Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, August 5, 2016
Is the Gadsden Flag Racist?
The “Don’t Tread on Me” Flag just got trod upon — by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC is investigating whether the Revolutionary War-era Gadsden Flag could be considered a racist symbol in the workplace. In recent years, the yellow flag with its coiled snake has also become a symbol of the Tea Party. “Whatever historic origins and meaning of the symbol, it also has since been sometimes interpreted to convey racially-tinged messages in some contexts,” the EEOC report states. The distinguished writer Eugene Volokh first exposed this absurd story in the pages of The Washington Post. Here’s the back story: In 2014, a black government worker filed a complaint alleging he had been discriminated against by a coworker who wore a ball cap that bore an insignia of the Gadsden Flag.
Shut Up for a Month, Donald
Forget the idea of a Republican intervention. Nothing GOP bigwigs or people like Rudy Giuliani can say to Donald Trump now will get his head straight and get him back on track. For candidate Trump, it ought to be pretty clear by now that there is no track, no train, no schedule and no final destination. His track goes wherever his wandering mind and runaway ego take him at any given instant, whether he’s speaking to 3,000 people or tweeting from his bedroom.
Both Parties Digging Graves — Republicans Dig Deeper
About 14 months ago, American politics began to resemble a B-level Washington, D.C. novel. A former secretary of state was revealed to have endangered U.S. secrets and possibly sold aspects of U.S. foreign policy to the highest bidder. Will she face indictment? No. But the FBI director acknowledges that the only way she could possibly get around security clearance is through her election as commander in chief. The writer might have come up with a more compelling character. Hillary Clinton is robotic, shamelessly money-grubbing, calculating, secretive and promiscuously deceitful — to the degree that if she has any discernible principles at all, they’re the wrong ones. When she raises her voice, which is often, it sounds like screetching tires. She represents the status quo in a year of change.
Donald Trump’s Opportunity Cost
Opportunity cost. That’s an economist’s term for what you lose out on when you divert your investments and attention to something less profitable. It’s also a good term for the losses Donald Trump has incurred in the last six days — more than 6 percent of the 94 days between the close of the Democratic National Convention and the election in November. Trump has spent much of that time attacking the father and mother of a Muslim U.S. serviceman killed in Iraq. He has made a point of refusing to support Paul Ryan or John McCain in their upcoming primaries. He accepted someone else’s purple heart and said that his business investments amounted to “sacrifices.”
Censorial DePaul Bans Conservative Ben Shapiro
The discerning have long recognized that the true enemies of free speech are certain leftist progressives who believe their ideas are so superior and their opponents so toxic that protection for the latter isn’t warranted. The left is practiced at painting conservatives as oppressive and intolerant, but their behavior repeatedly undermines their claims and exposes *them* as the intolerant speech fascists and thought controllers.
Paying Ransom to Iranian Thugs
Drip. Drip. Drip. More facts emerged [yesterday] in the Obama administration’s payoff of $400 million in hard cold cash to the Mullahs of Iran for the release of U.S. prisoners being held in that radical Islamist country. Now we have learned top officials at the Justice Department reportedly objected to the deal, warning Obama and Kerry that the “optics” were terrible and would appear to the public to be a violation of long standing U.S. policy not to pay ransoms.
Howard Stern’s Pitch to Hillary Clinton
Sex-crazed radio shock jock Howard Stern has an impossible new fantasy that he can’t keep to himself: He wants an in-depth interview with Hillary Clinton. Stern, who left broadcast radio for satellite radio so he could be as raunchy as possible and make his millions dwelling on the lowest common denominator for the demographic, men ages 18 to 34, has a less-than-zero chance of scoring a Clinton interview. The risk-averse woman, who hasn’t held a press conference yet in 2016, isn’t going to upset all her feminist supporters to please Stern. If any Clinton adviser wanted to suggest to her that it could be a great opportunity to address the gender gap, one can easily look at what accomplished women discuss on his show. Take a Newsmax headline from a year ago that read, “Megyn Kelly Talks with Howard Stern: Breasts, Penises, Sex.” Those are the lifelong obsessions of Stern (and his audience).
