Free Republic

Alaska's lipstick-wearing pit-bull is a "Little Shop of Horrors." That's how one longtime friend and campaign trail companion of John McCain, the vanquished 2008 GOP presidential nominee, described veep nominee Sarah Palin. In an expansive story in the August edition of Vanity Fair, a slew of senior members of McCain's campaign team told reporter Todd S. Purdum that they suffer a kind of survivor's guilt following the 2008 presidential election.

Sarah Palin has begun to get on the nerves of Republican senators who say the former GOP vice presidential nominee is taking her own White House aspirations entirely too seriously. But those same senators may have their eye on a 2012 White House run or be friends with senators with presidential ambitions. And Palin, who does not have a lot of Washington connections, energized the party’s grass roots in 2008 while bucking the D.C. establishment, leaving much of the party’s elite grumbling about her appeal to the conservative base. Several GOP senators offered searing criticism of the Alaska governor when...

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Some of Sarah Palin's former campaign aides are frustrated with the Alaska governor for remarking in a lengthy, freewheeling speech that she had refused to pray with them before last October's vice presidential debate. Palin told the story in a speech to a GOP dinner in Alaska last Friday. "So I'm looking around for somebody to pray with, I just need maybe a little help, maybe a little extra," she said of the moments before the debate. "And the McCain campaign, love 'em, you know, they're a lot of people around me, but nobody I could find...

Pope Benedict's repeated gaffes and the Vatican's inability to manage his message in the internet era are threatening to undermine his papacy, Vatican insiders have said. The Holy See is struggling to contain international anger over the Pope's claim on his first official visit to Africa that Aids "cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems". The Pope's remarks about condoms, and a recent furore over his lifting of the 20-year excommunication of a British bishop who has questioned the Holocaust, has left him looking isolated and out of touch, prompting calls for a radical...

The Republican U.S. senator sits glumly across the restaurant table. "I don't think we have learned much from the election in terms of what people want to see," he says. "We have the same gridlock." By the "same gridlock," he means that party hard-liners, both Democrats and Republicans, will remain in control of the machinery of Congress. And that means more of the same. It means more politics as usual — especially in his party. "We need someone who speaks from the center," he says. "Sarah Palin is not the voice of our party." He talks a little about immigration....

To my fellow bloggers: The next time you get an e-mail from someone saying it’s time to organize a conservative netroots, bear in mind that it’s these morons, by and large, whom that person wants you to support. The same people who couldn’t muster a judgment on the bailout independent of Nancy Pelosi being a big meanie, the same people who can’t organize a press conference without having it descend into backbiting and recriminations. Some Republican governors tell CNN they were not particularly happy with the way the Republican Governors Association press conference was executed Thursday, saying that they agreed...

Some aides to Sen. John McCain say they weren't happy that running mate Sarah Palin went off script Sunday...Palin deviated from her prepared remarks to talk about her wardrobe controversy Sunday. ... A senior McCain adviser told CNN those comments "were not the remarks we sent to her plane." ...A Palin aide said that the governor clearly felt like she had to say something to defend herself, because "that's really not who she is." ... sources told CNN that long-brewing tensions between Palin and key aides to McCain were on the rise. McCain advisers suggested that they have become increasingly...

Sarah Palin is the rogue elephant in the GOP war room. The maverick mom is distancing herself from John McCain and blowing off the advice of senior Republican aides, convinced they're damaging her reputation and ruining the campaign. Things have gotten so tense between Palin and her traveling staff, an insider said, that she's overruling their advice - which was evident last week when she ignored GOP aides piling into waiting cars at a Colorado event and strolled over to the press corps for an impromptu talk. MORE: Palin Has Future Even If McCain Loses In speeches, Palin has contradicted...

WATERLOO, Iowa, (AFP) – Bitter infighting between aides to John McCain and Sarah Palin erupted into public view in a sign of tension gripping the Republican camp with the election 10 days away. A series of recent surveys have suggested Palin's presence on the ticket is hurting McCain's chances in the November 4 election, at a time when Democratic rival Barack Obama has surged clear in most key polls. The inquests into what has gone wrong with McCain's campaign appear to have already begun, according to reports, with Palin's camp blaming the Arizona senator's senior advisers for mismanaging her contribution....

ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico (CNN) -- With 10 days until Election Day, long-brewing tensions between GOP vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin and key aides to Sen. John McCain have become so intense, they are spilling out in public, sources say.

CNN) -- With 10 days until Election Day, long-brewing tensions between GOP vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin and key aides to Sen. John McCain have become so intense, they are spilling out in public, sources say. Several McCain advisers have suggested to CNN that they have become increasingly frustrated with what one aide described as Palin "going rogue." A Palin associate, however, said the candidate is simply trying to "bust free" of what she believes was a damaging and mismanaged roll-out. McCain sources say Palin has gone off-message several times, and they privately wonder whether the incidents were deliberate....

Even as John McCain and Sarah Palin scramble to close the gap in the final days of the 2008 election, stirrings of a Palin insurgency are complicating the campaign's already-tense internal dynamics. Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the...

