Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Saturday, September 10, 2016
Clinton & Kaine, What a Pair!
There are so many putrid aspects to Hillary Clinton that one hardly knows where to begin. There’s the Hillary who attacked the women who had already suffered at the hands of her husband. There’s the Hillary who accepted untold millions in bribes while Secretary of State from regimes where women can’t drive or get an education and have to walk around wrapped in bed sheets, and then tries to sell herself as a feminist icon. She’s Super Hillary, she’d have us believe, who cracks glass ceilings, always making certain that the broken glass falls on other people.
My Brother’s Pregnancy?
I am a Baby Boomer who grew up with Time magazine. From before I was born it arrived at our home every week. We were subscribers, and I devoured every issue. Time was solid — carefully researched and cogently written. When I read the magazine I was educated, not indoctrinated. Regardless of viewpoint, they asked hard questions. They had integrity. How the mighty have fallen. For evidence of this ruin, look no further than the recent Time essay, “My Brother’s Pregnancy and the Making of the New American Family.”
Obama Thinks Americans Are Lazy, Imperfect?
President Obama stood on foreign soil and declared that Americans are lazy and the nation is imperfect. This guy really doesn’t like us, does he? The president’s latest USA shaming took place during a town hall gathering at the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Town Hall in Laos. “And I’ll be honest, everywhere we go, including here at ASEAN, sometimes people say, ‘Ah, why are the Americans talking about these issues? This is none of their business; they shouldn’t be meddling in other people’s business. And also, America is not perfect. Look, it still has racial discrimination. It still has its own problems. It should worry about its own problems,” he said. Really, Mr. President? Everywhere you go people are telling you that America is not perfect?
Friday, September 9, 2016
Lawsuit: Girls Exposed to Transgender Twerking & Grinding in Locker Room
A public high school in the town of Virginia, Minnesota, is accused of turning a blind eye as a transgender student engaged in twerking, grinding and all sorts of scurrilous activity in the girls locker room, according to an explosive lawsuit filed in federal court. Alliance Defending Freedom is representing at least 11 families asking the court to stop Virginia Public Schools’ policy that opens up showers and locker rooms to the opposite sex. “School policies should promote the rights and safety of every student, but that’s not what Virginia Public Schools is doing — and it’s certainly not what the departments of Education and Justice are doing,” ADF senior counsel Gary McCaleb said. “No child should be forced into an intimate setting, like a locker room, with someone of the opposite sex.”
Trump or Hillary or ?
It’s after Labor Day. Now the presidential election is getting serious. Now is when what the candidates say and do really counts. And now, incredibly, an already depressing campaign is getting worse every day. No matter who wins in November, we’re going to end up with a president that half the country hates and the other half didn’t really want to win. We have Hillary the Crooked still trying to lie her way out of her email crimes like a cheap lawyer.
Julian Assange Is Still a Creep
If Julian Assange plays this right, he just might score an invitation to CPAC next year. The notorious WikiLeaks founder would have to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference remotely because he is still holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, avoiding a rape investigation in Sweden and fearing extradition to the United States for his malicious exposure of state secrets. But, surely, the details could be worked out.
Incident in Hangzhou
The president of the United States lands with all the majesty of Air Force One, waiting to exit the front door and stride down the rolling staircase to the red-carpeted tarmac. Except that there is no rolling staircase. He is forced to exit — as one China expert put it rather undiplomatically — through “the ass” of the plane. This happened Saturday at Hangzhou airport. Yes, in China. If the Chinese didn’t invent diplomatic protocol, they surely are its most venerable and experienced practitioners. They’ve been at it for 4,000 years. They are the masters of every tributary gesture, every nuance of hierarchical ritual. In a land so exquisitely sensitive to protocol, rolling staircases don’t just disappear at arrival ceremonies. Indeed, not one of the other G-20 world leaders was left stranded on his plane upon arrival.
