Free Republic

This shouldn’t even be a question. A great party is trying to produce its presidential nominee. Donald Trump is the leader in the contest so far, and looks likely to be the victor. But the cycle has just started (61 delegates allocated, 2,368 to go) and the party isn’t united, it’s split, roughly 50/50 pro-Trump and not. Nikki Haley is right to stay in and fight. No one has the right to shut her down. She’s stumping in her home state, South Carolina, and getting a lot of advice.

“It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning, and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people.” ... he hid as a young woman was raped, and saw Hamas fighters capture another young woman near a car. “She was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her. They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her.” ... many of the women were naked and bleeding from the genitals...they collected 1,000 bodies in 10 days from the festival site and the kibbutzim. “No one saw more than us ... Hamas...

All things considered, Peggy Noonan must be the worst columnist in the United States. That is a rash judgment, I concede. She certainly has a lot of competition over at the New York Times. For the combination of fatuity and self-love, however, she must be in a class by herself. In her weekly Wall Street Journal column published in the paper on November 4 (whole thing here) Noonan opined:We continue to think in this space [editor’s translation: Peggy Noonan continues to think] that the invasion and bombardment of Gaza was a mistake, and not only because of the intractable question...

On Monday, David Zukerman wrote a good piece about Peggy Noonan and her WSJ editorial concerning former President Donald Trump. Noonan argues that electing Donald Trump again would destroy the Republican Party. Peggy may be right, and I hope she is.Trump's success in 2016 was, in large part, due to the way that he took the mechanisms of the Republican political machine and used them to secure victory. He ran a third-party-style campaign within the structure of the Republican Party. The "party" as a corporate entity was against him, but grassroots Republicans in name and philosophy were all in for...

If Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan decided to be a presidential candidate next year, she would be barred from the debates. The GOP debate rules include a pledge to support the Republican 2024 presidential nominee and Ms. Noonan makes it clear, from the opening paragraph of her latest weekend column that she would not back a Trump candidacy.Noonan declares in her lede paragraph that if "Trump Republicans" nominate the former president next year, "they will have ended the Republican Party." That there be no mistaking her comment as mere figurative remark, she declares in the following paragraph: "I mean...

If your big takeaway from the Durham report is that it didn’t solve the mystery of Trump and Putin, you might be checked out from reality.There was a time, years ago, when I looked forward to reading Peggy Noonan. Her weekly Wall Street Journal column seemed to cut through the noise of national politics and the churn of the news cycle to articulate some important nugget of wisdom about the state of our shared civic life. Whether I agreed with her or not, I always wanted to know what she thought, and I always took the time to read her.Those...

Ron DeSantis Is Definitely Running He presents himself as a serious, forward-leaning, pro-business, antiwoke conservative Republican. By Peggy Noonan The first GOP presidential debate is five months away, in August. Primaries begin about six months after. This thing is on. Some observations on Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor is definitely running. Every sign is there: donors, a growing and increasingly professional organization, a book that is part memoir, part platform and debuted this week at No. 1 on the New York Times list. A few days ago he gave a big, packed-house speech at the Reagan Library. He’s come off...

He’s a bad example to the young, an embarrassment to the old, an insult to the institution and America. By Peggy Noonan

The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit — yes, I know, it’s a crowded field — was the first line I ever wrote about the man who would become the 45th president: “If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.” This opening salvo, from August 2015, was the first in what would become dozens of columns denouncing Trump as a unique threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself. I regret almost nothing of what I said about the man and his close minions. But the broad swipe at his voters caricatured them...

President Trump annihilates RINOs, “losers” and backstabbers in a Save America StatementIn a statement put out today by President Trump, he identifies and absolutely crushes 5 RINOs and backstabbers whom he describes as “shortsighted ‘losers'” who spend their time criticizing him and the America First movement, while providing nothing positive to the Republican Party or to this nation.President Trump’s statement reads:I listen to all of these foolish (stupid!) people, often living in a bygone era, like the weak and frail RINO, Peggy Noonan, who did much less for Ronald Reagan than she claims, and who actually said bad things about...

p>Former President Donald Trump criticized three nominally conservative pundits as well as National Review magazine on Sunday following their recent dismissive pieces of the former president. Trump excoriated Peggy Noonan, columnist for The Wall Street Journal and former speech writer for President Ronald Reagan; Rich Lowry, editor of National Review; and George Will, columnist for the Washington Post."I listen to all of these foolish (stupid!) people, often living in a bygone era, like the weak and frail RINO, Peggy Noonan, who did much less for Ronald Reagan than she claims, and who actually said bad things about him and his...

