Free Republic

You don’t have to get all maudlin about McConnell’s supposed representation of bygone Senate traditions (I personally think he’s an amoral pursuer of power for its own sake) to marvel at his longevity at the helm of his party conference. When McConnell became leader in 2007, the party of Ronald Reagan was still in place; it had not yet been shaken by the tea-party movement or shattered by Donald Trump’s triumph over a Republican Establishment of which McConnell was an integral part. Republicans of that era were still fiercely defending George W. Bush’s “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq and...

Among both his friends and his enemies, there is a tendency to think of Donald Trump as sui generis: a political figure, and certainly a president, unlike any other. In some respects, including his incessant mendacity and his tendency to publicly insult everyone who doesn’t bow down to him, he may truly be without equal in U.S. history and more comparable to foreign political strongmen from Juan Perón to Viktor Orban. But at the New York Times, Ross Barkan suggests that as Trump pursues a comeback after his 2020 defeat (which, of course, he will not acknowledge), he may actually...

As Republicans have become mired in MAGA radicalism, it has become standard operating procedure for them to parry criticism of their extremist tendencies by pointing across the partisan barricades and shouting, “They’re worse!” This often involves scanning the landscape for any lefty idea or proposal that sounds scary and attributing it to the entire Democratic Party. And lo and behold, it turns out if you say Democrats want to “defund the police” often enough, people will begin to believe it, even though (1) Democratic elected officials from Joe Biden down to the local dogcatcher have vociferously denied it and (2)...

Former Democrat mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel famously said to never let a serious crisis go to waste. Several journalists gave President Biden the same advice for his upcoming State of the Union address Tuesday, urging him to use Russia invading Ukraine to his advantage. New York Magazine’s Ed Kilgore cut to the chase with his article entitled, "Did Putin accidentally reboot Biden’s presidency?"

Throughout much of 2021, left-of-center political analysts often asked themselves, What is Kyrsten Sinema’s deal? As she battled all year against simple Senate passage of the Build Back Better legislation, and against the filibuster reforms needed to enact other Biden priorities like voting rights, it became quite the parlor game. Sinema’s Democratic partner in Senate obstruction, Joe Manchin, had the obvious excuse of representing one of the reddest states in the country. Sinema’s Arizona is a battleground state that is trending blue. The fact that her centrist Arizona Senate colleague Mark Kelly, who is up for reelection this very year,...

There’s a long-standing tradition among conservative pols and gabbers to compare every Democratic president to Jimmy Carter. It’s hardly surprising: Carter was the first and last sitting Democratic president since the 19th century to lose a general election. His presidency, moreover, led to a sort of Republican golden age with the landslide election (and 49-state reelection) of Ronald Reagan and the first Republican-controlled Senate since the early 1950s. It was natural for many pundits to compare the southern governor Bill Clinton and the foreign-policy novice Barack Obama to the 39th president, and Republicans, of course, loved to point to signs...

There’s no question that the story of the Democratic party right now is about the ascending left. There’s a bumper crop of self-consciously progressive candidates running for office this year, while many relatively non-ideological “Establishment Democrats” are embracing policy positions and political messages long associated with party insurgents. The relative strength of various Democratic factions in Congress won’t be possible to reliably measure until after the midterms. But with the 2020 presidential election cycle soon to begin (the first candidate debates will probably be held about this time next year), it’s looking like progressives may have many more viable options...

... Democrats really need a great 2018 midterm, both to avoid an almost irreversible disadvantage in the Senate, and to give it a fighting chance to do well during the momentous redistricting cycle just on the horizon. For reasons that have almost nothing to do with her leadership abilities and other sterling qualities, a President Clinton would have made a great 2018 midterm for her party extremely unlikely, and a debilitating defeat quite possible. (The same would have been true, to be clear, with a President Sanders or a President Biden). A President Trump could make an inevitably bad midterm...

Well, so much for suspense. The networks called Indiana for Donald Trump about five seconds after the polls closed, and within two hours Ted Cruz announced he was suspending his campaign. Trump is winning a majority of the vote and will likely win all 57 delegates. Even if a few delegates stray back across the line, this win clinched the nomination for Trump. He will now have well over 1,000 bound delegates, which is less than 200 from what he needs to make it a lock. And that's without the unbound delegates he definitely has in Pennsylvania and is sure...

