Free Republic

'Life, Liberty & Levin' host Mark Levin breaks down what it means for someone to believe in 'America First.'

TAKE THE NEXT STEP AMERICA When people think of the United States of America, they tend to think of a few things right away: freedom, power, and capitalism. To true Americans, these three values are to be defended more strongly than life itself. But unfortunately, while many people are staunch believers in capitalism, few people take it to the next logical step: nationalism. Competition through capitalism is what forces companies to be better. It is what has made us the world power we are today. The influential philosophers of modernity, Ayn Rand and Adam Smith, praised our economic system as...

Senator Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, has waded into the ongoing blame game over who is responsible for the unfolding crisis in Iraq. A constant critic of President Barack Obama, this time the Republican presidential hopeful sided with the president and criticized the George W. Bush administration. Paul’s intervention follows an op-ed written by Paul for the Wall Street Journal in which he criticizes President George W. Bush’s decision to go to war to oust the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. “Much of the rationale for going to war did not measure up” to the “Weinberger Doctrine” by which President Ronald Reagan decided...

The Robert Taft Republicans Return - Isolationism has never served the interests of America, or the GOP. 'We'll be lucky to get 80 Republicans out of 230." That's an astute GOP congressman's best guess for how his caucus now stands on the vote to authorize military force against Syria. At town hall meetings in their districts, the congressman reports, House Republicans are hearing "an isolationist message." It's not America's war. The evidence that the Assad regime used chemical weapons is ambiguous, maybe cooked. There isn't a compelling national interest to intervene. "Let Allah sort it out." We'd be coming in...

In truth, the dominant foreign policy in the Republican Party, and to a degree, in American society as a whole is neither neoconservativism nor isolationism. For lack of a better name, it is what historian Walter Russell Mead has referred to as Jacksonianism, after Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the US. As Mead noted in a 1999 article in the National Interest entitled, "The Jacksonian Tradition," the most popular and enduring US model for foreign policy is far more flexible than either the isolationist or the neoconservative model. According to Mead, the Jacksonian foreign policy model involves a few...

To date, we've certainly seen the expected litany of reactions to the U.S. intervention in Libya. But there has also emerged a new category which displays such a blatantly stratospheric level of wanton hypocrisy that it strains the very term. Looking at the various brands of hypocrisy can tell us all we need to know about the different attitudes in America about military interventions in general and about the U.S. intervention in Libya specifically. The Odd Bedfellows When the United States intervenes militarily anywhere in the world, the sincerity of both the far left and far right is invariably on...

A tug of war over defense spending this week harbingers budget conflicts to come as the irresistible force of rising military costs meets the immovable object of growing fiscal deficits. On the one hand, a group of mostly Democratic lawmakers is urging the president's commission on reducing the national debt to consider wide-ranging cuts to the defense budget as a way to eliminate the deficit by 2015 — the commission's goal. For this group, such cuts are at the heart of a strategic effort to scale back America's global role and husband the nation's limited resources at a time of...

Most senior U.S. military leaders believe that the United States can’t lose in Afghanistan — provided our political class remains committed to a long, messy and protracted counterinsurgency campaign. But if we do lose, who’s to blame: 1. the American people, for prematurely (albeit understandably) tiring of the war; 2. the new right-wing isolationists; 3. the war itself, because it proved too hard and too difficult to win; or 4. President Obama, the Democratic Party, and the left-leaning political class, which includes the legacy media and the leftist net-roots? There are elements of truth in all of these answers, of...

Fred Thompson or Ron Paul? Like Perry and some others, I would rather see a big government Democrat elected than a big government Republican. At least that would bring back some opposition. Republicans in Congress have a much better record of reining in the Democrats' presidents than their own. And as I explain later, I think that one of these two is the only Republican candidate capable of winning the national election. Ron Paul answering the What programs? question by naming three cabinet level departments ... Wow. Good answer. If there was no rest-of-the-world, he would possibly have my vote....

Apparently, America's greatest patriot was on Loonwaffle/Trooferville's favorite radio show today with the King Nutbar himself, although I'm not sure if anyone grabbed audio. If you want to listen to the rebroadcast stream, go here. I don't feel like it. Have fun.

Rep. Ron Paul, the maverick Texas Republican who is running as an anti-war libertarian in the Republican primary, has come charging out of nowhere to become the leading fundraiser in the brief history of the Internet. Yesterday, his campaign reported a one-day take around $3.8 million, with an average donation of $98. In one respect, Paul deserves his success. He is a far more articulate and coherent critic of administration policy in Iraq than any candidate on the Democratic side, speaking as he does the frank and plain language of the isolationist. “The fundamental question remains,” he said in 2004,...

