is for non-Latino whites....

I think I owe an apology to George W. Bush. William F. Buckley once noted that he was 19 when the Cold War began at the Yalta conference. The year the Berlin Wall came down, he became a senior citizen. In other words, he explained, anti-communism was a defining feature of conservatism his entire adult life. Domestically, meanwhile, the right was largely a “leave me alone coalition”: Religious and traditional conservatives, overtaxed businessmen, Western libertarians, and others fed up with government social engineering and economic folly. The battle against tyrannical statism abroad only buttressed the domestic antagonism toward well-intentioned and...

RUSH: Folks, I'm gonna give you some advice. For those of you who are faint of heart, for those of you who scare easily, for those of you who... Let’s say you live in St. Louis. In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch today there are two pictures. There's a picture of a compassionate and caring and very attached and very hurting Obama, hugging a New Jerseyan who's lost everything. Right next to it is a picture of Romney in front of a large gathering waving and doing campaign appearances. Of course, the juxtaposition is Romney doesn't care; Obama cares. If you...

It was the Puss in Boots eyes. If you've seen the "Shrek" movies or the spin-off cartoon starring the storybook cat voiced by Antonio Banderas, you know what I'm talking about. Whenever Puss in Boots really needs something from someone, he flashes these enormous kitten eyes that melt anyone in their path. Whenever my daughter really wants something, she tries to lay them on me, and I have to say, "Stop trying to give me the Puss in Boots eyes ... you can't have chocolate cake for dinner." I knew Barack Obama was miserable when he tried to give debate...

Going by the conventional rules of American politics, the Democratic convention this week was an unmitigated disaster. And, going by the same rules, the GOP convention was a disaster, too. So, either the rules of American politics have fundamentally changed, or at least one of the parties is taking an enormous gamble.Since the Nixon years, the GOP has enjoyed a marked advantage over the Democrats at the presidential level. Cultural issues — race, religion, abortion, patriotism — have worked to the Republicans’ advantage. Until Barack Obama’s election in 2008, no Democrat has won the presidency without aggressively adapting to...

It is a real burden not to cite every other paragraph spoken from the stage as a vindication of my book, The Tyranny of Clichés (or, for that matter, Liberal Fascism). Over and over again the Democrats spout, to paraphrase De Tocqueville, clear-but-false ideas. The overarching one of the whole convention: Government is the only thing we all belong to. Such bogus appeals to unity and community as a justification for activist government drive me batty. That’s what Elizabeth Warren’s speech was all about and countless other lesser luminaries as well. Here’s Bill Clinton’s soundbite of the night: “You see,...

Jonah Goldberg’s “Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas” provides a quick, enjoyable, highly readable analysis of the memes employed by progressive argumentation. Repeated often enough, these clichés seemingly have a ring of what faux conservative comic Stephen Colbert would call “truthiness.” Therefore, a field guide such as Goldberg’s is in order to better enable those who would identify and refute such liberal claims that either stall or prevent completely honest and open public policy discourse. Liberals or progressives or what-have-you aren’t the only portion of the political spectrum subjected to Goldberg’s opprobrium. Conservatives also take...

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously remarked that, "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself." I've always liked that quote, but I think it misleads. That two plus two equals four is not a conservative truth or a liberal truth. It's simply the truth. (Moynihan himself recognized this when he even more famously said that people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.) Regardless, it's true that...

"It's a cliché because it's true" goes a cliché. Yet as National Review powerhouse and American Enterprise Institute fellow Jonah Goldberg demonstrates in his new book The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, many of the oft-repeated phrases and dicta utilized by the left are grounded in myth or complete falsehood, which is very appropriate given how the left uses them. For instance, did you know that Marie Antoinette never said, "Let them eat cake"? Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/06/review_the_tyranny_of_cliches_how_liberals_cheat_in_the_war_of_ideas.html#ixzz1zHc85vXY

Why not just cut open a goat and be done with it? In ancient Rome, a special kind of priest called a haruspex would "read" the entrails of sheep to divine the will of the gods, the health of the growing season, or whatever else was weighing on the minds of men. Because animal guts don't, in fact, impart that much information about, say, next year's wheat harvest, the haruspices (called "auspices" in Latin -- from which we get the English word) could pretty much make it up as they went along. The same went for the auguries (priests who...

Jonah Goldberg’s first book was called “Liberal Fascism.” It was a screed, of course, but a clever one. He argued that liberals who routinely denounce extreme conservatives as fascists should take a look in their own backyard, and he wasn’t fooling around: “It is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion.” Goldberg has read around a bit, and he was able to lace his thesis with embarrassing quotations from progressives past who expressed admiration for Italian Fascism, eugenics and other assorted statist atrocities. But his essential point was a simple one: fascists believe in state control of...

