Free Republic

No, not that personal tragedy. His other personal tragedy. Despite 35 years in the Senate and seven more as VP, this is the very first thing his biggest fans want low-information voters to know about him. I wonder if Biden quietly signed off on this just like he quietly leaked that “do it for Beau” anecdote to Maureen Dowd.But … it’s a good ad, no? However crass you may find this “He’s suffered enough so let’s make him president” campaign pitch, it’s a superb contrast with the RoboClinton. This is exactly the sort of thing the public likes about...

Joe Biden has been making his 2016 deliberations all about his late son since August. Aug. 1, to be exact — the day renowned Hillary Clinton-critic Maureen Dowd published a column that marked a turning point in the presidential speculation.

Joe Biden has been making his 2016 deliberations all about his late son since August. Aug. 1, to be exact — the day renowned Hillary Clinton-critic Maureen Dowd published a column that marked a turning point in the presidential speculation. According to multiple sources, it was Biden himself who talked to her, painting a tragic portrait of a dying son, Beau’s face partially paralyzed, sitting his father down and trying to make him promise to run for president because "the White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values.” It...

IS Hollywood really ready to give a 67-year-old woman a leading role in a big-budget production? Hillary Clinton’s campaign has echoes of various classic movies: “Single White Female,” with Hillary creepily co-opting the identity of the more trendy Elizabeth Warren; “My Fair Lady,” with Hillary sitting meekly and being schooled on how to behave by tyrannical Pygmalions (Iowa voters); “The Usual Suspects,” with Hillary’s hoodlums, Sidney Blumenthal and David Brock, vying to be Keyser Söze; and, of course, “How to Steal a Million,” a caper about a heist plotted by a couple that doesn’t need the money. From a narrative...

Jonathan Chait has joined the liberal choir experiencing buyers remorse for Hillary Rodham Clinton.  Maureen Dowd of the New York Times previously fired two bullets (here and here) at Hillary, first comparing her to Nixon (leading to the affectionate nickname “Grandma Nixon”), then encouraging her to run like a Tumblr Chick (I doubt Hillary has ever visited the site), or as Tina Fey’s “Bitch is the new black.” Chait, ever the liberal shill, blames Hillary’s Fukushima factor on Ol’ Bill. (I almost stopped reading his piece in New York Magazine after the second sentence: [TRIGGER WARNING]  “Jimmy Carter was an ineffective president who became...

Maureen Dowd's Sunday column ostensibly centers on the problem of Hillary's persona being alternatively too masculine or too Chipolte-granny feminine. But in passing, Dowd discharges a major diss in the direction of President Obama. Analyzing lessons learned from 2008, Maureen writes that "Hillary saw the foolishness of acting like a masculine woman defending the Iraq invasion after she fell behind to a feminized man denouncing it." Barack Obama: feminized man. Ouch.

<p>Hillary Clinton made the most anti-climactic announcement in the history of presidential politics today.  She's running for president.  Yawn.  We are looking at a politician with a perfect record:  everything she's touched has ended badly.  Here's for keeping it perfect.</p> <p>I posted the article below this morning on RedState, which got some play on Twitter.  Grandma Nixon is officially in the race.</p>

WHEN my brother Michael was a Senate page, he delivered mail to John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, who had offices across the hall from each other. He recalled that Kennedy never looked up or acknowledged his presence, but Nixon would greet him with a huge smile. “Hi, Mike,” he’d say. “How are you doing? How’s the family?” It seemed a bit counterintuitive, especially since my dad, a D.C. police inspector in charge of Senate security, was a huge Kennedy booster. (The two prominent pictures in our house were of the Mona Lisa and J.F.K.) But after puzzling over it,...

Well, here we are, the ides of March; and needless to say, beware.As every Romanophile knows, today is the day Julius Caesar was done in by his friends and enemies. Hillary should take note of Spurinna’s warning.Because I fear the long knives are coming for her. It now appears that her old boss and his consigliore are behind all of Hill’s current woes. (h/t Larwyn’s Linx)If they’d do it to Rhambo, they’d do it to anybodyBarry promised Bill and Hill to back Hill’s 2016 presidential run if they helped out during the historic 2008 contest. In politics, though, 8 minutes...

"Anarchists?" If only! Let's stipulate that Maureen Dowd's current column is absolutely brutal to Hillary. Riffing off the Republicans' letter to the ayatollah, Dowd deigns to send a letter from "America" explaining the Constitution to Clinton. Dowd denounces Hillary for being "willing to cite your mother's funeral to get sympathy for ill-advisedly deleting 30,000 emails," and describes her as "an annoyed queen, radiating irritation at anyone who tries to hold you accountable." But that won't stop us from holding Dowd accountable for her absurd shot at Republicans, whereby she writes of Hillary exploiting "our fear of the anarchists and haters...

