Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, August 10, 2016
Lies Politicians Tell
I don’t want Hillary Clinton to be president. She’s a liar. But I can’t vote for Donald Trump. He lies almost as often. Trump denies he ever said things, claiming he never used terms like “fat pig” to describe women, that he never was open to using nuclear weapons against ISIS, that he never mocked Jon Stewart for changing his name. Smears big and small — Trump just denies he said them. He’s also a bully. He intimidates weaker people by suing them. In business deals, he refuses to pay some of what he owes and then tells creditors: Go ahead and sue me! Creditors often take partial payment because they can’t afford to fight Trump in court.
No, Barack Obama Isn’t a Feminist — He’s a Self-Aggrandizing Tool
This week, President Obama penned a ridiculous piece in Glamour magazine. It dripped with self-regard and oozed with moral preening. Barack Obama, said Barack Obama, is a true feminist. This, of course, might not have been obvious from the fact that the Obama White House has paid women 89 cents for every dollar earned by a man, as of July. It might not have been obvious from the Obama administration’s belief that even men can be women, so long as they think it so — and they can invade women’s bathrooms, based on that subjective belief. But Obama, said Obama, is indeed a feminist.
The Decline of Civility
One of the unavoidable consequences of youth is the tendency to think behavior we see today has always been. I’d like to dispute that vision, at least as it pertains to black people. I graduated from Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin High School in 1954. Franklin’s predominantly black students were from the poorest North Philadelphia neighborhoods. During those days, there were no policemen patrolling the hallways. Today close to 400 police patrol Philadelphia schools. There were occasional after-school fights — rumbles, as we called them — but within the school, there was order. In contrast with today, students didn’t use foul language to teachers, much less assault them.
Trump Has Left GOP With No Good Options
Donald Trump has the GOP trapped in not one Catch-22, but two. Call it a Catch-44. The first Catch-22 has been the subject of widespread conversation over the last few weeks. As GOP pollster Glen Bolger summed it up for The New York Times: “Do we run the risk of depressing our base by repudiating the guy? Or do we run the risk of being tarred and feathered by independents for not repudiating him?” “We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t,” he added. Lots of Republicans adore Trump — just consider the enthusiasm at his massive rallies — and will turn on the establishment Republicans who betray him.
Tuesday, August 9, 2016
A Faithful Coach Wants His Job Back
High school football coach Joe Kennedy was fired for praying and now he wants his job back. Kennedy, a former Marine Corps gunnery sergeant, has filed a federal lawsuit against the Bremerton School District in Washington State, claiming he was let go because of his religious beliefs. The school district has yet to respond to the lawsuit. “They fired him for praying,” said Michael Berry, the coach’s attorney. Berry is with First Liberty Institute, one of the nation’s largest law firms handling religious liberty cases. “If a school can do this to someone like Coach Kennedy, they can do it to anybody,” Berry told me. The coach is not asking for a single penny in his lawsuit — he just wants his job back.
Ransom by Another Name
You’ve probably heard the very old riddle: When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar. An updated version might go like this: When is a ransom not a ransom? When the Obama administration says it isn’t. President Obama and his State Department want us to believe that $400 million in foreign cash that was flown into Iran under cover of darkness on an unmarked cargo plane was merely money “owed” to the world’s No. 1 sponsor of terrorism from a failed arms deal negotiated with the Shah of Iran more than 35 years ago.
Old Lies
We expect to hear a lot of lies during an election year, and this year is certainly no exception. What is surprising is how old some of these lies are, and how often they have been shown to be lies, years ago or even decades ago. One of the oldest of these lies is that women are paid less than men for doing the same work. Like many other politically successful lies, it contains just enough of the truth to fool the gullible. Women as a group do get paid less than men as a group. But not for doing the same work. Women average fewer annual hours of work than men. They work continuously for fewer years than men, since only women get pregnant, and most women are not prepared to instantly dump the baby on somebody else to raise.
The Infrastructure Illusion
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump don’t agree on much of anything, but there is one area where they have a meeting of the minds: they both want to spend way more on public works programs. Hillary ?Clinton says that her primary jobs stimulus will be a massive $275 billion-plus infrastructure spending binge. Donald Trump one-upped Clinton last week promising to spend twice that amount. He says the money is necessary because of crumbling roads and “bridges that are falling down.” It’s a rare source of agreement, so wouldn’t you know it: they’re both wrong.
The End of History Not Turning Out as Hoped
The scholar Francis Fukuyama has been widely ridiculed for the title of his 1992 book, “The End of History.” Critics point out that we’ve had — suffered — a lot of history since then: the 9/11 attacks, prolonged wars in the Middle East, a worldwide financial crisis and deep recession. But Fukuyama’s point wasn’t that all conflict would cease. His argument was that the Western model of democratic governance and market-based capitalism had emerged as the only intellectually serious model of a good society. Other models have persisted — China’s centralized control, Russia’s petrostate, Islamic jihad — but don’t have appeal beyond the places where they are imposed by force.
Obama’s Lie
Clearly stung by news reports that his administration paid a $400 million ransom to Iran, President Obama addressed reporters at the Pentagon last week and made this stunning claim: “By all accounts, [the Iranian nuclear deal] has worked exactly the way we said it was going to work. It’s not just the assessment of our intelligence community, it’s the assessment of the Israeli military and intelligence community. The country that was most opposed to this deal acknowledges this has been a game changer. . .”
Pope Francis and the Decline of the West
Pope Francis made comments last week that reveal the most important single thing you need to know about the modern world: The most dynamic religion of the last hundred years has been leftism. Not Christianity, and not Islam, but leftism. Leftism has taken over the world’s leading educational institutions, the world’s news media and the world’s popular entertainment, and it has influenced Christianity (and Judaism) far more than Christianity (or Judaism) has influenced anything. On July 26, two Muslims slit the throat of a French Roman Catholic priest, the Rev. Jacques Hamel, 85, while he was saying Mass in his church.
