Free Republic

Wesley Pruden would have undoubtedly wanted to spend his final hours at his keyboard, deftly deflating the pompous, entitled and arrogant of the political establishment, and he came awfully close. The venerable Washington Times editor, columnist and journalism institution was found dead Wednesday morning at his home, his passing coming hours after putting in a full day at the newsroom on New York Avenue in Northeast, where he had worked since 1982, four months after the newspaper’s founding.

Kim Jong-un is entitled to feel pretty good about his skill in playing Washington and the West. There’s a history of North Korea getting what it wants and not paying anything for it. A succession of American presidents, Republican and Democrat, have been eager to play the mark. Donald Trump seems to be cut from different cloth, but it’s early and too soon to determine the strength of his kidney. But the world can hope. Presidents before him earned their presidential chops dealing with diplomats, senators and assorted supplicants with good manners and proper deference, and the Donald absorbed the...

You’ve got to give the Democrats and their acolytes in the media credit for courage and a talent for tolerating bad taste and smell. It’s not easy to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a corpse. How else to keep alive the Trump-as-Russian agent investigation? Robert Mueller keeps hiring help, reluctantly cutting loose his chief investigator who turned out to be a Hillary plant eager for revenge, and keeping skeptics at bay with promises that he’ll light the fuse on a bombshell just as soon as he can find one. Mr. Mueller may have a secret witness or two ready to come...

The Democrats are feeling ruff, tuff and ready for the coming battle, and why shouldn’t they? They proved in Alabama that with a little help from the other side, a Democrat can still defeat a child molester. All they need now, going into the midterm congressional elections, are more child molesters. “The victory Tuesday by the Democrat Doug Jones to represent that heavily conservative state [of Alabama] in the Senate,” The Washington Post breathlessly assures its constituency, “was the latest example in a string of elections this year that Democratic leaders think represent a growing backlash against Donald Trump —...

Donald Trump promised in his barnstorming campaign for president, with bombast and bravado, that once elected he would tone everything down and be “presidential.” He was elected and we learned that, candidate or president, the Donald doesn’t do presidential. But sometimes he does. This week in Las Vegas he became the consoling witness to “pure evil,” leaving angry bombast for another occasion, struggling like the rest of us to show needed empathy, appropriate and subdued anger, and gratitude for the genuine heroics of the men and women who put their lives on the line to subdue Stephen Paddock. This was...

A lot of snakes and scorpions live with the alligators in the swamp, and there are even more dangerous monsters there. No swamp creature is deadlier than a Washington lawyer. The president is beginning to understand why he should never have agreed to his attorney general appointing a special prosecutor. We’re supposed to call him a “special counsel,” which may sound more upright, more punctilious and less fearsome, but words don’t fool anyone who lives in the swamp. A special counsel is hired to destroy the prey, like the gunfighter hired in Cheyenne to chase the sodbusters out of the...

This has been a bad year for dreams of dynasties. The Bush dynasty has been dismantled with Jeb, who was the first favored son, writing finis to the family dream of a trifecta. Hillary Clinton, who started plotting her path to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. when she was a law student at Yale, took a detour through Arkansas and if she still wants to be a president will have to settle for Wellesley, or Smith or one of the other Seven Sisters. But it won’t be anything in Arkansas.

Hillary Clinton won’t be able to say she didn’t see the bad moon rising. Donald Trump gave her a blistering introduction this week to Presidential Politics 102, which differs in a remarkable way from Politics 101, which she encountered in her first attempt in 2008 and before that as the managing partner in Bubba’s two campaigns. Whatever she learned from Bubba didn’t take. He was a master at covering his tracks and playing the rube when forced to, with a Huck Finn grin and country charm: “Aw, whatcha gonna do with a good ol’ boy like me?” He got away...

Every president is entitled to the confidence of the nation that he means well. That includes Barack Obama, even when he retreats to his other home in a universe far, far away. He just doesn't understand what's going on here on Planet Earth, where the rest of us live. Meaning well is not enough. He seems to understand now, after it was explained to him at some length, that America is indeed the exceptional nation that Abraham Lincoln said it is, but not for the reasons Mr. Obama thinks. "The United States of America is the most powerful nation on...

Hillary Clinton may think those creatures making wide, gentle circles over her campaign are bluebirds of happiness, but they’re looking more and more like buzzards. They look hungry.

"Everything about the so-called deal with Iran, including the reputations of the men who negotiated it, is a lie. It’s likely to be a deadly lie for millions of people who will die on account of it. The world should mark well everyone responsible for it."