Trump Smashes the Moral Compass of Conservatism
There was a time when one of the worst sins you could commit on the American Right was to buy into “false moral equivalence.” During the Cold War, this usually meant saying that we were no better than the Soviet Union. For example, Democratic Sen. William J. Fulbright — Bill Clinton’s mentor — said of the Soviet Union in 1971, “Were it not for the fact that they are Communists — and therefore ‘bad’ people — while we are Americans — and therefore ‘good’ people — our policies would be nearly indistinguishable.” My old boss William F. Buckley famously had the best retort to this kind of myopic asininity. “To say that the CIA and the KGB engage in similar practices is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around.”
Kids or Mosquitoes
*Aedes aegypti* may be the most deadly animal on the planet. It is better known as one of several species of mosquitoes. *Aedes aegypti* carries the zika virus, malaria, dengue, yellow fever, and chikungunya, which is a disease that causes permanent joint pain and crippling. There are over three thousand species of mosquitos, but only a few dozen transmit viruses to humans. *aedes aegypti* transmits the most. Eradicating the species would save hundreds of thousands of lives. Scientists have actually discovered a way to drive *aedes aegypti* to extinction, and it works.
HBO Prepares Another Corrupt-Pope Series
Imagine a miniseries that has at its center a cynical, corrupt President Obama who arrogantly tells a minister, “I don’t have any sins to confess.” Standing in front of an adoring crowd, the president says: “I am a contradiction. I am God.” He tells an enemy, “I am willing to wage war against you without end!” Then Obama proclaims, “They chose a president they didn’t know, and today, they begin to understand!” An interlocutor asks, “What do you intend to do?” He responds, “Revolution!” This miniseries casting Obama as an evil schemer and a revolutionary with a God complex has never been made, and it would certainly never air on a powerful American channel. So, consider all the quotes you just read. In fact, this plot is reminiscent of a trailer for an HBO miniseries about the first American pope.
Never-Trumpers vs. Reluctant Trumpers
Are you as sick as I am of seeing the tedious finger-pointing between never-Trumpers and certain Republicans who have decided — many reluctantly — to vote for Donald Trump? I assume that most people on both sides are in good faith and are doing what they believe is in the nation’s best interests. I wish people would quit judging the others as immoral or sellouts. That’s a bit presumptuous and self-congratulatory for my tastes. I doubt that many people outside the commentator universe are agonizing over the decision to the extent the “professionals” are. To most Republicans and conservatives, voting for Trump over Hillary Clinton is a no-brainer, even if they find Trump distasteful, unpredictable and significantly unreliable.
Commander-in-Chief Forum
[Wednesday] night, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton appeared separately but on the same stage at a forum devoted to foreign policy and military issues. The forum was moderated by NBC’s Matt Lauer. Judging from the furious left-wing reactions to Lauer’s performance, it seems safe to say that Donald Trump carried the night. Hillary Clinton went first and immediately got into a heated exchange with Lauer over her handling of classified information as secretary of state. In fact, more than a third of her time was spent discussing this issue.
Why the Polls Are Tightening Up
Maybe Hillary Clinton isn’t going to be elected president after all. That’s a thought that’s evoking glee in some, nausea in others, terror in some and relief at the removal of an increasingly tedious figure from public view in still more. The thought is prompted by the CNN/ORC poll showing Clinton trailing Donald Trump in four-candidate pairings by a 45 to 43 percent margin. Clinton’s lead in the RealClearPolitics.com average of recent polls is down from 7.6 percent on Aug. 9 to 2.8 percent today. The FiveThirtyEight website has Trump’s chances of winning up to 30 percent.
