Free Republic

Somebody check the calendar. Aren't we almost in 2012? Yet there's Kathleen Parker, still gushing over Barack Obama like a member of the liberal media in the deepest throes of 2008 Obama-adulation. After extolling Obama's foreign policy approach as "cool" [mangling a basketball metaphor along the way], Parker defiantly declares: "I know everyone's going to say [I'm] an Obama lover. Whatever." Parker put her crush on display on Chris Matthews' weekend show. View the video here.

Another debate, another episode of "The Dating Game." Will the winner be contestant No. 1, 2,... 8? The truth is, everyone has always known who the Republican nominee will be, but we enjoy the game. For a while. By now, self-caricature has evolved into full-blown self-mockery.... Herman Cain is a one-man clown car. God bless and peace be upon him.... Newt Gingrich is universally known as a man of ideas. He is also known as a man of mostly bad ideas.... His recent remark that the Occupy Wall Street crowd should get a bath and a job—as though Americans are...

The headline on Democratic strategist Paul Begala’s recent Newsweek essay dodged subtlety: “The Stupid Party.” “Republicans used to admire intelligence. But now they’re dumbing themselves down,” was the subhead. Democrats couldn’t agree more. And quietly, many Republicans share the sentiment. They just can’t seem to stop themselves. [Snip] Scientific skepticism, the engine that propels intellectual inquiry, has morphed into skepticism of science fueled by religious certitude. In this strange world, it is heresy to express concern about, for example, climate change — or even to suggest that human behavior may be a contributing factor. Jon Huntsman committed blasphemy when he...

Such rabble, all those grassroots conservatives that have infested the Republican Party. It's all that Sarah Palin's fault. She's so... common... so dumb. Well, we can't say "dumb," so let's say not very smart, not like Bill Buckley. All those flyover country conservatives aren't very smart, either. Paul Begala says so, and Paul shows up at the right parties, so... Read Kathleen Parker's latest in the Washington Post: "The Palinization of the GOP." Parker used to write for National Review. Then she graduated to the Washington Post. Going there, Parker's worldview gloriously expanded. Parker's opinions are just so sophisticated now,...

As the number of Republicans declaring themselves potential presidential candidates has begun to look like a conga line without music, hope lingered that somewhere unnoticed was a brilliant dark horse biding his sweet time. Wherever pundits and pinots merged, a mantra materialized. Surely, a miracle would occur, and The Candidate would emerge at just the right moment to rescue an ennui-stricken electorate from establishmentarians and their Tea-Partying ankle-biters. Cymbals would sound; angels would succumb to arias; Democrats would quake. And prosperity, world peace and well-adjusted children would follow. But who? Turns out: The Candidate would be tall and rich and...

This is doubtless heretical, but I'll say it anyway: I can wait to find out who the Republican presidential candidates will be. To be clear, I said "can," not "can't." Let's go further: I don't care who they'll be. At least not yet. I don't care because it's only March 2011. President Obama's first term is scarcely half over, and the next election is 20 months away. Twenty months! Can you bear this conversation 24-7 for 20 more months? ABC News in November produced a guide to Republican presidential contenders because, according to the network's Web site, the 2012 election...

Kathleen Parker, CNN's resident pseudo-conservative, gushed over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday's Parker-Spitzer, trumpeting how the San Francisco liberal stood amongst her fellow Democrats: "She's the 'mama grizzly' in this crowd, is she not?" Parker also stated she had "great admiration" for Pelosi, and even cheered her on: "Go, Nancy!" [audio available here] The host, along with her on-air partner Eliot Spitzer, shared yet another moment of mutual agreement during the lead segment of their program, ripping President Obama for his proposed tax compromise with congressional Republicans. Spitzer wasted little time in launching his attack on the executive: "He...

Despite its considerable gains in the midterm elections, the GOP has a problem looming in the margins named Sarah Palin. She who can rouse the base like none other is now She to Whom Respect Must Be Paid. Like it or not. Many within the so-called party establishment don't quite know what to do about Palin. She's adored by Tea Partyers, to whom she conveniently attached herself as soon as she sensed a shift in the air. A rogue like Palin isn't going to let a rogue movement fill a stadium - or a desert - without her. She also...

On Thursday's Larry King Live, future anchor Kathleen Parker verified her tenuous conservative credentials, as she identified herself as a "conservative," but added, "a pox on everybody's house, as far as I'm concerned." She later confessed that she "would put myself...slightly to the right of center," and that she was "a big fan of Barack Obama as he came into office...I didn't want him to fail." Anchor Larry King brought on Parker and future co-host Eliot Spitzer of "Client Number Nine" fame during the first half of the 9 pm Eastern hour. Three minutes in, King asked about the format...

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Alabama Republican governor candidate Robert Bentley has turned down an offered endorsement from former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, expected to be a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2012. Romney on Thursday endorsed a list of 24 Alabama Republicans, including U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, state treasurer Kay Ivey in her race for lieutenant governor and Birmingham lawyer Luther Strange, who is running for attorney general. The Birmingham News reported that Bentley turned down the endorsement. A spokeswoman for Bentley, Rebekah Mason, said Friday that Bentley wanted to concentrate on the race for governor and did...

