Free Republic

  Register Early for CPAC 2005 The HillTuesday, June 15, 2004 Right has few deep pocketsBy David KeeneBack in 1980, the late Terry Dolan, chairman of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), asked me to head up an independent effort supporting Ronald Reagan's campaign against President Jimmy Carter. Dolan felt he could raise substantial funds and quickly persuaded me to sign on.Independent expenditures of the sort we planned were perfectly legal as long as we resisted the temptation to coordinate any of our activities with the official campaign. We spent nearly $3 million (a lot of money in...

Talking Points Memo & Top Story The truth on terrorism President Bush continues to believe that the war in Iraq will eventually make Americans safer, but is this case strong enough? We're fighting terrorism as a nation divided... and defeat is not an option. Bill speaks with David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, for another view on America's war.

Last week, the Democratic National Committee began distributing several pages of quotes from conservatives critical of President Bush on a variety of fronts and suggesting to the media that the fact that we don't agree with the man on everything all of the time is evidence of real weakness in his base. Some in the media took the bait, and many of us got calls from reporters wondering if the president can really rely on the strong support he's going to need from his conservative base to win in November. Now, the summer silly season is fast approaching, so perhaps...

Can't trust U.N. to run IraqBy David KeeneIn Sen. John Kerry's world, where one can have everything both ways, the way to solve the Iraq "problem" is simple enough: turn it over to the United Nations. If the Massachusetts Democrat is serious, he is either naive or a true cynic. We are learning much from Iraq. We have learned, for example, that the United Nations is as corrupt and incompetent an institution as any yet devised by the mind of man. We are told that President Bush wants to avoid his father's mistakes in Iraq, so it's worth taking a...

<p>Democrats, liberals and moderate Republicans believed they had much to celebrate in November 1964. The new conservative movement that had begun in the '50s and actually managed to nominate a candidate for president that year had been vanquished. Barry Goldwater hadn't just been defeated; he'd been crushed and most of the day's pundits were convinced that in crushing him the new political movement was dead.</p>

To bring corporate profits home, keep Kerry on road The Senate, including Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry (Mass.), is in a position this week to do more than just blather about lost jobs, outsourcing and competitiveness. But in a world where talk often seems more important than action, one can only wonder if the Senate will act. It isn’t all that often that Congress comes upon a problem that it can actually solve with a simple change in the law, but the problem of U.S. corporations balking at the idea of bringing their foreign earnings home to invest here...

       The Secretary of the Senate refuses to enforce the law. ACU now has no choice but to go to court, file a lawsuit, and compel the Senate to enforce the laws of the land.As you know, in 2003 Sen. John Kerry missed 60 percent of the votes in the Senate. This year he missed all 22 Senate votes until last week, when he rushed back to Washington at the behest of the gun control crowd to cast votes for a series of anti-Second Amendment measures.U.S. Code allows a Senator to be absent from the Senate only...

When I read some of those descriptions [of me in the press] I get scared of me. —Attorney General John Ashcroft, U.S. News & World Report, January 26, 2004 In January of 2003, I, hardly known as a conservative or Bush admirer, was invited by David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, to appear at its annual Conservative Political Action Conference. It was the first time a Voice writer had been asked to speak at this center of conservative activism. Joining me at the panel on civil liberties, the Constitution, and the Bush-Ashcroft Patriot Act was Bob Barr, an...

Need A Pen, Mr. President? by David A. Keene President Bush didn't have much to say about the deficit in last week's State of the Union speech, but he's been vocal about it since, pledging a 1 percent cap on increases in domestic non-defense and homeland-security spending in the budget the administration will soon send to the Hill. The deficit is, of course, simply a symptom of an imbalance between revenues and expenditures that cannot be ignored over the long term without severe economic consequences. Few voters rush to the polls to vote based on either the size of the...

Many conservatives are concerned about skyrocketing federal spending, growing deficits and the seeming inability or unwillingness of the Bush administration and its allies in Congress to do much about either. I share those concerns. Moreover, like most conservatives, I opposed the recent expansion of the Medicare program and questioned a number of other administration and congressional initiatives on ideological and political grounds. I shall continue to do so because I am convinced, like Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, who gave the keynote address at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, that the "ship of governance" has wandered off course and...

"Walks like amnesty, talks like amnesty, it must be amnesty" Alexandria, VA - The White House's intention to grant legal status to non-citizens who have entered the country illegally was sharply criticized today by American Conservative Union (ACU) chairman David A. Keene. "The Bush Administration would have us believe that this move toward legalizing the status of illegal immigrants-lawbreakers-will curb the flow of illegal immigration and enhance our border security. Nothing could be further from the truth," said Keene. "When you send the message that violating our current border controls is all one has to do in order to stay...

