Free Republic

An unpopular president finds his path to reelection untenable. Forced out, he hands the reins over to a vice president whose previous try at the party nomination ended in defeat. His polarizing opponent looks to ride a wave of national discontent and end a brutal war, but won’t tell anyone what that plan is. This scenario describes both the elections in 1968 and 2024. Add to it the presence of a Robert Kennedy and significant third-party support and the similarities are downright eerie. More than that, however, 1968 provides both hope and warnings to Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Just...

Just in case you were thinking of giving it a try, be warned: Nobody will be able to write a competent history of 20th-century American politics without absorbing the themes and revelations in the new book by Luke Nichter, The Year that Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968. A history professor at Chapman University and the biographer of Henry Cabot Lodge, among others, Nichter is widely understood and rightly admired as a tireless researcher—though "tireless" doesn’t quite cover it: In his quest to transcribe most of the hopelessly garbled and obscure audio tapes left behind...

U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, acting on a lawsuit filed against the Biden administration by two states and a group of plaintiffs, said the case “arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”Court documents show that while top Biden administration officials such as Dr. Anthony Fauci sought publicly and privately to censor social media posts over COVID-19 content, the task was more extensively carried out behind the scenes by a select band of staffers. These aides led the administration’s efforts to squelch content they opposed, mostly by pressuring social media platforms with repeated requests...

When Donald Trump declared himself “the president of law and order,” comparisons immediately ran to Richard Nixon and 1968. Nixon too had campaigned on law and order, against the backdrop of urban riots following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and antiwar protesters who clashed with Chicago police right outside the Democratic convention. So the Nixon analogy is apt. But it is incomplete without its complement: Joe Biden as Hubert Humphrey. Like Mr. Biden, Humphrey was a garrulous establishment liberal and vice president who had spent decades in the Senate. Each man was nominated by a divided Democratic Party. Both were...

Foster Brooks roast of Hubert Humphrey

It’s 1968 All Over Again: It’s 1968 All Over Again- Where Nixon Running as Law and Order Candidate Smoked Democratic Humphrey For the Presidency Crooked and lying Hillary, the most untrustworthy Democratic candidate in modern times, thought she had the American presidency all locked up about a week ago. She had Obama campaigning for her with his great support in the black and Hispanic communities. Hillary thought that notwithstanding all her terrible political baggage that she and Slick Willy have been carrying for decades, she would easily defeat the political novice, the controversial Donald Trump.

Ben Bernanke is emerging as a high-profile scapegoat as critics ridicule his new "quantitative easing" policy. Charlie Gasparino on why mocking the non-partisan Fed chair is bad for America. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Here's how you know Ben Bernanke, the mild-mannered chairman of the Federal Reserve, a scholar of the Great Depression once considered a sage for saving the banking system during the 2008 bank meltdown, has suddenly found himself a target of ridicule lumped in with the financial morons and evildoers like Dick Fuld, Lloyd Blankfein and the rest of the fat cats of Wall Street. Go to YouTube.com, and one of...

There's something about quantitative easing that bothers just about everyone - including, believe it or not, Fed chief Ben Bernanke. But in contrast to his many critics, Bernanke's problem lies not with the policy itself, in which the Federal Reserve has pledged to buy $600 billion worth of Treasury bonds over eight months in its latest bid to bring down interest rates and stimulate the economy. What's in a name? No, Bernanke's beef is that what the Fed is doing isn't properly called quantitative easing, as he reminded everyone in his speech Friday. Incidentally, in my view, the use of...

There are two aspects of Governor Palin's decision to resign now, which have not been competently discussed, or discussed at all, in the main stream media. One is based on the map, the other is based in American political history. Regarding the map: I have two, immediate sources to know how long it takes, with what sort of wearing down from the journey itself, to travel to and from Alaska. One is my cousin who is a leading labor lawyer, and who went from Atlanta to Alaska frequently when the Aleska Pipeline was under construction. The other is my son-in-law's...

