Free Republic

Historically, the Clintons have proved to be politically indestructible. To paraphrase the movie Aliens, to truly destroy the Clinton-Industrial Complex, you’d have to nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. Given that alone, I doubt that the unfolding controversy over Hillary’s e-mail schemes spells her doom. The basic details are as follows: In 2009, a week before she started her job as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had a personal Internet server registered at her home address. She then used her own domain name, “clintonemail.com,” to conduct all of her business — for the State Department,...

Historically, the Clintons have proved to be politically indestructible. To paraphrase the movie "Aliens," to truly destroy the Clinton Industrial Complex, you'd have to nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. Given that alone, I doubt that the unfolding controversy over Hillary's email schemes spells her doom. The basic details are as follows: In 2009, a week before she started her job as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had a personal Internet server registered at her home address. She then used her own domain name, "clintonemail.com," to conduct all of her business -- for the State...

By now everyone knows about his transgressions. If even only some of the reports are true, Brian Williams is a serial embellisher, a self-aggrandizing fabulist. No doubt everyone knows somebody like this, and if you don't it's probably because you're that guy. But Williams' case is special. This isn't some sad Willy Loman at the end of the bar who needs to invent impressive stories about himself. If anything, he needed to not tell such stories, given that he reportedly makes more than $10 million a year to be a trusted name in news. Yet he couldn't stop himself. "To...

The president’s comparison of Christianity to radical Islam defies logic. On Tuesday, the so-called Islamic State released a slickly produced video showing a Jordanian pilot being burned alive in a steel cage. On Wednesday, the United Nations issued a report detailing various “mass executions of boys, as well as reports of beheadings, crucifixions of children, and burying children alive” at the hands of the Islamic State. And on Thursday, President Obama seized the opportunity of the National Prayer Breakfast to forthrightly criticize the “terrible deeds” . . . committed “in the name of Christ.” “Humanity has been grappling with these...

On Tuesday, the so-called Islamic State released a slickly produced video showing a Jordanian pilot being burned alive in a steel cage. On Wednesday, the United Nations issued a report detailing various "mass executions of boys, as well as reports of beheadings, crucifixions of children and burying children alive" at the hands of the Islamic State. And on Thursday, President Obama seized the opportunity of the National Prayer Breakfast to forthrightly criticize the "terrible deeds" ... committed "in the name of Christ." "Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history," Obama said, referring to the ennobling aspects of...

Could this argument be any dumber? The Obama administration has forced America and much of the world into a debate no one wanted or needed. Namely, does Islamic terrorism have anything to do with Islam. This debate is different than the much-coveted "national conversation on race" that politicians so often call for (usually as a way to duck having it), because that is a conversation at least some people want. The White House doesn't want a conversation about Islam and terrorism. White House spokesman Josh Earnest says, "We have chosen not to use that label [of radical Islam] because it...

There’s an old joke in the newspaper business, now immortal on the Internet: “The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don’t really understand the New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie-chart format. . . . The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to...

There's an old joke in the newspaper business, now immortal on the Internet: "The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand the New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie chart format. ... The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run...

Jonathan Gruber should have been Time's Person of the Year. The magazine gave it to the "Ebola Fighters" instead. Good for them; they're doing God's work. Still, Gruber would have been better. Time's Person of the Year designation has lost a lot of its stature over recent years. Part of its decline can probably be attributed to the fact that it's come to be seen as an honorific. It was originally conceived to recognize the person who, "for better or for worse ... has done the most to influence the events of the year." So Adolf Hitler (1938) and Josef...

Reasonable people can disagree on whether racism was involved in the tragic death of Eric Garner. My own suspicion is that this misfortune could have transpired just as easily with a white man resisting arrest and/or a black cop choking him. And even though lots of people don't want to hear it, reasonable can disagree on whether illegally excessive force was to blame. Personally, watching the ubiquitous video of Garner's arrest, it looks like excessive force to me. But the simple fact is that a Staten Island grand jury saw evidence that led it to conclude otherwise. People should at...

For a long time I resisted the word “torture” when discussing the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used against high-value captives in the War on Terror. I don’t think I can do that anymore. The report put out by Dianne Feinstein and her fellow Democrats may be partisan, one-sided, tendentious, and “full of crap,” as Dick Cheney put it the other night on Special Report with Bret Baier. But even the selective use and misuse of facts doesn’t change their status as facts. What some of these detainees went through pretty obviously amounted to torture. You can call it “psychological torture” or...

