Free Republic

When President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union address on Feb. 7, he’ll blame Republicans for his failures and take credit for things he hasn’t done. That’s what he does. It’s what many Democrats are doing intensely right now — a strategy I wrote about recently — but Biden has a special sauce that allows him to get away with it more than any of his colleagues. Unofficially launching his reelection campaign, he’ll cast the GOP as the inflation party for opposing his inflationary Inflation Reduction Act, which spent hundreds of billions of borrowed federal dollars on subsidies....

WASHINGTON - Welcome to the 2004 U.S. election campaign. If you think I'm too hasty, what with polling day still 18 months away, think again -- I'm actually weeks late. U.S. President George Bush has filed his official re-election papers with the Federal Election Commission; he raised US$22-million for Congressional Republicans last week at a single event, and he's had his Top Gun moment on the USS Lincoln. The Democrat hopefuls have done a couple of set-piece debates and sorted themselves between genuine Oval Office candidates and those simply fishing for the vice-presidency or even smaller fry. But such moves...

WASHINGTON - Actors have a recurring nightmare. In it, they appear on stage wearing nothing but a short undershirt and an ingratiating smile. It's all out there in the footlights for inspection. I was reminded of this at the weekend, when nine Democrats seeking their party's nomination to challenge George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election sparred in their first formal debate in Columbia, South Carolina. The eight men and one woman on stage are not peas in a pod; they range in plausibility from the maybe possible to the utterly hopeless. They're all experienced politicians, and some have...

WASHINGTON - Ain't it just the way -- I take a week off and the Anglophone good guys win another war before I'm back. Who's surprised? I am, a little. When I wrote last -- two weeks ago -- I said reports of setbacks were nonsense, the war was going splendidly and would be over nicely within the Bush administration's prediction of "weeks not months." But I did not realize quite how nicely -- a full five weeks early. Those who (as usual) got everything wrong are now backfilling their ludicrous predictions of quagmire and terrible loss. Even The Washington...