Free Republic

"The best and only safe road to honor, glory, and true dignity is justice." -- George Washington (1779) A Bronze Star Power Point? Actually, not ... Drive-by Journalism at Its Worst In keeping with our publishing deadlines, every Tuesday morning I send notice of my topic for Thursday's column to our editorial team. This week, I sent notice that I was writing about "military award inflation," and particularly a story from reputable news sources about an Air Force chaplain, Lt. Col. Jon Trainer, who received a Bronze Star for a PowerPoint. I first read this story under an inflammatory National...

Mario, I really think we are going to have to sit down around a decent bottle of Argentinean Malbec and thrash these matters out amicably. So, in the meantime, I don’t want to throw a match onto the tinder you’ve been gathering around the stake for your auto-da-fe. You should at least modify your condemnation of immigration hawks, since you are the one going up in flames. Very briefly, here’s why: You are alleging that immigration hawks are not conservatives and don’t deserve conservative allies because some of them are (coercive) population controllers. In order to make this stick logically,...

The Buckley Rule has been much invoked in recent weeks, in this space and elsewhere, and on almost every occasion it has been both misquoted and misapplied. As one who was present at the formulation, I feel obliged to record the “originalist” intention. It was the winter of 1964 and the unresolved question at NR editorial meetings, week to week, was this: Whom should the magazine support for the Republican presidential nomination? To outsiders, the question would have seemed all but settled. Issue by issue, NR gave every appearance of being all in for Barry Goldwater. Heck, there were those...

Ted Cruz (R., Texas) has been a United States senator for only 34 days, but already he is making his mark on national politics. His conspicuous presence and aggressive tone have thrilled his conservative cheerleaders, while inducing fits of rage in liberal detractors and Joe Scarborough. In the past week alone, Cruz has tangled with veteran Democratic spin-master Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) on Meet the Press, sent a tongue-in-cheek letter to Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, introduced legislation to fully repeal Obamacare, and recorded “no” votes on major items, including Hurricane Sandy relief, raising the debt ceiling, filibuster reform, and...

Conservative writers and academics gather for the National Review Institute Summit, beginning on Friday in Washington, D.C. The summit focuses on addressing the challenges facing conservatism and finding solutions that will strengthen the movement. First, political newcomer Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AK) sits down for an interview with Jay Nordlinger of National Review. Next, a panel of experts examine the topic "Can politics be hospitable to life?" Panelists include: Chuck Donovan of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, Jeanne Monahan of March for Life and Carter Snead of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. National Review Editor Rich Lowry interviews American...

Who would you trust more to reflect how William F. Buckley, Jr. would have felt on an important issue of the day: the editors of the National Review--the magazine that WFB founded--or the combined wisdom of Arianna Huffington and Joe Scarborough? In an editorial published before Hagel's nomination became official, the Editors at National Review wrote: "Chuck Hagel is a very poor choice for the next secretary of defense," concluding that he was "definitively not the man who should be the next secretary of defense." But on today's Morning Joe, when Huffington asked "don't you think William F. Buckley would...

Just one of the many misconceptions about conservatives, particularly in the academy, is that we all come off of an assembly line. To preserve this fiction, academics prefer to study us from a distance, if at all. Thus we get studies with bizarre conclusions about how much we love authority figures. They read us backwards: Conformity is the antithesis of our ethos. I’ve been to left-wing and right-wing events and found infinitely more diversity at the latter than at the former. “For all the cant about ‘openness to ideas’ (that word again!), they cooperate to impose an ersatz consensus on...

Dear fellow conservative: Could there be a worse incumbent Democrat senator facing re-election than New York's Kirsten Gillibrand? And could we have a better challenger-a more reliable, articulate, intelligent woman; a more authentic, talented, and real conservative-than my old pal, Wendy Long? snip The act of political donating used to be so . . . provincial. But we're all smarter now: We've learned, too often the hard way, that every senator, not just those from our own state, but every single senator has a huge impact on our lives. That one vote always seems to matter, snip Without question, Wendy...

One of Romney’s great skills is the ability to turn around failing enterprises. He did it with private firms while he ran Bain Capital, he did it for an indebted Massachusetts, and he did it for the Olympics. He needs to do it for his campaign now. Neil Newhouse, Romney’s pollster, attempted to soothe worried Republicans last week by stressing that the race remains extremely close. But the fact that Romney’s pollster isn’t worried is itself worrying. By rights, Romney should be ten points ahead. His campaign seems to think the bad economy will automatically win this race for the...