Is it time to start talking about the inevitable demise of the Democratic Party? Since the 1990s there's been a thriving cottage industry of doomsaying about the Republican Party. The gold standard of the genre is undoubtedly 2002's "The Emerging Democratic Majority" by Ruy Teixeira and John Judis, which argued that the Democrats were destined to become a majority party because demographic and cultural trends were on their side. The increasing cultural liberalism of professionals, the dramatic growth of Latinos and the increasingly liberal attitudes of (single) women were celebrated by Teixeira and Judis as proof that time was on...

Three generations of this imbecilic progressive talking point are enough. Social Darwinism, a popular topic in the 19th and early 20th centuries,” reported the Associated Press on April 5, “is making its way into modern American politics.” The news peg for the story was President Obama’s claim that the House Republican budget is nothing but “thinly veiled Social Darwinism.” It is, he added, a “Trojan Horse,” hiding within in it “a radical vision” that is “antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity.” To the surprise of no one, the New York Times hailed the “thunderclap of a...

President Obama's re-election largely hinges on his ability to play young voters for suckers -- again -- and whether Mitt Romney will let him. In 2008, Obama won the youth vote by better than a 2-1 margin, 66 percent to 32 percent. Even more impressive, he actually expanded the share of young voters going to the polls by some 3 million. Those extra voters helped tip several swing states. Obama owed his success to being a charming political unknown onto whom young people could project their hopes. His rhetoric was a hipsterized version of Successories for college kids: "Yes, we...

Charlie Sheen was clearly the man of the year. You'll recall that 2011 began with the oafish actor celebrating his own narcotic and sexual crapulence like a victorious gladiator working the crowds. He was egged on by a media with as much decency as the cons on the top tiers of the prison who chant "fresh fish" as the new inmates walk into general pop, their eyes stinging from delousing powder. Sheen succeeded at turning his own debasement into a national pseudo-event by calling the very definition of losing "winning." And that's what 2011 was all about: pretending to be...

Apoorva and Stu talk with the founding editor of National Review Online (and visiting fellow at AEI), Jonah Goldberg. Jonah gives us his take on the Occupy Wall Street protests that have been going on around the country. We also discuss the Republican Bloomberg debate and why Cain is such a “Happy Warrior.”

And now let us recall the "Fable of the Shoes." In his 1973 "Libertarian Manifesto," the late Murray Rothbard argued that the biggest obstacle in the road out of serfdom was "status quo bias." In society, we're accustomed to rapid change. "New products, new life styles, new ideas are often embraced eagerly." Not so with government. When it comes to police or firefighting or sanitation, government must do those things because that's what government has (allegedly) always done. "So identified has the State become in the public mind with the provision of these services," Rothbard laments, "that an attack on...

Look, I am past exhausted talking about liberal media bias. It’s real, we all know it, and people who deny it aren’t even fooling themselves. But some things just have to be pointed out. This morning I watched the first 15 minutes of the Today Show. I don’t particularly love or even like the program, but I find it useful to see what the producers think is the big news of the day. And sometimes Chuck Todd is on, and I like him. If I sound defensive about watching the show it’s only because I am. Anyway, the first ten...

"I think increasingly the American people are going to say to themselves, 'You know what? If a party or a politician is constantly taking the position my-way-or-the-highway, constantly being locked into ideologically rigid positions, that we're going to remember at the polls,'" President Obama said at his Friday news conference. I know everyone is sick of hearing about the debt-limit negotiations. Lord knows I am. When I turn on the news these days, I feel like one of the passengers seated next to Robert Hays in the movie "Airplane!" By the time we get to the phrase "in the out...

Historic

At this point, there’s at least one thing you can’t blame Donald Trump for: being Donald Trump. Like the scorpion in Aesop’s fables that must sting the frog because that’s simply what scorpions do, the world-renowned, self-promoting billionaire clown must tout himself with passion and narcissistic self-regard. It was only a matter of time, for instance, before he came out with his own fragrance: Donald Trump Cologne by Donald Trump Eau De Toilettes (You can find it on Amazon.com. The first of the two customer reviews is from a woman who discovered the scent as it wafted up from the...

And so now we enter the mopey phase of the GOP presidential contest. The gloom takes many forms, but foremost is the fear that the field taking shape might be the one we're stuck with. It's like that feeling you get when you're starving and you go into a restaurant. At first everything on the menu looks great, until you have to make your choice and you realize there's nothing you actually want to eat. There isn't a German word for this sensation, but one that comes close is futterneid -- the envy one feels when somebody orders a better...

