Free Republic

"There never was a good war or a bad peace," wrote Ben Franklin at the end of the American Revolution. But that depends on the war-makers and the causes for which they fight. Six months into the war in Ukraine, launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 24, when he could not get the U.S. or Kiev to rule out admission of Ukraine to a NATO alliance aimed against Russia, who appear to be the winners and who the losers?

Since the outbreak of the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict, Pat Buchanan and other paleoconservatives have made themselves true exponents of populism: the Jew-baiting, conspiracy-driven demagoguery of 1890s agrarians. In two columns, posted at WorldNetDaily this week, Buchanan accused President Bush of being a puppet of nefarious Jewish warmongers. Outlets of the Hate America Right – especially Paul Craig Roberts and LewRockwell.com – have joined him, and then some. Nothing sets Buchanan’s imagination racing like a Bush-backed Israeli war. On Tuesday, Pat asked, “Who is whispering in his ear?” His answer: bloodthirsty Hebrews. That Tel Aviv is maneuvering us to fight its wars...

There are lots of people crying and gnashing their teeth about Israel's punishment of Hezbollah in Lebanon – as if it is the bloodiest conflict of the century. Pat Buchanan and Kofi Annan are literally beside themselves, claiming Israel is overreacting to provocations by the Iranian-backed terrorists who murdered Israeli troops in northern Israel, kidnapped two others and repeatedly shelled civilian population centers from their strongholds in southern Lebanon. In fact, condemnations of Israel's restrained response are coming from all over the world. You've heard them. You've seen them. You've read them. You would think Israel was wantonly murdering innocent...

Three years ago, I wrote that Pat Buchanan was "the useful idiot of the liberal establishment" and that his "wisdom and patriotism must be questioned." After I penned those words, I received a barrage of hate mail from supporters of Buchanan. Much of the mail was anti-Semitic, and most of it was ignorant babble. Of course, it is no surprise that Buchanan's supporters compose the anti-Semitic and ignorant wing of the paleo-conservative right. Buchanan himself is anti-Semitic and ignorant. This week, he proved both his moral blindness and his myopic bigotry in a series of columns supporting American foreign aid...

WOW! Larry Kudlow is slapping Pat around and accusing him of asserting moral equivalency between Arafat and Jewish Leaders.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Today, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean called on ABC/Disney to reveal who poured $40 million into the slanderous 9/11 propoganda film they plan to start airing starting Sunday, and issued the following statement: "It's deeply disappointing that ABC would put something on the air that has been proven to have factual inaccuracies about one of the most important events in our nation's history. ABC should not air this distortion of history. "The fact that the writer/producer of the piece is a well known conservative raises additional concerns and questions. The American people deserve...

Dean, Buchanan offer some shared concerns at fund-raiser 3/3/2005, 9:39 p.m. ET By KATHY BARKS HOFFMAN The Associated Press LIVONIA, Mich. (AP) — Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean and conservative commentator Pat Buchanan said Thursday that they are concerned about the growing federal deficit and the movement of American jobs overseas. The pair spoke to nearly 1,000 people at a $125-per-plate fund-raising dinner for Michigan State University's 2005 Michigan Political Leadership Program at Laurel Manor. They disagreed on many issues, but reached agreement on more than a few. Buchanan said the nation must do something to stem its growing...

The question of how to handle Iran’s nuclear ambitions looms like a mushroom cloud on the horizon. As has become the norm with any crucial national security decision, there are multiple schools of thought on how to approach the mullahs’ desire to go nuclear. Do we impose sanctions on Iran? Do we use military force? Do we look the other way and hope the mullahs didn’t read Kim Jong Il’s playbook, entitled, ‘How to Fool The United States into Allowing you to Build Nukes Right Under Their Noses.’ Or was that Bill Clinton’s playbook? I forget. Anyway, since the answer...

Are the neocons losing it? William Kristol of the Weekly Standard now demands the firing of Donald Rumsfeld. William F. Buckley, whose National Review branded the anti-war right "unpatriotic conservatives" who "hate" America, now calls upon Bush for an "acknowledgement of defeat." But it is a March 20 essay in the Wall Street Journal that suggests the neocons may be coming unhinged. Written by Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes.. calls on Bush to fire press secretary Scott McClellan, chief of staff Andy Card, political adviser Karl Rove, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Treasury Secretary John...

