Free Republic

This week is the Ukraine war’s first anniversary, but it feels like 10 years, not one. Ukraine “fatigue” is understandable. But let’s try to put the sensation of war fatigue in context. Vietnam came to be known in the 1960s as the television war, shown on the TV news every night. News programs then lasted a half-hour, with Vietnam usually just a segment. Still, the unsettling daily footage eroded public support for the war. Today, with all media on all the time, we are saturated with Ukraine’s war, as we are with mass murders, weather disasters or a train derailment....

Israel was behind Sunday morning's drone strike on an Iranian munitions facility according to the Wall Street Journal. The Jerusalem Post on Monday reported the attack was a 'phenomenal success.' The attack follows an unannounced visit by CIA Director William Burns to Israel last week. Israel was behind Sunday morning's drone strike on an Iranian munitions facility; the Wall Street Journal has reported, citing American officials. The strike, which Iran says it thwarted, came after the US and Israel held a series of meetings and military exercises. One explosives-laden drone was shot down by an Iranian air defense system while...

He’s a bad example to the young, an embarrassment to the old, an insult to the institution and America. By Peggy Noonan

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) leads former President Trump by 14 points in a hypothetical 2024 GOP primary match-up, according to a new poll. The Wall Street Journal survey released on Wednesday found that DeSantis leads Trump among likely Republican voters, 52 percent to 38 percent. DeSantis also has an advantage in his approval rating, with 84 percent of Republicans surveyed having a favorable view of him. By comparison, 71 percent said they have a favorable view of Trump. DeSantis’s name recognition also appears strong, as only about 10 percent of likely GOP primary voters said they did not know...

When Covid-19 first erupted in 2020, the U.S. struggled to balance the trade-off between lives and livelihoods. Infections and deaths soared while lockdowns devastated economic output and sparked demonstrations across the country. China, by contrast, was a model of authoritarian efficiency. Mass testing, lockdowns and closed borders suppressed outbreaks. This allowed most Chinese to live normal lives without fear of infection, sustaining broad support for “zero Covid” (as best as outsiders could tell). The ruling Chinese Communist Party held out these divergent responses as proof of its superior governance model. The U.S. had lost its historical “capacity for self-rectification,” one...

We’re still waiting for the final results of the 2022 election. But it’s clear that Democrats decisively beat both expectations and the elections’s “fundamentals”—the incumbent party’s usual midterm losses, President Biden’s low approval rating, high inflation, voter negativity on the economy and the state of the country. Republicans look set to take back the House but only by a modest margin. And the Senate will remain in Democratic hands, albeit narrowly. The Democrats’ relatively good night is attributable, above all, to their secret weapon: Donald Trump. Mr. Trump’s ability to push Republican voters into picking bad, frequently incompetent candidates with...

After Tuesday’s elections, entities owned and managed by Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan have lined up against President Donald J. Trump. There is now a “coordinated effort” across the New York Post, Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal against Trump. The Post is running columns by longtime Trump hater John Podhoretz and gun grabber Piers Morgan bashing the 45th President. Podhoretz’s piece also lashes out at Blake Masters as an “election-denier,” and ludicrously asserts that we shouldn’t support candidates Mitch McConnell doesn’t like. Morgan, meanwhile, is urging Republicans to “dump Trump.” Unfortunately for him, Americans conservatives don’t tend...

With Conservatives point finger at Trump after GOP’s underwhelming election results: 'He's never been weaker' Many conservatives say Tuesday's election results show it's 'time to move on' from Trump. (Fox News'', November 9, 2022), as well as the Wall Street Journal - what do Freepers think?

A number of election fraud deniers, including the Editors of The Wall Street Journal, have been committing serial cognitive dissonance. In a series of editorials, the Journal's Editors have, on the one hand, claimed there is "no evidence" of massive voter fraud and that everyone questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election should be quiet and stop indulging in the "big lie". On the other hand, however, they have admitted that there were numerous irregularities that need to be addressed, in particular the fact that in State after State, including all the crucial swing States, the rules were changed at...

...Mr. Mueller resolutely set about to change the “culture” of the FBI. That’s the word he used. He was going to make the bureau into an intelligence agency, or in his repeated terminology, an “intelligence driven” organization. Unintended consequences followed. The organization I had served for 33 years would undergo a cultural change in subsequent years, culminating in the ugly disaster of Crossfire Hurricane, the fruitless but disruptive investigation of the Trump campaign and Russia. Mr. Mueller had worked with FBI special agents in Boston and San Francisco, but he didn’t know the FBI’s culture or how it functioned. He...

