Free Republic

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that we do not know who the GOP presidential nominee will be: It could be Mitt Romney—though our warnings in this space a couple of weeks ago that his victory is by no means inevitable seem increasingly justified by the dynamics of the race. The nominee could be Newt Gingrich—whose rise in the polls has been spectacular, and whose skills and appeal are still widely underestimated by many elites, including conservative elites [....] It could be someone not yet in the race. If the Gingrich surge turns into a Newt bubble, and if...

Baby Talk Bill Kristol I was struck by these sentences in President Obama’s speech: "Now, what makes today’s stalemate so dangerous is that it has been tied to something known as the debt ceiling – a term that most people outside of Washington have probably never heard of before. Understand – raising the debt ceiling does not allow Congress to spend more money. It simply gives our country the ability to pay the bills that Congress has already racked up." Consider the condescension implicit in the president’s statement—“a term that most people outside of Washington have probably never heard of...

Enter Mitch, Michele, and Mike The GOP presidential race begins to get interesting. 6:07 PM, May 1, 2011 • By WILLIAM KRISTOL Mitch Daniels is likely, I’m told, to announce his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination in the next couple of weeks. Michele Bachmann will, I think, enter the race in June. And it now looks as if Mike Huckabee is also going to run. Saturday evening, while tout Washington was “enjoying” the White House Correspondents Dinner—and while some of us, I might add, were truly enjoying the lovely wedding of Mary Katharine Ham and Jake Brewer—Mike Huckabee was...

President Obama’s unapologetic, freedom-agenda-embracing, not-shrinking-from-the-use-of-force speech. I knew pretty early on during tonight’s speech that President Obama had rejoined—or joined—the historical American foreign policy mainstream. It was when he mentioned Charlotte (the city, not the spider): At this point, the United States and the world faced a choice. Gaddafi declared that he would show “no mercy” to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment. In the past, we had seen him hang civilians in the streets, and kill over a thousand people in a single day. Now, we saw...

Where was Sarah Palin last Friday night, before coming to Washington to speak at the Glenn Beck gathering Saturday? She was a guest speaker at a Jewish "Shabbaton"—a Sabbath gathering for prayer, meals, songs, study and conversation—in Hershey, PA. Benyamin Korn's account of it in the New York Sun is a must read. Here are a few highlights: By evening, the halls of the Hershey Lodge were filled with the aroma of chulent, the traditional Sabbath stew....My colleague Sheya, director of PalinTV, presented Mrs. Palin with the ArtScroll edition of Perek Shira, a commentary on the song of celebration sung...

President Obama opposed the war in Iraq. He still thinks it was a mistake. It's therefore unrealistic for supporters of the war to expect the president to give the speech John McCain would have given, or to expect President Obama to put the war in the context we would put it in. He simply doesn't believe the war in Iraq was a necessary part of a broader effort to fight terror, to change the Middle East, etc. Given that (erroneous) view of his, I thought his speech was on the whole commendable, and even at times impressive.

A Letter to Michael Steele BY William Kristol July 2, 2010 12:12 PM Dear Michael, You are, I know, a patriot. So I ask you to consider, over this July 4 weekend, doing an act of service for the country you love: Resign as chairman of the Republican party. Your tenure has of course been marked by gaffes and embarrassments, but I for one have never paid much attention to them, and have never thought they would matter much to the success of the causes and principles we share. But now you have said, about the war in Afghanistan, speaking...

CNN published a story at 9:25 a.m. this morning titled "Haley's path to Christianity leaves some evangelicals uneasy." The story informs readers that Nikki Haley, who was raised a Sikh and converted to Christianity, "still attends Sikh services occasionally with her parents and extended family." It’s clearly a trouble-making attempt to gin up controversy among Republicans where there has been almost none, and so was able to find a couple pastors who question whether Haley, the frontrunner in next Tuesday's South Carolina gubernatorial primary runoff, is really a Christian. At 9:38 a.m., the CNN story was emailed to a colleague...

Barack's Bravado And a foolish metaphor. William Kristol March 25, 2010 4 In Iowa City today, President Obama mocked Republicans' efforts to repeal his new health care law. He dared them to "Go for it," and asserted, "I welcome that fight. Because I don't believe the American people are going to put the insurance industry back in the driver's seat." The insurance industry is a diverting talking point, but it’s not going to work. Republicans simply have to say: Barack Obama’s legislation would put the government in the driver’s seat of a giant, poorly-constructed bus in which we’re simply helpless...