-snip- Dissenters say our prosperity is hollow. While the economy appears healthy, a disease is eating away inside, a disease that Dr. Greenspan has been treating with oxycontin. The chairman, they say, was a friend to presidents and kept them happy and himself in power by the greatest expansion of money and credit in history. And just as the easy-money Fed policies of the Hoover-Coolidge era led to the crash of ’29, a day of reckoning is ahead. -snip-

Our aim is to "starve the whole population -- men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound -- into submission," said First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. He was speaking of Germany at the outset of the Great War of 1914-1918. Americans denounced as inhumane this starvation blockade that would eventually take the lives of a million German civilians. Yet when we went to war in 1917, a U.S. admiral told British Prime Minister Lloyd George, "You will find that it will take us only two months to become as great criminals as you are." After the...

Moreover, while Fauci and Redfield are specialists in epidemics, Trump’s portfolio goes far beyond that. He is chief of state, head of government and commander in chief, responsible for the security and defense of the nation. His portfolio is broader and deeper than those of Fauci and Redfield. In the first hours of the Normandy invasion, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower must have been rightly alarmed about the high U.S. casualties on Omaha Beach. But he also had to concern himself with the failure to capture the Port of Caen to bring ashore the armor to stop any German counterattack that might...

TEHRAN (AFP) - An Iranian government-sponsored body set up to probe the veracity of the Holocaust has challenged Europe to hand over documents about the mass slaughter of Jews in World War II. Mohammad Ali Ramin, the head of the "World Holocaust Foundation" created after Iran's controversial Holocaust conference last year, said Austria, Germany and Poland in particular should supply documents. "They should hand over the proof for the dossier on the organized massacre of Jews in Europe during World War II to the independent international fact-finding committee affiliated to this foundation," the IRNA state news agency quoted him as...

Isn't it time for W to come off the sidelines, forgive the nickname for Jeb! and help Trump manage the politics of the moment, the hatred and vitriol aimed at him by, in some cases former members of his administration? Much like 9/11, this is a moment when the Nation must come together. We already know the left will never relent. Where are you, Mr. President?

New photos have emerged which for the first time show convicted Nazi guard John Demjanjuk at the Sobibor death camp, a Berlin archive confirmed Monday, although he always denied ever being there. Ukrainian-American Demjanjuk was convicted of being an accessory to the murder of nearly 30,000 Jews at Sobibor by a German court in 2011. He died while his appeal was pending. According to the Berlin-based Topography of Terror archive, photos of Demjanjuk are among a newly discovered collection of more than 350 snaps which give "detailed insight" into the camp in German-occupied Poland. The photos surfaced from the estate...

"No voices calling for peace. No voices critical of empire. Just establishment media and current and former Pentagon officials who feed off the trillion dollar war machine." As President Donald Trump spent the early days of 2020 instigating and then backing down from a potentially catastrophic confrontation with Iran, corporate media in the U.S. turned to the very same people who promoted the country's worst foreign policy disaster in a generation to advocate for repeating the mistakes of two decades ago. The decision of networks and cable news outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News to bring on a stream of past advocates for...

Former Rep. Ron Paul said he wished President Trump would "flip-flop" his policy on Iran and criticized Trump's loyalty to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia. "I think our country is not doing so well. Our foreign policy is in shambles," the Texas Republican said. "Unfortunately, the one place where I wish he would flip-flop every once in a while or change his policy completely is dealing with Iran. He is steady on it, he said it on the campaign. He's very loyal to Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia." Trump authorized airstrikes that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and...

On this weekend’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday,” anchor Chris Wallace asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo if the airstrike that killed Qasem Soleimani was a “big step back’ in President Donald Trump’s commitment to stop endless wars. Wallace asked, “Is the president pulling us out of endless wars in the Middle East, or with his action this week, did he take a big step back in?” Pompeo said, “Endless wars are the direct result of weakness, and President Trump will never let that happen. We are going to get our facilities as hardened as we can possibly get them...

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future," Yogi Berra reminded us. But on "The McLaughlin Group," the TV talk show on which this writer has appeared for four decades, predictions are as mandated as was taking Latin in Jesuit high schools in the 1950s. Looking to 2020, this writer predicted that Donald Trump's great domestic challenge would be to keep the economy firing on all cylinders. His great foreign policy challenge? Avoiding war. When one looks at the numbers -- unemployment at or below 4% for two years, an expansion in its 11th year, the stock market regularly...

At first glance, it would appear that five months of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong had produced a stunning triumph. By September, the proposal of city leader Carrie Lam that ignited the protests -- to allow criminal suspects to be extradited to China for trial -- had been withdrawn. And though the protesters' demands escalated along with their tactics, from marches to mass civil disobedience, Molotov cocktails, riots and attacks on police, Chinese troops remained confined to their barracks. Beijing wanted no reenactment of Tiananmen Square, the midnight massacre in the heart of Beijing that drowned in blood the 1989...