Free Republic

When it comes to presidential obstruction, at least Watergate started with a crime. A stupid crime, but a crime. After 675 days, more than 2,800 subpoenas, nearly 500 search warrants, $30 million spent, endless jaw-jaw on cable and countless whiny Trump tweets, we have come down to one fundamental truth. And it’s the same truth that has been terrorising us all along: Donald Trump’s dirtbag machinations are driven by insane vanity. The First Narcissist’s all-consuming blend of braggadocio and insecurity has turned Washington and its rickety institutions into a dystopian outpost of his id. President Trump obstructed on nearly every...

With more millions than she and her Oscar-winning husband Michael Douglas can spend and more homes than they could ever live in, actress Catherine Zeta-Jones says she’s “sick” of apologizing for being filthy rich. “One thing I’m not is humble anymore. I’m sick of being humble. I really am,” Zeta-Jones said in an interview with British the newspaper The Daily Mirror. “So sorry I’m rich, so sorry I’m married to a movie star, so sorry I’m not so bad looking.”“No sorrys. Enough. All that is important to me now is my work,” the Feud star continued. “[The] rest of...

Donald Trump pulled off one of the greatest political feats in modern history by defeating Hillary Clinton and the vaunted Clinton machine. The election was a complete repudiation of Barack Obama: his fantasy world of political correctness, the politicization of the Justice Department and the I.R.S., an out-of-control E.P.A., his neutering of the military, his nonsupport of the police and his fixation on things like transgender bathrooms. Since he became president, his party has lost 63 House seats, 10 Senate seats and 14 governorships. The country had signaled strongly in the last two midterms that they were not happy. The...

His life took off, he said, when he fell in love with “that girl.” He told a familiar love story, recounted in his memoir, about springtime at Yale Law School in 1971 and a “magnetic” girl with thick blond hair and big glasses and no makeup and a long, white flowery skirt. He said when he first saw her in a political and civil rights class that he wanted to tap her on the shoulder but he knew if he did, he would be starting something beyond his control. With a sky-blue tie and silvery hair and an easy smile,...

HILLARY CLINTON first grabbed the national spotlight 47 years ago as an idealistic young feminist, chiding the paternalistic establishment in her Wellesley commencement speech. So it’s passing strange to watch her here, getting rebuffed by young women who believe that she lacks idealism, that she overplays her feminist hand and that she is the paternalistic establishment. Bernie Sanders may be a dead ringer for Larry David, but Hillary is running the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” campaign. She can’t fire up young voters by dwelling on what can’t be done in Washington and by explaining that she’s more prose than poetry.

In more cultured circles, Maureen Dowd is known as the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and columnist for the New York Times, who was once named woman of the year by Glamour and is regarded as one of the most influential left-leaning journalists in the country. On Twitter, she’s just another superparanoid stoner with a keyboard. Dowd’s half-baked odyssey began when she flew to Denver to immerse herself in some of the local culture. No, not hitting the slopes or visiting the rifle range. She had designs on getting high. You know, for one of her columns. So she went down to...

I SAW “Argo” with Jerry Rafshoon, who was a top aide to President Carter during the Iranian hostage crisis, when six Americans escaped and were given sanctuary for three months by courageous Canadian diplomats. We were watching a scene where a C.I.A. guy can’t get through to Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s chief of staff, to sign off on plane tickets for the escaping hostages, so he pretends to be calling from the school where Jordan’s kids go. “Hamilton wasn’t married then and didn’t have any kids,” Jerry whispered, inflaming my pet peeve about filmmakers who make up facts in stories about...

On Thursday, Bill Clinton once more telegraphed that he considers Obama a lightweight who should not have bested his wife. Bluntly contradicting the Obama campaign theme that Romney is a heartless corporate raider, Clinton told CNN that the Republican’s record at Bain was “sterling.” Covering a humorous W. at the unveiling of his portrait, the White House press actually seemed nostalgic for the president who bollixed up Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina and the economy — a sure sign that the Obama magic is flagging. On Friday, an ugly job market report led to the stock market’s worst day of the year....

Anti-Catholicism is arguably the oldest bias in the history of the American people. Or so Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. — who had no dog in the fight — once told the dean of U.S. Catholic historians, Fr. John Tracy Ellis. Over the centuries, however, anti-Catholicism in America has taken on several forms. In its classic New England iteration, anti-Catholicism was shaped by Protestant and, later, Enlightenment-rationalist assumptions. Both were neatly summarized in a letter from John Adams to his wife, Abigail, written during the First Continental Congress after Mr. Adams had undertaken an anthropological expedition through the streets of Philadelphia:This...

