Free Republic

The immediate aftermath of a tragedy is the worst possible moment to draw broad policy conclusions, let alone to toss blame about. Sadly, the modern technological environment militates against patience. Bloggers and Tweeters rush to make judgments, to infer lessons, to discuss ramifications. On both sides of the Atlantic, the horrible shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, and the killing of six bystanders, have been laid at the door of the Right in general, and the Tea Party in particular. In its front page story, The Independent described the abomination as “an event that seemed to grow out of America’s present disturbed...

Back in September I wrote a piece arguing that the Tea Party movement had become more powerful as an electoral force than the president of the United States. As I noted at the time, “while just 37 percent of Americans are more likely to vote for a candidate if backed by Barack Obama, a far larger 50 percent will vote for a Tea-Party endorsed candidate.” The tremendous power of the Tea Party was borne out in the November mid-terms, where the movement scored major successes in both House and Senate races. There were of course some notable setbacks in states...

President Bush may not have not have won the Nobel Peace Prize and was hugely unpopular at the dictator-friendly United Nations, but he was mightily feared by America’s enemies. Many a tyrant shuddered after US tanks rolled into Baghdad and removed one of the most odious psychopaths on the face of the earth from power. Even the supposedly unbeatable al-Qaeda wilted in the face of the surge in Iraq, suffering huge losses and humiliation at the hands of US forces. George W. Bush believed in American exceptionalism and wasn’t afraid to show it. He also believed that human rights and...

So THAT’s what he’s been up to! We were wondering what Barack Obama could be doing, as the Tea Partiers encircled the White House like coyotees sniffing a dying beast. What was on his mind, when he turned in such lack-lustre performances in India and China? What’s troubling him, that the great communicator should prove so distant and tongue-tied when out on the campaign road? Now we know. The most powerful man on the planet was writing a children’s book. Of Thee I Sing is dedicated to his two daughters and praises a host of American heroes, but of course...

A new study has found that belief in a God may be inversely correlated to belief in Government. A sense of political stability provides comforting reassurance that our world is orderly and controlled. So does belief in an all-powerful deity. This puts the two in a seesaw relationship: When one goes up, the other goes down. Obviously people who live in chaotic and anarchic parts of the world and who subsequently live in squalor are more likely to be religious. And until a society reaches high levels of education and wealth religion is unlikely to lose its grip. However there...

<p>Last night, an autocue was used in the Indian Parliament for the first time in its history. President Obama spoke for just 20 minutes with the help of “two textbook-sized panes of glass” that were installed by a technical team brought in – at some expense – from the US. “We thought Obama was a trained orator and skilled in the art of mass address,” complained one Indian official to the Hindustan Times.</p>

Almost going unnoticed in the continuing analysis of last week’s election has been the absence of the sort of high-drama and neurotic self-indulgence that followed Democrat losses in 2004. Where is the “Sorry, Everybody” movement of 2010? Post Election 2004, a website called sorryeverybody.com collected and displayed hundreds of photographs from disappointed Democrats expressing their disgust-in-defeat by offering their apologies to the world. “Sorry, we tried to stop the stupidity” was a common sentiment. Dogs, babies, animals, and snowmen were enlisted in the effort to express sad-faced, clownish contrition—to the whole wide world—that so many Americans could be such morons....

After last week’s humiliation of President Barack Obama in the midterm elections – in which the Republicans made huge gains at every level of government – you might think that the president would want to avoid another political disaster for a while. But not our Obama. To compound America’s rejection of his domestic policies, one week later he is determined to call attention to the bankruptcy of his foreign and security policies. Obama’s trip to India bears all the hallmarks of failure at home. In the past, when things were going badly for the president domestically, he went on a...

A thumping. That’s George W. Bush’s word, but it describes what happened to his successor Barack Obama’s Democratic party in the congressional and state elections on Tuesday. Republicans ousted Democrats from six Senate seats - ordinarily a good haul for an out of office party in an offyear election. But that is being depicted as something of a failure, since they failed to win seats in West Virginia, California, Nevada and Colorado which seemed within reach. That left them four seats short of a majority in the Senate. But they didn’t fall short in the House of Representatives. There they...

Watching President Obama’s press conference today, one could be forgiven for thinking that last night’s elections had never happened, and that his party had not slumped to its biggest midterm defeat in the House of Representatives since 1948. While he admitted that he had been “humbled” and talked about new cooperation with political foes, there was no acknowledgment whatsoever from the president that his policies had failed, or that they had been emphatically rejected by the American people. He demonstrated a striking defiance of public opinion, and a refusal to change the direction of his agenda. The US electorate has...

