Free Republic

Washington • These are the men that try The New York Times’ soul. With the disreputable Donald Trump challenging the disfavored President Joe Biden, the 2024 race has become the embodiment of Oscar Wilde’s witticism about fox hunting: “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.” Bleeding young and nonwhite voters, the president finally heeded Democrats urging him to “get out there,” as Nancy Pelosi put it, and throw some haymakers at Trump. Biden flew to Pennsylvania on Friday to visit Valley Forge and make a pugnacious speech invoking an earlier moment when we were fighting against despotism and clinging to...

Former Obama adviser David Axelrod doubled down after President Biden reportedly called him a "pr---" and argued that the president has a "real problem" if he thinks he can "cheat nature." New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd defended Axelrod in a column published on Sunday, criticizing Biden for engaging in "petty feuds." "I don’t care about them thinking I’m a prick — that’s fine," Axelrod told Dowd. "I hope they don’t think the polls are wrong, because they’re not." Axelrod, who Dowd noted has defended Biden in the past, told Dowd that Biden thinks he can "cheat nature," drawing a...

Liberal New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd shamed President Joe Biden in a piece, Saturday, for refusing to acknowledge his seventh grandchild, Hunter Biden’s daughter he had out of wedlock. The piece, headlined "It’s Seven Grandkids, Mr. President," berated Biden for his continual omission of the existence of this seventh grandchild named Navy Joan Roberts, a child the younger Biden had with an ex-stripper named Lunden Roberts. Dowd’s scathing column claimed that Biden’s callous treatment of this grandchild "undercuts" the "empathy" that "has been his stock in trade" while in political office.

I offered to help prep Chris Christie for the debate with Donald Trump. Christie helped prep Trump in 2016, saying he played Hillary Clinton very aggressively so that Trump would think the real thing was “a cakewalk.” And now, sitting at a table in the Times cafeteria with the former New Jersey governor, I figured I could play Trump. We have both known the blackguard for decades. And let’s be honest. We want Christie on that wall. After years of watching Republicans cower before Trump, it’s bracing to see the disgraced former president finally meet his mean match. Even my...

It’s nice to see the Democrats are back on track. It only took an upheaval turning women into second-class citizens, the possibility that the Orange Menace could be re-elected, and an out-of-control Supreme Court. With all that, the Dems seem to be pulling even. There’s still a better-than-even chance they could lose the House. If they’re lucky, they’ll hold on to the Senate; and for that they would have to thank the Republicans for putting forward horrible candidates. President Joe Biden’s ratings have gone up, from very bad to not good, with the base cheering on “Dark Brandon” - the...

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher argued that even with passing the Inflation Reduction Act, the inflation and jobs numbers, and the death of former al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, President Joe Biden shouldn’t run for reelection in 2024 and that his best move would be to use his momentum to find someone younger inside the party that he can back and then ride off into the sunset. Fox Nation host Piers Morgan asked, “But don’t you think the smart play actually is — I think Maureen Dowd wrote this last week — the smart play for...

Do a search for “Larry Elder” and gorilla on the CNN website and nothing comes up. Washington Post? Zilch. Nothing comes up on The New York Times site either, although if you make it to the 15th paragraph of a story titled “The Vice President pushed back against the effort to recall Newsom in the Bay Area,” you will find a bland passing reference to Wednesday’s disgusting incident. According to our nation’s media leaders, it’s not a story that a white person wearing a gorilla mask attacked Larry Elder, a black man seeking to become the first non-white governor of...

Jay Gatsby gave big, lavish, new-money parties at his sprawling mansion on the water because he wanted to seem cool. He wanted Daisy to notice him. Barack Obama gave a big, lavish, new-money party at his sprawling mansion on the water because he wanted to seem cool. Being cool is important to him. One difference is that Gatsby opened his house to the uninvited. Obama closed his house to many of the invited after getting flak for hosting “a celebrity mosh pit,” as Stephen Colbert called it, while officials were telling people to mask back up. It’s hard to stop...

A New York Times star columnist has lashed Barack Obama for axing people who helped him to the top from his lavish 60th birthday guest list in favor of A-list stars. Maureen Dowd branded Obama 'Barack Antoinette' - a reference to the out-of-touch renaissance queen - and likened him to Jay Gatsby, the shallow people-pleaser from F Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby in her scathing piece, published Saturday. She highlighted how the former president cut his ex-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and former campaign strategist David Axelrod from the original 600-person guest list, despite both helping him secure his...

I miss torturing Liz Cheney. But it must be said that the petite blonde from Wyoming suddenly seems like a Valkyrie amid halflings. She is willing to sacrifice her leadership post – and risk her political career – to continue calling out Donald Trump’s Big Lie. She has decided that if the price of her job is being as unctuous to Trump as Kevin McCarthy is, it isn’t worth it, because McCarthy is totally disgracing himself. It has been a dizzying fall for the scion of one of the most powerful political families in the land, a conservative chip off...