Albert Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And so goes the White House with these attacks on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce drummed up by the “professional left’s” blogosphere that it is using foreign donations to finance political advertising. Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer however, had another take on what these attacks are. He said they’re not insane, but desperation of on of the highest degrees. During the Oct. 11 broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Special Report with Bret Baier,” Krauthammer attacked the Obama administration, calling this campaign...

I'm only now getting to Jeffrey Miron's NRO column on why the tea parties should embrace drug legalization. My views on drug legalization are fairly well known to longtime readers (I'm for the decriminalization of pot, against the legalization of hard drugs), and I really don't want to start that debate from scratch again, so let me just say I find some of Miron's familiar points on the merits of the issue stronger than others. But my main objection to his argument is more practical: It's politically absurd. I can totally understand why someone who cares passionately about drug legalization would...

We are taught to believe that ideology is the enemy of free thought. But that's not right. Ideology is a mere checklist of principles and priorities. The real enemy of clear thinking is the script. We think the world is supposed to go by a familiar plot. And when the facts conflict with the script, we edit the facts. So, for instance, David Horowitz is a stock villain on U.S. campuses because he deviates from the standard formula of coddling the usual victims and lionizing the usual heroes. Once a committed left-wing radical, Horowitz now resides on the right. Two...

As I wrote last year, I find it amazing that the "Birthers" are considered more dangerous and evil than the "Truthers." The Birthers believe that an ambitious man who travelled a lot as a kid has concealed the circumstances of his birth so he could be eligible for the presidency. I don't think they've made their case. And, frankly, I'm not sure I'd want them to at this point. Aside from the horror of a Biden presidency, I for one don't yearn for a constitutional crisis. And while I am sure there are more elaborate and crazier versions of Birtherism,...

Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism is now in paperback.Jonah Goldberg has written an important article in Commentary on what he calls the "neo-socialism" of the Obama administration. I like this label. It is both accurate and more palatable than the term "neo-communism" which I have applied to the hard left. But given the twenty-year political partnership between a neo-Communist like Billy Ayers and Obama, and Obama's coterie of Communist Party mentors and allies, it is at bottom a distinction without a difference. Neo-socialists are fellow travelers of neo-Communists and vice-versa. The real division in the modern world is between totalitarians...

I attended the Cincinnati Tax Day Tea Party rally as a speaker. But it was more interesting to be an observer. First, here's what I didn't see. I didn't see a single racist or bigoted sign or hear a single such comment. Nor did I see any evidence of "homegrown fascism." Though in fairness, such things are often in the eye of the beholder, now that dissent has gone from being the highest form of patriotism under George W. Bush to the most common form of racism under Barack Obama. But I did see something a lot of people, on...

Back in September, Tom Friedman, speaking of China, proclaimed that "there is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today." That prompted Jonah Goldberg to call Friedman a "liberal fascist," drawing an example from his seminal book, Liberal Fascism, to demonstrate how Friedman's fawning over the Chi-Coms "is exactly the argument that was made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s." But far from being abashed, Friedman is apparently so enamored of his formulation that he has repeated it virtually verbatim. The Times columnist suffered another bad...

"Victory has a thousand fathers," John F. Kennedy reportedly said, "but defeat is an orphan." By that standard, George W. Bush has won the Iraq war. Last month, Vice President Joe Biden proclaimed on CNN's "Larry King Live" that the peaceful transition to democracy and the (partial) withdrawal of U.S. forces "could be one of the great achievements of this administration." Initially, I ignored Biden's comment because, well, he's Joe Biden. As critical as I may be of the Obama administration, holding it accountable for Biden's mouth seems grotesquely unfair. But then White House spokesman Robert Gibbs defended the vice...

Almost exactly 10 years ago, I boarded a Northwest Airlines plane in Minneapolis. As I started toward my veal-pen seat in steerage, I saw the faces of the preboarded aristocrats in business class. But before I could glare at them with proletarian rage and envy, I heard a loud bang and felt a sharp pain on the top of my head. Everyone looked to see what the sound was; even the two flight attendants chatting like village women around the well broke off their no-doubt-vital conversation. The source of the preflight disturbance? I'd smacked my enormous gourd of a head...

On the last day of 2009, that awful year, I was listening to a report on National Public Radio. Reporter Tamara Keith presented a by now familiar recap of the worst financial and corporate scandals of the decade, from Enron and Martha Stewart to Tyco and Bernie Madoff. It was a depressing slog of greed, venality and theft. When the report was over, "Morning Edition" host Steve Inskeep summarized it with a tart, "the decade in capitalism." I don't want to single out Ins- keep, since he was doing what pretty much the entire media establishment has done, particularly of...

