Free Republic

Orrin Hatch, who's served in the U.S. Senate representing Utah since 1977, announced Tuesday he would not seek re-election in 2018.

In 1979, after a long campaign of political pressure applied by the Carter administration in the United States, the Shah of Iran fell to the Islamic Revolution, ending a tradition of monarchic rule that had persisted in Iran for thousands of years since the rule of Cyrus the Great. The stage was set for the rise of the Ayatollah, and the establishment of a theocracy in Iran that, today, most Iranians do not even want. But what if none of that had ever happened? While a momentous departure from actual history, it is not nearly so far-fetched as it sounds....

The political scientist who applies the ‘rational choice’ theory of economics to voters says there was a method to the GOP’s primary madness. Go to the source:

Ronald Reagan would be familiar with some of the challenges facing Donald Trump lately. Imagine an establishment-busting presidential candidate rolling up the primaries but polling 20 points behind the presumptive Democratic nominee. The controversial Republican front-runner is considered so radical that the party establishment eyes a brokered convention, perhaps to nominate a failed candidate from the previous election. Sound familiar? Welcome to March 1980. In retrospect, Ronald Reagan’s presidency seems inevitable, but the prevailing wisdom in the Republican Party 36 years ago was that he was leading the party to certain defeat. Going into the 1980 race, some Republican leaders...

I miss Ronald Reagan. Even his harshest critics must admit that he had an unflagging belief in the general goodness of the average human being, a commitment to the American experiment and faith in the ability of most people to make decisions in their own best interests without undue meddling by officious busybodies. Above all, Ronald Reagan -- like a number of other truly great American political leaders from both sides of the aisle -- had the ability to inspire Americans to see the best in themselves and their neighbors. We are stronger as a people, better as a...

Bob Dole, the former Kansas senator and 1996 Republican presidential nominee, has never been fond of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. But in an interview Wednesday, Mr. Dole said that the party would suffer "cataclysmic" and "wholesale losses" if Mr. Cruz were the nominee, and that Donald J. Trump would fare better. "I question his allegiance to the party," Mr. Dole said of Mr. Cruz. "I don't know how often you've heard him say the word 'Republican' - not very often." Instead, Mr. Cruz uses the word "conservative," Mr. Dole said, before offering up a different word for Mr. Cruz:...

Ben Wattenberg died this week at the age of 81. He gave me my first job in Washington, as his research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. (I returned to AEI as a fellow a few years ago, my office just a few doors down from where Ben used to work.) Ben was one of the last star pundits of what might be called the Old Order, before cable news and the Internet transformed the landscape. When everyone was rushing to CNN to shout at each other on "Crossfire," he launched a PBS show called "Think...

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s devastating opinions on same-sex marriage and Obamacare, some conservatives are asking themselves: Has America reached the point when we have become like ancient Rome in its final days, all bread and circuses, that we cannot make our way back to the ideas on which we were founded? Do the actual words of the Constitution matter anymore? Should we give up the fight for limited, constitutional government and simply accept that the left has won? Of course not! Conservatives have never been quitters as two of our greatest heroes—Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan—demonstrated when...

Well folks, for about four years I haven't written anything, except a few movie reviews and some scripts. I had a strong calling to give up (I thought permanently) writing books. All that time, however, it kept nagging at me that the biography treatments of Ronald Reagan just were not satisfying. So, I feel "released" now to begin a new book project, perhaps my final book: a biography of our greatest 20th century president. I have already written a script that Arc Entertainment/Victory Pictures (who did the Palin movie) have agreed to produce called "The Lifeguard: Ronald Reagan and his...

Ramallah (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - Former US president Jimmy Carter on Saturday urged Palestinians to hold elections to end the de facto division of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Islamist-run Gaza Strip. He was speaking at a joint news conference with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas in the Palestinian political capital Ramallah in the West Bank. "We hope that sometime we'll see elections all over the Palestinian area and east Jerusalem and Gaza and also in the West Bank," said Carter, a member of the independent Elders Group of global leaders. No election has been held in the occupied territories...

(Editor's note: The following op-ed essay was published on June 23, 2004.)Imagine how different history would be if Ronald Reagan had won the 1976 New Hampshire Presidential primary instead of narrowly losing it to incumbent President Gerald Ford by barely 1 percent, as he did.Ford's candidacy would have collapsed, and Reagan likely would have gone on to win the nomination. But 1976 was the first Presidential election after Watergate, and perhaps no Republican could have won that year. Losing to Jimmy Carter would have ended Reagan's political career, and he'd never have become President.Reagan's strategy was to knock Ford out...