Trump Has Turned America Into a One-Party State
The real political tragedy of Donald Trump isn’t only that he’s annihilating the Republican Party — which, let’s face it, was the stated point of his campaign when it started — or that he says odious and dangerous things all the time. It’s that his presence allows most of the media to ignore the corruption, recklessness and policy failures of Democrats, who now function without any genuine ideological opposition. This week offers a vivid example of this dynamic. Trump, allegedly a tell-it-like-is tough guy, is adept at nicknaming his enemies, but lacks any comprehension of long-standing ideological debates in this country. People love to complain about the duopoly, but it doesn’t exist solely because plutocrats prefer it. There’s a real-life, organic right-left cultural and economic divide in this country that has evolved over decades. While the plight of the white working class is important, there’s a lot more to this argument. One side still clings to partisanship, but has abandoned the philosophical debate.
A Brief History Lesson
As World War II wound down, the Allied forces advanced on Berlin from two directions. The Americans, British and French resistance advanced from the west, and Russia from the east. Hitler committed suicide, the war ended and everyone headed home. Except not everyone did. The Americans, British and French turned around and went home after helping prop up local governments of those who had opposed the Nazis. The Russians never really left. If they did leave, they propped up puppet regimes that the Soviet leaders in Moscow would exterminate if any resistance to Soviet rule cropped up. Instead of restoring democratic rule, the Soviets installed communist regimes.
Donald Trump and the Fitness Threshold
Donald Trump, the man who defied every political rule and prevailed to win his party’s nomination, last week took on perhaps the most sacred political rule of all: Never attack a Gold Star family. Not just because it alienates a vital constituency but because it reveals a shocking absence of elementary decency and of natural empathy for the most profound of human sorrows — parental grief. Why did Trump do it? It wasn’t a mistake. It was a revelation. It’s that he can’t help himself. His governing rule in life is to strike back when attacked, disrespected or even slighted. To understand Trump, you have to grasp the General Theory: He judges every action, every pronouncement, every person by a single criterion — whether or not it/he is “nice” to Trump.
When Is a Ransom Not a Ransom? When It’s Inconvenient to Call It That
One of my all-time favorite lines is from Henry Thoreau: “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” It came to mind this week when the White House and State Department insisted that the charge the U.S. paid a ransom to get back American hostages was purely circumstantial. Sometimes, a $400 million pay-off in laundered money, delivered in the dead of night in an unmarked cargo plane isn’t what it looks like. January 16 was “Implementation Day” for the nuclear deal between the United States and Iran, in which the state sponsor of terror received sanctions relief possibly worth as much as $150 billion — which would be roughly equivalent to 40 percent of its GDP — in exchange for some guarantees against developing nuclear weapons ... for a while. (The merits, and even the nature, of the Iran nuclear deal are hotly disputed, but that’s a topic for another time.)
Thursday, August 4, 2016
Plagiarizing the Industrial Revolution: Of Coal and India
India’s new Environmental Supplement Plan (ESP), drafted by its Ministry of Environment and Forests in May, came under heavy scrutiny for plagiarism recently. It was found that many sections of the ESP were copied from the American version of it. While plagiarism in itself is wrong, it is worth noting that India’s Environment Ministry has admitted that it borrowed the idea (of ESP) from the U.S., and that the language of its draft is different. This is not a creative document, but a policy document, and many documents such as these borrow from one another.
Donald Trump, Postmodern Candidate
Early 20th century modernism ignored classical rules of expression. But late 20th century postmodernism blew up those rules altogether. Barack Obama was a modernist candidate. He turned out vast numbers of young and minority voters, mastered new social media, and in 2008 overturned the old-guard Democratic furniture such as Hillary Clinton. In contrast, Donald Trump has simply destroyed normal politics. Unlike Obama with his record Wall Street fundraising of 2008 and 2012, Trump has raised almost no money. He ignores endorsements from political kingpins. Trump has organized no serious voter registration drives. His convention was bizarre, showcasing his kids instead of party bosses and special-interest groups.