After supporting husband Michael Douglas through his battle with throat cancer, Catherine Zeta-Jones needed medical care for herself. After “the stress of the past year,” her representative said in a statement, the movie star “made the decision to check into a mental health facility for a brief stay to treat her bipolar II disorder,” a condition similar to bipolar I disorder, characterized by mood swings from high to low. Zeta-Jones has been hit with a series of devastating events: In 2010, her stepson, Cameron Douglas, was sentenced to five years in prison on drug charges, and four months later, her...

How did the first president of color become so colorless? The president is everywhere, trying to get more aggressive and recapture some of his “Yes we can” mojo in an effort to fend off the rebuke that’s barreling toward him from voters this fall. One of the independent voters Obama will be trying to charm over the next two years is my sister, Peggy, a formerly ardent Obamican (a Republican who changed spots to vote for Obama). Despite being a Washington native, Peggy believed that the dazzling young newcomer could change Washington. But she has lost a lot of faith...

Her critics used to paint her as a scary Marxist. Now they cast her as a spoiled princess. During the campaign, she was caricatured on the cover of The New Yorker as a fist-bumping, gun-toting Black Panther. Now she’s mocked by a New York Daily News blogger as a jet-setting, free-spending Marie Antoinette. Michelle Obama is the most popular figure in the administration, but last week she had her first brush with getting brushed back in the press. In politics and pop culture, optics are all. And Michelle’s optics sent a message that likely made some in the White House...

PUNXSUTAWNEY, Pa. — An animal rights group wants organizers of Pennsylvania's Groundhog Day festival to replace Punxsutawney Phil with a robotic stand-in.

The normally nonchalant Barack Obama looked nonplussed, as Nancy Pelosi glowered behind. Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t. But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

How quaint. The Republicans are concerned about checks and balances. The specter of Specter helping the president have his way with Congress... (snip) Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, tried to put the best face on it, noting, “This will make it easier for G.O.P. candidates in 2010 to ask to be elected to help restore some checks and balances in Washington.” This is quite touching, given that the start of the 21st century will be remembered as the harrowing era when an arrogant Republican administration did its best to undermine checks and balances. (Maybe when your reign...

She'd need to tone down her famous sex appeal - and seriously cultivate her eyebrows. Even so, Catherine Zeta Jones is said to be desperate to play Susan Boyle on screen. Miss Zeta Jones, 39, has apparently asked about the film rights to the singer's life story and sensational appearance on Britain's Got Talent. It is believed that Oscar-winning film director James Cameron, who was behind Titanic, has expressed an interest in a similar project. Miss Boyle, a shy church volunteer from West Lothian, Scotland, has become a star in the U.S. after her performance of I Dreamed A Dream...

Barack Obama’s grandmother told him to smile more. Bill Clinton tells the new president to strut more. As the country takes a bullet train to bankruptcy, the last Democratic president urged the current one to “embody” that old American spunk. That spirit of — as they sing in “Oklahoma” — “We know we belong to the land and the land we belong to is grand! A-YIP-I-O-EE-AY!” “It’s worth reminding the American people that for more than 230 years everyone who bet against America lost money,” Clinton told Chris Cuomo on “Good Morning America.” “I just want him to embody that...

WASHINGTON: As President Obama spreads his New Testament balm over the capital, I’m longing for a bit of Old Testament wrath. Couldn’t he throw down his BlackBerry tablet and smash it in anger over the feckless financiers, the gods of gold and their idols — in this case not a gilt calf but an $87,000 area rug, a cache of diamond Tiffany and Cartier watches and a French-made luxury corporate jet? Now that we’re nationalizing, couldn’t we fire any obtuse bankers and auto executives who cling to perks and bonuses even as the economy is following John Thain down his...

Repeatedly, FR moderators have moved TOP postings related to current NEWS and calls for conservative ACTIVISM from the News and Activism section, over to "blogger's and personal" which has no traffic by comparison. I fully understand Jim Robinson's original purpose in launching FR, to provide a community in which conservatives could get TRUTH not available in the MSM, information not available in the MSM and access to fellow conservatives so that we could work together towards a conservative agenda. Yet time after time, FR moderators bury this information over in "blogger's and personal" and kill story after story, vital to...

THE MAVERICK WEARS PRADA Screenplay by Maureen Dowd Revised third draft © Oct. 29, 2008 (snip) NICOLLE Think like a diva. Where would you go rogue? TRACEY Sean Hannity’s pocket. Could he pant over her more? Or maybe she’s hiding in Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s dressing room at “The View.”