Free Republic

He's done it before, but he quadrupled down this time. CNN's serial plagiarist Fareed Zakaria, who insists that former President Barack Obama's administration was "largely scandal-free," contended on Don Lemon's CNN Tonight show Friday evening that Donald Trump owes his whole life, his success and his election to the presidency to "bullsh*tting." As Matthew Balan at NewsBusters observed in early August, Zakaria described Trump as a "bullsh*t artist," and went to the left's favorite characterization of anyone they disagree with or don't like: CNN's Fareed Zakaria ripped Donald Trump with an uncensored expletive on Monday's Wolf program over the billionaire's...

For months now, the Democrat-Progressive fever swamps have been using the word “fascist” in connection with Donald Trump and those who voted for him. It took Michael Kinsley to elevate this shoddy claim onto pages of the Washington Post: Trump, he asserts, is a fascist. Sadly, Kinsley reveals, as so many before him have, that academic degrees are no substitute for intelligence, knowledge, critical analysis, and basic logic. The term “fascist” is a very distinct one and Kinsley can apply it to Trump only by redefining it entirely. His is a deconstructionist effort that leeches all meaning from the word....

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/05/ted-cruz-election-2016-political-goat

My daughter asked me my opinion on an article she read in Vanity Fair attempting to debunk the presidential record of Ronald Reagan. I happily responded. The writer of the piece is veteran liberal commentator Michael Kinsley, who used to be a regular on William F. Buckley Jr.'s "Firing Line" and CNN's "Crossfire." It's not as though he appeared out of nowhere, studied the evidence anew and shared a novel theory. He's been dissing Reaganomics for decades along with other Democrats and liberals, whose only recourse is to distort the Gipper's phenomenal record. Why is this even relevant, you ask?...

Is Michael Kinsley sure he wants to go down this path? In a Bloomberg View column and then in a clip run on "Good Morning America" today, the liberal pundit claims Chris Christie is "just too fat" to be president. According to Kinsley, Christie's weight is evidence of a lack of the self-control necessary to be an effective president. If self-control is a key requirement for the presidency, I wonder how Kinsley would apply that standard to other recent occupants of the White House? View GMA video here.

Could Michael Kinsley possibly be any more predictable? His review of George Bush's "Decision Points," appearing in today's Sunday New York Times, is precisely the smug piece of sneering partisanship you would expect to find in this paper and from this quintessential liberal MSM elitist. As the headline indicates, Kinsley flatly accuses W of "stealing" the 2000 election. Kinsley offers no proof, but surely most of the people who will read this review require none. They take it as a matter of deep partisan faith. Speaking of faith, the former Crossfire man is mocking of Bush's. Consider this excerpt: "[H]e...

So Michael Kinsley wants to know if we’re “poorer than we used to be.” He wonders why, since GP is currently about the same as it was in the third quarter of 2007, we’re so “glum” now and we weren’t then. It’s a fair question. And, to anybody who’s not a liberal columnist, it has a simple answer: experience. As Kinsely helpfully points out, in Q3 2007, “the bank bailouts, the government takeover of General Motors, the stimulus package all lay ahead.” That’s right. The American people hadn’t yet been told, repeatedly and – yes – triumphantly, that capitalism had...

Michael Kinsley thinks Baby Boomers are a failed generation. I agree.  We have been the most self satisfied and smug generation in this nation’s history–with the least about which to be smug and self satisfied, unless self absorption is warrants such attitudes. But…We should not, out of guilt, submit to health care rationing.  But Michael Kinsley thinks we should–as sort of our form of World War II sacrifice that marked our parents’ generation.  From the end of his current article in the Atlantic: One final thought: as we learned during the health-care debate, citizens of other advanced countries live...

Writing in the New York Times, Michael Kinsley defends treating Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the al-Qaeda operative who recently tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit) as a criminal defendant rather than an enemy combatant. He argues that, since any line to be drawn between waging war and engaging the criminal-justice system is going to be arbitrary, the U.S. border is as good a line as any. That is, al-Qaeda terrorists captured abroad are enemy combatants while those captured at home are criminal defendants, entitled to all the rights provided by our Constitution and statutes. The problem is that the...

From the Left, former Crossfire host Michael Kinsley schools his progressive pals: Miss California’s views on gay marriage have nothing to do with her qualifications for the job and shouldn’t disqualify her for it. This is really Liberalism 101, and it’s amazing that so many liberals don’t get it. Yes, yes, the Bill of Rights protects individuals against oppression by the government, not by other private individuals or organizations. But the values and logic behind our constitutional rights don’t disappear when the oppressor is in the private sector. They may not have the force of law in that situation, but...

