Free Republic

Was Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and then his body cut up with a bone saw and flown to Riyadh in Gulfstream jets owned by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman? So contend the Turks, who have video from the consulate, photos of 15 Saudi agents who flew into Istanbul that day, Oct. 2, and the identity numbers of the planes. Supporting the thesis of either a murder in the consulate or a "rendition," a kidnaping gone horribly bad, is a Post story that U.S. intel intercepted Saudi planning, ordered by the prince, to...

Sen.-elect Mitt Romney(R-Utah) (R-Utah) on Wednesday condemned President Trump's and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's latest comments about journalist Jamal Khashoggi's killing, calling them "inconsistent" with the U.S. national interest. "The President's and Secretary of State's Khashoggi statements to date are inconsistent with an enduring foreign policy, with our national interest, with basic human rights, and with American greatness," Romney said in a statement. "Sanctions do not necessarily require ending the alliance; they do demand real and painful consequence," he added.

The 633-word statement of President Donald Trump on the Saudi royals' role in the grisly murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi is a remarkable document, not only for its ice-cold candor. The president re-raises a question that has roiled the nation since Jimmy Carter: To what degree should we allow idealistic values trump vital interests in determining foreign policy? On the matter of who ordered the killing of Khashoggi, Trump does not rule out the crown prince as prime suspect: "King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman vigorously deny any knowledge of the planning or execution of the...

Saturday, in Pittsburgh, a Sabbath celebration at the Tree of Life synagogue became the site of the largest mass murder of Jews in U.S. history. Eleven worshippers were killed by a racist gunman. Friday, we learned the identity of the crazed criminal who mailed pipe bombs to a dozen leaders of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. From restaurants to Capitol corridors, this campaign season we have seen ugly face-offs between leftist radicals and Republican senators. Are we more divided than we have ever been? Are our politics more poisoned? Are we living in what...

Over the weekend Donald Trump warned of "severe punishment" if an investigation concludes that a Saudi hit team murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Riyadh then counter-threatened, reminding us that, as the world's largest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia "plays an impactful and active role in the global economy." Message: Sanction us, and we may just sanction you. Some of us yet recall how President Nixon's rescue of Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War triggered a Saudi oil embargo that led to months of long gas lines in the United States, and contributed to...

AFTER A 50-YEAR siege, the great strategic fortress of liberalism has fallen. With the elevation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court seems secure for constitutionalism — perhaps for decades. The shrieks from the gallery of the Senate chamber as the vote came in last Saturday, and the sight of that bawling mob clawing at the doors of the Supreme Court as the new justice took his oath, confirm it. The Democratic Party has sustained a historic defeat. And the triumph is President Trump’s. To unite the party whose nomination he had won, Donald Trump pledged to select his high...

Our diversity is our greatest strength. After playing clips of Democratic politicians reciting that truth of modern liberalism, Tucker Carlson asked, "How, precisely, is diversity our strength? Since you've made this our new national motto, please be specific." Reaction to Carlson's question, with some declaring him a racist for having raised it, suggests that what we are dealing with here is not a demonstrable truth but a creed not subject to debate. Yet the question remains valid: Where is the scientific, historic or empirical evidence that the greater the racial, ethnic, cultural and religious diversity of a nation, the stronger...

Obama hit the campaign trail on Friday running. He was in top shape. The American Mirror reported, "Obama refers to himself 102 times during 64-minute speech." And Obama had a new straw man to slay. Obama said, "How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad." We rid the world of the Nazi threat 74 years ago. So it is pretty easy to call Nazis bad. Deporting them takes courage, morals, and brains. I know that because President Trump just deported one that Obama refused to deport for eight years, and Bush 43 failed to deport for four years....

This summer, the sex scandal that has bedeviled the Catholic Church went critical.First came the stunning revelation that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former Archbishop of Washington and friend to presidents, had for decades been a predator-priest who preyed on seminarians and abused altar boys, and whose depravity was widely known and covered up.Then came the report of a Pennsylvania grand jury that investigated six dioceses and found that some 300 priests had abused 1,000 children over the last 70 years.The bishop of Pittsburgh, Donald Wuerl, now Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, defrocked some of these corrupt priests, but reassigned others to new...

Friday, deep into the 17th year of America's longest war, Taliban forces overran Ghazni, a provincial capital that sits on the highway from Kabul to Kandahar. The ferocity of the Taliban offensive brought U.S. advisers along with U.S. air power, including a B-1 bomber, into the battle. "As the casualty toll in Ghazni appeared to soar on Sunday," The Wall Street Journal reported, "hospitals were spilling over with dead bodies, corpses lay in Ghazni's streets, and gunfire and shelling were preventing relatives from reaching cemeteries to bury their dead." In Yemen Monday, a funeral was held in the town square...

