Free Republic

"Is this what Germany looked like in 1933?" Joe Scarborough asked on Morning Joe this week. No. Not at all. Though many in my family were exterminated during the Holocaust -- including one of my grandfathers, who died trying to make his way home from Mauthausen after years of forced labor -- I'm not completely offended by an occasional gratuitous Nazi analogy. But as much as I hate to intrude on our week of national indignation, Donald Trump's idiotic, undoable, and probably unconstitutional immigration proposal (if we can call it that) is not comparable to the genocide of 6 million...

The lowest moment from what was probably the lowest speech of his presidency — so far. David Harsanyi, watching this, asks a good question: Imagine what would have happened if Bush had said that Democrats were caucusing with Saddam Hussein?— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) August 5, 2015 The GOP opposes the nuclear deal because they think it’s too favorable to Iran and not favorable enough to America. The hardliners in Iran’s parliament oppose the deal for the opposite reason. Insofar as they both want the deal to fail, I suppose that’s “common cause.” But then, as Harsanyi says, it must also...

Abdulazeez shot his victims in a ‘gun-free zone,’ which is a useful illustration of the absurdity of gun-control laws: we constrain conscientious Americans but offer free rein to killers. [..] Surely, we are in for a new round of emotional pleas for more gun-control laws. And, helpfully, in this week’s Newsweek cover story by Kurt Eichenwald we already have a compendium of muddled and misleading anti-Second Amendment talking points that dominate the Left these days. The confusion begins with headline, which is based on an absurd premise, and bleeds into the lead: Let’s start with an undeniable truth: In the...

You can pick the Islamic Republic or the Jewish State. You can't pick both. Isn’t it odd how every pundit and politician who’s been antagonistic towards Israel is also super excited about an Iranian deal that’s allegedly going to help protect the Jewish State from the threat of nuclear Iran? All the peacemongers love it. “We are satisfied that the solution found is based on the principle of phasing and mutuality which our country has been consistently supporting at every stage of these complicated negotiations,” says Vlad Putin, the leader of the country that made Iranian nuclear power a possibility....

If same-sex marriage is used to pummel religious Americans into submission, it will be a disaster. I’ve supported same-sex marriage ever since I first heard the idea. And when I became a political columnist in the early 2000s—despite being the “conservative” at a good-sized newspaper—I was the only one at the paper (as far as I can recall) who unequivocally backed gay marriage publicly. Though I wasn’t gullible enough to believe I’d be persuading many readers, I was gullible enough to believe that my allies in the cause were merely concerned with “equality.” As we dig out from the avalanche...

Do something about guns. In his statement on the Charleston shooting, President Barack Obama called on congressional leaders to “come to grips” with their positions on guns, because “it is in our power to do something about it.” This is a refrain we hear after every gruesome mass shooting. Today, Eugene Robinson writes that “the one thing about which there can be no debate is that he had a gun.” The only way we can change things is to hold “presidential candidates of both parties accountable” to do something about them. Ok. What?

This week, Pope Francis informed an audience in Turin that gun manufacturers—and those invested in the weapons industries—were hypocrites if they called themselves Christians. Francis, who earlier this year accused weapons makers of participating in an “industry of death,” explained: “It makes me think of … people, managers, businessmen who call themselves Christian and they manufacture weapons. That leads to a bit a distrust, doesn’t it?” Well, not really. This piece comes with customary caveat that English-speaking media tends to tweak the translation of the Pope’s messages just enough to mislead or strip it of proper context—or sometimes, miss...

"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." - Rahm Emanuel Less than 24-hours after a racist young white man killed nine black members of the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina Wednesday night, the left took the opportunity to immediately politicize the tragedy with a push for more gun control. First, President Obama made a statement from the White House claiming violence like this "doesn't happen in other advanced countries" and blamed easy access to a firearm for the...

Fair enough. Let’s almost not execute him. This seems to answer the lingering question of what was running through this degenerate’s mind while he sat through a Bible study meeting with a group of people he intended to murder in cold blood. I was thinking about that last night and couldn’t recall another case where a terrorist spent time getting to know his victims in an intimate setting before opening fire. To the extent you can understand the mind of a mass murderer, you would think dehumanization of the target is key. And the easiest way to dehumanize is to...

Sometimes, probably because he’s such an affable media presence, I forget why I dislike the political version of Mike Huckabee so much. Maybe it’s the aw-shucks populism, which isn’t substantively very different from the class-conflict rhetoric we hear from so many on the left these days. Or maybe it’s that Everyman Huckabee has been running for one political office or another for the past 25 years — a fact that might escape the attention of anyone listening to the nuggets of blue-collar wisdom found in his speeches and those God-guns-grits-and-gravy books he writes. Since his previous run for the presidency,...