With despair rising even among many of John McCain’s own advisors, influential Republicans inside and outside his campaign are engaged in an intense round of blame-casting and rear-covering—-much of it virtually conceding that an Election Day rout is likely. At his Northern Virginia headquarters, some McCain aides are already speaking of the campaign in the past tense. Morale, even among some of the heartiest and most loyal staffers, has plummeted. And many past and current McCain advisors are warring with each other over who led the candidate astray. One well-connected Republican in the private sector was shocked to get calls...

Abstract: There is a growing discontent by Republicans with John McCain’s presidential campaign. Nowhere is that more evident than Florida, a state McCain must carry to win the White House. Troubled by sliding poll numbers, GOP loyalists here wonder whether the national campaign has taken the state for granted. "My question would be, 'What campaign?' I just don't see one," said Bill Negron, an Orlando member of McCain's regional Hispanic steering committee. "To me, it looks like people are working hard to ensure that McCain doesn't get elected." One GOP strategists who has advised the McCain organization called it the...

"...Two officials of the Bush administration say that if Obama had done what the Post story asserted – which they believe to be untrue – U.S. Ambassador Crocker and embassy officials attending the meeting would have ensured that the Bush administration heard about it immediately. If such an incident occurred in front of officials of the Bush administration, it would have constituted a foreign policy breach and would have been front-page huge news; it would not have leaked out two months later in an op-ed column..."

Though it was high in shock value, the Palin pick left bruised feelings among the short-list contenders who were not picked -- and infuriated some Republican officials who privately said McCain had gone out on a limb, unnecessarily, without laying the groundwork for such an unknown. Two senior Republican officials close to Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty said they had both been rudely strung along and now "feel manipulated." "They now know that they were used as decoys, well after McCain had decided not to pick them," one Republican involved in the process said. Democrats quickly absorbed the Obama talking...

The liberal New York Times is wasting no time in smearing John McCain, the Republican Party nominee for President. Late Wednesday, the Times published to its website a story set to hit print editions Thursday, linking McCain to a female lobbyist. The paper suggested the Arizona Senator has been engaged in an illicit relationship. "A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet," the Times reported. "Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff...

The colonel was furious. "Can you believe it? They actually drew their weapons on U.S. soldiers." He was describing a 2006 car accident, in which an SUV full of Blackwater operatives had crashed into a U.S. Army Humvee on a street in Baghdad's Green Zone. The colonel, who was involved in a follow-up investigation and spoke on the condition he not be named, said the Blackwater guards disarmed the U.S. Army soldiers and made them lie on the ground at gunpoint until they could disentangle the SUV. His account was confirmed by the head of another private security company. Asked...

BISMARCK, N.D. - A B-52 bomber was mistakenly loaded with five nuclear warheads during a flight from North Dakota to Louisiana, a newspaper reported Wednesday. The bomber carried advanced cruise missiles as part of a Defense Department program to retire 400 of the missiles, the Military Times said, quoting three officers who spoke on condition they remain anonymous because they were not authorized to discuss the incident. The officers said the nuclear warheads should have been removed before the missiles were mounted onto pylons under the bomber's wings for the Aug. 30 flight from Minot Air Force Base in North...

A 40-year-old professional man with close ties to Republican officials told the Idaho Statesman he had oral sex with Sen. Larry Craig at Washington's Union Station, probably in 2004. The man spoke to the Statesman on the condition he not be named. He said he was sure it was Craig he had oral sex with but said he had no evidence other than his word. Craig denied the allegations, and said, "I am not gay and I have never been in a restroom in Union Station having sex with anybody. "There's a very clear bottom line here," Craig said. "I...

The New Republic magazine recently ran into big trouble for publishing a first-person account of military savagery in Iraq. The author, Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, used the pseudonym "Scott Thomas" to write of the debasement of war that he claims he saw in the cauldron of Iraq. But it was soon discovered that one of the gruesome "wartime" incidents the private described -- the author, desensitized by war, mocking a disfigured woman -- took place in Kuwait before his unit actually went into Iraq. And when, post-publication, The New Republic rechecked Beauchamp's other suspicious anecdotes and assured its readers they...

ABC News has been told the White House is in "panic mode" over the recent defections of Republican senators on the president's stay-the-course policy in Iraq. Senior Bush administration officials are deep in discussion about how to find a compromise that will "appease Democrats and keep wobbly Republicans onboard," a senior White House official told ABC News. [snip]"We're not retreating or announcing troop withdrawal," the official said, but, "we need to buy more time for Petraeus." The White House has not reached any kind of consensus about what to do, despite the high-level discussions. The White House suggests a much-anticipated...

WASHINGTON - A progress report on Iraq will conclude that the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad has not met any of its targets for political, economic and other reform, speeding up the Bush administration's reckoning on what to do next, a U.S. official said Monday. One likely result of the report will be a vastly accelerated debate among President Bush's top aides on withdrawing troops and scaling back the U.S. presence in Iraq. The "pivot point" for addressing the matter will no longer be Sept. 15, as initially envisioned, when a full report on Bush's so-called "surge" plan is due, but...

SOME of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources. Tension in the Gulf region has raised fears that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely before President George Bush leaves office. The Sunday Times has learnt that up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack. “There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,”...