The Patriot Post® · Friday Opinion

Best of Right Opinion

• David Limbaugh: Paul Ryan — Still an Entitlements Reform Crusader?
• Marc A. Thiessen: Why North Korea Will Be Watching What Trump Does in Syria
• David Harsanyi: The Zuckerberg Hearings Prove Government Shouldn’t Regulate Facebook
• Tony Perkins: Pompeo and Circumstance
• Rich Lowry: The Last Special Counsel

For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion.

Opinion in Brief

David Limbaugh: “Does anyone think that in this politically hostile, hate-Trump atmosphere fomented by the media and the Democratic Party … [Paul] Ryan would have had a snowball’s chance in Hades of getting to first base on any entitlement reform proposal? Does that mean Ryan or other Republicans should abandon reform? No. But when you are under relentless fire, you’d better fire back right then, or you won’t be around to fight another day. And it’s not just Democratic demagoguery and the unpopularity of reforms that stand in the way of action but also the tyranny of the urgent. Ryan didn’t choose the speakership. He even resisted the position. But he eventually relented. It soon became clear that the mood of the country was to work on Trump’s agenda, and that did not include entitlement reform. Ryan can be fairly criticized perhaps, along with many others, for the GOP failure on repealing and replacing Obamacare, but if he had dreams of addressing long-term entitlement reform in the short run as speaker under Trump, they would have been just that — dreams. The hard, cold fact is that we do have more pressing problems than entitlement reform, and we always will — until we finally bankrupt ourselves. But the political climate has made current attention to such reform almost impossible. … If you say that reform is impossible, then you are necessarily saying the country is headed for destruction — sooner than we imagine. Are you willing to live with that?”