Is it any of Canada's business whether Saudi women have the right to drive? Well, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland just made it her business. Repeatedly denouncing Riyadh's arrest of women's rights advocate Samar Badawi, Freeland has driven the two countries close to a break in diplomatic relations. "Reprehensible" said Riyadh of Freeland's tweeted attack. Canada is "engaged in blatant interference in the Kingdom's domestic affairs." The Saudis responded by expelling Canada's ambassador and ordering 15,000 Saudi students to end their studies in Canada and barred imports of Canadian wheat. A $15 billion contract to provide armored vehicles to Saudi Arabia...

"Make America Great Again!" will, given the astonishing victory it produced for Donald Trump, be recorded among the most successful slogans in political history. Yet it raises a question: How did America first become the world's greatest economic power? In 1998, in "The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy," this writer sought to explain. However, as the blazing issue of that day was Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, it was no easy task to steer interviewers around to the McKinley Tariff. Free trade propaganda aside, what is the...

Beginning his joint press conference with Vladimir Putin, President Trump declared that U.S. relations with Russia have “never been worse.” He then added pointedly, that just changed “about four hours ago.” It certainly did. With his remarks in Helsinki and at the NATO summit in Brussels, Trump has signaled a historic shift in U.S. foreign policy that may determine the future of this nation and the fate of his presidency. He has rejected the fundamental premises of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War and blamed our wretched relations with Russia not on Vladimir Putin, but squarely...

Beginning his joint press conference with Vladimir Putin, President Trump declared that U.S. relations with Russia have “never been worse.” He then added pointedly, that just changed “about four hours ago.” It certainly did. With his remarks in Helsinki and at the NATO summit in Brussels, Trump has signaled a historic shift in U.S. foreign policy that may determine the future of this nation and the fate of his presidency. He has rejected the fundamental premises of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War and blamed our wretched relations with Russia not on Vladimir Putin, but squarely...

With never-Trump conservatives bailing on the GOP and crying out for the Party of Pelosi to save us, some painful truths need to be restated. The Republican Party of Bush I and II, of Bob Dole and John McCain, is history. It's not coming back. Unlike the Bourbons after the Revolution and the Terror, after Napoleon and the Empire, no restoration is in the cards. It is over. The GOP's policies of recent decades -- the New World Order of George H.W. Bush, the crusades for democracy of Bush II -- failed, and are seen as having failed. With...

“No Borders! No Nations! No Deportations!” “Abolish ICE!” Before last week, these were the mindless slogans of an infantile left, seen on signs at rallies to abolish ICE, the agency that arrests and deports criminal aliens who have no right to be in our country. By last week, however, “Abolish ICE!” was no longer the exclusive slogan of the unhinged left. National Democrats were signing on. Before his defeat in New York’s 14th Congressional District, Joe Crowley, fourth-ranked Democrat in the House, called ICE a “fascist” organization.

If Trump's supporters are truly "a basket of deplorables ... racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic" and "irredeemable," as Hillary Clinton described them to an LGBT crowd, is not shunning and shaming the proper way to deal with them? So a growing slice of the American left has come to believe. Friday, gay waiters at the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia, appalled that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was being served, had the chef call the owner. All decided to ask Sanders' party to leave. When news reached the left coast, Congresswoman Maxine Waters was ecstatic, yelling to a...

“If you’re … pathetically weak, the country is going to be overrun with millions of people, and if you’re strong, then you don’t have any heart, that’s a tough dilemma. … I’d rather be strong.” So said President Donald Trump, on issuing his order halting the separation of children from parents caught breaking into the country. Trump’s enemies are celebrating a victory. Yet the issue remains. Under U.S. law, teenagers and tots cannot be detained for more than 20 days and must be held in the least-restrictive facilities. But if the children cannot be separated from the parents as they...

Saturday's White House Correspondents' Association dinner, billed as a celebration of the First Amendment and a tribute to journalists who "speak truth to power," has to be the worst advertisement in memory for our national press corps. Comedian Michelle Wolf, the guest speaker, recited one filthy joke after another at the expense of President Trump and his people, using words that would have gotten her kicked out of school not so long ago. Media critic Howard Kurtz said he had "never seen a performance like that," adding that Wolf "was not only nasty but dropping F-bombs on live television." Some...

Behind the Headlines by Justin RaimondoAntiwar.com April 8, 2002 WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA POSTREL?Post-9/11: Who speaks for libertarianism – the Old Right or the Neocon Clones? A note from the author: I apologize, in advance, for the sheer length of this column, but since it addresses the sell-out of basic libertarian principles by people and institutions who purport to speak in its name, I thought it important to address these questions thoroughly, with extensive quotations from those I name. Too bad, in attacking Antiwar.com, these pathetic losers didn't do the same – but then what can one expect from craven...