Free Republic

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Even before U.S. Rep. Mark Foley (news, bio, voting record)'s cybersex scandal, Republicans fighting to keep control of Congress were struggling to hold on to "values voters" who usually are energized by issues like gay marriage and abortion. While such issues motivated the Republicans' social-conservative base in the past, they are overshadowed in this year's congressional election campaign by concerns about the Iraq war, the economy and national security, according to opinion polls and political strategists. "Poverty, the wealth gap, health care -- people can't afford Medicare. Something's got to be done about that," Sue Harrell, a...

My weekend visitor was one of the founders of the postwar Republican Party in the South, one of those stubborn men who challenged the Democratic rule in his one-party state. He was conservative enough that in the great struggle for the 1952 nomination, his sympathies were with Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio, not Dwight D. Eisenhower. He has lived long enough to see Republicans elected as senator and governor of his state and to see a Republican from the Sun Belt behemoth of Texas capture the White House. His profession won't let him speak with his name attached, but he...

The most striking thing about the uproar over Illinois Senator Dick Durbin’s comparison of American servicemen to ‘‘Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or ... Pol Pot’’ is that his grotesque comparison even caused an uproar in the first place. Of course his analogy was obscene. Of course he knew perfectly well that there is no equivalence between the treatment of several hundred Muslim detainees in Guantanamo — some of which may have been appalling, but none of which has been fatal — and the Nazis’ genocidal slaughter of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust or Stalin’s imprisonment of 25 million...