Reasonable people can disagree on whether racism was involved in the tragic death of Eric Garner. My own suspicion is that this misfortune could have transpired just as easily with a white man resisting arrest and/or a black cop choking him. And even though lots of people don’t want to hear it, reasonable people can disagree on whether illegally excessive force was to blame. Personally, watching the ubiquitous video of Garner’s arrest, it looks like excessive force to me. But the simple fact is that a Staten Island grand jury saw evidence that led it to conclude otherwise. People should...

For those who don't know, in Internet parlance, trolling is an effort to elicit outrage from a specific group or the public generally. As the always useful -- but not always G-rated, or spell-checked -- Urban Dictionary explains, "Trolling requires deceiving [sic]; any trolling that doesn't involve decieving [sic] someone isn't trolling at all; it's just stupid." (Pro tip: When spelling "deceiving," remember it's "i before e except after c.") The definition continues: "As such, your victim must not know that you are trolling; if he does, you are an unsuccesful [sic] troll. I don't like the president's executive action...

We know Barack Obama is good at least one thing -- getting Barack Obama elected president of the United States. How good he is at being president of the United States is a subject of considerable debate. A less debatable proposition: He is just plain awful at running a political party. People often forget that among the many formal roles the president has -- commander in chief, first diplomat, etc. -- he is also the leader of his own party. And in that role, he stinks. It wasn't supposed to be like this. In 2008, Obama was supposed to herald...

Reader (unless you’re the kind of chickens**t who calls people “chickens**t” anonymously), Obama fatigue is setting in. Indeed, I’ve gone from Obama fatigue through full-on Obama Epstein-Barr to end-stage Obama narcolepsy. I hear him talking, or hear some MSNBC-type rhapsodizing about how misunderstood he is, and I start dozing off like a truck driver who took the drowsy-formula Nyquil by mistake. “Gotta stay awake! This is my job!” But then 20 seconds later, Jonathan Alter starts telling me how misunderstood the president is, and suddenly orange traffic cones are bouncing off my truck’s grill as I somnolently drift into a...

"Now let's make two things clear: ISIL is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL's victims have been Muslim. And ISIL is certainly not a state." -- President Barack Obama in his address to the nation on Wednesday. About the second point reasonable people can quibble. The terrorist army that calls itself the Islamic State is certainly trying to build a state -- and not just a state, but a super state or caliphate. They're not there yet; their delivery of social services seems spotty at best, though they do collect taxes...

In yesterday’s G-File, I wrote about Obama’s tendency to insist that he has done everything right. Failures are always the result of people or institutions not pulling their weight the way he does. An excerpt: At the press conference, the president made no mention of this in his prepared remarks about the Africa summit, which he read aloud with all of the passion of a DMV bureaucrat explaining the different methods of payment for a parking ticket. He then took questions. Chris Jansing of NBC asked whether the sanctions against Russia were working. With his customary logic-chopping defensiveness, the president...

Conservatives need to get over their insecurities about not being cool in the eyes of liberals. ear Reader (including the many new anti-Semitic and just plain bat-guano crazy people who’ve wandered into my life in recent days), Last night I said on Twitter: Forgetting may not be the right word. Though if this was the Soviet Union, teams of fat-fingered bureaucrats would be airbrushing his likeness from all official records. In case you’re not up to speed, let’s recap. It’s really a wonderful, feel-good story for the whole family. In the Halbig decision this week, the court ruled that according...

You wouldn't think, five years into the Obama presidency, that so many liberal Americans wouldn't like America. A new Pew survey found that 44 percent of Americans don't often feel pride in being an American, and only 28 percent said that America is the greatest country in the world. Respondents who "often feel proud to be American" were overwhelmingly conservative (from 72 percent to 81 percent depending on the kind of conservative). A majority (60 percent) of "solid liberals" said they don't often feel proud to be an American. The polling data only proves what has been obvious for...

It's a fact of human nature that it's easier to talk about who's to blame for a problem than it is to figure out what to do about the problem. Case in point: There's a near-riot in liberal circles over the very idea that supporters of the Iraq War should even be allowed to criticize the president's handling of the current Middle East crisis, never mind offer advice on how to proceed. The Atlantic's James Fallows says Dick Cheney and company "have earned the right not to be listened to." Slate magazine's Jamelle Bouie says that prominent public intellectuals...