It is hard to imagine that anything has gone unsaid about the so-called Ground Zero mosque, but we seem to be missing an important point. The mosque should be built precisely because we don't like the idea very much. We don't need constitutional protections to be agreeable, after all. This point surpasses even all the obvious reasons for allowing the mosque, principally that there's no law against it. Precluding any such law, we let people worship when and where they please. That it hurts some people's feelings is, well, irrelevant in a nation of laws. And don't we, really, want...

This tripe from Kathleen Parker is something. She bemoans the loss of privacy and kinship when the Journolist blew up in the faces of some 400+ reporters: It should come as no surprise that self-identifying liberals have liberal thoughts and friends, so no foul there, as Carlson has said. And, indeed, some of the comments are, on their face, condemnable, not to mention banal. But some also have been presented out of context and, besides, were offered as part of an ongoing argument among colleagues who believed they were acting in good faith that theirs was a private conversation. Were...

Sarah Palin, the ubiquitous enchantress of the disenchanted, may not have been ready to lead the free world back when John McCain anointed her as his running mate. But she's left rubber on the road that leads to fame, fortune and a new feminine mystique that drives certain men and women wild -- in very different ways. For what it's worth, I get a kick out of Sarah. May I call her Sarah? She and I apparently share a certain genetic predisposition to annoy all the right people. These would be the folks who take themselves and their ideologies a...

This is truly fascinating, or would be, if Kathleen Parker wasn’t a crazy person, so listening to her is often like finding yourself in a Victorian insane asylum with Renfield, cringing as he devours flies and other bugs. Like “apartment creeper” Maureen Dowd, and a broken clock, Parker’s right about two times each day, and lucid every week or so. In a new piece discussed by the excellent NeoNeocon site, Parker waxes about how feminine “president” Obama is in his approach to the presidency. She discusses his constant use of the passive voice, the way he blames problems on other...

The RINO hunt is back on, and the coveted trophy is Scott Brown.Inevitably and predictably, the new senator from Massachusetts -- Mr. 41, Mr. I-Drive-A-Truck, tea party poster dude -- has disappointed his base by, alas, representing his constituents. It's the purity test all over again; only this time, the stakes are high and the weird are turning seriously pro. Not that the tea partiers are weird, not most of them, anyway. But some are at risk of flying off into the blood-red zone of wing-nuttery. One of the sessions at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) questioned whether...

It's no surprise that elitism and a pretentious point of view have a place on The Washington Post editorial page, but even this is a little much. Pseudo-conservative columnist Kathleen Parker asserted that Trig Palin, the Down syndrome son of the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin might one day find his mother's abortions comments "hurtful." A Feb 14 column published in the Post focused on the delicate art of criticizing Palin's recent political and personal defense of the special-needs community, stemming from White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's controversial comments involving the word "retarded."...

Sarah Palin Should Beware Of Exploiting Her Youngest Child By Kathleen Parker February 14, 2010 A hurdle familiar to any mother is learning to view her baby as separate from herself. How many of us have answered questions about our babies in first-person plural? -- How old is your baby? -- Oh, we're 22 months now. Well, no, we're not; he is. Yet we nod in universal understanding of the profound sense of oneness that evolves in part from pregnancy. For nine months, mother and baby are inextricably "we" -- linked in body and spirit, every move and morsel belonging...

In the run-up to Barack Obama's State of the Union address, the so-called narrative question is whether the president will be -- pick a curtain -- party leader, president, conciliator or fighter. Depending on whose head is talking, the president's problem is that he's been: (a) playing party politics and not leading the nation; (b) stuck in community-organizer mode, seeking consensus rather than fighting. So agitated have SOTU speculators become that some have resorted to counting the number of times Obama uses the word "fight," or some variation thereof, in recent gatherings and speeches. At a Monday morning meeting of...

IS RICK SANTORUM running for president of the United States, or isn’t he? I caught him by phone on a people mover at Dulles Airport and posed the question: He’s not running, then again, he’s not NOT running. En route to South Carolina Tuesday to stump for gubernatorial candidate and Republican Rep. Gresham Barrett, Santorum wasn’t being cagey, just practical. Whether the former Pennsylvania senator can raise the millions needed for a presidential bid remains to be seen. In the meantime, he has some things to say. For starters: “I have no great burning desire to be president, but I...

... The so-called purity test is a 10-point checklist -- a suicide pact, really -- of alleged Republican positions... James Bopp Jr., chief sponsor of the resolution and a committee member from Indiana, has said that "the problem is that many conservatives have lost trust in the conservative credentials of the Republican Party." Actually, no, the problem is that many conservatives have lost faith in the ability of Republican leaders to think. The resolutions aren't so much statements of principle as dogmatic responses to complex issues that may, occasionally, require more than a Sharpie check in a little square. It's...