Free Republic

MESSAGE: They care. Republicans care deeply. They really do. They care deeply about making us think that they care deeply. That’s why they knocked themselves out producing a convention that was a colossal hoax.

WASHINGTON If you thought it would be hard for TV to top the Summer of the Insatiable Sharks, Ravenous Bears, Killer Bees and Stampeding Lizzie Grubman, you were wrong. Two networks are racing to air prime-time specials this fall featuring mediums interviewing dead celebrities. As Lisa de Moraes reported in The Washington Post, NBC and ABC are both doing such shows for fall sweeps. "The November of the Chatting Dead," she dryly calls it. In a culture so besotted with celebrity, we were bound to run out of upright luminaries to interview. I may tune in if the mediums manage ...

Today’s four words: Et tu, Mo Do? Not again! The president who started off with such dazzle now seems incapable of stimulating either the economy or the voters. His campaign is offering Obama 2012 car magnets for a donation of $10; cat collars reading “I Meow for Michelle” for $12; an Obama grill spatula for $40, and discounted hoodies and T-shirts. How the mighty have fallen. Hey MoDo! They’re all high quality products! ...Cook told Maraniss that she thought Obama’s desire to “play out a superhero life” was “a very strong archetype in his personality.” Well, that certainly does explain...

Last week, two prominent Catholic women -- Kathleen Sebelius in an address to the graduates of Georgetown University's public policy school, and Maureen Dowd in a column published in the New York Times -- delivered strong statements about the Church's role in civil society. Dowd's column was more or less a screed, while Sebelius's address was relatively measured in tone. Yet both were marked by some pretty fundamental misunderstandings, which have, sadly, become widespread. Echoing an army of commentators from the last fifty years, Dowd exults in James Joyce's characterization of the Catholic Church (drawn, it appears, from the pages...

Maureen Dowd is a woman of many talents. She is, of course, a New York Times featured columnist, a Pulitzer Prize winning commentator, and the liberals acknowledged Queen of Snark. Ms. Dowd has also completely blown a gasket, if her column of last week (April 5th) is any indication of her psychological-emotional state. In her column of last week entitled, Men In Black, Maureen employs language and phraseology that her fellow liberals would quickly label “hate speech” if it were uttered by their foes. Ms. Dowd assails the Supreme Court in the most personal and vitriolic terms for their...

WASHINGTON — How dare President Barack Obama brush back the Supreme Court like that? Has this former constitutional law instructor no respect for our venerable system of checks and balances? Nah. And why should he? This court, cosseted behind white marble pillars, out of reach of TV, accountable to no one once they give the last word, is well on its way to becoming the one of the most divisive in modern U.S. history. It has squandered even the semi-illusion that it is the unbiased, honest guardian of the Constitution. It is run by hacks dressed up in black robes....

Video here. Appearing on This Week With Christanne Amanpour George Stephanopoulos, noted theologian Matthew Dowd decried the "irony" that certain legislators and governors who "push for" gun rights also "push for" prayer in school. It actually gets better. Thus spake Dowd: "We wanna be a Christian nation and we wanna act in a Christian manner but, oh by the way, we don't believe in the 'Turn your other cheek' and we don't believe in 'Love your enemy', we believe in loading citizens and basically giving them an opportunity to shoot people." Apologies for his tortured use of the English language...

TRUST Mitt Romney to be on top of the latest trend of the superrich: the trophy basement. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported on the new fashion to look low-key on the outside while digging deep for opulence — carving out subterranean spaces for Turkish baths, Italianate spas, movie theaters, skateboarding ramps, squash courts, discos and golf-simulation centers. The Journal reported that Romney has filed an application to replace his single-story 3,000-square-foot beach house in La Jolla, Calif., with a 7,400-square-foot home featuring an additional 3,600 square feet of finished underground space. It’s a metaphor alert, reinforcing the two...

Rick Santorum has been called a latter-day Savonarola. That’s far too grand. He’s more like a small-town mullah. “Satan has his sights on the United States of America,” the conservative presidential candidate warned in 2008. “Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.” When, in heaven’s name, did sensuality become a vice? Next he’ll be banning Barry White. Santorum is not merely engaged in a culture war, but “a spiritual war,” as...

Libs think Bain Capital is Mitt Romney’s Achilles heel. In creating more than 100,000 jobs at just 3 of the 77 companies Bain Capital was involved in during his tenure as CEO, Bain had to pull the plug on a factory or two. This means some people are unhappy with Bain Capital and face it, some of them are unionists. Some conservative bloggers worry about those ads even before anyone films them. It is the old Doctor Smith cries of “we are doomed” from Republicans, RINO and Tea Party alike. How can we nominate a candidate who is not perfect?...

