Free Republic

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...