Time Mag's Michael Kinsley Makes MoveOn.org's 'Betray us' Ad Fault of Limbaugh, O'Reilly Goodness gracious, Michael Kinsley, vaunted leftist, upright "journalist," salt of the earth, is supporting a group that would rather call names and stir hatred for our troops than support a general that the entire U.S. Senate voted unanimously for only a few months ago. The founding editor of Slate online magazine, Microsoft's "serious" news and commentary magazine, thinks brash, slander is a great way to carry out the public debate on serious issues that affect the lives of millions of people. It's disgraceful. It's just beyond the...

It seems to be time once again to play Kick the Democrats. Everyone can play, including Democrats. The rules are simple. When Republicans lose elections, it is because they didn't get enough votes. When Democrats lose elections, it is because they have lost their principles and lost their way. Or they have kept their principles, which is an even worse mistake. Democrats represent no one who is not actually waiting in line for a latte at a Starbucks within 150 yards of the east or west coastline. They are mired in trivial lifestyle issues like, oh, abortion and gay rights...

Former political commentator and columnist Michael Kinsley has resigned as editorial and opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times after 15 months at the paper. Andres Martinez, hired by Kinsley last September from The New York Times to be editorial page editor, will take on a broader role overseeing the Times' opinion pages, publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson announced Tuesday. Kinsley, 54, said in an interview with The New York Times in July that his arrangement to commute to his job from his home in Seattle had become a problem and that he was in discussions to change his role at...

The Los Angeles Times' Michael Kinsley is currently in negotiations to change jobs, a move that will likely end his brief but eventful tenure as the paper's editorial and opinion-page editor. Although details of his new position have yet to be finalized, Kinsley is expected to remain at the paper as a columnist and may handle some Web site duties, according to a source at the Times and a report in Tuesday's New York Times. John Carroll, the outgoing editor of the paper who had originally hired Kinsley away from Slate, told E&P Monday he did not know about Kinsley's...

Michael Kinsley shook up the editorial staff of The Los Angeles Times recently, transferring four of his eleven writers, letting one go, and outsourcing some editorials to freelancers. "Michael Kinsley is not unaccustomed to controversy as an editor." But many on the newspaper's staff knew what was coming because Mr. Kinsley, who was hired to oversee the newspaper's editorial and opinion pages last spring, accidentally left a Power Point document describing his plans on a Xerox machine in their office in early May. He said he had intended to share his ideas at a company management retreat. "We had a...

After about the 200th e-mail from a stranger demanding that I cease my personal coverup of something called the Downing Street Memo, I decided to read it. It's all over the blogosphere and Air America, the left-wing talk radio network: This is the smoking gun of the Iraq war. It is proof positive that President Bush was determined to invade Iraq the year before he did so. The whole "weapons of mass destruction" concern was phony from the start, and the drama about inspections was just kabuki: going through the motions. Although it is flattering to be thought personally responsible...

As conscientious followers of politics are doubtless aware, the better sort of American liberal is troubled by the unprecedented vituperation that has stolen into the public discourse. The Clintons refer to it as "The Politics of Personal Destruction" -- well said, Bill and Hillary. They, and concerned citizens like them, recognize that this inflammatory rhetoric comes, in the main, from the right -- or as they put it, "the extreme right." Dr. Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, likewise is alarmed by the abusiveness from the right or more generally from Republicans whom he has recently identified as...

It was the TV talker Chris Matthews, I believe, who first labeled Democrats and Republicans the "Mommy Party" and the "Daddy Party." Archaic as these stereotypes may be, they do capture general attitudes about the two parties. But we live in the age of the one-parent family, and it is Mom, more often than Dad, who must play both roles. It has not escaped notice that the Daddy Party has been fiscally misbehaving. But it hasn't really sunk in how completely the Republicans have abandoned allegedly Republican values — if, in fact, they ever really had such values. Our text...

Like many women of a certain age, I have a bad habit, first learned in the 1960s and '70s. Whenever I'm in a professional setting, I count the number of women in the room. These days there are occasions when I don't have enough fingers and toes to do the job. Which brings me to the present, and an ugly little spat that is roiling the waters of opinion journalism in the same way that Lawrence Summers's comments about the dearth of women in math and science rocketed through the academy. Op-ed pages, the accepted wisdom insists, don't carry enough...

Out here, in L.A., we have recently been treated to a colossal hissy fit that had liberals gunning for other liberals. One would think that any right-thinking conservative would happily sit back and watch the blood run in the gutters. But even in a battle royal that pits lefties against their own kind, a fair-minded person can’t help taking sides. On one side, you have the knee-jerk liberal editors at the L.A. Times wearing the white trunks or, in this case, at least the white hats; on the other side, you have the idly rich women of the Westside –...