Free Republic

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...

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...

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...

Melania has learned a few things from the master. The first lady will never be as brilliant at trolling as her husband. He is an idiot-savant who plays in the roiling ocean of Twitter as naturally as a blubbery-necked sea lion. Only Donald Trump, a Rat Pack relic who spurred the reckoning with his transgressions toward women, could send out a tweet taking credit for the women’s march. But the Slovenian Sphinx has her moments. It started when she seemed to sartorially upbraid Trump for his Billy Bush vulgarities by wearing a pussy-bow blouse to the St. Louis debate. Then,...

Donald Trump was promising to destroy a vile criminal cartel. Unfortunately, not his own. But one could be forgiven for mistaking the vicious tactics of the MS-13 gang, as described by the president in a Long Island speech on Friday, with those of the Trump White House. “They don’t like shooting people because it’s too quick, it’s too fast,” Trump said, adding: “They like to knife them and cut them, and let them die slowly because that way, it’s more painful, and they enjoy watching that much more. These are animals.” The president could have been describing his own sadistic...

Dear Donald, We’ve known each other a long time, so I think I can be blunt. You know how you said at campaign rallies that you did not like being identified as a politician? Don’t worry. No one will ever mistake you for a politician. After this past week, they won’t even mistake you for a top-notch negotiator. I was born here. The first image in my memory bank is the Capitol, all lit up at night. And my primary observation about Washington is this: Unless you’re careful, you end up turning into what you started out scorning. And you,...

WASHINGTON — Now, stacked on the Trump tower of petrifying things we have to worry about — war with Iran, war with China, war with Mexico, war with Islam, war with koala bears — there is yet another looming disaster. The East Wing is perilously behind in planning for the Easter Egg Roll. Is the White House dropping the ball — or rather, the ovoid? As our omnipresent new president hijacked our reality, the first lady vanished, sparking headlines for nary a glimpse in D.C. since the inaugural. Just as there is a gush of leaks from the resistance in...

President Donald J. Trump will walk into the Oval Office and be stunned. First, it will be a shock to work in an office decorated with images of men other than himself. Second, he is bound to be suffused with awe as he looks around at the Remington bronze bronco, the Rockwell “Statue of Liberty,” the portraits of Washington and Lincoln, the Swedish ivy on the mantel that has eavesdropped — and leavesdropped — on so much history. The new president will suddenly realize that Joe Biden is right. He needs to grow up. Chuck Schumer is right. He has...

Donald Trump pulled off one of the greatest political feats in modern history by defeating Hillary Clinton and the vaunted Clinton machine. The election was a complete repudiation of Barack Obama: his fantasy world of political correctness, the politicization of the Justice Department and the I.R.S., an out-of-control E.P.A., his neutering of the military, his nonsupport of the police and his fixation on things like transgender bathrooms. Since he became president, his party has lost 63 House seats, 10 Senate seats and 14 governorships. The country had signaled strongly in the last two midterms that they were not happy. The...

I sat watching in astonishment. The one who couldn’t bear to show up to concede was not, as expected, Donald Trump, but Hillary Clinton... When the Apocalypse came at midnight and the TV analysts — even on Fox — were scrambling to reverse their analyses and justify their bad polling data; and the stock exchanges had to temporarily halt the futures market because it was falling too fast, and the world was spinning off its axis, I called my conservative brother to see what the heck was going on. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “As flawed a candidate as...

His life took off, he said, when he fell in love with “that girl.” He told a familiar love story, recounted in his memoir, about springtime at Yale Law School in 1971 and a “magnetic” girl with thick blond hair and big glasses and no makeup and a long, white flowery skirt. He said when he first saw her in a political and civil rights class that he wanted to tap her on the shoulder but he knew if he did, he would be starting something beyond his control. With a sky-blue tie and silvery hair and an easy smile,...

The novelty of flying cars never materialized. But flying novels are right around the corner. If you aren’t nervous enough reading about 3-D printers spitting out handguns or Google robots with Android phones, imagine the skies thick with crisscrossing tiny drones.