Former President Donald Trump issued a severe smackdown to his Republican haters in a statement on Sunday, characterizing them as talentless fools.Calling out George Will, Rich Lowry, Jonah Goldberg, and others by name, the former president said that nobody should listen to such “foolish (stupid!) people”:I listen to all of these foolish (stupid!) people, often living in a bygone era, like the weak and frail RINO, Peggy Noonan, who did much less for Ronald Reagan than she claims, and who actually said bad things about him and his ability to speak, or Rich Lowry, who has destroyed the once wonderful...

By Peggy Noonan April 7, 2022 6:48 pm ET [cut] Why can’t we put a strict age limit on using social-media sites: You have to be 18 to join TikTok, Youtube, Instagram? Why not? You’re not allowed to drink at 14 or drive at 12; you can’t vote at 15. Isn’t there a public interest here? Applying such control would empower parents who face “all the other kids are allowed,” with an answer: “Because it’s against the law.” When we know children are being harmed by something, why can’t the state help? In theory this might challenge economic libertarians who...

Thank you Peggy https://t.co/eiy4gKyeYs— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) February 12, 2022 wsj Republicans, Stand Against Excess Be the party of the big center—of normal, regular people—against the forces of ideology assailing them. By Peggy Noonan Feb. 10, 2022 6:35 pm ET "A great party can’t be a cult. Cults are by definition marginal, not of the majority. Donald Trump brought new voters in, it’s true, and the party would do well to hold them by taking good stands. But don’t forget the votes he lost. He never came close in two tries to winning the popular vote, he lost once-Republican suburbs,...

America has just made one of its worst foreign policy mistakes in its entire 245 year history. If left as is, the negative ramifications will mushroom for decades. As such, this situation must be fixed — and the only way to do so is via a massive airlift of U.S. combat troops back into Afghanistan. Human nature has a characteristic which often proves fatal to those who succumb to it — that being "we are inclined to see what we want to see, instead of what actually is." Investors and government leaders the world over did this in 2005 -...

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace isn’t having any of conservative columnist Peggy Noonan’s sexist criticism of Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris. In a controversial article published over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal opinion writer rubbished the senator from California, who could become the first Black woman to be vice president, for being “giddy” on the campaign trail. Noonan wrote: “She’s dancing with drum lines and beginning rallies with “Wassup, Florida!” She’s throwing her head back and laughing a loud laugh, especially when nobody said anything funny. She’s the younger candidate going for the younger vote, and she’s going for a...

Has President Trump just eaten Joe Biden's lunch? Sure looks that way based on multiple indicators flashing pro-Trump signals in the wake of the Democratic National Convention. Sure, the leftist press is reporting that Biden's favorability numbers have notched up in the wake of his curiously gaffe-less convention speech, but it's thin gruel. Fact is, that's the only thing they have. But if you look mostly on the right column of the front page of RealClearPolitics, it's pretty clear the trend is President Trump's friend. Apparently the artifice and over-processed convention infomercial, with its many technical sleights of hand (see here and here), didn't fool the voters. And...

There is a slight redemptive quality in the helpless, irrational, and often demented fury of the haters. The current safe harbor of the disdainers is to nod smugly to each other on cable news panels while insisting the president and his defenders have failed in their effort to represent the Ukraine allegations as bunk and legally unassailable. Now the administration is left scrambling for excuses and technicalities.This usually leads quite quickly to the idea that everyone knows the president’s “perfect” conversation with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky was “wrong” but that there is some question whether it justified impeachment and genuine...

Look, the case has been made. Almost everything in the impeachment hearings this week fleshed out and backed up the charge that President Trump muscled Ukraine for political gain. The pending question is what precisely the House and its Democratic majority will decide to include in the articles of impeachment, what statutes or standards they will assert the president violated.

Look, the case has been made. Almost everything in the impeachment hearings this week fleshed out and backed up the charge that President Trump muscled Ukraine for political gain. The pending question is what precisely the House and its Democratic majority will decide to include in the articles of impeachment, what statutes or standards they will assert the president violated. What was said consistently undermined Mr. Trump’s case, but more deadly was what has never been said. In the two months since Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry was under way and the two weeks since the Intelligence...