Free Republic

Charting a course through the left's countless U-turns since January of 2009.  Here are a few things that I think don’t quite compute.a)    The now familiar Palin/Edwards dichotomy. John McCain was damned for picking Sarah Palin who had not finished her first term as governor, and had previously only been elected to local political offices and served on a state commission.Her middle American ‘you betcha’ twang, NASCAR persona, good looks, and occasional deer-in-the-headlines interviews with hostile anchor people, coupled with the kids, conservative creed, Christianity, and 19th century husband, sickened—there is no other word for it— the DC-New York...

                                      It’s politically incorrect to mention it, but even in an age of terrorism and insurgency, killing the enemy remains a key to victoryVictory has usually been defined throughout the ages as forcing the enemy to accept certain political objectives. “Forcing” usually meant killing, capturing, or wounding men at arms. In today’s polite and politically correct society we seem to have forgotten that nasty but eternal truth in the confusing struggle to defeat radical Islamic terrorism. What stopped the imperial German army from absorbing France in World War I and eventually made the Kaiser abdicate was the destruction of a...

Joe Biden's zig-zagging odyssey on Iraq is a variable primer on how the political class reinvents itself depending on the current pulse of the battlefield, both overseas and in D.C. “I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration.” Joe Biden, February 12, 2010. Just Politics?All politicians hedge and backtrack, as the daily news proves their previous assertions and boasts wrong. That somersaulting is part of American politics. But even the most astute triangulators know when to go silent, especially in the age of the Internet when one’s...

This is Whittle's own repost of one of his best essays. Long, but worth every second (IMHO of course) A note from Bill Whittle: I'm slowly trying to move the best of the old archives over here to the new. Mostly that consists of the SILENT AMERICA essays, but there were a number of pieces that I really liked, and this is one of them -- courtesy of a request by an old friend who was looking for it.In a month or two I'm going to be putting out two compilations of previously unpublished materials: SEEING THE UNSEEN: ADVENTURES IN...

If the tea party movement is the soul of small government and personal responsibility, the Republican Party is the institutional body conservatives need to regain control over government run amok. You can't have one without the other, says Bill Whittle. The transcript of this video essay is below. IMHO: video is better - Bill Whittle's presentation is characteristically passionate; and his passion is contagious. Well, the Tea party movement is not even a year old, and already it is holding its first national convention. I was honored to be asked to speak at the West Los Angeles event on September...

Count the waysA German scholar twenty years ago listed, I recall, some 210 reasons for the collapse of the Western empire. Readers, you have heard many of them, plausible and otherwise—corruption, civil strife, Germanic barbarians, Christianity, lead in the pipes of the elite, etc.Any such discussion is also predicated on two other twists: the Eastern Empire at Constantinople went on for nearly another 1,000 years until the 1453 sack by the Ottomans. And for the last twenty years, revisionists have disputed Gibbon’s notion of a dramatic “fall” in the West, and argued instead that it was a “transition” as the...

Who is Afraid of Big Government?There is no reason to review all the standard reasons why the American people are terrified of an all-powerful federal or state government. The case has been made in thousands of elegant treatises and books, and is best reflected in the Constitution and the written work of the Founding Fathers.But let me list a few other, less elegantly expressed worries, many anecdotal in nature. 1) Juvenal’s “Who will police the police?”One of the scariest things about government is its exemption from laws by virtue of its monopoly on lawmaking and enforcement. I see this every day,...

The following is a transcript of Bill's video essay Super Bowl Democracy: One of Us Is Better Than Most of Them If you can spare 10 minutes, better watch it - his presentation is passionate, sharp and down to earth.[bold and italics in the text by Bill]If you asked the average American on the street what kind of government we have, they’d likely as not say we live in a democracy. A democracy is – by definition – where the people rule.But we don’t live in a democracy. You don’t get to determine when or if our country goes...

One of the sad characteristics of contemporary Western society is the tendency to embrace noble lies. These are assertions and acts that don’t square with reality, with what we see and hear—and are voiced for apparently noble social purposes. Here are a few politically-incorrect examples.1.  Debt and Deficits. At our current rate we will very soon pile up between $18 and $20 trillion in accumulated national debt. We use the euphemism “stimulus”, talk of massive borrowing in terms of percentages of GDP, and casually pontificate about “inflating” our way out of the debt. The  fact is that the borrowing is now...

Obama, the rhetorician, forgot that people might actually take seriously what he said What is Barack Obama’s real problem? Too many people here and abroad took him at his word, and he now seems quite angry at that. For two years Obama serially damned the entrepreneurial classes. They should “spread the wealth,” be “patriotic,” and pay “their fair share.” They should be paying more income, payroll, and inheritance taxes. They could not be trusted with health care, student loans, high finance, or auto manufacturing. Their lifestyles of private jets and Super Bowl junkets came at the expense of the...