Woman admits voter fraud By Robert Patrick ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH 03/24/2009 ST. LOUIS – An East St. Louis woman pleaded guilty to a mail fraud charge Tuesday in federal court in St. Louis and admitted submitting false voter registration cards in the lead-up to the last year's elections, federal prosecutors said. Deidra Humphrey, 44, worked for the Missouri Progressive Vote Coalition and submitted false and fraudulent voter registration cards for voters in St. Louis city and county, knowing it was illegal, the U.S. Attorney's office said.

Reagan's War, Not Charlie Wilson's Media Bias: Hollywood would have us believe that Democrats defeated the evil empire in Afghanistan, and that President Reagan played only a minor role and even helped pave the way to 9/11. If you think Hollywood's idea of a Christmas movie being one about the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan is strange, even stranger is the plot line. "Charlie Wilson's War," which opened Friday, manages to reduce the president who won the Cold War to a background footnote. Charlie Wilson was a pro-abortion, Equal Rights Amendment-supporting congressman widely known as "the liberal from Lufkin." To his...

This summer's Republican U.S. Senate race just may have established a Tennessee political precedent or two that will be followed in lower-level campaigns to come. In races for the state Legislature, for example, every incumbent who voted for the state budget can henceforth be attacked for voting to raise his or her own pay under the precedent established by Bob Corker's innovative attack advertising. Corker aired television commercials declaring that his primary opponents, former U.S. Reps. Ed Bryant and Van Hilleary, voted to raise their own pay. The claim is based, the campaign said, on Dec. 15, 2000, votes cast...

...To date, President Bush hasn't suffered the kind of political harm that Carter did from his ineffectual handling of the Iran hostage crisis. The main reason: Despite widespread misgivings over the way the postwar is going, voters have by and large accepted the administration's contention that going after Saddam Hussein was an integral part of the War on Terror. Which, of course, explains Kerry's "wrong war, wrong time, wrong place" argument: He's trying to convince the public that Iraq was an unwise diversion from the genuine War on Terror, which he believes should be limited to Osama bin Laden and...

<p>The recent attempt by the liberal media to mock the Republicans&#8217; decision to hold their convention in one of the major Democratic strongholds misses the point. The Republicans knew what they were doing when they decided to hold their first-ever convention in a city they have no hope of carrying.</p>

More proof: two johns in your home = good; two Johns in the White House = bad.

NEW YORK--Leftist or centrist? That's the big question facing Democrats in the run-up to next year's primaries. "The way to beat George Bush is not to be like him," declares former Vermont governor Howard Dean, whose feisty antiwar rhetoric has caught fire among liberals and made him the current frontrunner for the nomination. Seizing the centrist standard of the Clintonites, Senator Joe Lieberman warns that a liberal standard-bearer like Dean "could lead the Democratic Party into the political wilderness for a long time to come. It could be, really, a ticket to nowhere." Who's right? "[Democrats'] major goal is to...

IN DEFENSE OF HOMELAND SECURITY In case anyone is wondering, I have my contribution to "homeland security" sitting within arms reach of my keyboard. And, if that's not enough, there is another just a few feet away. Besides being part of my birthright as an American citizen, they are 100% legal, too -- in four different ways. When the term "homeland security" is mentioned, I immediately think of the perceptive advice of Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of The Declaration of Independence, a significant kibitzer when James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights and our third U.S. President. As a...

Craig Benson, former CEO of Cabletron Systems is running for the Republican nomination for governor of the state of New Hampshire. Craig Benson has a lot of money, and Craig Benson has raised a lot of money for Republicans, there's no doubt about that, his campaign commercials on TV and radio repeat it over and over. Along the way, Craig Benson has also raised a lot of money for Democrats. In 1993, Craig Benson gave a substantial contribution to the Bill Clinton Inaugural Committee. He gave money not to Republican candidate John Dowd, but to Democrat Beverly Hollingworth, who was...

The quote below has often been repeated with several variations. Recent research has gone back to the source, to squelch distractions. "Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used, and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to keep and bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against a tyranny which now...