<p>Sarah Palin during an audience question-and-answer session at the "Saturday Night Live" 40th-anniversary special last week.</p> <p>Sarah Palin in 2016?</p> <p>Even she thinks that’s a joke.</p> <p>The former vice-presidential candidate made her final transition to pure celebrity and political punch line on Sunday night, when Lorne Michaels’s “Saturday Night Live” celebrated its 40th birthday with a comic extravaganza that became NBC Entertainment’s top-rated show in more than a decade.</p>

When David Axelrod published his memoir he hoped it would be seen as a respectable political memoir. Naturally, everyone just wants the bitchiest dish.President Obama despises Maureen Dowd—absolutely loathes the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist. He’s annoyed by Mitt Romney. And the president’s messaging guru and top gun, David Axelrod, has little regard for Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s erstwhile chief strategist. Those are a few of the gossipy take-aways from Believer: My Forty Years in Politics, Axelrod’s hotly-anticipated (by political junkies) memoir that goes on sale today. Yet those anecdotes represent just the sort of slicing and dicing of...

Brian Williams is taking a sabbatical until he’s no longer the laughing stock of the internet - this is HUGE! I can tell because even Maureen Dowd can’t seem to find the humor in it. It’s as if she senses something more existential (yes, I said it) is at stake here. It may be starting to dawn on her that the broadcast (and print) journalism franchise is flailing. Like Radio Shack, who continued to hang around providing inferior product and service long after they had lost sight of their objective.Here’s MoDo’s take on the situation: Although Williams’s determination to...

THIS was a bomb that had been ticking for a while. NBC executives were warned a year ago that Brian Williams was constantly inflating his biography. They were flummoxed over why the leading network anchor felt that he needed Hemingwayesque, bullets-whizzing-by flourishes to puff himself up, sometimes to the point where it was a joke in the news division. But the caustic media big shots who once roamed the land were gone, and “there was no one around to pull his chain when he got too over-the-top,” as one NBC News reporter put it.

When Roger Goodell was growing up here, he had the best possible example of moral leadership. His father, a moderate New York Republican appointed by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to Bobby Kennedy’s Senate seat after the assassination, risked his career to come out against the Vietnam War... The two legacies from his dad, Bryan Curtis wrote in Grantland last year, could well be “a measure of his dad’s idealism, his contrarianism, his stubbornness. And I bet we’d also find a kind of defense mechanism that develops when you see your dad destroyed on a public stage. An instinct that makes you...

FORE! Score? And seven trillion rounds ago, our forecaddies brought forth on this continent a new playground, conceived by Robert Trent Jones, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal when it comes to spending as much time on the links as possible — even when it seems totally inappropriate, like moments after making a solemn statement condemning the grisly murder of a 40-year-old American journalist beheaded by ISIL. I know reporters didn’t get a chance to ask questions, but I had to bounce. I had a 1 p.m. tee time at Vineyard Golf Club with Alonzo...

FORE! Score? And seven trillion rounds ago, our forecaddies brought forth on this continent a new playground, conceived by Robert Trent Jones, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal when it comes to spending as much time on the links as possible — even when it seems totally inappropriate, like moments after making a solemn statement condemning the grisly murder of a 40-year-old American journalist beheaded by ISIL. I know reporters didn’t get a chance to ask questions, but I had to bounce. I had a 1 p.m. tee time at Vineyard Golf Club with Alonzo...

WASHINGTON — Affectations can be dangerous, as Gertrude Stein said. When Barack Obama first ran for president, he theatrically cast himself as the man alone on the stage. From his address in Berlin to his acceptance speech in Chicago, he eschewed ornaments and other politicians, conveying the sense that he was above the grubby political scene, unearthly and apart. He began “Dreams From My Father” with a description of his time living on the Upper East Side while he was a student at Columbia, savoring his lone-wolf existence. He was, he wrote, “prone to see other people as unnecessary distractions.”...

Maureen Dowd travelled to Colorado in January, ate a bit too much of a marijuana-laced chocolate bar and proceeded to have a Valley-of-the-Dolls-style meltdown in her hotel room. Here's how she describes the experience in her Wednesday New York Times column: "I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn't move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the...

In more cultured circles, Maureen Dowd is known as the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and columnist for the New York Times, who was once named woman of the year by Glamour and is regarded as one of the most influential left-leaning journalists in the country. On Twitter, she’s just another superparanoid stoner with a keyboard. Dowd’s half-baked odyssey began when she flew to Denver to immerse herself in some of the local culture. No, not hitting the slopes or visiting the rifle range. She had designs on getting high. You know, for one of her columns. So she went down to...