Free Republic

Vote against all Republicans. Every single one. By Max Boot Columnist October 31 at 3:31 PM “I am sick and tired of this administration. I’m sick and tired of what’s going on. I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I hope you are, too.” — Joe Biden I’m sick and tired, too. I’m sick and tired of a president who pretends that a caravan of impoverished refugees is an “invasion” by “unknown Middle Easterners” and “bad thugs” — and whose followers on Fox News pretend the refugees are bringing leprosy and smallpox to the United States. (Smallpox...

In Thursday’s Washington Post, columnist Max Boot provides a call to arms for those who seek to oust the sitting president of the United States. His column claims that the presidency has now been shown to be illegitimate because of this week’s allegations and that Congress should have already acted on impeachment. None of this is surprising, Trump’s has been the photo on Boot’s dartboard for some time now, but in his zesty finale, Boot may have revealed a bit too much. He writes: The voters of the United States must now say to this Congress what Oliver Cromwell said...

How I miss Barack Obama. And I say that as someone who worked to defeat him: I was a foreign policy adviser to John McCain in 2008 and to Mitt Romney in 2012. I criticized Obama’s “lead from behind” foreign policy that resulted in a premature pullout from Iraq and a failure to stop the slaughter in Syria. I thought he was too weak on Iran and too tough on Israel. I feared that Obamacare would be too costly. I fumed that he was too professorial and too indecisive. I was left cold by his arrogance and his cult of...

Personally, I’ve thrown up my hands in despair at the debased state of the GOP. I don’t want to be identified with the party of the child-snatchers. But I respect principled conservatives who are willing to stay and fight to reclaim a once-great party that freed the slaves and helped to win the Cold War. What I can’t respect are head-in-the-sand conservatives who continue to support the GOP by pretending that nothing has changed. They act, these political ostriches, as if this were still the party of Ronald Reagan and John McCain rather than of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller...

I’m used to being vilified by the far left as a bloodthirsty neocon warmonger for the Original Sin of having supported the invasion of Iraq along with 72 percent of the American public. It has been a little more surprising to be simultaneously vilified by the far right as a dangerous left-winger. David Horowitz’s FrontPage magazine accused me of going “full leftist” for acknowledging that racism and sexism remain pervasive problems. Breitbart called me, with ironic quotation marks, the “Washington Post’s ostensibly new ‘conservative’ columnist,” because, among other sins, I support gun control and immigration. American Greatness wrote that I...

2017 Was the Year I Learned About My White Privilege I used to be a smart-alecky conservative who scoffed at “political correctness.” The Trump era has opened my eyes. In college — this was in the late 1980s and early 1990s at the University of California, Berkeley — I used to be one of those smart-alecky young conservatives who would scoff at the notion of “white male privilege” and claim that anyone propagating such concepts was guilty of “political correctness.” As a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union, I felt it was ridiculous to expect me to atone for the...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/11/10/roy-moore-response-shows-gop-doesnt-deserve-survive-max-boot-column/851640001/ Link only.

Tucker Carlson triggers man by his laughter. Tucker destroys him.

Here’s your shocker for the day: The neoconservatives are lying. Now before I tell you how I figured that out — apart from the fact that their lips are moving — I need to begin by parrying any manifestations of Trump Derangement Syndrome. I do not support or endorse Donald Trump, who is not a libertarian and who appears to have no clear philosophy of any kind. He would no doubt do countless things that I would deplore. Just like all the other candidates, in other words. My point is not to cheer for him. My point is that the...

Donald Trump’s runaway success in the GOP primaries so far is setting off alarm bells among neoconservatives who are worried he will not pursue the same bellicose foreign policy that has dominated Republican thinking for decades. Neoconservative historian Robert Kagan — one of the prime intellectual backers of the Iraq War and an advocate for Syrian intervention — announced in the Washington Post last week that if Trump secures the nomination, “the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.” Max Boot, an unrepentant supporter of the Iraq War, wrote in the Weekly Standard that a “Trump presidency would...

28 Shares A Every day seems to bring an escalation of the Russian military involvement in Syria. First it was airstrikes from more than 30 warplanes that Russia has positioned in Syria. Now it’s cruise missile strikes from warships in the Caspian Sea. Soon, if hints from Moscow are to be believed, Russian “volunteers” — a.k.a. “Little Green Men” — will be showing up in Syria to engage in ground combat alongside Iranian and Assad forces. President Obama can pretend that this is no big deal and that Russia is getting sucked into a quagmire, but this is a serious...

