Free Republic

Ruh-Roh. This can’t end well… Krauthammer disagreed with Rush Limbaugh’s view of the Obama speech last night saying he has “a condescending view of much of America.” Krauthammer disagreed with Rush’s assessment that the elites were slobbering all over the president’s speech last night.

Some 31 million U.S. television viewers tuned in to see President Barack Obama lead a memorial tribute to victims of the deadly shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona, according to TV ratings provider Nielsen. The emotionally charged speech, in which Obama urged Americans not to politicize a tragedy that left six people dead and 13 others wounded, drew generally high marks for his bid to balance words of consolation with a call for national unity. The seven-network tally for Obama's 30-minute address, carried live on Wednesday night from the University of Arizona, topped the 29 million viewers the president drew in...

Glenn Beck criticizes Tucson memorial, compares it to Paul Wellstone memorial debacle. A day after the Barack Obama-attended Tucson memorial for the victims of the Jared Loughner killing spree, Glenn Beck has nothing kind to say about the raucous crowd that seemed to think it was at, as Beck put it, a high school pep rally. Beck went on to address the inappropriate and zany behavior of the memorial crowd, comparing them to what occurred at the late Senator Paul Wellstone’s memorial more than eight years ago. At that memorial, opportunistic and exploitative Democrats used what was supposed to be...

Most Americans have soundly rejected every crazy idea put forward by the liberal media regarding the root cause of the Arizona shooting. A new theory is now being advanced by some in the media. The phrase "blood libel" used by Sarah Palin in her video was really some kind of a super-secret code to be used as a signal to Palin's base. Jennifer Epstein of Politco writes: Sarah Palin’s use of the charged term “blood libel” may not have been an accidental blunder, but a deliberate “‘dog whistle” appeal to her evangelical Christian supporters for whom the expression has meaning,...

...Yes, yes, The Speech was fine. Full of rainbows and unicorns and signifying nothing. But did the whole thing have to be turned into a campagin rally? Were the names of the victims listed on the back, like a rock band’s tour schedule? Faugh! This is appalling. Do you remember anything like this happening at the memorial for the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting? Nope. Columbine? The Amish West Nickel Mines School shooting? Nope. Sure wish my great grandmother had grabbed one of these when she went to Gettysburg...

The suppression of the facts is by no means the most dangerous aspect of any Big Lie. After all, facts don't go away even amid efforts to suppress them. All sorts of inconsistencies, impossibilities and clues remain behind, and sometimes in plain sight, for anyone who cares to look. The real threat the Big Lie poses to society comes when it is not stopped in its tracks, exposed and trashed for what it is -- a lie -- but rather accepted, accommodated and, indeed, treated as if it were the truth. At that point, a Big Lie is a big...

RUSH: Oh, come on. It was everything we knew it would be. It became everything we knew it would be, and that is attacking talk radio, attacking Sarah Palin. We knew. It was utterly predictable. I tell you, the reason why they waited as long to do this was they were waiting for polling data. The polling data shows the American people do not associate political rhetoric with anything that happened in this incident. That's what they were waiting on. If the polling data had been different the speech would have been different, but because the polling data says the...

...In April 2009, a disgruntled, unemployed loser shot and killed three Pittsburgh police officers in a horrifying bloodbath. The gunman, Richard Poplawski, was a dropout from the Marines who threw a food tray at a drill sergeant and had beaten his girlfriend. Was this deranged man who pulled the trigger to blame? Nope. Despite evidence that Poplawski’s homicidal, racist tendencies manifested themselves years before Obama took office, lefty publications asserted that the real culprit of the spree was the “heated, apocalyptic rhetoric of the anti-Obama forces” (according to mainstream liberal Atlantic Monthly pundit Andrew Sullivan), along with Fox News and...

To anyone hoping that New York Times columnist Paul Krugman would apologize for his unfounded, untrue and inflammatory declarations in a Saturday blog post and Monday column that right-wing rhetoric drove Jared Loughner to shoot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and murder six others in Tucson Saturday — don’t hold your breath.

Within minutes of the news breaking that Jared Lee Loughner had killed six and wounded 14 in a rampage outside a Tucson Safeway store, including a critically injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the news media immediately leaped to the conclusion that the harsh tone of our political discourse -- led by conservative talk radio -- surely must be to blame. That narrative turned out to be hogwash, but another one has emerged during the investigation into Loughner's psyche, yet virtually no one wants to discuss it. Was the shooter inspired by the entertainment media? Why would violent movies or music be...

Joe Scarborough did invite folks to "rub it in my face if I'm wrong," and there will surely be many who would like nothing better than to oblige him . . . Today's Morning Joe saw considerable consensus around the notion that Sarah Palin's response to the Arizona shootings "probably ended her political career." Donny Deutsch was first to float the notion. Joe Scarborough embraced and elaborated on the idea, and Jon Meacham briefly signalled his assent. View video after the jump.