Free Republic

It seems like only yesterday when Joe Biden’s Customs and Border Protection chief Chris Magnus was saying ‘hell no, I won’t go.’ (Actually, it was two days ago.) It was immediately understandable why Magnus would feel that he didn’t need to resign and was being made to take the fall for the gross errors and incompetence of others. The man had been handed an impossible task without anywhere near the resources required to accomplish it. But last night, he thought better of his options and relented, tendering his resignation. At least for the moment, this decision staves off an ugly...

Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed? In normal times, this would be a ludicrous question. But these are not normal times. They are times of great danger. Today, the new US administration can disown responsibility for its inheritance; tomorrow, it will own it. Today, it can offer solutions; tomorrow it will have become the problem. Today, it is in control of events; tomorrow, events will take control of it. Doing too little is now far riskier than doing too much. If he fails to act decisively, the president risks being overwhelmed, like his predecessor. The costs to the US and...

February 11, 2009 Murphy's Law, the Peter Principle and Barack Obama By Kyle-Anne Shiver What happens when everything that can go wrong in a person's character formation does go wrong, and that person continues to be promoted to his level of incompetence? President Barack Obama happens. I'm well into my sixth decade of life and have yet to see a more perfect collision of Murphy's Law with the Peter Principle in a single individual. Proper character development is the overriding aim of good parents in raising their children. Mature parents, especially those Judeo/Christian parents with faith, believe it sinful to...

As FoxNews reports today, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin has "narrowly" won re-election to his mayoral office today. This, despite his complete incompetence in both preparing for Hurricane Katrina and in the now-infamous aftermath. (Surely you haven't forgotten the details, like the fleet of school buses sitting useless in standing water.) And then there was his famously racist comment about New Orleans needing to remain "a chocolate city." (As other writers have noted, can anyone seriously contemplate a white guy running for reelection appealing to voters to keep a city "vanilla"?) What Nagin's reelection ensures, is that New Orleans will...