Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, September 30, 2016
From Congress to Obama, a Dis Best Served Cold
“Congress’ overwhelming rebuke of President Barack Obama on a bill allowing 9/11 victims to sue the government of Saudi Arabia — and the bitter finger-pointing that followed — was a fitting coda to the dysfunctional relationship between the Obama White House and Capitol Hill.” Thus began a Politico article by Seung Min Kim posted yesterday. But it was the headline — which she probably did not write — that really completed the picture: “Congress disses Obama one last time.”
Trump Hones Message
As the campaign heads into its final weeks, Donald Trump appears to be honing his populist message. According to Breitbart, Trump focused on a handful of themes in a series of post-debate campaign events. IMMIGRATION — Immigration and border security helped Trump prevail in the GOP primaries and he is not backing down now. But he is smartly allowing others, such as Angel Mom Michelle Root, whose daughter Sarah was murdered by an illegal immigrant, to make the commonsense case for him.
Unorthodox Thoughts About the Unorthodox Debate
I realize my biases probably keep me from assessing debates as objectively as some, but I still must dissent a bit from the conventional wisdom on Monday’s Trump-Clinton contest. First, as anyone who has consistently read my column knows, I was an ardent supporter of Ted Cruz’s and was often critical of Donald Trump, particularly about his debate performances. But Trump won the Republican nomination, and like many others, I have had to regroup and shift my allegiances. I am now going to vote for Trump — irrespective of my sincere criticisms of him during the primaries — without hesitation, mainly because of the horror I envision with a Hillary Clinton presidency.
Thursday, September 29, 2016
Advice for Second Debate
Donald Trump scored a gentleman’s “C” in his first debate with Hillary Clinton. She was programmed, like one of those androids from the film “Westworld,” spewing out well-rehearsed sound bites, smiling (sometimes condescendingly), and even tossing in a few wiggles. It was all designed to make her look warm and wonderful. As the saying goes, if you can fake sincerity, you can fake anything. Trump did best when he didn’t focus on himself and this is the pattern he should follow in the next two debates. As a seasoned debater, who has taken on professors and liberal thinkers on campuses from Harvard, Dartmouth and Yale in the east, to the University of California, Davis in the west, I think I can say without too much hubris that I know how to destroy a bad argument.
Why Donald Trump Is Winning
On the matter of the debate the other night, tell the truth. Admit it: You were underwhelmed. Somewhere inside of your cranium, you did not get the spectacle you anticipated. I understand. After Hillary Clinton’s coughing spells, her wobbly display at the 9/11 ceremony in New York City (she almost fell face forward on the running board of her van), her admission of having pneumonia and all the rumors that admission gave rise to, you had expected something highly dramatic. Perhaps the cough would return. Perhaps she would pass out under Donald Trump’s relentless barbs and be wheeled out on a gurney. Or perhaps you thought Trump would explode or go into a wild rant. Well, it did not happen. Both debaters pretty much played to form. Both were highly disciplined — one being a billionaire who has made it mostly on his own, and the other having survived public life for at least 45 years with no jail time.
The Next President Unbound
Donald Trump’s supporters see a potential Hillary Clinton victory in November as the end of any conservative chance to restore small government, constitutional protections, fiscal sanity and personal liberty. Clinton’s progressives swear that a Trump victory would spell the implosion of America as they know it, alleging Trump parallels with every dictator from Josef Stalin to Adolf Hitler. Part of the frenzy over 2016 as a make-or-break election is because a closely divided Senate’s future may hinge on the coattails of the presidential winner. An aging Supreme Court may also translate into perhaps three to four court picks for the next president. Yet such considerations only partly explain the current election frenzy.