I SAW “Argo” with Jerry Rafshoon, who was a top aide to President Carter during the Iranian hostage crisis, when six Americans escaped and were given sanctuary for three months by courageous Canadian diplomats. We were watching a scene where a C.I.A. guy can’t get through to Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s chief of staff, to sign off on plane tickets for the escaping hostages, so he pretends to be calling from the school where Jordan’s kids go. “Hamilton wasn’t married then and didn’t have any kids,” Jerry whispered, inflaming my pet peeve about filmmakers who make up facts in stories about...

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan has condemned The New York Times -- blasting the Gray Lady and its columnist Maureen Dowd for what he says are examples of unfair, prejudicial and just downright mean anti-Catholicism. Dolan used his blog last Thursday on the Archdiocese of New York's Web site to rail against the Times a day after the paper refused to print his critique as an op-ed piece. He singled out Dowd -- a poison-penned, Pulitzer winner and former Catholic-school girl -- for "the most combustible," "intemperate and scurrilous" "diatribe" she wrote on Oct. 25, which "rightly never would have...

Karl Rove was impressed with Barack Obama when he first met him. But now he sees him as a “coolly arrogant” elitist. This was Rove’s take on Obama to Republicans at the Capitol Hill Club Monday, according to Christianne Klein of ABC News: “Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.” Actually, that sounds more like W. The cheap populism is really rich coming from Karl Rove....

CLEVELAND A huge Ellen suddenly materialized behind Hillary on a giant screen, interrupting her speech Monday night at a fund-raiser at George Washington University in Washington. What better way for a desperate Hillary to try and stop her rival from running off with all her women supporters than to have a cozy satellite chat with a famous daytime talk-show host who isn’t supporting Obama? “Will you put a ban on glitter?” Ellen demanded. Diplomatically, Hillary said that schoolchildren needed it for special projects, but maybe she could ban it for anyone over 12. Certainly, Hillary understands the perils of glitter....

When I walked into the office Monday, people were clustering around a computer to watch what they thought they would never see: Hillary Clinton with the unmistakable look of tears in her eyes. A woman gazing at the screen was grimacing, saying it was bad. Three guys watched it over and over, drawn to the “humanized” Hillary. One reporter who covers security issues cringed. “We are at war,” he said. “Is this how she’ll talk to Kim Jong-il?” Another reporter joked: “That crying really seemed genuine. I’ll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand.” He added dryly: “Crying doesn’t...

In 2005, a year after Ellie Grossman, a doctor, met Ray Fisman, a professor, on a blind date, she was talking to her grandmother about her guy. “Never let a man think you’re smarter,” her grandmother advised. “Men don’t like that.” Ray and Ellie “had a good laugh, thinking times had changed,” he recalled. The pair went on to marry — after she proposed. But now, he says, “it seems like the students at Columbia University should pay heed to Grandma Lil’s advice.” Mr. Fisman is a 36-year-old Columbia economics professor who conducted a two-year study, published last year, on...

Does success make women less marriageableto men? In some cases, the answer is yes: Most women like to "marry up," and that is harder to do if a woman is on the top floor of her profession. But a bigger problem simply may lie in successful women's lack of planning for marriage, said Carrie Lukas, director of policy at the Independent Women's Forum. Most women want a loving husband and children, Mrs. Lukas said. If they know that is what they want,"then theyshould take that goal as seriously as their goal to reach law partner by age 35." NewYork Times...

Are men facing extinction? Not quite yet, but times are a changin' in the gender playground, writes Simon Caterson.'THE REASON THERE are so many divorces," I remember my secondary school literature teacher telling our class, "is that people nowadays marry for love." It is one of those throwaway lines that remain lodged in the mind long after whatever it was we were supposed to be learning has been absorbed, regurgitated and forgotten. I was reminded of this aphorism two decades later when, at a recent dinner party, one of the guests announced that his de facto relationship of 14 years...