Donald Trump was right. Germs are scary. For three decades, I talked to Trump about his fear of germs. When I interviewed him at the Trump Tower restaurant during the 2016 race, the famous germophobe had a big hospital-strength bottle of hand sanitizer on the table, next to my salad, ready to squirt. He told me about the nightmarish feeling he had when a man emerged from the bathroom in a restaurant with wet hands and shook his hand. He couldn’t eat afterward. Today, in a stunning twist of fate, germs are infecting his presidency and threatening a bad prognosis...

<p>WASHINGTON — Everyone here is keyed up for the Big One.</p> <p>The One that’s going to finally bring Donald Trump down.</p> <p>As soon as the news broke Wednesday night in The Washington Post that a whistle-blower had accused the president of making some sort of nefarious “promise” during a call to a foreign leader, the hive erupted.</p>

WASHINGTON — After I interviewed Nancy Pelosi a few weeks ago, The HuffPost huffed that we were Dreaded Elites because we were eating chocolates and — horror of horrors — the speaker had on some good pumps. Then this week, lefty Twitter erected a digital guillotine because I had a book party for my friend Carl Hulse, The Times’s authority on Capitol Hill for decades, attended by family, journalists, Hill denizens and a smattering of lawmakers, including Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Susan Collins. I, the daughter of a D.C. cop, and Carl, the son of an Illinois plumber, were hilariously...

Some Dowd whining, then: "Chakrabarti sent shock waves through the Democratic caucus when he posted a tweet about the border bill comparing moderate and Blue Dog Democrats — some of whom are black — to Southern segregationists in the ’40s. Rahm Emanuel told me Chakrabarti is “a snot-nosed punk” who has no idea about the battle scars Pelosi bears from the liberal fights she has led. “What votes did you get?” Emanuel said, rhetorically challenging A.O.C.’s chief of staff. “You should only be so lucky to learn from somebody like Nancy who has shown incredible courage and who has twice...

When it comes to presidential obstruction, at least Watergate started with a crime. A stupid crime, but a crime. After 675 days, more than 2,800 subpoenas, nearly 500 search warrants, $30 million spent, endless jaw-jaw on cable and countless whiny Trump tweets, we have come down to one fundamental truth. And it’s the same truth that has been terrorising us all along: Donald Trump’s dirtbag machinations are driven by insane vanity. The First Narcissist’s all-consuming blend of braggadocio and insecurity has turned Washington and its rickety institutions into a dystopian outpost of his id. President Trump obstructed on nearly every...

WASHINGTON — When it comes to presidential obstruction, at least Watergate started with a crime. A stupid crime, but a crime. After 675 days, more than 2,800 subpoenas, nearly 500 search warrants, $30 million spent, endless jaw-jaw on cable and countless whiny Trump tweets, we have come down to one fundamental truth. And it’s the same truth that has been terrorizing us all along: Donald Trump’s dirtbag machinations are driven by insane vanity. The First Narcissist’s all-consuming blend of braggadocio and insecurity has turned Washington and its rickety institutions into a dystopian outpost of his id. President Trump obstructed on...

Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said George H.W. Bush called Donald Trump a curse word and threw his shoe at the television when Trump was on. Dowd said, “I think, you know, that Donald Trump would be incomprehensible to him literally. And even that was 2011, so in our wildest imagination we couldn’t imagine that Trump would be the nominee and that he would, you know, eviscerate H.W.’s dream of Jeb in the White House with two words, ‘low energy.’ All of that was unimaginable.”

TORONTO — The snow is falling lightly. My thoughts are racing darkly. I’m feeling something foreign, something I’ve never felt before. It takes me a moment to identify it. I’m feeling sorry for the Clintons. In the 27 years I’ve covered Bill and Hillary, I’ve experienced a range of emotions. They’ve dazzled me and they’ve disgusted me. But now they’re mystifying me. I’m looking around Scotiabank Arena, the home of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and it’s a depressing sight. It’s two-for-the-price-of-one in half the arena. The hockey rink is half curtained off, but even with that, organizers are scrambling at...

#CalExit just received a big boost from an unlikely source: Peter Thiel, billionaire tech buddy of President-elect Trump. In a “Confirm or Deny” interview with the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, the 49 year-old Thiel confirmed that he believed California should secede. Maureen Dowd: California should secede. Peter Thiel: Confirm. I’d be fine with that. I think it would be good for California, good for the rest of the country. It would help Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign. Apparently Thiel’s comment that “…it would help Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign” was made rather tongue-in-cheek. But it does raise an interesting question. With...

WASHINGTON — It was a moment of peak Spock. Hours after the globe-rattling election of a man whom Barack Obama has total disdain for, a toon who would take a chain saw to the former president’s legacy on policy and decency, Obama sent a message to his adviser Ben Rhodes: “There are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth.” ...... As president, Obama always found us wanting. We were constantly disappointing him. He would tell us the right thing to do and then sigh and purse his lips when his instructions were not followed. .........