Climate Fraud: In an attempt to defend his role in the greatest scam of modern times, Climate-gate's poster child threatens to defend his tarnished reputation in court. First, hide the decline, then hide the deceit. 'Get lost" was National Review editor Rich Lowry's appropriate response to a threatened lawsuit by Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann. NR printed a post by the great Mark Steyn, who graces these pages as well, calling Mann's famous hockey-stick graph "fraudulent." That it is indeed a fraud has been documented by many, including us. Mann was at the heart of the Climate-gate scandal in...

John R. Lott Jr. and Grover G. Norquist are the authors of Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future. Lott, a former colleague of the president’s at the University of Chicago Law School, answers some questions about the depth of the debacle and the way out from National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez. KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: John, you say that when you were a faculty colleague of Barack Obama, he tagged you as “the gun guy” and announced that “I don’t believe people should be able to own guns.” That...

Former Republican Rep. Tom Davis told The Hill newspaper: “The middle is getting squeezed,” but his comment vastly understates the crisis in the capital. Activists in both parties have declared war on moderates. The ideological gap between the two parties is widening rapidly. Paralysis is pervasive. Political scientist Keith Poole of the University of Georgia, who studies voting patterns, told the National Journal: “We are clearly as conflicted as we’ve been since 1905. The parties are, I think, completely dysfunctional and incapable of acting on major policy.” The National Journal reports that as recently as 1999, more than half of...

Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer. I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, “Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, or any one of his “Straggler” columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative. His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our...

WALTHAM, MA (July 12, 2007) -- Twenty-two conservative activist leaders have publicly released a letter challenging the conservative magazine National Review's "puff work" for presidential candidate Mitt Romney and implying that the magazine is quietly abandoning the social conservative grassroots and constitutionalism. The letter was sent to National Review on June 1, 1007. The editors refuse even to acknowledge receipt of the letter, which cites information about which they've misled their readers, most strikingly: •Romney's stance and record after his "awakening" are not pro-life. •The Massachusetts Constitution says the people are bound only by laws ratified by the legislature; and...

The fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last month by a neighborhood-watch volunteer was a sickening and — unless new facts come to light — unjustified loss of an innocent life. Unless Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, had reason to believe that Martin was armed, shooting him was a grossly disproportionate response to a fistfight, even leaving aside the fact that Zimmerman had initiated the encounter. If such a shooting is justified under Florida’s broad self-defense law, that law has licensed violence that goes far beyond legitimate self-defense. Every American shares the despair of Martin’s family over this heartbreaking tragedy...

The most frequently cited (and probably the most controversial) research on the “Chicks Dig Jerks” thesis is the “Dark Triad” work of Professor Peter Jonason of the University of South Alabama. The Dark Triad is a combination of psychological traits — subclinical psychopathology, subclinical narcissism, and what Professor Jonason calls “Machiavellianism” — that are, he believes, in fact a unitary phenomenon associated with a higher level of sexual success, defined in the literature as a larger number of total lifetime sexual partners. The correlation of the Dark Triad with larger numbers of sexual partners holds true for both men and...

The National Review wants former House speaker Newt Gingrich to call it quits. The GOP presidential candidate has long had an uneasy relationship with the mainstream conservative press in general and National Review in particular, and he will likely dismiss the editorial as “establishment” meddling. The paper’s harsh assessment is likely the tip of the iceberg, however, and Gingrich will be forced to defend his own relevance going forward in the campaign — never a good place for a candidate to be. “[Former Pennsylvania senator Rick] Santorum has won more contests than Gingrich (who has won only one), has more...

Jonah, I agree with you on the general tin-ear of Romney. He’s extremely un-nimble on the stump, which means that Republicans will be gambling that he can be sufficiently insulated and managed across the finish line without offering up any campaign-detonating hostage to fortune.

So with New Hampshire behind us (and with any luck, never again in front of us), and with my tendency to be overloaded with life to the point at which I catch up on things I meant to write two to fifty-two weeks after they are timely, I wanted to say something about the controversy which was and is best described as “National Romney Online.” For those of you who don’t keep up on conservative tendencies to engage in circular firing squads, a summary is in order; for those of you who couldn’t give a rat’s anus, best just to...

In last night’s debate among Republican presidential candidates, Newt Gingrich defended his proposal to oust bad judges from office by statutorily abolishing the judicial offices they occupy. In a series of posts, Matt Franck and I will explain why we believe that this particular proposal of Gingrich’s is constitutionally unsound and politically foolish. (Matt and I may have somewhat different thinking on the underlying issues, so the views expressed by one of us should not necessarily be imputed to the other.)In this opening post, I will set forth Gingrich’s proposal to abolish judgeships. At the outset, let me emphasize that...