Monday, August 8, 2016
To Dad, From Joe
My father reads everything I write. Most of my weather blogs are written very quickly as I need to get info out in a timely fashion. So my mom will print them out and my dad will correct them with a red pen. I guess there are boxes full of corrected blog postings as a result of this. The Patriot Post sharpens up my commentaries, so I don’t know how much red pen it uses on them. But there was one piece my dad always loved — a takeoff I did on “Julius Caesar” — and my mom mailed it to me the other day. Perhaps you might enjoy it too. So for my father, and in the spirit of Mad Magazine I used to read as a kid, here it is.
What Are the Chances Democrats Will Steal the Election?
There’s been quite a bit of scuttlebutt lately over whether the Democrats are going to try and steal the presidential election. Donald Trump is all but certain that’s exactly what’s going to happen. “I’m telling you, Nov. 8, we’d better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged,” he told Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity. “And I hope the Republicans are watching closely or it’s going to be taken away from us.” Would Democrats do something so nefarious? Would they really try to rig a presidential election? Anybody want to wager how Bernie Sanders might answer that question? Left-wingers have dismissed Trump’s concerns as fear-mongering.
Relationships Matter — But Which Ones?
Everyone knows that relationships matter. But few of us pause to ponder exactly *which* relationships matter. Recently, I came across a study by the well-regarded Search Institute, a Minnesota research group whose early work identified a range of protective factors for young people — developmental assets — and has morphed in recent years to studying how to create resilient young people with strong character, whatever the child’s particular circumstances. Key to developing such young people, they’ve discovered, are what they refer to as *developmental relationships*, or those between a young person and an adult or peer that are characterized by the expression of care, the challenge to grow, support, shared power, and the expansion of possibility.
Reward Organ Donors, and Thousands of Lives Will Be Saved
Howard Broadman is a retired California judge with an active private practice as an arbitrator. He is also the grandfather of a little boy named Quinn, who was born with serious kidney problems. In time Quinn will require regular dialysis to stay alive until he’s eligible for a kidney transplant. Broadman would gladly have donated one of his own kidneys to save his grandson’s life. But Quinn is still too young for a transplant — and by the time he’s ready, his grandfather will be too old.
The Wretched Refuse
In “The New Colossus,” the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus put out a call for the wretched refuse of teeming foreign shores. I believe we have received our allotment and we can now stop advertising. Perhaps it’s time we replaced the poem by the unrepentant communist with Irving Berlin’s heart-felt lyrics to “God Bless America.” But the more wretched the refuse, the more that left-wing politicians — who see in every 10,000 Muslims that Obama welcomes aboard 10,000 potential voters, not the hundred or two hundred potential jihadists the rest of us see — seem to like it. That also explains why Hillary Clinton thinks the numbers should be increased by a multiple of six or seven. But why shouldn’t she? She has already proven with her private server that served as a direct pipeline to Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, that national security is the very least of her concerns.
Sunday, August 7, 2016
The Sinking Fantasy That Trump Would Defend the Constitution
Like shipwrecked mariners clinging to a floating mast, many Republicans rationalize supporting Donald Trump because of “the court.” This two-word incantation means: Because we care so much for the Constitution, it is supremely important to entrust to Trump the making of Supreme Court nominations. Well. In a Republican candidates debate, Trump complained that Ted Cruz had criticized Trump’s sister, a federal judge. Trump said: “He’s been criticizing my sister for signing a certain bill. You know who else signed that bill? Justice Samuel Alito, a very conservative member of the Supreme Court, with my sister, signed that bill.” Trump, the supposed savior of the Supreme Court, thinks federal judges sign bills. The mast-clingers say: Well, sure, he knows nothing about American government, including the Constitution, which he vows to defend all the way to “Article XII.” He will, however, choose wise advisers and humbly defer to them.
Saturday, August 6, 2016
The Ransom That Dare Not Speak Its Name
It’s funny how coincidences work. In 2010, as much as $7 million was dropped on the deck of the Maran Centaurus, an oil tanker captured by Somali pirates, and the brigands happened to free the crew. In 1997, Walter Kwok, the son of extravagantly wealthy Chinese businessman, was found alive in a wooden box after — oddly enough — the gangster holding him was paid $77 million. In 1974, Marxist guerrillas in Argentina who had kidnapped Exxon employee Victor Samuelson unaccountably decided to release him upon receipt of more than $14 million.
Waiting for the Ransom
Fox Business network interviewed Saeed Abedini [Thursday]. Abedini is a Christian pastor who was one of the four hostages held by Iran and released at the same time the Obama administration was flying $400 million in cash to Tehran. Obama [Thursday] scoffed at the notion that the money was ransom for the hostages. Pastor Abedini says on the night of their release the hostages were taken to the airport and told they would soon be free. But hours passed with nothing happening. Abedini asked one of their guards what was causing the delay. The guard told him, “we [the Iranians] are waiting for another plane,” and only then are we “going to let you go.”
Lipstick on Pigs
The Democrats would have us believe that these are the best of times and that we are on the verge of seeing Barack Obama’s head added to the four already immortalized on Mt. Rushmore. The question is whether in November the majority of Americans will actually ignore all of the disheartening facts concerning our economy, race relations, terrorist activity here and abroad and the fissures growing between us and our traditional allies, and vote for eight more years of the same or worse. If Hillary Clinton is able to rally the forces responsible for re-electing the tyrannical wannabe in 2012, she will be able to combine the worst ideas of Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders going forward. Worse yet, she will be able to leave, as her legacy, a majority of leftist loons in complete control of the Supreme Court.