Part One—Chapters One to Four and Part Two. Chapters Five-Six The verdict is still out on whether this attempt to become more like Europe can be stopped. The story will eventually be written something like this: Chapter One — The Liberal Hope and DreamI think our Obama collective story will some day be written something like this. The leftwing anointed vision of America got stalled with the failures of the Great Society, and the high tax, big government discontent of the 1970s and 1980s.Abroad after Vietnam, the gospel that America was the problem sputtered out — with the fall...

All politicians fudge on their promises. But this president manages to transcend the normal political exaggeration and dissimulation. Whereas past executives shaded the truth, Barack Obama trumps that: on almost every key issue, what Obama says he will do, and what he says is true, is a clear guide to what he will not do, and what is not true. It is as if “truth” is a mere problem of lesser mortals.1. Obama now rails against a pernicious Washington and its insiders: ergo, Obama controls Washington through both houses of Congress and the White House, and wants to expand Washington’s...

Cap and trade, statist health care, and an end to “don’t ask, don’t tell” for thee. And for thou, Obama the tax cutter, Obama the gas-and-oil driller, Obama the budget freezer, Obama the anti-lobbyist reformer, Obama the bipartisan healer? This half-hearted pivoting was quite transparent: Obama made these about-faces without acknowledging that the Obama of 2010 is now and then rejecting the Obama of 2009, much less that the partisanship and bickering of the past year stemmed largely from the hubris of having both houses of Congress and an obsequious press. Instead, Obama seemed miffed that after Scott Brown’s victory...

I think we could see what was coming. This presidency has about as much subtlety in plot as a grade-B western, soap opera, or teen-age tantrum.Stage One: A lackluster McCain candidacy, the September 2008 meltdown, weariness with eight years of Bush incumbency, conservative anger over spending, liberal furor over Iraq, a toady media, and Republican congressional corruption all led to a 50/50 electorate that was open to being mesmerized by Obama’s rhetoric and the dream of the nation’s first African-American president.With congressional majorities, a compliant press, soaring public support, a soon-to-be President Obama was convinced, as he had been convinced...

He doesn’t mind pushing noble legislation that most people oppose. In Plato’s ideal society, philosopher kings and elite Guardians shepherded the rabble to force them to do the “right” thing. To prevent the unwashed from doing anything stupid, the all-powerful, all-wise Guardians often had to tell a few “noble” lies. And, of course, these caretakers themselves were exempt from most rules they made for others. We are now seeing such thinking in the Obama administration and among its supporters. A technocracy — many Ivy-League-educated and without much experience outside academia and government — pushes legislation most people do not want...

The humanitarian catastrophe in Haiti is turning out to be a classic illustration of anti-Americanism in seven easy steps. Calamitous events take place in a chaotic place (think Bosnia, think Somalia, think Iraq in 1991).The U.N and the U.S intervene.The civil government proves to be useless or malign, or both.  The U.N isn’t up to the job.  The only effective force in sight is the U.S.  According to today’s Guardian, John O’Shea, the head of Goal, a medical charity, has called on the U.S to take charge of the whole operation.  So has a major U.S aid agency (“which declined...

From Stalin to Obama, the mainstream media's history of bias leaves us asking: Who can handle the truth? Andrew Breitbart's newest venture, Big Journalism, arrives just in time -- as Bill Whittle explains in the latest Afterburner. Watch and comment here: http://pjtv.com/v/2955 Journalism: The Most Trusted Scam In America Jan 18 / Afterburner with Bill Whittle   10 min Consequences of unending bias DuranteCronkiteand so many more Left-wing bias costs people their lives

It’s the lying, Stupid?“Lie” is a rather harsh word; the noun and its verb form leave little to context or extenuating circumstances. So I use it sparingly.But I know no other word for President Obama’s long string of “misstatements,” especially the blatant ones about closing Guantanamo within a year of his inauguration or serially declaring that he would insist on health care debate airing live on C-SPAN.How odd that the liberal block is quiet that once coined “Bush lied, thousands died” (even when the CIA  and Defense intelligence was accepted by both parties and in sync with what the Arab...

There are a number of things we simply no longer talk about. The silence is partly due to intellectual laziness. Or maybe it is because of political correctness—or even attributable to ignorance and the absence of curiosity.In no particular order, I list five propositions that simply have become taboo.1). Illegal Immigration and California.There are dozens of recent exposés on the California mess. The “I accuse” themes—all quite accurate—are well known. (a) The state propositions have hamstrung the legislature, and resulted in almost no free choices anymore in budgetary decision.(b) The legislature—due to partisan gerrymandering, the unnecessarily large number of legislators in...

Bill Whittle goes to Washington, DC to investigate radical Islam's influence over our government and access to our national security secrets. Two whistleblowers have the chilling details. 14 min video (might require FREE registration at PJTV ). The info is shocking, but not surprising to the most of freepers. Bill says: "Shocking news from DC. I first saw this brief in private. It was five hours long. But these 14 minutes ought to give you a taste of how appalling things are." The West in general, and our government in particular, indulges in pretending that we live in a...