Free Republic

In an editorial published Wednesday at National Review, the editors argue that an “unspoken consensus” has emerged among Republican senators that what President Trump did was wrong but it doesn’t warrant his removal from office. The editors think this a “reasonable” position and that Republicans should make the case for it publicly, but they can’t because of the president’s “obstinacy” in defending his actions vis-à-vis Ukraine.Instead of insisting that Trump “cannot be impeached for any abuse of power unless that abuse took the form of a criminal violation of a statute,” they write, “Republicans would be better off arguing...

At first glance, the new nationalism of conservatives will seem benign and even uncontroversial. In his book “The Case for Nationalism,” Rich Lowry defines nationalism as flowing from a people’s “natural devotion to their home and to their country.” Yoram Hazony, in his book “The Virtue of Nationalism,” also has a rather anodyne definition of nationalism. It means “that the world is governed best when nations agree to cultivate their own traditions, free from interference by other nations.” There is nothing particularly controversial at all about these statements. Defined in these terms, it sounds like little more than simply defending...

Never has history felt less consequential. The impending impeachment of President Donald Trump is, as news accounts and blaring newspaper headlines tell us, historic. This is true by definition since a president has been impeached only twice before in 230 years. But everyone knows this history isn’t going to matter much. In fact, the day after the Senate trial ends in inevitable acquittal, everything goes on exactly the same as before (except for vulnerable House Democrats from Trump districts, who will have to defend their votes until November).

President Trump should want a rapid impeachment process. The Ukraine story hasn’t been good for him, and there is only one way out — to get impeached, and the sooner, the better. Impeachment is baked in the cake. There is no way that Democrats, having opened an impeachment inquiry, although without a vote, can pull up short now. How could they, after touting revelation after revelation, including a supposed “confession” by Trump’s chief of staff? If there are Democrats in swing districts holding back the House from impeachment, Speaker Nancy Pelosi will have no option but to twist their arms...

Impeachment is about to make everything worse. If our politics seems overheated, our institutions beleaguered and our public debate degraded, just wait until we are in the midst of the impeachment debate. Dems have had an impeachment itch they have been desperate to scratch ever since President Trump took office. For them, Ukraine is equal parts a genuine outrage and an excuse, the release valve for three years of fear and loathing. Rather than conduct himself as if he is aware that a hysterical ­opposition is eager to impeach him as soon as it finds a reason, Trump has embraced...

. . . on the terms set out by Beto O’Rourke. Beto O’Rourke, the losing Texas Senate candidate who bootstrapped his way into becoming a losing presidential candidate, had a message for refugees who had come to America: Your new country is a hellhole. The former congressman told a roundtable of refugees and immigrants in Nashville, Tenn., last week: “This country was founded on white supremacy. And every single institution and structure that we have in this country still reflects the legacy of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and suppression.” Just in case the newcomers were inclined to believe...

Trump outdid himself with anti-“squad” tweets over the weekend suggesting that the four Democratic congresswomen go back where they came from. The tweets were clearly trolling and meant to be sardonic — supposedly they are to go back home, fix their countries, and then return here to tell us how it’s done, with Nancy Pelosi happy to pay the airfare. They are several things to say about this: 1) As always, presidents shouldn’t troll; 2) on a tactical level, it’s incredibly dumb for the president to insert himself into the middle of the Democratic circular firing squad between Nancy Pelosi...

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, accused Democrats of going "bat-crap crazy" during a speech to a gathering of conservative activists on Friday in which he assailed the other party for its views on abortion, border security, and the environment. “I think there is a technical description for what’s going on, which is that Democrats have gone batcrap crazy,” Cruz told National Review editor Rich Lowry at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md. “They are getting more and more and more extreme on every issue,” Cruz said.

The decline of an American institution heralded by smears and contempt. The poseurs really stepped in it this time. The “conservative” elitists at National Review may well have caused irreparable damage to their already tottering reputations, with their knee-jerk attack on a group of Kentucky high school kids in MAGA hats. Then they made things much worse with the barely concealed contempt in their shallow “apologies,” offered begrudgingly when the smear blew up in their faces.The pile-on assault of the Covington Catholic high school kids who attended the March for Life wearing Make America Great Again hats gave full witness...

To his credit, National Review editor Rich Lowry has apologized more than once for his and the publication’s initial response to the flap at the Lincoln Memorial involving the kids from Covington Catholic. He has much to apologize for. In his initial response, without any apparent fact checking, Lowry commended the knee-jerk mea culpa of the Covington diocese, tweeting, “A necessary and appropriate apology.” In a later tweet, having seen just a little bit of the video, Lowry still felt obliged to condemn the “obnoxious, dumb, and disrespectful behavior of the teens.” National Review’s deputy managing editor, Nicholas Frankovich, meanwhile...