Conservativism, Chronicles and Paleoconservativism Thomas Fleming, the brilliant editor of the self-styled paleoconservative magazine, Chronicles, deserves much of the blame for the founding of ConservativeBattleline. Months ago, he published an editorial proclaiming the "fusionist" conservatism of old National Review was dead and that no one under 60 years old adhered to its principles any longer. In the most recent issue, leading columnist Samuel Francis makes the same damning indictment, adding, fusionism "died childless." Being over sixty myself, it was hardly apt to respond to the editor--this would merely confirm his charge. Besides, the truth hurts. I was afraid he was...

Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? It’s the Left — liberals, left-wingers, socialists, commies, pinkos, the Noam Chomskys and Alec Baldwins and Barbra Streisands — that hates America. But the Right – good old flag-waving patriotic God Bless America conservatives? How could they possibly be anti-American? It sounds ridiculous. Yet whatever sense or nonsense it makes, anti-Americanism is seeping into the entire conservative movement and is threatening to splinter it into pieces. I’m not talking about the racist nuts, the white supremacists and militia types. I’m talking about mainstream heartland conservatives. Howard Phillips, head of the famed Conservative Caucus, is...

Right joins left to denounce the Patriot Act. At a hotel in the suburbs of Washington Sunday, conservative leaders Grover Norquist and David Keene joined forces with some of the most bitter and determined foes of the Bush White House to denounce the administration's main law-enforcement tool in the war on terrorism, the Patriot Act. Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, and Keene, of the American Conservative Union, joined actor Alec Baldwin and People for the American Way president Ralph Neas as part of a conference called "Grassroots America Defends the Bill of Rights." The conference featured seminars designed...

Retired Gen. Wesley Clark has been leading the Democratic presidential field now for nearly two weeks. He's survived his first debate and must be feeling pretty good about things. Pundits are hailing him as just what the Democrats need to counter the image of President Bush as commander-in-chief at a time of continuing national crisis, and the other contenders must be wondering when the media guns will turn on the new entrant. In last week's debate, the general survived not so much as a result of his fast footwork, but because the other leading contenders are still focused on Howard...

Attorney General John Ashcroft began his recent "victory" tour at the American Enterprise Institute where he disingenuously justified his campaign-like appearance as necessary, lest those lacking his unique dedication to the war against terrorism succeed in "repealing" the USA Patriot Act. He then took his show on the road, speaking primarily before closed meetings of law enforcement officials assembled to applaud and nod as he not only defended the vast investigative powers he and they have acquired since Sept. 11 but argued that more were needed. Meanwhile, his spokespeople were hinting publicly that anyone who even dares question the need...

<p>The conservative movement has scored historic gains but has yet to achieve several of its basic goals.</p> <p>That's the verdict of some of its founding fathers (and one important mother).</p> <p>"We won the battle against communism, but I guess we've largely lost the battle against big government," says Eagle Forum President Phyllis Schlafly, 79, who defied conventional wisdom by leading a women's crusade that defeated the Equal Rights Amendment in the mid-1970s.</p>

Things never seem to change. Liberals have never been able to grasp the fact that sane, responsible men and women might disagree with them for substantive or even intellectual reasons, and have been trying to dismiss conservatives since the 1950s as cranks, nuts racists and misfits. When I was in college in the early 1960s, there weren't that many of us in what has come to be known as the "conservative movement." There were the folks at National Review, of course, and there was a small publisher in Chicago that kept publishing books by NR founder Bill Buckley and a...

Tom Ridge was a pretty good governor and is President Bush's friend. People who know him say he's also a pretty good guy. But it's becoming increasingly clear that he's rapidly becoming little more than another run-of-the-mill Washington bureaucrat more interested in accumulating power than in doing his job. Anyone who doubts that should look at what his Department of Homeland Security is up to these days. The department was cobbled together in the days after Sept. 11 by an administration rightly worried about our security, and, on paper at least, it made a lot of sense. The new department...

Remembering Conservatism's Unsung HeroBy David KeeneThe Hill | July 30, 2003 I am told that we conservatives are in disarray -- that we have lost our moorings and don't quite know what to do about the fact that everything isn't going our way and that some of us actually disagree with each other on just where we ought to be going.These things are true. But they have been true from the beginning. Conservatives are and always have been a fractious bunch. The movement that grew out of the writing and feverish activity of folks interested primarily in ideas and policies...