Sacred underwear, baptizing holocaust victims, gods of their own planets. When some of America’s most celebrated pundits and public intellectuals talk about Mormons, these are the images that are summoned. Ironically in this “Mormon Moment”—signaled by a hit Broadway musical, polygamous housewives on TLC, and of course two Mormon presidential candidates—Mormons, long considered quintessential “outsiders” to mainstream American culture, today find themselves at the center of the American zeitgeist. Yet it is the Mormons’ supposed theological weirdness that is the centripetal attraction. As Joanna Brooks has noted in these pages, the New York Times recently featured Harold Bloom’s musings on...

Whether Bill Clinton is being mischievous or helpful is never entirely clear. But the former president often manages to show the current president just how the game should be played. When Barack Obama was languishing by the phone in July, yearning to hear from John Boehner on the elusive Grand Bargain, the Big Dog advised blowing off the obstructionists in Congress and invoking the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling. Clinton will often forcefully — and feelingly — frame the argument for Obama policies that would help the working class in a way that Obama himself, once hailed as...

WOW, what a relief. The president was strong and House Republicans were conciliatory. There was only one teensy-weensy problem: The president is weak and House Republicans are obstructionist. Congressional Republicans, heeding polls indicating that their all-out assault on President Obama was risky, finally tempered their public comments after the jobs speech on Thursday and stopped acting like big jerks. Obama, heeding plummeting polls and beseeching voices from his despairing base, finally deigned to get tough. In the capital of political tactics, it was just another fine day of faking it. The president’s supporters had a single reaction to the fiery...

ONE day during the 2008 campaign, as Barack Obama read the foreboding news of the mounting economic and military catastrophes that W. was bequeathing his successor, he dryly remarked to aides: “Maybe I should throw the game.” On the razor’s edge of another recession; blocked at every turn by Republicans determined to slice him up at any cost; starting an unexpectedly daunting re-election bid; and puzzling over how to make a prime-time speech about infrastructure and payroll taxes soar, maybe President Obama is wishing that he had thrown the game. ... Obama’s re-election chances depend on painting the Republicans as...

The president was in "Afternoon of a Faun" mode, a rural deity playing on his panpipes in the woods. Then, suddenly, he stood very still as he sensed electoral danger. The president looked breezy in khakis and white shirt. But he seemed to tense up as Emily spoke. "So when you ran for office you built a tremendous amount of trust with the American people, that you seemed like someone who wouldn't move the bar on us," Emily said. "And it seems, especially in the last year, as if your negotiating tactics have sort of cut away at that trust...

Bill O'Reilly thinks the only thing that can save the Obama presidency is the extremism of the Tea Party followers in Congress. And he's right. Maureen Dowd compares Obama to Jimmy Carter today in her Sunday New York Times column, clearly overwhelmed by the job, bowing to Republican demands at every turn, out of his depth. And she's right. Both leading Irish American columnists essentially agree that the only thing that can save this ineffectual president is the extremism on the right . The two leading Irish American voices (pictured together at an Irish Central/Irish Voice event above) rarely agree...

HE was born this way. Bi. Not bisexual. Not even bipartisan. Just binary. Our president likes to be on both sides at once.

US officials have blamed Britain for an embarrassing fiasco in which an impostor met Afghan and Nato officials before it was discovered he was not the Taliban leader they thought he was, according to sources familiar with the incident. It was revealed this week that the man – understood to be a shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta – was masquerading as Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, the second highest-ranking official in the Taliban. He attended three meetings in Kabul. The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported today that people familiar with the con – as she described it...

We had a feeling we'd spoken too soon when we labeled James Stokoe's out-of-nowhere release of 100 amazing unpublished pages from Murderbullets one of the few remaining "WTF moments" of 2010. Within a matter of hours, our minds have been blown again by a compellingly absurd new Benjamin Marra comic book called The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd: A Work of Satire and Fiction. As the title and distinctly 1980s alterna-comix-esque artwork suggest, the book is indeed a depiction of the divisive New York Times columnist as a buxom action heroine with a gun in her garter and a...

So true to character, Maureen Dowd weighed in on the election, and got it wrong. See, she believes the vote wasn’t about Obama, it was about gullible voters. She writes that Republicans “were able to persuade a lot of Americans that the couple in the White House was not American enough, not quite “normal,” too Communist, too radical, too Great Society.”