Higher Medicaid Expansion Costs Reveal Another Obamacare Design Flaw
Remember when the Obama administration promised that the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid would be awesome? The idea behind this part of the law was that the expansion of the pool of people eligible for Medicaid would help reduce the number of uninsured and that these new enrollees would be relatively cheap when compared with those already in the program. Well, that’s not what happened. A colleague of mine at the Mercatus Center, Brian Blase, recently reported a shocking statistic: The Department of Health and Human Services just “found that the ACA’s Medicaid expansion enrollees cost an average of $6,366 in (fiscal) 2015 — 49 percent higher than the $4,281 amount that the agency projected in last year’s report.” That’s quite a mistake.
Boycott the Olympics
August is upon us, and it is time to change the subject from the hype of presidential politics to the hype of international sports. No, not the hype of international soccer — the scam of that racket is well-known. Let us turn to the hype of the Olympic competition. As I wrote in this column some 30 years ago, I am against the Olympics. I have boycotted them for years. The boycott is not going as well as I had anticipated, but this year, we shall try again. Rio de Janeiro may be different. I am told it is an unhealthy habitat and a very poorly governed city. Thirty years ago I was actually sitting seaside, tapping out my column with a former Olympian looking over me. His name was Alan Somers, and he had been a member of the U.S. swim team of the 1960 Olympics in Rome, Italy. I swam with Al at Indiana University, along with many other Olympians and world record-holders. It was an amazing environment for sport.
The Third Coming of Ben-Hur
Since Mel Gibson’s 2004 blockbuster “The Passion of the Christ” grossed more than $600 million worldwide, Hollywood has slowly begun to look at faith-based movies as a way to fatten their bottom lines and reach a demographic they have mostly ignored for decades. Last week in Los Angeles, the show business publication Variety co-sponsored another of its occasional programs called “PURPOSE: The Family Entertainment and Faith Based Summit.” The summit’s goal is to encourage filmmakers to make more movies with faith content from a mostly Christian perspective. Recently there have been some modest box office successes with films like “Heaven is for Real” and “God’s Not Dead.”
Where Is the ‘Hillary Lied, People Died’ Crowd?
The same clueless nitwits who, with no evidence, cried “Bush lied, people died!” are now ignoring overwhelming evidence of Hillary Clinton’s violation of the Espionage Act and how that behavior imperiled national security. In George W. Bush’s case, there is zero evidence of a “lie.” In Clinton’s case, as to a violation of the Espionage Act, her violation is clear-cut.
Five Ways Obama Disserved His Office
Has President Barack Obama, who leaves office in January, provided a good or bad model for those who will succeed him? Here are five ways he has disserved his office: 1. Obama has attacked the most fundamental God-given right — the right to life. Before he entered federal office, while he was in the Illinois state senate, Obama went so far as to oppose legislation that would have defined a born baby who had survived an abortion as a “person.” As president, his dedication to maintaining the legality of killing unborn babies has guided everything from his Supreme Court appointments to the legal battles he has fought all the way to that court.
Palestinian Athletes Deserve Better Than Jibril Rajoub
“The goal of Olympism,” proclaims the Olympic Charter, “is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.” Well, that’s one approach. Jibril Rajoub takes a somewhat different view. Rajoub, a longtime senior official of Fatah, the militant Palestinian faction founded by Yasser Arafat, harshly condemns efforts to promote good will through athletics, at least when the athletes include Israelis. “Any activity of normalization in sports with the Zionist enemy,” he declares, “is a crime against humanity.”
A Ransom to the Ayatollahs?
The Wall Street Journal reported [yesterday] that the Obama administration sent $400 million in cash to Iran in January, which coincided with the release of four Americans detained by the Islamic Republic. Wooden pallets were literally stacked with hard cash, including Swiss Francs, and Euros and were flown in an unmarked cargo plane to Iran. The cash came from banks in Switzerland and the Netherlands.