Free Republic

To judge by several early polls, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has a decent shot of beating former President Donald Trump in the race to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Some liberals have pronounced this terrible news — because, they say, a DeSantis presidency would be just as awful as, and perhaps even worse than, a second Trump term. This is wrong. A DeSantis presidency would be bad in many ways, and my fellow liberals should fight with all they have to prevent it. But Mr. DeSantis almost certainly would not be worse than Mr. Trump. Exaggerating the...

By now, every political commentator has offered a suggestion for how Donald Trump ended up as president of these United States. Few have missed their targets as badly as Damon Linker's most recent offering, which suggests that we could have avoided President Trump if only the government had remained committed, for the past 40-plus years, to a policy that forced young Americans to die in foreign wars. Linker, a senior correspondent at The Week, suggests that historians will ultimately trace the rise of Trump to the decline in social cohesion that began, yes, with the abolition of military conscription in...

So Bernie Sanders is leading in New Hampshire. That cheers me — though not because he's my ideal candidate, and certainly not because I think he could win in the general election. I'm convinced he would almost certainly lose against all but the loopiest or scariest Republican opponent. Then why am I — someone almost certain to vote for a Democrat, and hoping to vote for a woman, in 2016 — so pleased by Sanders' ascent? Because it helps to puncture the aura of inevitability around Hillary Clinton. Yes, she continues to lead in every national poll by a large...

The return of Benghazi is the latest evidence that the GOP is putting its unhinged obsessions before the good of the country. Back in March 2013, I wrote a column titled, "Why I am no longer a Republican." A more accurate (though admittedly more ponderous) title would have been, "One important reason among many that I am no longer a Republican." That important reason was the Iraq War, which I never supported and which the Bush administration and its legion of defenders in Washington and around the country justified in terms that struck me at the time as highly ideological,...

It's not hard to understand why. Even without a replay of the Bachmann-Cain-Gingrich-Perry-Paul GOP primary freak show of 2012, the party is heading into its confrontation with Hillary Clinton at a serious general election disadvantage. Some of the weakness has demographic roots that no single candidate can change in a single race. But the rest is a product of the party's rightward lurch over the past six years — and a restive base that demands absolute ideological purity on the part of candidates. The result, as in 2012, is likely to be a primary contest devoted to winning the Real...

Democracy is starting to get me down. Oh, I know what you're thinking: I write regularly about American politics, and democracy is only just starting to get me down? Okay, good point. Maybe I should say that democracy is starting to get me down even more than it usually does. And why is that? Because it's beginning to dawn on me that Jeb Bush is probably going to be the Republican Party's nominee for president in 2016. Consider: With the ongoing implosion of Chris Christie's political career, the GOP establishment has lost its best hope for a candidate who could...

It has a lot to do with the Iraq war -snip My own position on the war fits into none of these categories. Ten years ago, I was working as an editor at First Things, a monthly magazine that's aptly been described as the New York Review of Books of the religious right. (And no, that's not oxymoronic.) The magazine strongly supported George W. Bush's original conception of the War on Terror, and so did I. In his speech to Congress and the nation on September 20, 2001, Bush stated that the United States would seek to decimate al Qaeda...

More and more, I wonder whether lefties mean it, any of it. Take Rosie O’Donnell. The other day, one of her co-hosts on “The View” was musing on current events and opined, “If you take radical Islam and you want to talk about what is going on there you have to…” And at this point Rosie interrupted. “One second. Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have a separation of church and state.” Does she really believe that? That “radical Christianity” is “just as threatening” as “radical Islam”? These terms are...

While Muslims were busy threatening to kill the Pope, Rosie O’Donnell – talk-show host, constitutional scholar and celebrity airhead – was busy comparing conservative Christians to Islamo-fascists. On ABC’s “The View” last week, O’Donuts smeared committed Christians while trivializing the suffering of Islam’s many victims. Responding to the comments of her co-host that militant Islam is a threat to free people everywhere, O’Donnell – famous for her keen intellect – shot back: “Just a minute. Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have separation of church and state.” Actually , we...