On the last day of 2009, that awful year, I was listening to a report on National Public Radio (yes, I’m a listener). Reporter Tamara Keith presented a by-now-familiar recap of the worst financial and corporate scandals of the decade, from Enron and Martha Stewart to Tyco and Bernie Madoff. It was a depressing slog of greed, venality, and theft. When the report was over, Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep summarized the report with a tart: “The decade in capitalism.” I don’t want to single out Inskeep, since he was doing what pretty much the entire media establishment has done,...

Fire Napolitano [Jonah Goldberg] Understandbly, the White House is trying very hard to get out in front of the would-be Christmas bomber story. The head of the Department of Homeland Security isn't helping. I watched her on three shows and each time she was more annoying, maddening and absurd than the pevious appearance. It is her basic position that the "system worked" because the bureaucrats responded properly after the attack. That the attack was "foiled" by a bad detonator and some civilian passengers is proof, she claims, that her agency is doing everything right. That is just about the dumbest...

On Monday, Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, formally announced that her agency now considers carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant, subject to government regulation. The "finding" comes two years after the Supreme Court ruled that CO2 falls under the EPA's jurisdiction. A day later, an unnamed White House official told Fox's Major Garrett that the message for Congress is clear: "If you don't pass this (cap-and-trade) legislation ... the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area. ... And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it's...

By now you might have heard something about the scandal rocking the climate change industry, though you can be forgiven if you haven't, since it hasn't gotten nearly the coverage it should. Computer hackers broke into the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England and downloaded thousands of e-mails and other documents. The CRU is one of the world's leading global warming data hubs, providing much of the number-crunching to global policymakers on climate change. And, boy, can they crunch numbers. In a long string of embarrassing e-mail exchanges, CRU scientists discuss with friendly outside colleagues,...

I think I've had my fill of moral hypocrisy. We routinely hear stories of evangelical ministers who "mentor" hookers at $500 an hour, "family values" politicians who like the cut of a congressional page's jib, or senators who love to press the flesh, one bathroom stall at a time. And, given the times, we increasingly hear stories about progressive politicians and columnists who -- gasp! -- have bigger carbon footprints than they want the rest of us to have: CO2 emissions for me and not for thee! For shame. The press loves stories of moral hypocrisy. Catching a finger-wagging politician...

'm writing about this for my USA Today column, but the Frank Rich hissy fit is a perfect example of the real story of the election. The story is not that the GOP is self-destructing, it is that the conventional wisdom is being shown to be ludicrous. For some time now Frank Rich, Sam Tanenhaus and countless others (including David Frum) have been arguing that the GOP is a rump party and the only way for it to survive is for it to embrace me-too Republicanism of one flavor or another. The story of all three major races (VA, NJ,...

"When John McCain said we could just 'muddle through' in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and made clear that we must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights," Barack Obama thundered as he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in Denver last year. "John McCain likes to say that he'll follow bin Laden to the gates of Hell. But he won't even go to the cave where he lives." It was a shabby bit of...

If you think American politics have gotten nastier, crueler, and more symbolic over the last 20 years, blame Ted Kennedy.

The fight over health care took the most interesting turn last week. President Obama briefly switched from wonkish frippery about bending cost curves to speaking of faith. Reaching out to progressive faith leaders in two massive conference calls, Obama insisted that God was on his side. Expanding health care fulfills a "core moral and ethical obligation that we look out for one another ... that I am my brother's keeper, my sister's keeper." This would be an easy opportunity to call attention, once again, to the double standards applied to Obama. When President George W. Bush invoked God as his...

Here is video of Jonah Goldberg saying the Veteran's Administration's use of a booklet that urges veterans to consider "whether life is worth living" is similar to the Germans during World War II believing they had the right to "value whether life is worthy of life." The booklet is for use with veterans and urges them to consider whether they are a "financial burden on their family" and asks if they have a hard time getting over the blues. Fox News' Chris Wallace challenged the Assistant Sec. of Veteran's Affairs about the booklet yesterday. . . . . (Watch Video)

Since a bunch of readers want to know where I come down on the great debate of the day, let me start by saying that Rich Lowry is not only a handsome man, but a wise and powerful one. As are all of the editors and others who make my work so enjoyable around here (of course, the womenfolk are lovely, as opposed to handsome). But I guess I'm more in the McCarthy & Steyn camp. As a matter of the finer points of policy discussion, I think the death-panel label is awfully blunt and inexact. But in the arena...