Hysteria has lapsed into disaffection: it was a bleak night for President Obama. But, despite the apparent immediacy of a ‘conservative moment’, there is caution in Republican circles this morning. Both Clinton and Reagan won from similar positions in 1982 and 1994.The G.O.P's leadership knows that elections are not won from the extremes, as Barack Obama has discovered to his cost, and it is trying to calm the party’s often excitable fringe, which will be no easy task if Rand Paul's 'Tea Party tidal wave' is anything to go by. Ben Brogan recently highlighted the G.O.P’s growing ‘Stop Palin’ campaign....

Republicans captured control of the House of Representatives on Tuesday and expanded their voice in the Senate, riding a powerful wave of voter discontent as they dealt a setback to President Barack Obama two years after his triumphal victory. A Republican resurgence, propelled by deep economic worries and a forceful opposition to the Democratic agenda of health care and government spending, delivered commanding defeats to Democrats from the northeast to the south and across the Midwest. The tide swept aside dozens of Democratic lawmakers regardless of their seniority or their voting records, upending the balance of power for the second...

REPUBLICANS have claimed their first victories in US elections today, with Tea Party-based Rand Paul and Marco Rubio among those winning their Senate races. Two years after Barack Obama won a landslide election and helped boost majorities of his party in Congress, the outlook was bleak for his ruling Democrats today. The predicted win for Mr Paul is an early boost for the ultra-conservative Tea Party, which has a batch of endorsed Republican candidates running in the mid-term elections. Mr Paul beat state attorney-general Jack Conway, despite a late campaigning effort by former president Bill Clinton to try to win...

The Democrats suffered a debacle at the polls in the US on Tuesday -- and President Barack Obama is to blame. Once celebrated as a great communicator, the president has lost touch with the mood in his country. Now, he must re-invent himself. But can he succeed? On Thursday, US President Barack Obama will be leaving Washington behind. He is embarking on a trip to Asia, including a stop in Indonesia. The flight is a long one -- almost an entire day. But Obama lived for a time in Indonesia as a child, and the feeling of being at home...

Tonight’s emphatic conservative House victory in the US midterms is a powerful rejection of President Obama’s handling of the economy and his Big Government agenda, including his controversial healthcare reform plans. The conservative revolution has been largely spurred by disenchantment with the federal government, and a strong belief in limited government, lower taxation, and reduced public spending, as well as a desire to return to America’s Founding principles. It is also a powerful rejection of American decline, currently being fueled by massive debts at home, weakened defences and a defeatist foreign policy. The federal debt has jumped from 40 percent...

“The cause of America,” wrote my countryman Tom Paine, “is in great measure the cause of all mankind”. That statement now has a practical, financial truth which Paine couldn’t have imagined in 1776. The US is the world’s leading economy, the dollar its reserve currency. American prosperity is especially critical to Britain, the single largest overseas investor in the US. That, above all, is why Britons should take satisfaction from the return of candidates committed to restoring order and sanity to the federal budget. Virtually the first thing John Boehner, the new Speaker of the House, said in his acceptance...

THE White House is bracing for a sharp rebuke from voters in mid-term elections today after a final opinion poll gave the Republican Party a 15-point lead. Voters disappointed with the President's handling of the US economy are expected to take out their anger on his Democratic Party. A USA Today/Gallup poll gave Republicans a 55-40 per cent advantage based on likely voting intentions. It indicates the party will benefit from a massive swing, easily scoring the 39 additional seats needed to take control of the 435-member House of Representatives for the first time since 2006. The respected Cook Political...

The anti-tax, small-government Tea Party, expected to be a big winner in the elections, has raised the prospect of a US government shutdown if the axe does not fall on federal government spending. “We expect Congress to stop spending,” said Mark Meckler, a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots group. “We don’t want to see any tax raises, we want to see cuts. “We don’t expect to see the budget ceiling raised and that means these guys are going to have to get serious and make some hard decisions right away.” He said that the Tea Party’s status as a...

The liberal residents of Manhattan and Brooklyn aren’t looking forward to the midterm results tonight. Many of them have only just recovered from their Halloween partying and are still trying to shrug off that lingering post-hangover depression. The New York Times is bravely trying to raise their spirits, pointing out that midterm defeats don’t stop presidents being handsomely re-elected. So that’s a straw progressive voters can cling on to, however bad the news. But will they be rushing to election-night parties? You must be kidding. Maybe they’ll head off to a bar to watch the results and let out a...

Polling day hasn’t even dawned yet and it appears the Democratic circular firing squad is forming up. It is highly significant that Democrats are now openly turning on President Obama. Although David Axelrod and/or others may be the fall guys, the buck stops with Obama himself in terms of how he led his party during this mid-term election campaign. The Caprio debacle, Team Obama’s focus on 2012, Obama’s preoccupation with his own image, the “Blame Bush” strategy – it’s all being second-guessed publicly already. From Peter Wallsten and Jonathan Weisman of the WSJ: Some high-level Democrats are calling for President...