We're well into the new century, moving swiftly through the second decade of the new millennium, at ease in an era of science, modern medicine and wondrous electronics that our grandparents could not have imagined. (Even our parents don't understand most of it.) So why does 2015 smell like Munich in 1938, reeking of denial, blindness, cant and cowardice in the year that would introduce monstrous tyranny and barbarism, an assault on the very idea of civilization? Comparisons may be odious but only the weak and foolish look and do not see. A gunman invades the sanctity of a synagogue...

Transparency, the current vogue word for truth-telling, is usually a good thing, unless you’re trying to fool all the people some of the time, like spending 7,000 words to resurrect a fairy tale in Benghazi, all to give a helping hand to a lady in distress.The New York Times understands that Hillary Clinton is likely to be the only credible hope the Democrats have for 2016 and that she already needs lots of remedial help. The Times huffed and puffed to deliver an excuse for betrayal in Benghazi, meant to second Mrs. Clinton’s famous alibi for her tortured misfeasance as...

October 31, 2013 Spoiled, greedy, indifferent boomers infest Obama’s self-indulgent White House Wesley Pruden The Obama White House suffers from “the ‘60s disease.” The affliction seems to be terminal. The president’s men — and women — are mostly boomers, spoiled, greedy and self-centered, nurtured and indulged in the decade of the 1960s, when the culture first began to rot. The boomers taught each other many things, how to turn up the volume on their “music,” where to find the best pot and where to crash to smoke themselves into mellow stupefaction, how to avoid taking responsibility for their blunders, and...

Why are intellectuals, sometimes the most intelligent among us, so dumb? This is the question that confounds everyone; some intellectuals most of all. The late William F. Buckley Jr., a certified egghead, once said he would rather be governed by the first 50 names in the Boston telephone book than by the professors at Harvard. Another wit observes that an intellectual is someone who so prefers theory over experience that he would sit down on a red-hot stove, twice. You can be too smart for your own good, and have the blisters on your bottom to prove it. The intellectual...

Politics occasionally drive John Boehner to tears, but rarely to plain English. Gobbledygook is the Washington disease, and the Republicans have a bad case of it. Wonkery was not invented in Washington, but Washington is where it thrives. Corporate-speak is closely related to government gobbledygook, and those most fluent in the tongue have been carefully trained and tutored in using words not to amplify meanings, but to hide them. One way to do this is to use five words when one or two will do. Perfumed words are preferred. Initials and acronyms are best of all. The Democrats are rarely...

The Park Service appears to be closing streets on mere whim and caprice. The rangers even closed the parking lot at Mount Vernon, where the plantation home of George Washington is a favorite tourist destination. That was after they barred the new World War II Memorial on the Mall to veterans of World War II. But the government does not own Mount Vernon; it is privately owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association. The ladies bought it years ago to preserve it as a national memorial. The feds closed access to the parking lots this week, even though the lots...

The man they called “the Hammer,” who used Democrats as anvils, got a little satisfaction Thursday. An appeals court in Texas reversed the money-laundering conviction of Tom DeLay and told him to go and sin no more. Time and events move quickly in the modern media, and a new crime of the century arrives with the noise of every news cycle. The final acquittal of Tom DeLay, who was once the Republican majority leader in the House, is but a footnote to the news. He was once the most feared man on Capitol Hill, merciless in pursuit, and like all...

Al Gore and his traveling medicine show is back in town with his new, improved snake oil, guaranteed to grow hair, improve digestion, promote regularity and kill roaches, rats and bedbugs. Al and his wagon rumbled into town on the eve of “a major forthcoming report” from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is a panel of scientists affiliated with the United Nations. Their report is expected to buck up the spirits of the tycoons of the snake-oil industry. A snake-oil salesman’s lot, like a policeman’s, is not a happy one. There’s always a skeptic or two (or...

You can understand Barack Obama’s frustration now that he finally put down his putter on Martha’s Vineyard and noticed that something was going on in Cairo. John Kerry bestirred himself, too, pronouncing the chaos in Cairo “dreadful.” That’s pretty strong language for a tea-sipper. There’s glum agreement everywhere that there’s no peace for Egypt in sight. The nations of the West, including Israel, must keep looking, but we fool only ourselves if we think there’s a magic elixir to encourage the lion to lie down with the lamb and not regard it only as dinner. In the days following Sept....