Free Republic

This week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin all but confirmed a blockbuster report in the Financial Times from late March indicating that the Biden administration was prepared to sacrifice Ukraine’s battlefield objectives if they imperiled his own reelection prospects. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Austin scolded Ukraine for executing long-range attacks on Russian oil refineries. “Ukraine is better served in going after tactical and operational targets that can directly influence the current fight,” the Pentagon chief said. But Austin gave away the game when he fretted that Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian infrastructure “could have a knock-on effect.

Senator Mitt Romney and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan are holding a two-day summit that began Tuesday. It is described as a “closed-door” summit in Park City, Utah. The Republican presidential ticket from 2012, who lost an election that should have been winnable, brought together four current presidential candidates. The four are Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Chris Christie, and Doug Burgum. This is an 11-year-old summit called the E2 Summit. It focuses on foreign policy, tech, and finance/business. Those attending the summit are “well-heeled, well-wired Republicans” who want to find an alternative to Trump and fund that candidate.The...

I know, I know; National Review is still the outfit that published the infamous “Against Trump” issue as a last ditch effort to foil the successful 2016 candidacy that led to four years of peace, prosperity, low inflation, and disproportionate gains for the lower end of the income scale under President Trump. But still, it comes as a bit of a shock that the publication I must credit for opening my eyes to the virtues of conservativism seems to be throwing in with Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and the rest of the J6 kangaroo court crowd that censored...

Some of the bluest states in the nation have committed themselves to war with the most efficient appliances in your home: natural gas-powered heaters, furnaces, and stoves. In September, California announced a new rule passed unanimously by the thoroughly undemocratic California Air Resources Board (CARB). It will outlaw the sale of natural-gas heaters at the beginning of the next decade. New York’s newly reelected Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed a similar initiative this month, which would ensure that the Empire State constructs only “climate-friendly electric homes” by 2027. The first step on the long march involves a ban on the...

As the battle over the recount of votes continues to grind on, we are beginning to see some lines form that gives us a hint on how things will play out over the next four years should the Electoral College or the Congress eventually decide to recognize Joe Biden as Commander-in-Thief. While many of us have no intention of ever recognizing Joe Biden as a legitimate president unless and until President Trump concedes that he lost in a free and fair election, For my part, I’m 100% with my colleague Shipwreckedcrew in Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton Takes a Hard Line...

For two years, the GOP had many opportunities to fund Trump’s wall both in part or in whole and it declined on every occasion. On Friday, January 11, a dubious milestone was reached. We are now living through what has become the longest government shutdown in American history. This seemingly intractable stalemate has created the illusion of partisan consensus. Democrats seem united in opposition to President Donald Trump’s demand for a small amount of funding that would be used to construct portions of the president’s long-promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Republicans, meanwhile, are posturing as though they have always...

There were few who defended Romney’s comments. Even snake-bit Republicans, chastened by the swift backlash in the media, hedged when asked to back up Romney’s assessment of the challenges posed by Moscow. But MSNBC’s wagons circled particularly quickly in defense of the president. Volley after volley of snark was lobbed in the GOP nominee’s direction. ... “This is Mitt Romney’s severely conservative problem,” University of Georgia professor Cynthia Tucker opined on-the-air. “It made Romney look dumb. He’s not a dumb man, but he said something that was clearly dumb.” Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein agreed that Romney’s statement was evidence...

"They are obliged to spell out in clear terms why immigration—to say nothing of the importation of seasonal, temporary, and skilled labor—is an economic necessity."

Republicans of all stripes must be made to acknowledge and accept that Trumpism is an experiment that failed," Noah Rothman wrote in Commentary. It was October 2016 and Rothman was declaring the terms on which Never Trumpers would accept the surrender of Republicans after Trump’s defeat. Some "examples must be made", but after some political purges, the GOP could be reunited around "free trade" and "an internationalist foreign policy". But instead of losing, Trump won. The disasters that Rothman was predicting, the loss of Congress and the White House, never came about. And the scorned prophets of Never Trump, instead...