Rush Limbaugh identified National Review as a news media outfit that prioritizes the pursuit of “approval [from] the mainstream media” over veracity in reporting, offering his remarks on Monday’s edition of his eponymous show. Limbaugh highlighted recent news media narratives framing a group of Covington Catholic High School students as “racists,” including agreement from ostensibly conservative news media outlets and personalities.

<p>How many times do cucks like Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry, Ben Shapiro, Ben Howe etc. get to play "I didn't know the left lied and attempted to manipulate weak soyboy beta cucks like me into carrying their message for them" card?</p>

One striking feature of left-wing hostility to conservative Christianity is its insistence that opposition to secular progressive morality is proof of malign intent. Instead of asking whether progressive intolerance (or the selection of a corrupt Democratic candidate) played any part in the 81 percent white Evangelical opposition to Hillary Clinton, all too many progressives use that level of united opposition as grounds for further hatred. And, yes, there’s also the condescending sympathy: “They’re brainwashed by Fox. They’re voting against their interests.” Last summer I wrote an essay called the Great White Culture War. I argued that a great deal of...

One aspect of the Covington controversy has received very little coverage, let alone condemnation: the outright racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism of the (very small) black-nationalist group confronting the teenagers. If you watch the nearly two-hour YouTube video, filmed by a man who seems to be a member of the Black Israelites, you will see the black men, all adult, hurling insult after insult at the students, for well over an hour. It seems accidental that the students and the black nationalists are at the same spot on the mall — the former waiting for their buses back to Kentucky and...

It appears that most of the teenagers in this video are from a Catholic high school near Covington, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. They mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ. “Bullying” is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here. For some of us, the gospel stories of Jesus’s passion and death are so familiar we no longer hear them. The evangelists are terse in their descriptions of the humiliations heaped on Jesus in the final hours before his...

According to a source inside of #NeverTrump stalwart National Review, who spoke to Big League Politics on the condition of anonymity, the magazine is in turmoil after publishing a now-deleted piece bashing the Covington Catholic High School students. Deputy managing editor Nicholas Frankovich penned a piece called “The Covington Students Might as Well Have Just Spit on the Cross,” which was published at 3 a.m. on Sunday. “The guy who posted that did it at 3am without running it by anyone,” an employee familiar wit the situation told Big League Politics. The source said that editor Rich Lowry is “deeply...

It’s been about three weeks since CNN reporter Jim Acosta repeatedly told President Trump at a news conference that the migrant caravan is “hundreds and hundreds of miles away” and “not an invasion.” Acosta strenuously objected to a Trump ad that showed migrants climbing border walls: “They’re not going to be doing that.” Now, thousands of migrants from the caravan have arrived in the border city of Tijuana, Mexico. Over the weekend, hundreds of them stormed a border crossing, climbing the fence and throwing rocks. US border agents used tear gas to repel the mob. If the throng was too...

Brett Kavanugh is on the Supreme Court and the biggest reason is Donald Trump. When he won the nomination in 2016, it wasn’t unreasonable to think that Trump wouldn’t win the general election, he wouldn’t be true to his promise on judges even if he won, and even if he nominated the right people, he wouldn’t care enough about the Court to see through a difficult, high-stakes confirmation fight. We can now say of these presumptions, wrong, wrong, and wrong. The Kavanugh confirmation was clarifying in another way. Brett Kavanugh is not a loudmouth. He never insulted anyone or said...

Kavanaugh’s powerful testimony may well end up changing the course of the Supreme Court, and of our politics. Brett Kavanaugh may have saved his Supreme Court confirmation with one of the most memorable statements in modern congressional history. After his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, delivered a compelling, sympathetic performance earlier in the day, Kavanaugh entered the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with his chances hanging by a thread. Commentators speculated about how he’d inevitably be dumped by the GOP. Instead, he transformed his situation with a sustained exercise in righteous indignation as forceful and compelling, in its way, as Clarence Thomas’s...

The Trump phenomenon is impossible to gainsay. The attempted political assassination of Brett Kavanaugh is bad for the country, but good for a Trumpian attitude toward American politics. The last-minute ambush validates key assumptions of Donald Trump’s supporters that fueled his rise and buttress him in office, no matter how rocky the ride has been or will become. At least three premises have been underlined by the tawdry events of the past couple of weeks. First, that good character is no defense. If you are John McCain, who genuinely tried to do the right thing and carefully cultivated a relationship...