What Trump Should Have Said About ‘Birther’ and Tax Returns
Monday night’s debate moderator, NBC’s Lester Holt, asked Donald Trump why he “perpetuated a false claim that the nation’s first black president was not a natural-born citizen.” Hillary Clinton added that Trump “has a long record of engaging in racist behavior, and the birther lie was a very hurtful one.” Trump defended himself by saying: “Sidney Blumenthal works for the campaign and (is a) close — very close — friend of Sec. Clinton. And her campaign manager, Patti Doyle ... during ... her campaign against President Obama, fought very hard. ... And if you look at CNN this past week, Patti Solis Doyle was on Wolf Blitzer saying that this happened. Blumenthal sent McClatchy, (a) highly respected reporter at McClatchy, to Kenya to find out about it. They were pressing it very hard. She failed to get the birth certificate. When I got involved, I didn’t fail. I got him to give the birth certificate.”
Will Musk Launch for Mars Off the Backs of Taxpayers?
Elon Musk delivered a much-anticipated speech Tuesday at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he laid out his vision for colonizing Mars. There’s no doubt that taming our celestial neighbor would be a testament to human innovation and determination. Today, however, it might be more impressive if Musk could provide a vision for how his companies can succeed here on Earth first, especially without heavy reliance on taxpayer support. SpaceX, founded by Musk in 2002, has never hid its ambition to one day enable people to live on other planets. In the meantime, the company has relied on income from the more mundane business of launching payloads into space with its Falcon 9 rockets. Earlier this year, SpaceX won an $82.7 million Air Force contract by promising to save taxpayers millions of dollars. (The bid was 40 percent less than what the government had estimated the mission would cost.) Cost savings are great, but only if they materialize. It’s too soon to tell, but as of now, the probability isn’t zero that SpaceX’s super-cheap launch cost will be illusory, especially if its rockets — and their expensive cargoes — keep blowing up.
Bush Alumni for Trump
Fifty top officials from the previous Bush Administrations announced their support for Donald Trump this week. Their support comes amid headlines that some members of the Bush family may withhold their support for the GOP ticket this year. In a press release, these officials stated that they were supporting Donald Trump due to “the need for bold leadership, a strong national defense, sound economic policy and a Supreme Court committed to preserving the freedoms framed in the Constitution.”
Preach Out and Touch Someone
Imagine an America without the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. The late civil rights leader almost single-handedly turned the tide against racial segregation in this country — and he did it from the pulpits of churches. Where would we be now, as a nation, if pastors like the Reverend King hadn’t made their voices heard on the cultural issues of the day? Right now, the clergy of America are in that very dilemma, thanks to a vague, 62-year-old piece of the U.S. tax code. Called the Johnson Amendment, it was slipped into an IRS bill a half-century ago without a floor vote or committee debate.
Donald Trump’s Rise Reflects America’s Decay
Looking on the bright side, perhaps this election can teach conservatives to look on the dark side. They need a talent for pessimism, recognizing the signs that whatever remains of American exceptionalism does not immunize this nation from decay, to which all regimes are susceptible. The world’s oldest political party is an exhausted volcano, the intellectual staleness of its recycled candidate unchallenged because a generation of younger Democratic leaders barely exists. The Republican Party’s candidate evidently disdains his credulous supporters who continue to swallow his mendacities. About 90 percent of presidential votes will be cast for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, refuting the theory that this is a center-right country. At the risk of taking Trump’s words more seriously than he does, on some matters he is to Clinton’s left regarding big government powered by an unbridled presidency.
Lawsuit: Christian School Banned From Delivering Pregame Prayer
Last December the Florida High School Athletic Association refused to allow a private Christian school to deliver a pregame prayer over a loudspeaker before a championship football game. On Sept. 27 Cambridge Christian School filed a federal lawsuit alleging the FHSAA unlawfully censored the prayer and violated the players’ religious freedoms. “This is a case about the restriction of a Christian school’s private speech through a policy and a practice that discriminates between religious and secular speech,” attorney Adam Foslid, with the law firm of Greenberg Traurig, said in a prepared statement. First Liberty Institute is also representing the Christian school. The case stems from a Dec. 4th game between Cambridge Christian and University Christian School. The game was played at Camping World Stadium in Orlando.
