Free Republic

“Anybody but Mitt” has become a familiar mantra throughout the Republican primary campaign. It is also weird and self-defeating. Republicans apparently want to nominate anyone except the one person who can defeat Barack Obama. And for all the strangest reasons: One: He’s changed his mind. True. He changed his mind, thus becoming more conservative. Two: He’s too perfect. Three: You can’t drink beer with him. Whatever. The result of these petty obsessions has been a pathological flirtation with a parade of lesser candidates who could replace Romney. This parade has persisted despite polls consistently showing Romney as the most likely...

Meghan McCain, MSNBC's newly hired contributor, conducted her first interview for the cable news network on Wednesday with Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann. McCain--who in January called Bachmann "a poor man's Sarah Palin" on MSNBC--said that the interview will air "soon" on "Now With Alex Wagner," the network's lunch hour show. On Lawrence O'Donnell's "Last Word" in January, McCain took vigorous issue with Bachmann's tea-party rebuttal to President Obama's State of the Union. "I think it's important to note that Michele Bachmann is not a leader, and she's not the leader of the Repbulican Party," McCain said. "Michele Bachmann is no...

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...

Michelle Bachmann's new top consultant, Ed Rollins, began his tenure with scathing criticism of potential Bachmann rival Sarah Palin. "Sarah has not been serious over the last couple of years," Rollins told Brian Kilmeade on his radio show, Kilmeade and friends. "She got the Vice Presidential thing handed to her, she didn't go to work in the sense of trying to gain more substance, she gave up her governorship." He suggested that the contrast would favor Bachmann. "Michele Bachmann and others [have] worked hard, she has been a leader of the Tea Party which is a very important element here,...

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...

"The more people try to take her out, she only becomes emboldened, strengthened, it makes her such a martyr," said Mrs Wallace, who has recently written a thriller called Eighteen Acres, drawn in part from her experiences on the bid for the White House of John McCain and Mrs Palin, his running mate. "She has very obvious deficiencies that will reveal themselves as the nominating contest gets closer," she told The Daily Telegraph, adding: "Let her shoot her moose or whatever the heck she does on her [television] show, it will all work out." ...... "What's troubling is she has...

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...

It seems almost unfair for an intellectual lightweight like Meghan McCain to take Palin on. While I personally find the Palin-Reagan comparisons a little insulting to the Gipper, Palin is still vastly more intelligent than the majority of PDS-sufferers and is certainly smarter than Meggie-Poo. If this was a boxing match, Sarah would be Mike Tyson facing off against Meggie Mac as Screech. While McCain’s rambling, nonsensical columns are usually full of schadenfreude-y goodness, the columns where she attempts to attack Sarah Palin are simultaneously the most groan-worthy and the most entertaining. In her latest pathetic excuse for a column,...

Eliot Spitzer’s CNN co-host Kathleen Parker is so furious about Spitzer’s on-air domination that she is threatening to leave their nightly show. Parker went so far as to storm off the set of the “Parker Spitzer” show Eliot, Spitzer, CNN, Kathleen, Parkerduring a recent pre-taping, according to the New York Post. She did return to finish the segment, however.

It's no secret that [Nicolle] Wallace is no fan of Sarah Palin. But the former Bush communications director and McCain campaign aide perhaps took things to another level with her attack on Palin on today's Morning Joe. Wallace was on to comment on Joe Scarborough's astonishing claim of yesterday, noted here, that "all" conservatives and talk radio hosts with whom he's spoken are harshly critical of Palin off the record, but are afraid to express their views publicly. Wallace opined that if it ever looked as if Palin were close to copping the Republican presidential nomination, many GOP leaders who...

But … I thought they were friends. Well, acquaintances. Sort of: She had spent most of her time [on election day] ensconced at the Fox television studios, though she managed to squeeze in a jog in Central Park — which she promptly chronicled on Twitter: “Beautiful!” Also at the studios was her fellow Fox News contributor Karl Rove, who had recently questioned in a British newspaper whether Palin’s new reality TV series, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” made her appear Oval Office-worthy. The building was abuzz over what would ensue when the two would inevitably bump into each other. The moment came...

You know it is a slow news week when something which happens on CNN’s dreadful “Parker & Spitzer” show makes “news,” but that is what happened when I appeared on the not-long-for-this-world program last Thursday. The full story behind the appearance may be even more interesting than why it was deemed by many to be “buzz worthy.” The reason I was asked on the show was that my latest documentary film, “Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted,” is in the process of being re-released nationwide in a truly unprecedented fashion (a major development that is being...