Free Republic

If there were any lingering doubts about whether Democrats did the right thing by pushing Joe Biden off the ticket in July, any remaining thought that maybe the president — even in a somewhat diminished state — was right to think that he could have beaten Donald Trump, then the exit polls from this week’s election should have put them to rest. Because however history remembers Biden (and I think it will be kinder), it’s clear that a solid majority of Americans have determined his presidency to be a decisive failure. In Pennsylvania and Georgia, states Biden narrowly won in...

Hunter Biden, the budding artist, is never going to be Jackson Pollock or Edward Hopper. He probably isn’t Dennis Hopper, for that matter. That doesn’t make him an influence-peddler hiding behind an easel, however. And ethical conflicts, like modern art, are best viewed with some perspective. In case you missed the brouhaha here, the president’s 51-year-old son, whose shady business dealings have long been the subject of scrutiny, is now being represented by a SoHo gallery owner who expects to sell some of Hunter Biden’s abstract paintings for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The White House has said the identity...

When it was first announced last Thursday that President Trump was to personally meet with North Korea Dictator Kim Jong-un for negotiations, the media’s response varied from optimistic to seething anger. But with some time, it appears as though their consensus is now to denounce the idea as was blatantly obvious on Sunday’s Meet the Press. The entire panel up in arms and fretting that Trump was either going to hand North Korea a victory or blow a gasket at the meeting and start a war. Moderator Chuck Todd, still bitter because Trump called him a “sleeping son of a...

If you've been at the beach and missed the latest world news, let me briefly catch you up. Terrorists in Syria and Iraq have been overrunning the countryside, pausing to savagely murder an American journalist. Pakistan is reeling from political crisis. The Russians just made an incursion into Ukraine, the Israelis have been blowing up every other building in Gaza, and Ebola's rampaging through West Africa. All of which has led to some of the most blistering criticism of Barack Obama's presidency — and not just because he found time to golf. Republican leaders have called Obama feckless and incompetent,...

Just how much of a liberal cocoon does New York Times political reporter Matt Bai live in? Apparently a mighty thick one judging by the fact that he thought he could repeat a provably false lie about an supposed example of Tea Party racism in his most recent article. Almost everybody with even a little bit of political savvy can already guess what example I am referring to but let us allow Bai to repeat the false charge: The question of racism in the amorphous Tea Party movement is, of course, a serious one, since so much of the Republican...

The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, by Matt Bai (Penguin Press, 316 pp., $25.95) Matt Bai’s The Argument is the most significant book to date on the upcoming 2008 elections—not because it has anything to say about the horse race for the Democratic nomination, but because it offers an account of the people who constitute what Howard Dean calls “the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.” Bai writes regularly on politics for the New York Times Magazine, where some of this material originally appeared. He has been sharply critical of George W. Bush and...

Seven years later, the pain lingers for some. “Since ‘Seinfeld’ ended its first run, no new network sitcom has come along that even compares with it in terms of intelligence and wittiness -- especially not at NBC, which each fall stands for New Bad Comedies,” Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote in July 2003, after watching Jerry Seinfeld perform his standup routine. It’s cute that he slips the words “first run” in there, as if there may eventually be a “second run.” There won’t be. The actors have plenty of cash, and aren’t likely to tarnish their franchise with...

After last November's defeat, Democrats were like aviation investigators sifting through twisted metal in a cornfield, struggling to posit theories about the disaster all around them. Some put the onus on John Kerry, saying he had never found an easily discernable message. Others, including Kerry himself, wrote off the defeat to the unshakable realities of wartime, when voters were supposedly less inclined to jettison a sitting president. Liberal activists blamed mushy centrists. Mushy centrists blamed Michael Moore. As the weeks passed, however, at Washington dinner parties and in public post-mortems, one explanation took hold not just among Washington insiders but...

At the Shadow Party’s "Take Back America" conference in Washington on June 3, 2004, following a glowing introduction from Hillary Clinton, George Soros stepped to the podium to explain to the audience that when it came to electoral politics in the USA, he was a newcomer. Only his outrage over Bush’s invasion of Iraq had stirred him to get involved in the partisan struggle. "[I]t is the first time that I feel that I need to stand up and do something, and become really engaged in the electoral process in this country," Soros said.[1] This was far from the truth,...