It’s Not Flight 93, and Trump Cannot Save America
My old friends Dennis Prager, Bill Bennett and Rush Limbaugh, among many others, seem to have made a transition. It’s not enough to vote for Trump. No, even reluctant supporters must now talk themselves into believing that conservative “principles” *require* a vote for Trump. Like John C. Calhoun, who discovered that slavery was not only not wrong, it was a “positive good,” some Republicans are urging that a vote for Trump is a moral imperative. To oppose him is, in Bennett’s words, to put vanity and a sense of “moral superiority” above the interests of the country. Rush Limbaugh, who travels in a private plane, condemns anti-Trump intellectuals at tiny, poorly funded think tanks for “(wanting) their paychecks.”
The Media Is Giving Hillary Clinton a Free Pass
Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was finally asked a tough question during NBC’s commander-in-chief forum, so naturally the establishment media immediately coagulated around the notion that NBC’s Matt Lauer was the worst moderator ever. An Air Force and Navy veteran, who said he held “the top secret sensitive compartmentalized information clearance,” said to Clinton regarding her acts as secretary of state, “Had I communicated this information not following prescribed protocols, I would have been prosecuted and imprisoned.” He then asked, “Secretary Clinton, how can you expect those such as myself who were and are trusted with America’s most sensitive information to have any confidence in your leadership as president when you clearly corrupted our national security?”
Thursday, September 8, 2016
Hermine a Poor Example to Push Man-Made Global Warming
I read this article with great interest, given what I do for a living: “Clinton says Hurricane Hermine was caused by climate change as hurricane drought persists.” I have watched and forecasted hurricanes on a professional level for almost 40 years. So what Mrs. Clinton is asking people like me to believe is that a storm that took 15 days to develop and then hit Florida as a Category 1 hurricane, and then never re–strengthened off the Mid-Atlantic in spite of record warm water, is a sign of extremes. Actually, I am sure she doesn’t care that people like me show the facts, since the idea is to get it out there and rely on the idea that the media will gladly pick it up, publicize it and, once the horse is out of the barn, know there is no way to get it back. In reality, portraying Hermine as some kind of climate change demon is either ignorance as to the history of hurricanes or deceit.
Are Rising Seas a Risk to U.S. Naval Bases?
The Union of Concerned Scientists, a not-for-profit advocacy group based in Cambridge, MA, recently issued a report that drew immediate responses from news outlets. They predict 17 U.S. military facilities, including the Norfolk Naval Yard, will deal with flooding events from rising seas by the year 2050, and also assert some bases may be awash by 2100. Such dire predictions are based on climate models suggesting future atmospheric temperature rise of two degrees or more accompanied by melting of the massive glaciers that cover Greenland and Antarctica. But the climate models, which have yet to be validated, come under criticism because of poor correlation between increasing CO2 and global temperatures — temperatures that have not risen at the pace models predict, while CO2 emissions have risen significantly. Without meaningful temperature increases, little melting of either polar icecap would occur.
How Mother Teresa Challenged Hillary Clinton on Abortion
Two very different women on the minds of Christians right now are Mother Teresa, with her canonization on Sept. 4, and Hillary Clinton, with her name on the presidential ballot in November. Hillary stands as the most influential woman in America. Someone who might have foreseen such prominence for Hillary was Mother Teresa. Perhaps that’s why the bold nun from Kolkata, India, persistently challenged the then-first lady’s push to make abortion more widely available. Let’s back up to where it all began.
University of Colorado Creates Drones, Not Thinkers
Imagine a university where individual differences are viewed, not as a key strength, but as a danger to the learning environment. Think of a campus where people ARE singled out, marginalized, or excluded because of their differences. Now, stop imagining. Because, despite the aspirations of its sister college located up I-25, this kind of university exists.
Lame Ducks and Zombies: How Congress Avoids Accountability
No matter which party wins on Election Day, Americans are going to have to deal with a few zombies. That’s what I like to call the politically “undead” senators and representatives who lose their seats in November, but get to shuffle around the halls of Congress (and keep voting) for a month before Christmas break closes out the legislative year. They’re especially dangerous during a lame-duck session of Congress. That’s when our elected representatives — zombies included — gather to vote on legislation after the election but before the new Congress begins.