Free Republic

Michael Bloomberg obviously knows a lot about making money, even about the politics of Manhattan, where his money speaks in the loud and unctuous voice liberals love. But he doesn’t know diddly about life where the rest of us live it. He threw a tantrum after Barack Obama’s gun-control bill crashed and burned in Congress, stamping his polished wingtips on his Persian carpets, nursing a pout and behaving like a 3-year-old with a broken toy. This was excusable in a 3-year-old, but it’s not the behavior you expect of the nanny. When the wah-wah and the bitter tears subsided, the...

The Republicans who can’t wait to talk impeachment should sit down, shut up, and be patient. President Obama may yet deserve impeachment, but we’re not there yet. Patience, as anyone old enough to remember Watergate knows, is how this game is played. Republicans tempted to reach too far too soon should remember that when impeachable presidents, like persimmons, are picked green, they’re inedible. Once ripened, they’re delicious. Like guilty presidents finally run to ground, ripe persimmons can be eaten fresh, dried, raw, or cooked. Properly ripened persimmons have the texture of pudding, with no risk of becoming “a pudding without...

When crunch time comes, when the chips are down, when the rubber meets the road — employ the cliché of your choice — Americans can put away their selfish concerns and come together in common cause. Even Congress, our only native criminal class. Deep in the bowels of the Senate and House Office Buildings, secreted away where there will be no distractions, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, have put aside partisan differences to work for the common weal. This particular weal has never had it so good. The issue at hand transcends taxes, immigration reform, the war on terrorism,...

We’ve finally located the terminus of the slippery slope. It’s on a side street in Philadelphia, in a modest three-story red-brick building, where a painted sign advertises dental, family planning, family practice, gynecological and physical therapy services. This is under an illustration of two happy parents, swinging a small child between them. But there are no happy children within these walls. This is an abortion clinic made infamous by a doctor on trial for his life, charged with killing seven infants who survived abortions, and a woman who died during “the procedure.” The State of Pennsylvania wants to execute Dr....

Atheists think they’re on the march, “like a mighty army,” as a favorite hymn of the church describes the followers of the Christ, and this angers and dispirits many Christians — before, during and after Holy Week. The mockery of Christianity, and not just the ridicule of individual Christians, has even won the sanction of the courts. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which will sanction everything weird and contentious, ruled in 2011 that “hostility to religion” is OK, after a 16-year-old Mormon boy sued his teacher for ridiculing him for his beliefs, saying there was no more evidence...

The new pope is a puzzle to nearly everybody, particularly to the politicians, pundits and other know-it-alls. He looks and sounds like a remnant of a previous time, thrown up in the squalid swamp of a trashy and superficial age. He’s not at all hip and “with it.” He’s not interested in “moving forward,” as in the current cliche. He projects humility and kindness and speaks of his Christian faith as if he really believes in the amazing grace of the Gospel. This makes the intellectual elites, and even some “holy men” of the various bureaucracies of modern Christendom, incredulous,...

Talking is the national sport in Washington. For the old geezers in Congress, it’s more fun than watching baseball, complaining about the weather or remembering sex. Nobody drones on like a U.S. senator and nobody loves the sound of his raspy voice like a U.S. senator. Rand Paul, the freshman from Kentucky who stars in the bad dreams of every Republican geezer in town, talked for almost 13 hours on the Senate floor this week to delay a confirmation vote on John O. Brennan as director of the CIA, and earned only the scorn of the geezers.

Joe Biden, a gun nut. Who knew? The veep never fails to entertain, even when he’s trying not to, and this time his boss is probably not amused. Joe famously pushed President Obama to endorse same-sex marriage by sniffing the orange blossoms first, but if his advice for Americans to buy a shotgun to protect the homeplace was an attempt to convert the president to a Second Amendment aficionado, he’ll no doubt fail. Joe’s endorsement of domestic mayhem in the cause of survival predictably infuriated those who are so terrified of guns that on certain playgrounds even little boys who...

Barack Obama is laying out a revolutionary agenda for his second term, and he’s calling up his heaviest artillery to enforce the transformative presidency delayed in the first. The campaign to confirm Chuck Hagel will be no campaign for the fainthearted summer soldiers who know only small-caliber combat. The emerging White House strategy is to repeat and repeat the canard that anyone who criticizes the president and his agenda is a racist, probably a Klansman and maybe even a conservative. If the canard is repeated often enough, some people will believe it, even if they’re mostly people who believe it...

Barack Obama says he's a Christian. Good for him (and for the Gospel). But rarely has a Christian paid such obeisance to another faith and ideology. The president's bow and scrape to Islam knows no end. That's not so good. The U.S. Army is soon to issue a handbook instructing soldiers to copy Mr. Obama's example of when and how to defer to an alien ideology that stands against everything Americans are taught, whether by faith, ethics, morals or another code of good conduct. The new manual, which runs to 75 pages, orders American military personnel to refrain from saying...

