Politics

Ron Paul, Fox News, and the Conservative Life of the Lie

by Jacob G. Hornberger January 7, 2008

Last week television commentators Greta van Susteran and Shepard Smith, treading cautiously and with a bit of trepidation, wondered aloud why their employer, Fox News, was banning Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul from its New Hampshire presidential debate. Permit me to explain the likely reason: the life of the lie, the life that conservatives have ...

Are Conservatives (Undocumented) Aliens?

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 19, 2007

Conservatives are strange and fascinating creatures. Their minds operate in a strange, Bizarro-like universe in which delusion and deception seem to be considered normal. Consider, for example, the most recent Republican presidential debate. Let’s leave Ron Paul out of the picture for the time being. The rest of the candidates were standing there and periodically proclaiming how committed ...

Big Government at Home and Abroad, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 1, 2007

Part 1 | Part 2 No matter how much we address the socialism and interventionism that pervade our nation on a domestic level, it will all be for naught if we fail to address the great big elephant in the room — U.S. foreign policy, including the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. For unless we dismantle the ...

Do Elections Guarantee Freedom?

by James Bovard November 1, 2007

Elections are sometimes portrayed as practically giving people automatic remote control on the government. Elections kindly provide a chance for people to pre-program the government for the following years. The government will be based on the popular will, regardless of the ignorance of the populace or the duplicity of the government. President Lyndon Johnson declared in 1965 that the vote ...

Big Government at Home and Abroad, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger September 1, 2007

Part 1 | Part 2 Practically everywhere we look there is a crisis. Public schooling: crisis. The drug war: crisis. Social Security: crisis. Medicare and Medicaid: crisis. Immigration: crisis. Iraq: crisis. Terrorism: crisis. Federal spending: crisis. The dollar: crisis. So many crises! Yet there is a common denominator to all these crises. Focusing on that common denominator provides the key ...

Bushs AmeriCorps Fraud

by James Bovard September 1, 2007

Politicians have long used moral doggerel to make citizens docile. Though President Bush is often verbally inept, he has hit the same chords his predecessors played to sway Americans to glorify government workers as moral icons worthy of gratitude and respect. Two months after the 9/11 attacks, Bush announced that he was expanding AmeriCorps and that all of us can ...

How Bogus Fears Bought Bush Four More Years

by James Bovard July 1, 2007

Is a president entitled to frighten voters into submission to perpetuate his power over them? While many people are catching on to Bush’s deceits on Iraq, most Americans have forgotten the scams of his reelection campaign. George W. Bush was reelected in large part because he boosted the number of Americans frightened of terrorism during 2004. In October 2001, 73 ...

Ron Paul and the MSNBC Debate

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 9, 2007

During the recent MSNBC Republican presidential debate, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul made three profound points on U.S. foreign policy that the American people would be wise to heed. Needless to say, Paul’s three points, being libertarian in nature, aren’t likely to be favorably received within the Washington, D.C., establishment, especially among lobbyists ...

Speaker Spotlight: Ron Paul and Andrew Napolitano

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 4, 2007

This week we spotlight Congressman Ron Paul and Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst Andrew Napolitano, our two Sunday dinner speakers for our upcoming June 1-4 conference Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties in Reston, Virginia. If there is a genuine hero of our time with respect to the advancement of liberty, it is Ron Paul. The ...

Boxer’s Confusion about Ownership

by Tibor R. Machan May 4, 2007

California Senator Barbara Boxer sent around a letter to the editor that was published in The OC Register on April 30th, hoping to clarify my California Wild Heritage Act. She states in this letter that the approximately 2.3 million acres included in the bill are all publicly owned lands. Not one acre of private land is included in the ...

What Do Citizens Owe Government?

by James Bovard May 1, 2007

When politicians are not promising new benefits to citizens, they continually remind citizens what they owe the government. From their first years in government schools, children are indoctrinated with the notion that government provides them some grandiose benefit. This seed often produces a harvest of servility in later life. But few people stop and ...

Why Germans Supported Hitler, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 2007

Part 1 | Part 2 The most remarkable part of the movie Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is the courtroom scene, which is based on recently discovered German archives. Sophie and her brother Hans, along with their friend Christoph Probst, stand before the infamous Roland Freisler, presiding judge of the People’s Court, whom Hitler had immediately sent to Munich ...