Will Obama Repudiate Smear Campaign? Silence is complicity. BY WILLIAM KRISTOL January 16, 2010 So the Massachusetts Democratic Party is alleging, in a mailer, that "1,736 women were raped in Massachusetts in 2008. Scott Brown wants hospitals to turn them all away." This is as ridiculous as it is offensive. And it is, of course, a lie. In fact, according to the Boston Globe: "The 2005 amendment that Brown sponsored in the state Senate would have allowed a physician, nurse, or any other employee to deny rape victims an emergency contraceptive if it 'conflicts with a sincerely held religious belief.'...

I’m told reliably: 1. Internal Democratic polls have the race close, with a small and fading Coakley (Dem) lead. 2. One Republican poll, and one poll for an independent group, now actually have Brown (Rep) up by a few points. 3. The Democrats are pouring everything in—one report is that the buy behind this DSCC ad against Brown is close to a million dollars. The Democratic campaign now consists to a remarkable degree simply of screaming that Brown equals Bush/Republican/right-wing. It could work—or has Brown done a good enough job of introducing himself to Mass. voters that most will shrug...

Still: By mid-2010, Obama will have more than doubled the number of American troops in Afghanistan since he became president; he will have empowered his general, Stanley McChrystal, to fight the war pretty much as he thinks necessary to in order to win; and he will have retroactively, as it were, acknowledged that he and his party were wrong about the Iraq surge in 2007 -- after all, the rationale for this surge is identical to Bush’s, and the hope is for a similar success. He will also have embraced the use of military force as a key instrument of...

President Obama chose not to travel to Germany for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead, he graced the occasion with a video address. He didn't have time in his two-and-a-half minutes to mention Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher or Pope John Paul II. But somehow he did find time to mention .  . Barack Obama: Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent. But human destiny is what human beings make...

The Pelosi Plan ... and the Swine Flu Democrats.by William Kristol 11/09/2009, Volume 015, Issue 08 In 1993, a newly elected Democratic president and a Democratic Congress pushed through a tax increase on a party-line vote. The next year Democrats lost control of Congress, with House Speaker Tom Foley defeated in his reelection bid and the Senate seat of retiring majority leader George Mitchell going Republican. In 1995, the newly elected Republican Congress tried to reduce the rate of growth of Medicare. The proposal was pilloried by the Clinton White House as drastic and unconscionable. The bill did not...

Bien-pensant conservative elites and establishment-friendly Republican big shots yearn for a more moderate, temperate and sophisticated Republican Party. It's not likely to happen. And probably just as well. This Story A good time to be a conservative Who's 'us' to the GOP? Time to reawaken young voters The Gallup poll released Monday shows the public's conservatism at a high-water mark. Some 40 percent of Americans call themselves conservative, compared with 36 percent who self-describe as moderates and 20 percent as liberals. The conservative number is as high as it's been in the two decades that Gallup has been asking the...

The sickos over at Kos never cease to amaze me. Irving Kristol died today. He was a great writer and thinker and admired on both sides of the aisle--even my own liberal father loved his columns and books. Yet here I see a thread on DailyKos tonight where they are reveling in his death, and even hoping his wife (and Bill Kristol's Mom) Gertrude Himmelfarb would die soon too. Here are the lovely comments... Paging Bill O'Reilly. He's been silent on them for a while.

In his 60 Minutes interview to be aired tonight, President Obama apparently says, "I intend to be president for a while and once this bill passes, I own it....I'm the one who's going to be held responsible. So I have every incentive to get this right." No, Mr. President. It’s not about you. If legislation passes, you don’t own it. We all own it. Any health care bill will become part of the U.S. Code, not simply an item on the Obama White House web site. We will all feel its effects. We are all responsible for the future of...

An e-mail from my friend Michael Anton, who gave me permission to pass it on: I visited West Point today for a series of business meetings, mostly with faculty and some with Cadets.**** It was of course the eighth anniversary of 9/11, which was on my mind as I listened to the NY radio stations' remembrance shows on the way up..***** They feed the entire Corps (4,400) plus much of the faculty and staff in one sitting, every day, in a gigantic building shaped like a six-pointed asterisk.***** About halfway through the meal, there was another announcement from the poop...