In my post yesterday about the #NROrevolt Twitter rebellion by restrictionist Donald Trump fans against the pro-restrictionism National Review, I mentioned that there was a rich stream of apoplectically anti-Donald Trump commentary emanating from within the conservative media. I thought it might be useful to catalogue some of the vituperative and often entertaining arguments thus far into one place. (For a previous post on Trump's conservative-media supporters, click here.) The following list, encompassing neoconservatives, social cons, and libertarian-leaners, includes Bret Stephens, George Will, Glenn Beck, Michael Gerson, Charles C.W. Cooke, Karl Rove, Jonah Goldberg, John Podhoretz, Kevin D. Williamson, Mona...

In a compelling column, George Will – who knows a thing or two about conservatism – makes the conservative case against Donald Trump. Mr. Will refers to Trump as an “unprecedentedly and incorrigibly vulgar presidential candidate” who is coarsening our civic life. He labels Trump “a counterfeit Republican and no conservative.” And he argues that Trump is an affront to anyone devoted to the legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of National Review and a giant in American conservatism. Just as Buckley excommunicated the John Birch Society from the conservative movement in the 1960s, so should conservatives today...

WASHINGTON — A great deal of diplomatic attention over the next few months will be focused on whether the temporary nuclear deal with Iran can be transformed into a full-blown accord. President Obama has staked the success of his foreign policy on this bold gamble. But discussion about the nuclear deal has diverted attention from an even riskier bet that Obama has placed: the idea that Iran can become a cooperative partner in regional security. Although they won’t say so publicly, Mr. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry surely dream of a “Nixon to China” masterstroke. They are quietly...

That's the heading on the first page of the court order obtained theGuardian. Top Secret is one of the highest levels of security classification in the U.S. government; the other initials indicate that this is "special intelligence," aka "signals intelligence," one of the most closely guarded capabilities of the U.S. intelligence community, and that it should not shown to any foreigners. Ironically and disturbingly, a British newspaper obtained this document. ... I have no idea who this intelligence officer is, but he (or she) has committed a serious crime by the unauthorized disclosure of such sensitive information. He needs to...

Likely we will never get to read the email exchanges between Petraeus and Paula Broadwell, but we do have these, accidentally leaked to Mondoweiss, between the celebrated general and Romney the advisor and uberhawk Max Boot. The context is that in 2010 Petraeus submitted a statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee which said that the conflict between Israel and Palestine presented challenges for America’s ability to advance its interests in the Muslim world.

Obama repeated Bush's mistake, and the power vacuum has been filled by jihadists. ...There has been a crippling and dangerous lack of security in Libya since Moammar Kadafi was overthrown last year with the help of NATO airstrikes. The Obama administration has waited to get serious about security in Libya. Good idea, but it's too little too late. Why wasn't such an initiative undertaken a year ago when Kadafi was overthrown?

We're in an era of "covert action." That phrase went into disrepute in the 1970s, when Congress's Church Committee exposed hare-brained CIA plots to eliminate foreign leaders, such as assassinating Fidel Castro with exploding cigars. President Ford banned assassinations, a chastened CIA cast many veteran officers into the cold, and Congress imposed new limits on covert activities. From then on the president would have to approve all operations in writing and notify senior members of Congress. There would be no more "wink-and-nod" authorizations. Covert action made a comeback in the 1980s, as the U.S. directed billions of dollars in aid...

The White House has been crowing that Russia’s decision last week not to sell advanced S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Iran represents a big triumph of its attempt to “reset” relationships with Moscow. The reality is somewhat more complicated — and less to our liking. The fact is that Russia has flirted with selling the S-300 to Iran for years without ever actually going through with the deal, thus suggesting that the Russians were not truly planning to transfer the technology after all — they were simply hoping to get a good payoff from the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and other countries...

You gotta’ love the New York Times and its hyper-politically correct sensitivities about revealing the ethnic or religious backgrounds of criminal suspects. Thus we have today’s front-pager: “4 Accused of Bombing Plot at Bronx Synagogues.” Who were these four, I wondered? Could they be Chrysler shareholders upset that they are getting stiffed in bailout proceedings? ACLU lawyers mad that President Obama has refused to release interrogation photos? Possibly Greenwich hedge-fund managers furious about plans to regulate their industries? Or maybe just random nuts who like to set off bombs for the fun of it? Nope. It turns out–get ready for...