Craig Karpel is a recovering addict. He says so himself. His addiction is to Barack Obama, and his recovery inspires him to write a book. He offers a 12-step program, patterned after the program that has rescued thousands of town drunks. He’s a confirmed Obamaholic, but he doesn’t blame the president. He absolves Mr. Obama of blame for the addiction to the messiah from the South Side of Chicago that turned so many healthy Americans into junkies. His book has created a bit of a buzz already. “My name is Craig K.,” he says in the opening line of “The...

The Democrats have a Jewish problem, and his name is Barack Obama. Reluctantly, many Jews, loyal Democrats by birth and tradition, have concluded that he’s not The One they thought he was. With even greater reluctance, the White House has concluded that their Jewish problem is real, growing, and they better do something about it. Mitt Romney’s dramatic declaration Sunday in Jerusalem that preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon is America’s “highest national security priority” and military force should not be excluded, and that he regards Jerusalem as the true capital of Israel, puts in stark relief the difference...

This is not what Barack Obama expected for a coming-out party. The “historic” revelation that he is now fully evolved, as from tadpole to frog, and now grooves on same-sex marriage, was meant to be marked with quiet ceremony. No music, no flowers, no kiss, no dancing, not even a cupcake. Rage and outrage over same-sex marriage would take everybody’s mind off the dreary economy, which whimpers on. Everybody was then supposed to shut up and get back to work (for those with work). Instead, the president gets his photograph (with a rainbow halo) on the cover of Newsweek magazine...

If only those pesky Jews would shut up and submit, all would be right with the world. Allah could be praised. Such is the emerging Democratic strategy for making peace in the Middle East. Only this week, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state, and Leon E. Panetta, the secretary of defense, sent reassurances to the region that they’re eager to see Israel brought to heel. Mr. Panetta even employed a little mild profanity, undignified as that may be for a Cabinet officer, to attempt to intimidate the Israelis. Get back to “the damn table” and resume negotiations, he told...

ANALYSIS/OPINION The 2012 presidential marathon is on, and one mainstream pollster (Rasmussen) says a Republican apparition is opening up a lead on President Obama. (Any Republican 46 percent, Barack Obama 42 percent.) A growing number of Democrats figure that whoever can keep his head in the rattle and bang of unexpected events just doesn’t understand the situation. Republicans tempted to indulge in excessive giddiness should remember this is akin to fantasy football. A poll is a snapshot, and snapshots can deceive. Tomorrow is another day, to quote the estimable Mrs. Scarlett O’Hara Butler, and the chickens of ‘12 are not...

Sarah Palin is the hottest act in town, and the critics can only grind their teeth.... Her “secret” bus tour of America is a secret so closely held that she travels in a Greyhound-sized monster decorated with her name and an American flag the size of a barn. The lady who was mocked by the wisenheimers for saying she could see Russia from her backyard in Alaska now sees revenge through the windshield of her bus. The media’s Gaffe Patrol, ever on the scout for mistakes, errors, blunders, slips of the tongue and other erratum the patrollers think they see...

<p>The president, revealing himself to be Barack Obungle, has done what nobody else could have done, not even the spectacularly hapless original New York Mets, who drove Casey Stengel to his famous cry of terminal frustration.</p> <p>The White House converted a picture-perfect military operation into a public-relations disaster that will be cited as what not to do and how not to do it in flackery textbooks for a hundred years. Days after the raid on Osama bin Laden’s “mansion” they still can’t get the “fact pattern,” in the language of the White House, even close to straight.</p>

ANALYSIS/OPINION: "The difference between the Soviet Union and the United States," an elderly Russian woman said to me over a cup of rough black tea on my first visit to Moscow a quarter of a century ago, "is envy. If a Russian sees a new car parked at his neighbor's house, he says, 'I'm going to find out how he got it and turn him in.' "But if an American sees a new car parked in front of his neighbor's house, he says, 'My, that is such a beautiful car. I'm going ask my neighbor how to get one of...

Barack Obama, like all flimflam men, is a master of words. But unlike the best of the flimflam men, he can't keep his stories straight. Here he was on Friday night last, speaking about the ground zero mosque to a dinner at the White House celebrating Ramadan: "Let me be clear: As a citizen and as president I believe that Muslims have the same right … to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan. … This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable." Who argues with that? But...

President Obama rids himself of a particularly clueless general, but his fundamental problem remains. The clueless general is Stanley A. McChrystal. His fundamental problem is himself.