Free Republic

Rolling Stone led leftist celebrations of Henry Kissinger's death with a brutal headline that labeled him a 'war criminal' and declared 'good riddance' to the 100-year-old statesman. The outlet published a skewering obituary by Spencer Ackerman last night in which they said Kissinger's legacy should only be his 'confirmed kills'. 'Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies,' read the headline. Ackerman compared Kissinger to domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber who killed 168 people, and said: 'The infamy of Nixon's foreign-policy architect sits, eternally, beside that of history's worst mass murderers.' Leftists applauded Rolling...

Following Turkey and America’s agreement on a “permanent ceasefire” in Syria, President Trump lifted the sanctions placed on Turkish officials. The sanctions were put in place when Turkish forces were plunging into Syrian territory held by the Kurds, who were U.S. partners in the fight against ISIS. The new ceasefire agreement would set up a buffer zone on the Syria-Turkey border that Kurdish forces couldn’t occupy.The ceasefire marks a stark turn of events from where things stood earlier this month, when the entire Washington political and media establishment was lambasting Trump for daring to pull troops out of northern Syria.Yet at...

A heavyweight right-wing financier has thrown in with a left-right coalition to end the U.S. military’s involvement in the Saudi-led war on Yemen, one of the world’s most devastating humanitarian catastrophes, The Daily Beast has learned. The Charles Koch Institute, bearing the brand of one of the most influential sources of conservative political money, is backing an effort spearheaded by progressive California Democrat Ro Khanna to demand either an end to non-counterterrorism aid to the Yemen war or a direct congressional vote authorizing it. Multiple congressional and allied sources told The Daily Beast they plan to bring their resolution to...

As Trump prepares to release a GOP document accusing the FBI of abuses, bureau alums hope Director Chris Wray holds the line—but has to be ready to walk. Former FBI agents are warning that FBI Director Christopher Wray has to be prepared to quit, should President Donald Trump assent over bureau objections to the release of a memo calling the FBI’s integrity into question. The release of the memo, considered imminent, shows no signs of stopping, even as the leader of Democrats in the House called on its Republican author, Devin Nunes, to be removed from his chairmanship of the...

The Daily Beast's headline, subheadline, and lede about the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee refusing to answer a question are all false.Once again, reporters got burned by believing anonymous Democrats on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.Betsy Woodruff and Spencer Ackerman of The Daily Beast credulously believed their “sources familiar with the exchange,” who said Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, refused to deny he had coordinated with the White House when putting together a memo alleging surveillance and law enforcement abuses at the FBI.In fact, Nunes explicitly denied the charge before shutting...

Today's journalism scandal involving liberal media members of the invitation-only "Journolist" listserv discussing ways to help 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama or discredit his press critics is far more organized than the Clinton era "vast right-wing media conspiracy," according to former Clinton aides. While the two media conspiracies have been compared since the listserv E-mails started appearing on the Daily Caller website, former Clinton aides say that there is one major difference between the two. Unlike the current scandal, reporters with conservative media back in the 1990s were competitive and didn't share story ideas. What's more, the Journolist affair threatens...

OBAMA'S POLL NUMBERS DOWN, IMAGINARY RACISM UPJuly 21, 2010 The Democrats are depressed about their collapsing poll numbers, so it's time to start calling conservatives "racist." As we now know from the Journolist list-serv, where hundreds of liberal journalists chat with one another, and which was leaked to Daily Caller this week, journalists cry "racism" whenever they need to distract from bad news for Obama. (Ironically, this story did not make headlines.) When the Rev. Jeremiah Wright scandal broke during the 2008 campaign, the first response of Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent was to demand that they start randomly...

The following 65 names are confirmed members of the now-defunct JournoList listserv. 1. Ezra Klein 2. Dave Weigel 3. Matthew Yglesias 4. David Dayen 5. Spencer Ackerman 6. Jeffrey Toobin 7. Eric Alterman 8. Paul Krugman 9. John Judis 10. Eve Fairbanks 11. Mike Allen 12. Ben Smith 13. Lisa Lerer 14. Joe Klein 15. Brad DeLong 16. Chris Hayes 17. Matt Duss 18. Jonathan Chait 19. Jesse Singal 20. Michael Cohen 21. Isaac Chotiner 22. Katha Pollitt 23. Alyssa Rosenberg 24. Rick Perlstein 25. Alex Rossmiller 26. Ed Kilgore 27. Walter Shapiro 28. Noam Scheiber 29. Michael Tomasky 30....

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign. The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public –...

Quite the culture war on Morning Joe today . . . The combatants were Pat Buchanan and Spencer Ackerman of the lefty Washington Independent. The topic was the treatment of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab. Buchanan wanted the budding terrorist classified as an enemy combatant in order to extract the maximum amount of information from him. Ackerman, in ACLU mode, favored having young Umar tried in federal court and given all rights extended to US criminal defendants. My antennae went up when at the end of their debate, Buchanan saw Ackerman off by wishing him "Merry Christmas." A bit of Googling...