Free Republic

Raccoon Exterminator! I have been drawn between candidates and have not made up my mind. I just need some particulars before I follow the Pied Piper. Trump does bring some new ideas to the table. When was the last time you could vote for the ideal candidate? I’m old, and I've always voted. I can’t remember ever thinking any were ideal. We always have two choices, usually Tweedledee and Tweedledum. If you didn’t vote for Tweedledee you got Tweedledum. That’s the way it is folks. Now consider this… An interesting analogy. You've been on vacation for two weeks, you come...

It's a language all its own. Only a beginner may need a guide for the perplexed. Those fluent in it just let it wash over them the way Angelenos do the smog. Examples abound. --What they say: "I would do a tax, and the tax, let me tell you what the tax should be. The tax should be 45 percent." --Donald Trump, speaking of how much still-Communist China's exports to this country should be taxed. What they mean: "There, that ought to please all the voters who yearn for an old-fashioned, mutually destructive trade war like the one that led...

Of course it was only by happenstance that former Mayor Thomas Menino died just days before the 2014 election, and that his funeral at Most Precious Blood Parish in Hyde Park coincided with the closing hours of all the campaigns whose outcomes would be decided on Tuesday. But that unplanned juxtaposition couldn't have illustrated more vividly the emotional extremes we resort to when it comes to political figures.A newcomer watching the local TV news broadcasts in Boston early Monday morning might reasonably have concluded that the former mayor had been a hero of mythic proportions, a saint and a superstar whose goodness...

Occupy Wall Streeters claimed that they were populists. Their ideological opposites, the Tea Partiers, said they were, too. Both became polarizing. And so far populism, whether on the right or left, does not seem to have made inroads with the traditional Republican and Democrat establishments. Gas has gone up about $2 a gallon since Barack Obama took office. Given average yearly rates of national consumption, that increase alone translates into an extra $1 trillion that American drivers havencollectively paid in higher fuel costs over the last 54 months.Victor DavisVictor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution,...