Free Republic

The Democratic National Virtual Convention opened Monday with a two-hour prime-time bash Trump fest. If nothing else, we learned the Washington establishment hates Donald Trump. In Tuesday's installment, we learned why. It has nothing to do with Charlottesville, the post office or Twitter. (continued below)

Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday warned that “true civil discourse” is under threat around the world while speaking to graduates at NYU Abu Dhabi, an event that the school blocked journalists from filming. While obliquely criticizing President Donald Trump, Kerry did not mention the 2015 Iran nuclear deal he secured with other world powers, an accord of which Trump now has pulled America out. […] While never naming Trump, Kerry began his remarks by saying: “Given what’s going on today, I’m glad to be invited anywhere, folks.” He quickly added that the U.S. “needs to build...

Wednesday during a commencement speech at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, former Secretary of State John Kerry criticized the presidency of the Donald Trump as “not normal” several times, and added, “In the end, there is nothing American about it either.” Partial transcript as follows: Distinct from the hurly burly of any presidential visit, my travel to Asia, Europe, and the Middle East these past few months has informed me that the global community is watching and unsettled about the leading nation in the free world.They see us gridlocked and politically trapped in a low-intensity internal conflict of...

… A spokesman for the British Prime Minister issued a statement criticizing Kerry’s focus on the Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem. “We do not… believe that the way to negotiate peace is by focusing on only one issue, in this case the construction of settlements, when clearly the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians is so deeply complex.” The spokesman also criticized Kerry’s description of the current government in Israel as “the most right-wing government” in Israeli history. “And we do not believe that it is appropriate to attack the composition of the democratically-elected government of an...

Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Wednesday that the United States allowed the passage a U.N. condemnation of Israel’s settlement policies as the only way to preserve a two-state solution on the verge of being destroyed. In a response to Israeli criticism that the United States has abandoned and betrayed its closest ally in the Middle East, Kerry said no U.S. administration has done more for Israel’s security than the current one.

11:45 a.m. Secretary of State John Kerry says that if Israel rejects a two-state solution for peace with the Palestinian people, "it can be Jewish or it can be democratic."

Secretary of State John Kerry delcared Wednesday that Israel "can either be Jewish or democratic" but "it cannot be both." Here's a transcript: "The truth is that trends on the ground, violence, terrorism, settlement expansion and the seemingly endless occupation, they are combining to destroy hopes for peace on both sides and increasingly cementing any reversible -- an irreversible one state reality that most people do not actually want. Today, there are a similar number of Jews and Palestinians living between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea. They have a choice. They can choose to live together in one...

Israel fired back at Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blasting Kerry’s lengthy televised rebuke of the Middle Eastern democracy and the United States’ abstention from an anti-Israel United Nations vote last week. Netanyahu, speaking in Jerusalem just over an hour after Kerry’s speech had ended, said the speech was “as unbalanced as the anti-Israel resolution passed last week.” “Secretary Kerry paid lip service to the unrelenting campaign of terror that has been waged by the Palestinians against the Jewish State,” Netanyahu said. He later added: “Israelis do not need to be lectured about...

On December 28th, outgoing Secretary of State John Kerry delivered a rambling truth-challenged defense of the Obama administration’s scandalous decision allowing the United Nations Security Council to pass its most egregious anti-Israel resolution yet. Security Council Resolution 2334, which was adopted last Friday, denounced Israel’s settlements activities as illegal and destructive to the prospects of a two-state solution. Kerry concluded his 73 minute speech by outlining six principles to guide direct negotiations of a final status agreement on all outstanding issues, giving some indication that the Obama administration does not intend to use the Security Council to impose complete parameters...

Will they ever be out of our hair? At the State Department on Wednesday, John Kerry tried to emulate the late Fidel Castro with a tedious, whiny, self-absorbed and self-serving 72-minute marathon of musings about Israeli-Palestinian peace. Contrary to the event’s title and hype, Kerry’s homily was light on “vision.” That part of the speech was summarized, an hour into the thing, in a sketchy, six-point plan only a political theoretician could like, which will soon join numerous other peace plans now collecting dust in forgotten archives. Most of the speech was a defense of President Obama’s decision to allow...

The other evening in New York when Secretary of State John Kerry came to talk about President Barack Obama's foreign policy, everyone thought he had come to praise it. An hour and 6000 words later, it was clear that he had come to bury it. The expected encomium became an unintended obituary. Kerry started by building an edifice of excuses for what he knew, and didn't want to admit, was failure on a grand scale. To heighten his profile, Kerry told the audience that he had just had lunch with Henry Kissinger who had admitted that the world was more...

Secretary of State John Kerry's speech at the groundbreaking ceremony for the U.S. Diplomacy Center in Washington, D.C. Wednesday included an intriguing aside that appeared to reference the upcoming 2016 presidential election. Kerry spoke after remarks by each of the five former secretaries of state in attendance: Henry Kissinger, James Baker, III, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, and Hillary Clinton (Condoleezza Rice and George Shultz were not present.) After extolling the accomplishments of each of the five former top diplomats, Kerry said, "Join me, all of you, in thanking five of our six living former secretaries of state... They all look...

KERRY SPEECH TODAY TO RESOLVE IRAQ? The Note reports: "In his speech, Kerry is expected to try to finally and once and for all clarify his position on the war in Iraq, and to put President Bush on the defensive for how he's conducted the war in Iraq. 'The reason Iraq is an issue in this campaign is NOT over the question of whether it was right to hold Saddam accountable. The reason it is an issue is because of the way George Bush went to war, making the wrong choices and weakening the United States here at home...

We are here tonight because we love our country. We are proud of what America is and what it can become. My fellow Americans: we are here tonight united in one simple purpose: to make America stronger at home and respected in the world. A great American novelist wrote that you can't go home again. He could not have imagined this evening. Tonight, I am home. Home where my public life began and those who made it possible live. Home where our nation's history was written in blood, idealism, and hope. Home where my parents showed me the values of...

What John Kerry's speechwriters say to expect from his address tonight. (Not that they wrote it, of course.)BostonTONIGHT JOHN KERRY will deliver the most important speech of his 30-year-long political career. And Terry Edmonds wants you to know the senator wrote the speech himself. Edmonds, 54, is the Kerry campaign's chief speechwriter and a veteran of the Clinton White House. He spoke with reporters on Thursday morning, along with Bob Shrum, Kerry's chief political consigliere. "A number of people wrote drafts," Shrum said. "But Senator Kerry wrote his speech." Edmonds and Shrum, perhaps the only two Kerry staffers able to...

TO: Interested Parties FR: Marc Racicot, Chairman, Bush-Cheney '04 Ed Gillespie, Chairman, Republican National Committee DT: 7/29/04 RE: Preview of John Kerry's Acceptance Speech After 18 months on the campaign trail and more than $100 million in paid advertising, John Kerry's chief objective this evening will be to introduce himself to Americans. Again. We can expect John Kerry to deliver a well-crafted speech that pleases Democrats and attempts a pivot to more moderate rhetoric designed to appeal to independent voters. If his convention meets the historical standard for moving a challenger campaign in the polls, the Kerry-Edwards ticket will...

Senator John Kerry, D-Mass. December 17, 2003 Portsmouth, New Hampshire One hundred years ago today - at this very hour - two brothers from Ohio stood on a lonely hill at the Outer Banks of North Carolina and changed the world. The Wright Brothers' invention of the airplane changed the world for ever and for the better. We are able to understand and learn about, first-hand, distant corners of the globe. We are able to unlock the doors to commerce with other nations and get our people and products to places we never otherwise could never reach. And at this...