Why Won’t Anyone Challenge Hillary? by DAVID HARSANYI March 13, 2015 Other Democrats could do just as well, with far fewer negatives and less drama. Though it’s unsettling to imagine such a scenario, both the republic and the Democratic party would likely survive if Hillary Clinton were not to become president. Now, if the Clintons have proved anything over the years, it’s that they are resilient in the face of scandal. So in all likelihood, Hillary hangs tight on the State Department e-mail fiasco and waits for Democrats to rally behind her. And judging from the trial balloons — “If...

Media are largely silent about their fear of vaccination and their belief in astrology and UFOs The New York Times claims that the vaccine controversy we’re all talking about raises important questions about “how to approach matters that have largely been settled among scientists but are not widely accepted by conservatives.” Well, here’s another question: How do we deal with the false perception that liberals are more inclined to trust science than conservatives? Also, how do we approach the media’s fondness for focusing on the unscientific views of some conservatives but ignoring the irrational — and oftentimes more consequential —...

In a recent post at The Federalist, senior editor David Harsanyi noted that, based on recent reports from Fox News and NBC News, it appears as though the Defense Department is set to charge Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl with desertion: Leaving his post in Afghanistan in 2009 “in the middle of a combat zone, potentially putting the lives of his fellow soldiers at risk.” For the record I was deployed to Afghanistan from October 2009 to September 2010; I arrived in-country after Bergdahl “went missing,” but remember hearing some scuttlebutt regarding the incident shortly after arriving from some guys who...

Evidently, Republicans don’t feel competent enough to make a case against infanticide. Why else would the GOP pull its 20-week abortion-limit bill? Here’s a short list of things that are less popular than banning late-term abortions: “Acting” on climate change. “Free” community college. Taxing the wealthy. Building the Keystone XL pipeline. President Barack Obama. Future President Hillary Clinton. Every Republican who’s thinking about running for president. A new Marist poll finds that 84 percent of Americans favor some level of further restrictions on abortion. And regardless of their feelings about the legality of the procedure, 60 percent believe it to...

The Obama Boom is finally here. Gross domestic product grew by a healthy 5 percent in the third quarter, the strongest growth we’ve seen since 2003. Consumer spending looks as if it’s going to be strong in 2015. Unemployment numbers have looked good. Buying power is up. And the Dow Jones Industrials closed at 18,000 for the first time ever. All good things. So what happened? Here’s David Axelrod on Twitter: “Note: The quarter before Obama took office, the U.S. economy SHRUNK by 8.9 percent, worst since 1930. Last quarter it GREW by 5 percent, best since 2003.” Note:...

The Obama Boom is finally here. Gross domestic product grew by a healthy 5 percent in the third quarter, the strongest growth we’ve seen since 2003. Consumer spending looks like it’s going to be strong in 2015, unemployment numbers have looked good, buying power is up and the stock market closed at 18,000 for the first time ever. All good things. So what happened? Note: The quarter before Obama took office, the U.S. economy SHRUNK by 8.9%, worst since 1930. Last quarter it GREW by 5%, best since 2003.— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) December 24, 2014 Note: Contrasting the most severe...

There’s no good reason for her not to run. When Elizabeth Warren rallied beleaguered House liberals to push back against a bank-coddling omnibus bill and the spineless White House that enabled it, she showed us some of her dynamic appeal. Her only leverage? An implicit threat to shut down the government. Hypocrisy? Sure. Consider the agitated criticism Warren and her allies threw at Republicans not very long ago. And yes, St. Warren’s righteousness was aimed at some inconsequential riders. Still, passing trillion-dollar pieces of legislation should never be easy, and disrupting the current cozy, bipartisan environment surely can’t be a...

For many in the media, the Ferguson grand jury’s decision was going to confirm the existence of deep American injustice one way or another. If it found there was insufficient evidence for an indictment against Darren Wilson, it would mean that the American justice system was corrupt, unjust, and rife with racism. If the grand jury decided to move forward with an indictment, it could only mean that American law enforcement was corrupt, unjust, and rife with racism.Even if many of your grievances are legitimate, “justice” doesn’t exist to soothe your anger. In the end, there wasn’t probable cause...

The new season of "19 Kids and Counting" is here. And I'm excited. So what? Generally speaking, I enjoy the most salacious, violent and depressing television shows I can find. Maybe it's just a perverse form of escapism, maybe it's the high quality of shows being produced these days, but I can't resist "prestige" television -- "The Wire," "Breaking Bad," "Fargo," "The Sopranos," "Game of Thrones," "House Of Cards," "The Walking Dead" and so on. For that matter, I also hung around for four seasons of "The Killing" and watched every episode of the "Halt and Catch Fire." So, apparently,...

Burger King plans to merge with Canuck coffee-and-doughnut chain Tim Hortons and base the company's headquarters in Canada, where it will enjoy the kind of reasonable corporate tax structure that Democrats continue to obstruct here in the United States. And the move has provoked a fresh round of moral panic, faux patriotism and confusion. It's doubtful, despite much wishful thinking, that there will be much of a real backlash. Nor should there be. Most obviously, the majority of fast-food customers are probably less inclined than the petitioners of MoveOn.org to mistake high tax rates for patriotism. This kind of distorted...