Wednesday, September 28, 2016
How High Taxes Kill Jobs: A Tale of Two Tax Plans
Although Hillary Clinton hopes to be the “champion” of small businesses, she fails to recognize the difference between how a government program works and how a business is run. From her website, DNC speech, commercials and debates, it appears that her plan is not only to simplify the tax code but to overtax the wealthy in order to finance government loans for business efforts. It is indeed noteworthy that she has identified 1) the tax code as too complicated and 2) there is a need for businesses to thrive in the United States. However, government-sector solutions for private-sector problems rarely, if ever, work well and efficiently. Let’s take her plan to overtax the wealthy and redistribute the money in an unspecified way for businesses. For this example, we’ll name our chief protagonist Bob.
Hillary Clinton’s Estate Tax Proposal
“Hillary Clinton Proposes 65% Top Rate for Estate Tax” blared a headline in The Wall Street Journal. Since the current top statutory tax rate on estates is 40 percent, Clinton’s proposal is nothing if not audacious. I can’t recall Barack Obama, our most leftward president, ever calling for a 62.5 percent increase in tax rates for the rich. Going after inheritances and estates is textbook Marxism. That is not an exaggeration. The third plank in Karl Marx’s 10-point platform for achieving socialism through democratic means — see his 1848 textbook to communism, “The Communist Manifesto” — was the abolition of inheritances. To repeat: it was point three in Marx’s 10-point plan.
Obama Has Shed His Vanity. Just Ask Him.
Nothing oozes hubris like Barack Obama putting on a humble act. “There’s a point where the vanity burns away and you’ve had your fill of your name in the papers, or big adoring crowds, or the exercise of power,” the president tells historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in an “exit interview” published by Vanity Fair. “And for me that happened fairly quickly.” Since he no longer revels in his own grandeur, he explains, he won’t fall into the trap of making decisions out of ambition or “thirsty” attachment to the prerogatives of office. Do tell.
The Bible, Guns & Self-Defense
Perhaps one of the greatest areas of division in our nation today is the debate over guns. For the last several decades we have seen politicians, celebrities, corporations and even religious groups come out against the idea that Americans should be able to own guns and carry them on their person. Firearms known as “assault rifles” — in particular AR-15s — have been heavily targeted by activists and politicians.
Hillary, Interrupted
Whatever happened to “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar”? Whither “Girl Power”? When did Rosie the Riveter’s “We Can Do It!” give way to Hillary the Haranguer’s “We Can’t Handle It”? It’s 2016, and the Democrats’ feminist heroine running for commander in chief is whinnying about being — wait for it — interrupted. Quick! Prepare a complaint to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. Poor, fragile, defenseless Hillary Clinton is a victim of the international human rights crime of serial conversational obstruction. Mainstream media outlets (also known as the Coalition of Liberal Narrative-Benders For Hillary) howled about the unconscionable injustice after Monday’s first presidential debate.
Where They Stand
The first presidential debate of 2016 is over. Initial ratings suggest a record audience tuned in at home. That’s a good thing because a Pew Research survey released last week finds that many Americans don’t know much about where the candidates stand. For example: 48% of registered voters said they knew “a lot” about Hillary Clinton’s positions on “important issues facing the country.” 32% said they had “some” knowledge of Clinton’s positions. And 18% said they knew little or nothing at all about Clinton’s views.
Excuses for Losing Just Don’t Cut It
When Mitt Romney lost in 2012, there was very little discussion of blame. Everyone assumed that Romney simply lost because he didn’t do a good enough job of convincing voters to punch the ballot for him. He didn’t debate Barack Obama properly; he didn’t stand up to Candy Crowley; he backed off of the Benghazi issue, or botched it completely; he gratuitously insulted 47 percent of Americans. Romney lost, Republicans generally believed, because Romney deserved to lose — even if he deserved to win morally. That’s not so for Donald Trump.
Trump-Clinton Debate Put on Holt
[Monday] night was supposed to belong to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. But the biggest story of the first debate wasn’t the candidates answering the questions — it was the person asking them. In one of the most talked-about plots of the first head-to-head, moderator Lester Holt seemed intent on making the debate a three-person affair — injecting himself with almost as many challenges to Trump as the person officially opposing him. For most of the night, the Republican nominee was fending off not one — but two — attackers, repeatedly put on the defensive with topics that had nothing to do with the major issues facing America.