The Democrats have the “fascist” business wrong. Donald Trump isn’t a fascist, or even a semi-fascist, in President Biden’s term. Mr. Trump is an opportunist. His ideology is coextensive with his temperament: In both, he is an anarcho-narcissist. He is Elmer Gantry, or the Music Man, if Harold Hill had been trained in the black arts by Roy Cohn. He is what you might get by crossing the Wizard of Oz with Willie Sutton, who explained that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.” As for Mr. Trump’s followers, they belong to the Church of American Nostalgia. They...

Democrats are entering the homestretch before November’s election in better shape than earlier this year, boosted by gains among independent voters, improved views of President Biden and higher voting enthusiasm among abortion-rights supporters, a Wall Street Journal poll shows.

Stocks took their worst beating in months Friday, with the Dow industrials shedding more than 1,000 points and notching their worst day since May. The S&P 500 closed 3.4% lower The Dow industrials dropped about 1,008 points, or 3% The Nasdaq Composite dropped 3.9% All 11 of the S&P 500's sectors finished in negative territory. Only 5 components in the benchmark index closed higher. The major averages each posted roughly 4% losses for the week.

As many as 80,000 Russian troops have been wounded or killed in less than six months of fighting in Ukraine, the Pentagon said Monday, the first time the U.S. military announced its estimates of the toll of the invasion on Russia. According to U.S. estimates, Russia has suffered 70,000 to 80,000 casualties, Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, told reporters at a press briefing Monday. In the days leading up to Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion, Western officials estimated that Russia had staged roughly 150,000 troops near Ukraine’s border.

I am a minor-league philanthropist. I give modest sums to animal shelters, the preservation of wildlife, children’s hospitals, my local public library, the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation and several other organizations and institutions. I don’t give to universities, lest they think I encourage their wanderings from their true mission—although I have considered giving $5,000 to Northwestern University, where I taught for 30 years, and earmarking the money to be spent exclusively on a Jewish tight end for the football team. I have never given money to politicians or political parties. Yet I am about to send a $200 check to Liz...

The conflict in Ukraine is driving a modernization of NATO weaponry, honing the alliance’s ability to face off against Russia and adding to the list of unintended consequences from Moscow’s invasion of its smaller neighbor. Former East Bloc NATO members have been arming Ukraine with Soviet-designed equipment similar to Kyiv’s existing gear. That has permitted a military housecleaning of their own arsenals on a scale that would have been unimaginable months ago. In turn, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will help its eastern members replace those arms with newer ones, greatly improving efficiency.

Russia was poised to default on its foreign debt for the first time since 1918, pushed into delinquency not for lack of money but because of punishing Western sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine. Russia was likely to miss payments on two foreign-currency bonds late Sunday, according to holders of the bonds who had yet to see funds deposited. The day marks the elapse of a 30-day grace period since the country was due to pay the equivalent of $100 million in dollars and euros to bondholders.

You would think by now that, informed by so many examples from history, we would be familiar with the stages of a policy disaster in the making. Calamitous wars and foreign-policy misadventures; economic, fiscal and regulatory blunders, costly social policy initiatives—almost all seem to follow the same pattern. First denial, the refusal to accept the mounting evidence that we are on the wrong track. Next, complacency: Even when the inconvenient facts are reluctantly acknowledged, a misplaced confidence that a small adjustment is all that is needed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. When that fails, the policy maker...

Ukraine and Russia poured reinforcements into eastern Ukraine this weekend, preparing for what is likely to become the war’s biggest battles as refugees continued to flee the looming Russian assault. Russia’s main objective now is to seize the parts of the eastern Donbas region not yet controlled by Moscow. Unlike the first phase of the six-week-old conflict, that shift is forcing Ukraine into fighting conventional battles involving tanks, artillery and aircraft on flat, often barren terrain that allows Russia to leverage its superiority in military equipment.

When seeing America’s we’ll-fight-to-the-last-Ukrainian approach to Russian aggression, many Arabs conclude that the U.S. can’t be counted as a security guarantor, and that nuclear weapons—which Russia has, Iraq didn’t and Ukraine gave up—make all the difference. To be sure, many of my Arab interlocutors have perfected the art of expressing grievance through historical cherry-picking: highlighting America’s inadequacies while sidestepping their own governments’ follies and self-inflicted wounds. The reality is more complicated, and no critique of American policy can justify indulgence of Russia’s criminal behavior or reluctance to lend assistance to the Ukrainian people. These Arabs have a point, however. If...