Stephanie Burns and Ben Parkinson strolled down sun-drenched Fillmore Street with political thievery on their minds. Both are grass-roots volunteers for Republican presidential contender Ron Paul, a Texas congressman whose libertarian views might seem to make him a tough sell in this legendarily left-wing city. But Burns, Parkinson and other Paul supporters have been spending their weekends marching, staffing tables and knocking on doors in an improbable quest: picking up some of California's 173 convention delegates in the Feb. 5 primary. On the surface, the plan seems quixotic given general assumptions about California: that the state is too big for...

In the spin room after the Republican debate on Tuesday evening in Dearborn, Mich., a reporter from the Arab-American News asked Ron Paul what he thought of the term "Islamic fascism." "It's a false term to make people think we're fighting Hitler," Paul responded. "It's war propaganda designed to generate fear so that the war has to be spread." Now, when Paul asserts that the war in Iraq is a mistake that is bankrupting America, he's making a serious argument which current polls suggest a majority of Americans agree with -- though not most Republicans. When he says 9/11 was...

What a Waste. Steve Sailer said it all. [L]et's stop and think about what an enormous waste of six years it has been for the President, aided and abetted by the almost the entire American Establishment, to pursue his delusion of imposing his immigration obsession on the citizenry. Even leaving aside how much better the immigration situation would be if Bush had followed his oath and simply enforced the damn laws, imagine what he would have been able to accomplish legislatively in other areas without wasting time, energy, and political capital on a losing proposition like this. Well, why...

Is this what my grand party has come to?  Ron Paul is insulting, incompetent, and now I am sure he is an outright nut.  What I am posting here stupefied me after I read it.  I could not believe I was reading about a Republican... in Congress for 20 YEARS NO LESS!  I've posted the statement from Eric Dondero in its entirety; emphasis mine.  I suggest you take the time to read the whole thing.  It is a sad and pathetic story.  Read my previous post on this so-called Republican and after you do that, read this: ________________________________________My name is Eric Dondero Rittberg.  For 12 years I worked...

During the recent Republican debate, Congressman Ron Paul spoke the truth about U.S. Middle East policies and faced down attacks by hostile fellow presidential candidates. Ron Paul, a Republican congressman running for president, is saying what needs to be said about the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war. Clearly, his rivals and the news media can't handle the truth. At the most recent Republican debate, Paul not only repeated his opposition to the illegal and unconstitutional war, but he also identified 50 years of U.S. intervention in the Middle East as "a major contributing factor" in al-Qaeda's attacks in 2001....

FOR many Americans, it's a mad, mad, mad, mad world out there, and getting worse. During the Salman Rushdie affair 17 years ago, angry Muslims were content merely to call for the death of the allegedly blasphemous author and his publishers. This week, they were calling for the death not only of some allegedly blasphemous cartoonists but also their compatriots. And people from neighbouring countries. And Jews. And, inevitably, Americans. What's the point, some Americans grumble, of engaging with such people? We gave the Iraqis freedom, runs the argument, and they repaid us with roadside bombs. Palestinians got the vote...

To understand the trade deficit, residents of Sandison Street do not need the help of world-class economists. They can just glance across the street at the mountain of faded brown cargo containers blocking the Wilmington sky. The equation is simple. As the deficit grows, the mountain gets higher. "It's getting taller; it's spreading out," said resident Maria Lopez, eyeing the pile that stretches for two blocks. Tens of thousands of containers sit empty today in Wilmington — stark testimony that America buys more from other countries than it sends overseas to sell. Millions of the 40-foot-long steel containers arrive in...

Question for conservatives who vote for Republican candidates every few years because the Republicans are the "lesser of two evils." P> How is your voting strategy working out? Since "conservative" Republicans have taken over the House of Representatives 11 years ago, the expansion of government has continued at every level. Nothing has been done to stop the holocaust of abortion. Gay marriage under the guise of "civil unions" is becoming a norm in our society. Our government continues in its Wilsonian tradition of globe-trotting and nation-building with the precious blood of American soldiers fertilizing the subjected nations, making them "safe...

The prolonged war in Iraq is generating an isolationist backlash among Americans, according to broad survey of public opinion released on Thursday. Some 42 per cent of Americans say the country should "mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own", according to the study, conducted every four years by the Pew Research Center and the Council on Foreign Relations. That is up from just 30 per cent in 2002. The last time Americans expressed similarly strong isolationist sentiments was in 1995, when the end of the cold war created expectations...