It's hard for a political party to self-diagnose its problems when its thinkers are at odds about the nature and extent of the current symptoms. That’s the condition of the Republican Party, which began this presidential cycle highly confident about consolidating power gained at the congressional and state levels during the last two midterms with the capture of that last Democratic redoubt, the White House.

Here’s a puzzler for you: we all know the next week will feature a competition among the 35 or 52 or however many Republicans are considering a 2016 presidential run as to who can say the most irresponsible things about the multilateral nuclear deal with Iran that just got a big step closer to reality yesterday. But how are they going to outdo Scott Walker’s pledge, initially made last week and then repeated like a terroristic threat, that he’d blow up any such deal on his first day as president? I mean, I guess someone could say they’d shout insults...

Conservative gabber Hugh Hewitt interviewed Scott Walker on foreign policy issues yesterday, and the ensuing headlines involved Walker’s commitment to nullify any U.S.-Iran nuclear deal “on day one” if he is elected. But a different item caught my attention: the Wisconsin governor seems to be side-swiping his Republican rivals in his rather unorthodox claim that only someone with executive experience can be trusted to know his ass from page eight on foreign policy and national security issues. Speaking of Obama, he said: [T]he unfortunate reality is this is what happens when you put someone in office who’s never led before....

p>Those tolerant liberals have been at it again. Ted Cruz and evangelicals were public enemy no. 1 and 2 on Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show March 24. Host Larry Wilmore brought on liberal comedian Lewis Black, Actor and former member of the Obama Administration Kal Penn, pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, and only one conservative, Amy Holmes, anchor for The Blaze TV, to discuss Ted Cruz’s run for President. The discussion began with Lewis Black blasting Cruz as a relic of the segregated past. BLACK: “We’ve lived through this before. This is 1956. If he had appeared at Liberty University and...

While it’s becoming common to hear Scott Walker dismissed as a flash-in-the-pan or Flavor of the Month or Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time gaffmeister sure to be pushed aside to make way for Jeb’s Brinks truck of cash or Rubio’s glamor, there are less-apparent aspects of his appeal worth noting. That intrepid translator of the Christian Right’s codes, Sarah Posner, has a fascinating take at Religion Dispatches about Walker perfectly matching a growing mood among politically active conservative evangelicals who want a less showy but more reliable champion: >>>>Should he run for president, Walker may very well turn out to be the 2016 cycle’s...

Eeeeek!!! Diversity of political opinion must not be permitted. Expressing this deep fear is Washington Monthly contributor Ed Kilgore who is worried about a politically diversified panel at the post David Gregory Meet The Press. He presents his "remedy" in an article boldly titled, Who Should Be Banned as Panelists For the New “Meet?” What has gotten Kilgore so worried that contrary opinion might creep into Meet The Press is a New York Times article about NBC News President Deborah Turness considering the use of a panel to question guests as was done in the original Meet The Press:

The following 65 names are confirmed members of the now-defunct JournoList listserv. 1. Ezra Klein 2. Dave Weigel 3. Matthew Yglesias 4. David Dayen 5. Spencer Ackerman 6. Jeffrey Toobin 7. Eric Alterman 8. Paul Krugman 9. John Judis 10. Eve Fairbanks 11. Mike Allen 12. Ben Smith 13. Lisa Lerer 14. Joe Klein 15. Brad DeLong 16. Chris Hayes 17. Matt Duss 18. Jonathan Chait 19. Jesse Singal 20. Michael Cohen 21. Isaac Chotiner 22. Katha Pollitt 23. Alyssa Rosenberg 24. Rick Perlstein 25. Alex Rossmiller 26. Ed Kilgore 27. Walter Shapiro 28. Noam Scheiber 29. Michael Tomasky 30....

If you were in the presence of a man having a heart attack, how would you respond? As he clutched his chest in desperation and pain, would you call 911? Would you try to save him from dying? Of course you would. But if that man was Rush Limbaugh, and you were Sarah Spitz, a producer for National Public Radio, that isn’t what you’d do at all. In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” as Limbaugh writhed...

It's long been my belief that the GOP hole card in 2008 is going to be a rancid furriner-bashing anti-illegal-immigrant smear campaign. Make no mistake, whatever lipstick they put on this pig, the bottom line is the same old know-nothing nativism that has been a minor American stain since the Protestants began to get worried about the Irish Catholic surge in the 1840s (among some of our earliest settlers, the only acceptable immigrants were slaves). I tend to be an extremist on this issue. I am wildly in favor of immigration, legal and illegal. I realize that national security--i.e. terrorism--requires...