Free Republic

EXCLUSIVE — A group of 12 prominent conservatives, including a former governor, media executives, and a former U.S. attorney general, have issued a letter calling for Nikki Haley to drop out of the race for president. The former U.N. ambassador is the last remaining GOP opponent in former President Donald Trump‘s quest to win a nonconsecutive second term in the White House. She has vowed to remain in the race and is continuing to raise money, but the group argues she is only damaging her party. “While you have waged a spirited campaign for the 2024 Republican Party nomination, it...

It has taken a long time, but finally the Justice Department is training its guns on what heretofore was unthinkable, unless you are a career civil libertarian. For years the civil libertarians have been warning us that the intelligence community posed a threat to democracy, as we know it in these United States. Every so often they would point to some excess of the FBI or the CIA and tell us that the lights were going out in democratic America. Does not the Washington Post run atop its front page the maudlin line, “Democracy Dies in Darkness”? Well, the darkness...

Washington -- People on the left think highly of themselves when they exalt the lowly poor, when they cry out for world peace and when they speak about a race. As these Americans on the left prattle on about their alleged noble ends (as opposed to the means to those ends), some conservative Americans have grown downright envious. They think to themselves, why can't we, too, think well of ourselves when we talk about poverty, international relations and race? The answer is that conservatives generally talk about specific policies that lead to jobs for the poor (a modus vivendi for...

Allow me to offer a suggestion as to how our government might avoid the slaughter of our personnel in diplomatic installations around the Islamic world by mobs. It seems to me most probable that insults to the Prophet Muhammad appear regularly in the modern world. After all, insults against revered figures in the world's other major religions pop up all the time. As for Islam, a book such as Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" can be published anywhere. A thirteen-minute anti-Islamic video can arrive on YouTube, and my guess is there are others that have and will appear there. In some...

WASHINGTON -- There is a grisly pallor that has beset former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Then, too, there is a lumpiness: to his face, to his features, to his – well -- to his lump. When he walks into a room I feel rather sorry for him, but then I feel rather sorry for Bill Clinton too and for Hillary. No longer do I call her "Bill's lovely wife, Bruno." She looks grandmotherly rather than tough. I guess maybe her coeval from the 1960s generation of student government goody-goodies, Newt, looks grandfatherly rather than brainy. What does Al...

WASHINGTON -- Why is the governor of South Carolina still a national news story? This past week, Gov. Mark Sanford was again in the news, and neither sex nor romance had anything to do with it. I can understand his first great news splash, after he completely vanished from the face of the earth. Then he duped his staff into announcing that he was communing with the birds and the bees along the Appalachian Trail. Then it was discovered that he had actually been emulating the birds and the bees down in Argentina with a secret Argentine inamorata. She is...

Is it possible that Justice David H. Souter has sensed what I have sensed in reading the liberals' dutiful adieus to him, their judicial Benedict Arnold? They are all snickering behind their hands. Sure, he pleased them enormously by his 19 years of tergiversations against conservative jurisprudence, after being President George H.W. Bush's "conservative" Supreme Court nominee. But through all Justice Souter's years here in Washington he revealed himself to be a stupendously self-absorbed oddball and not much else. He fell far short of the liberals' conception of a progressive Supreme Court dissenter, to wit: a charismatic, outspoken, slightly outre...

Stop the presses! Finally, after half a century of staunch disagreement with Fidel Castro, I see the Cuban dictator has rendered a judgment with which I heartily agree. Responding to the Prophet Obama's friendly conversation with his brother President Raul Castro at the Summit of the Americas in steamy Port of Spain, Mr. Castro, in the words of the Associated Press, "blasted the new U.S. president for showing signs of 'superficiality.' " After all the Hollywood stars Mr. Castro has hosted on his island paradise, you can rest assured he is a connoisseur of superficiality. Mr. Castro apparently was angered...

WASHINGTON -- Let us put an end to the dark murmurings over why The New York Times did not renew its contract with its lone conservative columnist, Bill Kristol. Some say it was a matter of politics. Kristol is a Republican. The Times is Obamist. For a certitude, the political disagreement was there, but politics were not the ultimate cause of Kristol's departure. I can report on copper-bottom authority that The New York Times let Kristol go owing to public health concerns. As the Times' financial condition has grown fragile, the publisher of the Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., has...

There is a condign symmetry about this financial crisis. A government-induced crisis is getting a government-insured resolution. The excesses of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are being mopped up by huge federal spending made all the more massive by all the reckless endeavors of the politicians, the regulators, and the financiers who frivoled with the intemperance of Freddie and Fannie.

