Free Republic

President Bush on Friday provided a preview of his two-front strategy for protecting the Republican congressional majority in an ominous political climate: hammer Democrats on national security and the economy, and raise millions of dollars for embattled GOP candidates such as Rep. Michael E. Sodrel (Ind.). A Democratic majority in the House or the Senate would be likely to launch hearings and investigations into the war and other issues, and would be positioned to stop the Bush agenda in the remaining two years of the Bush presidency. "The Democrats' plan for 2006? Take the House and Senate, and impeach the...

I don't know about the rest of America, but as a former intelligence analyst, what we don't know right now about nuclear proliferation in the world scares the hell out of me. Let's review just some of the news reports over the last several weeks... Many have probably heard of A.Q. Khan... Osama Bin Laden who has already declared it a Muslim duty to acquire nuclear weapons, recently received a Fatwa, or religious declaration, approving his use of one.... CIA Director Porter Goss... "It may be only a matter of time before al-Qaida or other groups attempt to use chemical,...

THE NOVEMBER ELECTION won't be about the future of Iraq. John Kerry's selection of John Edwards, who joined Kerry and a majority of Senate Democrats in voting to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq, is merely the final confirmation of the Kerry campaign's decision to remove forward-looking Iraq policy from the roster of issues in the fall campaign.If Kerry had wanted to argue the Richard Clarke/Howard Dean thesis that the invasion of Iraq was a colossal blunder, his course of action would have been simple. He would have picked as a running mate Florida senator Bob Graham, or someone else...

Being underestimated is George W. Bush's secret political weapon. WHEN IT ALL boiled over that day in September--with a red-faced Tom Daschle denouncing the president from the Senate floor--George W. Bush had already given the Democrats two very bad years. Two years of predictions that never quite happened. Two years of gotchas that never came through. Two years of hopes dashed. Two Septembers ago, let us remember, candidate Bush appeared dead in the water. He misspoke, went off message, blew his big lead. In the debates, surely, Al Gore would finish him. Not quite. Bush won the debates. Then Bush...

Then one day I remember thinking that the American policy had something peculiar about it. It almost seemed as if the Bush administration positively wanted to encourage the idea that we were just bluffing. Here and there came signals that, perhaps, after all, we really weren't quite serious, and that we would certainly settle for some kind of negotiated settlement of the Kuwaiti situation. This led me to ask myself, What advantage could there be in deliberately letting other think you were bluffing?

Bush Making Sure He Doesn't Forget 'Working Families' Although Democrats hope to use the Enron scandal and the Bush administration's environmental record to paint the GOP as too close to corporate America, the President isn't making that easy for them. Indeed, President Bush, more than other Republican chief executives before him, seems intent on neutralizing the Democrats' advantage among working-class voters. Bush's gambit isn't a mere political sideshow; it has huge implications. For if the President is successful, he not only improves his party's chances in this year's midterm elections but also makes his own re-election in 2004 a virtual...