Free Republic

It’s time to acknowledge that the U.S. isn’t going to risk World War III to maintain Ukraine’s 1991 borders.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is in Washington this week, once again pressuring U.S. lawmakers to dole out tens of billions of taxpayer dollars for his war effort. At issue is a $110 billion national security supplemental the Biden administration has requested that includes about $61 billion for Ukraine, as well as more funding for Israel, humanitarian aid for Gaza, and money to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.Senate Republicans last week sensibly blocked a vote to advance the bill because it doesn’t include changes...

Musk understands what many commentators don’t: The war will end in a negotiated settlement or it will escalate, possibly into nuclear war.As if to burnish his reputation as a super-villain in the eyes of the corporate press, Elon Musk this week floated an idea on Twitter for a possible resolution of the Russo-Ukrainian war. For his trouble, he was swiftly accused of being a pro-Putin stooge by guardians of the Official Narrative. His suggested peace plan was dismissed out of hand as “Russia-friendly” and, as The Washington Post’s Olivier Knox put it, “designed to lock in Russian territorial gains.”But Musk’s...

Democrats have been bragging that ‘demographics is destiny’ for years. But a more diverse electorate isn’t voting the way they’d hoped. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre in Buffalo, New York, where a deranged white supremacist killed 10 people, elite opinion quickly settled on the real culprit: Republicans. The New York Times spelled it out explicitly in an editorial this week, claiming Republican politicians and conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson, “openly espouse versions of a white supremacist conspiracy theory holding that an orchestrated effort is underway to displace white Americans.” The Times is of course referring to so-called “replacement...

It’s not too much to ask that Congress debate and vote on whether to authorize a U.S. march to war that’s now well underway. The New York Times claimed this week that the United States is providing real-time battlefield intelligence to Ukraine that has enabled the Ukrainians to target and kill approximately a dozen Russian generals, and helped >locate and strike the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet last month. Described as a “classified effort,” the U.S. provision of targeting intelligence to Ukraine “also includes anticipated Russian troop movements gleaned from recent American assessments of Moscow’s secret battle plan for...

The media’s deluge of lies about the Rittenhouse case is a disturbing reminder that the corporate press lies about everything all the time.As far as corporate media are concerned, the massacre in Waukesha, Wis., on Sunday was a “Christmas parade crash.” That’s how the attack that killed six people and injured more than 60 others is being described by ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Newsweek and others. Not an intentional attack, not a massacre allegedly committed by a violent career criminal already facing multiple felony charges, but merely a crash. The New York Times is calling it a “tragedy.” ***...

When the Republican Party formally nominated Donald Trump four years ago at the national convention in Cleveland, I thought the GOP was making huge mistake. It seemed Trump would certainly lose in November, and that every Republican officeholder who climbed aboard the Trump train that summer would be purged from whatever came after his inevitable defeat. It would be the end of the GOP as we knew it.I was wrong about all of that—and in hindsight, I’m glad I was wrong.Like a lot of observers at the time, I thought Trump had no real policy agenda to define his...

More than any other group in Lebanon, the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah bears responsibility for the conditions that led to the blast. ... Lebanon is a mafia state governed entirely through criminality and institutionalized corruption. The .. Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah. If there’s one group that bears primary responsibility for the state of affairs in Lebanon that led to the explosion in Beirut, it’s Hezbollah. ... Tony Badran.. Hezbollah’s role in governing Lebanon. .. the terrorist group isn’t a parallel structure to the government, it is the government. ... Hezbollah has long used the port for massive commercial scams and...

In an editorial published Wednesday at National Review, the editors argue that an “unspoken consensus” has emerged among Republican senators that what President Trump did was wrong but it doesn’t warrant his removal from office. The editors think this a “reasonable” position and that Republicans should make the case for it publicly, but they can’t because of the president’s “obstinacy” in defending his actions vis-à-vis Ukraine.Instead of insisting that Trump “cannot be impeached for any abuse of power unless that abuse took the form of a criminal violation of a statute,” they write, “Republicans would be better off arguing...

Do Democrats really care about the getting to the bottom of the allegations against Trump, or do they just want a show trial? With President TrumpÂ’s impeachment trial set to begin next week, the Senate faces a stark choice: it can hold a legitimate trial that aims to get to the bottom of the allegations against the president, or it can stage an empty media spectacle like House Democrats did in their sham impeachment inquiry.The problem for Democrats is that if Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell opts for the former, it will mean calling not just the witnesses Democrats want,...