Free Republic

Donald Trump has fired his first shots of the general election campaign. Predictably, they have nothing to do with anything that matters. In a new video released on Instagram, Trump features audio interviews with women who’ve accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault. Against the backdrop of shadowy audio clips, the accompanying text asks if Hillary Clinton is “really protecting women.” We hear the voices of Monica Lewinsky, Kathleen Wiley, and a clip from a 1999 Dateline interview with Juanita Broaddrick. Near the end, as the sound of Hillary Clinton’s cackle fades, the words “Here we go again” flash on the...

Chaos erupted at the Nevada Democratic convention on Saturday as supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders clashed over the awarding of the state’s 35 pledged delegates. Clinton edged Sanders in the Nevada caucus on Feb. 20th (52.6 percent to 47.3 percent). On April 2, however, the state party held its Clark County convention and Sanders mobilized more delegates than the Clinton campaign (1,613 to 1,298), which swung the delegate count in his favor. At the state convention this weekend, the final step in the process, Sanders supporters hoped to secure the lion’s share of the remaining 12 delegates. Instead,...

Labeling Cruz a conservative underestimates how dangerous he is. It's time we called out this Messianic crusader. The people of Texas owe America an apology. They elected Ted Cruz to the United States Senate, and now the country is forced to endure his presence throughout the interminable election season. Cruz has worked diligently (and successfully) to become the least liked human being in Congress. Judging by last night, he’s hated most by his Republican colleagues, who, once again, blocked his inane efforts to shut down the government unless it defunded Planned Parenthood. Both Republicans and Democrats passed a temporary spending...

An obscure Louisiana State university professor named Sean Illing, writing for leftist rag Salon, attacked GOP presidential candidates for espousing their Christian beliefs at a Christian rally at a Dallas-area megachurch, asserting insanely that no one in the Republican party cares about the U.S. Consitution, including “star of the show” Senator Ted Cruz. Let’s put aside the hilarious assumption that the GOP doesn’t care about the Constitution (we’ll get back to that) and focus on the charge that Cruz doesn’t care about the Constitution. Illing, an esteemed intellect who obtained his bachelor’s degree at LSU, then had to travel to...

Jeb thinks he can beat Trump by attacking his liberal past. He clearly doesn't understand the nature of this beast.I wrote two months ago that Donald Trump is a mirror image of the conservative psyche, a perfect distillation of the Tea Party id: No ideas, no substance – just bluster and fiery platitudes. Everything that’s happened since has confirmed my initial suspicion. Trump has continued to repackage shopworn stupidities and beam them back at his audiences, and conservatives can’t get enough of it. If you’ve followed Trump’s ongoing spat with Jeb Bush, you’ve probably noticed that Trump is winning. And...

Former Vice President Al Gore offered up some rare criticism of President Barack Obama’s environmental policy in a recent interview, calling for a ban on all Arctic drilling and blasting the administration’s decision to allow Royal Dutch Shell to begin sinking exploratory wells in the oil-rich Chukchi Sea in the Arctic as “insane.” “I think that in his second term, he has done really quite a good job,” Gore said in an interview with The Guardian published Thursday. “Of course there are things I would change. I think Arctic drilling is insane. I think that countries around the world would...

It’s time to draft Al Gore: If Democrats want to win, it’s clear neither Hillary nor Sanders is the way The presidential election is still sixteen months away, but this much is clear: Hillary Clinton is a vulnerable candidate. Since announcing her candidacy in April, Clinton’s stature has steadily slipped. Things got even worse this week. We learned, first, that Bernie Sanders eclipsed Clinton in small, individual donations, which is an indicator of popular support among likely voters. Second, and more problematic, the newest AP poll revealed significant weaknesses among Democrats on a host of issues, including trust, character, and...

Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal and the religious right are still flinging nonsense about marriage equality The legalization of same-sex marriage has been met with near-comical resistance on the right. The GOP presidential candidates in particular are struggling to face this new – but always inevitable – reality. Most of them have embraced a shopworn trope about a shadow war on Christianity in this country. By their lights, being Christian has become a borderline crime in today’s America. According to Mike Huckabee, we’re “criminalizing Christianity in this country by telling people who hold to an orthodox worldview of...