WASHINGTON -- In the acrid aftermath of the South Carolina primary I think it is safe to say that Toni Morrison, the novelist, was dealing in fiction when she pronounced Bill Clinton our first black president. After watching him huff and puff up the issue of race in a way that Americans have not seen since the presidential campaigns of the late George Wallace, the former Boy President, rather than being our first black president, is our second redneck president. I say Clinton is our second redneck president because first came Jimmy Carter. Jimmy did not play the role of...

WASHINGTON -- Most informed Americans have heard about "anger management counseling." It is a widely prescribed therapy for those who lose their temper uncontrollably in public or in private or while watching the Hon. Henry Waxman pretend to be the late Andrei Vyshinsky, prosecutor at the Moscow Show Trials. Well, during the past few days I have been following the Hon. Jean-Francois Kerry's (D-Mass.) controversy with Boone Pickens, and I believe I am in need of "laughter management counseling." Every time I think of this ponderous stone-headed senator bellowing phony pieties, I suffer a dreadful agitation in the funny bone....

  Conservative columnist and author R. Emmett Tyrrell has not really spent half his career reporting scandals about Bill and Hillary Clinton. It just seems that way. The American Spectator, the conservative monthly magazine he founded in 1967, broke some of the earliest stories about "Troopergate," "Travelgate," and "Filegate" in the early 1990s. And two of his books, 1997's Boy Clinton and 2003's Madam Hillary, were unflattering but best-selling biographies of his favorite Democrat power couple. Now the irrepressibly troublemaking Tyrrell has updated the Bill Clinton saga with The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President's Life After the White House. I...

It should be obvious to any thinking person that we in the west are engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the dark side of Islam. From the turmoil we are seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan, from the obvious support that so-called, peaceful Muslims in the Middle East give to the terrorists, and from the clear indications that in large portions of Europe, they have already won, it’s also clear that we are in for a long and difficult struggle for the survival of our way of life and of our civilization.

As we watch the left of the Democratic Party press its case to return to the top of the heap in American politics, or at least evade the fate of the Dodo, we have ever more evidence validating an insight on which I stake my reputation as a political seer. To wit: partisan politics more often falls under the professional expertise of the psychiatrist than that of the political scientist. A learned shrink can often tell us more about a political issue than any other professional, not excluding a swami or a voodoo priest. Consider the ongoing controversy over Sen....

    Secretive and SmugBy R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Published 3/2/2006 12:07:52 AM WASHINGTON -- So we hear this week that President George W. Bush is taking delight in the spread of the "alternative press" (read conservatives on the Internet, in talk radio, in print, and at Fox) and the gentle detumesence of "mainstream media" (read liberal media, or more precisely Democratic media). Well, I join him in his satisfaction. I have spent much of my life with journalists, beginning in competitive swimming and moving on to politics and culture. Usually, even in covering sports, the journalists have been liberal Democrats....

    Our Angry LeftBy R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Published 2/16/2006 12:08:40 AM WASHINGTON -- For weeks now civilized observers around the world have been astonished by the dispendious angers vented by indignant young Muslims. These young indignados have listened to the counsel of their venerable leaders in government and in the mosques. They have noted the intolerable provocations of the unbelievers. Finally, they have taken to the streets and city squares to burn flags, bash passersby, rush the cops, and -- from what I have observed on the TV news -- take a swing or two at each other. Their...

WASHINGTON -- Contemplate this: A Danish newspaper in September publishes some cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. Four months later Muslims, mostly Arab, get wind of this event and riot, burning Danish flags and attacking embassies, mostly Danish, but thus far also an Austrian Embassy. Apparently geography is one of the many subjects not studied very attentively in Arab schools. At any rate, as the riots intensify local governments can apparently do nothing. Most of these governments, for instance the Syrian, are famously repressive. Yet in this instance they are impotent against the dirty-necked galoots burning flags and howling in the...

    Woolsey-Eyed DemocratsBy R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Published 2/2/2006 12:08:54 AM WASHINGTON -- In the months after our invasion of Iraq -- our liberation of Iraq -- there was a neat little peace movement. It was composed of the likes of linguist Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, and various lesser patheticos who all looked like they belonged on the streets of Berkeley, California, some with begging pots in their hands. That this forlorn band did not grow for many months was no surprise to me. America had suffered 3,000 casualties at home, not one of whom had been engaged in warfare...

Who Is Byron Dorgan? By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Published 12/15/2005 12:07:04 AM WASHINGTON -- All's well, Senator Byron Dorgan of the great state of North Dakota has done come clean. Senator Dorgan is the vice chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee. In that capacity he accepted $67,000 in contributions from Indian tribes represented by the recently indicted Jack Abramoff, a fabulous fixer here in the capital of the Free World. Abramoff, a Republican, has obviously been an equal-opportunity fixer, and apparently Dorgan was not above accepting his help, though Dorgan claims he never met the rogue and never backed...