A Bad Day for Preferred Narratives Noah Rothman Everything was going as planned at President Barack Obama's Thursday evening town hall on gun control when the unexpected occurred. A woman, a mother, a victim of sexual assault in college, someone who according to the overly simplistic center-left perspective should be sympathetic both to Democrats and stricter gun laws, stood up and defended firearm ownership. It was a moment that demonstrated the fragility of narratives and stereotyping. It exposed just how rapidly worldviews predicated on a naïve and one-dimensional typecasting - a trap into which political demographers easily fall - can...

Senator Marco Rubio's recent support for an Article V Convention of the States is causing some folks heartburn. Noah Rothman at Commentary calls Rubio's support for a Convention of the States a Pander for the Ages. Rather than taking Rubio at his word and assuming this is a principled stand, Rothman argues that Rubio's support for the Convention of the States is a politically strategic rouse. As a political maneuver, Rubio’s latest is a deft one. Hardened by influential talk show hosts who have spent months inveighing against his support of a 2013 immigration reform bill, Rubio will need to...

You don’t have to agree with all or even most of Senator Rand Paul’s brand of libertarianism to concede that his candidacy once held so much promise. Paul entered the race buoyed by what seemed like a burgeoning libertarian moment. From the conduct of the global war on terrorism to massive comprehensive reform packages, American political culture had grown suspicious of the federal government’s ability to avert the unforeseen negative consequences of its good intentions. For several weeks in the summer of 2014, Rand Paul led a field of nine prospective Republican presidential candidates in the polls. It was a...

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...

It was particularly revealing when David Axelrod explained that, of all his accomplishments in Barack Obama’s White House, he was proudest of the fact that “there hasn’t been a major scandal.” The qualifier “major” lays the burden on shoulders of the press to define what constitutes a serious scandal, and political media had thus far reliably covered the administration’s ethical lapses as merely the peculiar obsessions of addlebrained conservatives. Surely, much of the political establishment in Washington nodded along with Axelrod as he patted himself on the back. A mere seven months later, though, and it is clear now that...

A well-intentioned article by Noah Rothman in Commentary Magazine offers that Donald Trump’s supporters are the right wing’s version of Obama’s vacuous “Hope and Change” acolytes. Says Rothman: “Trump is the right’s Obama, insofar as his policy preferences are ill-defined, pliable, and reflective of whatever the audience immediately before him wants them to be.” Such comparisons short-change Trump’s supporters.

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...

For political pundits, the carnival they watched last night was an enlightening affair. Trump aside, they say, the Republican Party’s presidential aspirants performed admirably. The marginally tuned-in voter who watched the debate last night saw something quite different. This was a raucous event, a reality show with little redeeming value beyond its most entertaining aspects. That’s not necessarily a fair assessment, but it is an honest reflection of what they have come to expect from the Dadaist performance art that is Donald Trump’s campaign of self-promotion masquerading as a presidential bid. The pundits are, however, pundits for a reason; they...

Only the most vicious partisans on either side of the aisle care a whit for the party platform. The outdated practice of defining a political party’s ideals in writing so that they can be ignored by the institution’s elected officials serves only the opposition’s purposes. For Republicans, the platform’s codification of the GOP’s support for banning of all legal abortion practices and legally defining marriage as an institution that exists only between a man and a woman have provided their Democratic opponents ample opportunity to frame the party as “extreme.” The Democrats, too, stumbled into a public relations nightmare...

You might recall the name Mark Salter for the role he played as a speechwriter for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) when he ran for president in 2008. In the years that followed his involvement on that failed presidential bid, Salter eventually evolved into a commentator and political analyst. Following McCainÂ’s failed campaign, Slater spent much of his time attempting to rehabilitate the image of his friend and former employer. In 2011, Salter wrote a meandering, discursive essay on how George W. Bush had failed to meet the expectations of posterity when he chose Dick Cheney as his running mate....

And here we go: Right off the deep end. It’s as predictable as the sunrise. As those who are genuinely and honestly outraged over the revelations contained within the Senate Intelligence Committee’s “torture” report strain themselves in the effort to adopt a posture of unparalleled indignation, they inevitably overreach. So far, the best example of this kind of indulgence in regrettable hyperbole in the pursuit of moral preening is Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA). In an appearance on MSNBC on Wednesday, Speier reacted to the release of the SSCI’s report on the CIA’s Bush-era enhanced interrogation program by saying America’s clandestine...