Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Saturday, July 16, 2016
Those College Nightmares — Mine and Yours
Dream surveys consistently show that dreaming about being back in school is among the top three content areas of our adult dreams. College is often described as being the best years of our lives (though I don’t care to repeat those years), yet our college dreams are more often nightmares than glowing memories.
Friday, July 15, 2016
It’s Not the Gun’s Fault
It happened after Sandy Hook. It happened after San Bernardino and Orlando. It happened last week after Dallas. Whenever a spoiled young nut job, wannabe Islamic terrorist or disturbed cop-hater goes on a mass killing spree, liberals and their choir members in the mainstream media can be counted on to react in the same ignorant, knee-jerky way. It was the gun’s fault.
Despite Marketing Efforts, Clinton and Trump Aren’t Changing
If you love Hillary Clinton just the way she is, you’re in luck. If you adore Donald Trump and don’t want to ever see him change, congrats. But if you’re a passionate liberal who is sour on Clinton and hoping that the “real Hillary” will break through, my advice to you is, “Start drinking heavily.” Likewise, if you’re a committed and sincere conservative but just can’t get your head around the excitement over Trump, I’m afraid to tell you: This is it. Visions of a mature, disciplined, “presidential” Donald Trump are hallucinatory fantasies.
Resisting the Revisionists: Finally, a First Step
“The most significant reinforcement of our collective defense any time since the Cold War,” President Obama called it. A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but it was still an achievement: Last week’s NATO summit in Warsaw ordered the deployment of troops to Eastern Europe, the alliance’s most serious response yet to Russia’s aggression and provocations on its western frontier. The post-Ukraine economic sanctions have been weak; the declamatory denunciations, a mere embarrassment. They’ve only encouraged further reckless Russian behavior — the buzzing of U.S. ships, intrusions into European waters, threats to the Baltic States. NATO will now deploy four battalions to front-line states. In Estonia, they will be led by Britain; in Lithuania, by Germany; in Latvia, by Canada; in Poland, by the United States. Not nearly enough, and not permanently based, but nonetheless significant.
The Grand Sez Who Arrives
The President of the United States went to the memorial service for the Dallas police officers gunned down while protecting and serving. Taking the podium, the President quoted scripture, mourned the dead, then turned decidedly partisan. The president claimed it is easier for kids to buy guns than either computers or books. The only people who say such things are people who have never tried to buy guns. It is simply not true. The problem is not that the president said it, but that the president used a nonpartisan memorial service for dead police officers to lie in the name of his preferred public policy.
Obama, Clinton and Race Exploitation
Hillary Clinton, exploiting the venue of her appearance in Springfield, Illinois — where Abraham Lincoln warned against “a house divided” — told America that Donald Trump is not fit to lead in times of racial tension. This is rich, considering that she served under the most racially divisive president in American history. On the very site where Lincoln denounced slavery, Clinton said: “Trump’s campaign adds up to an ugly, dangerous message to America — a message that you should be afraid.” Clinton said Trump is “pitting American against American” when we need “a president who can help pull us together, not split us apart.”
How Obama Divides America
At the funeral service for five slain Dallas cops, President Barack Obama delivered another one of his needlessly politicized lectures. As is customary these days, those who were critical of his rhetoric were branded racists and unthinking haters. That’s one theory. Another one is that people may be put off by Obama’s grating habit of turning every tragedy into a sermon about our supposed collective failings. I doubt the president is substantively more partisan than the average politician, but like most people on the left these days, he no longer bothers to make a distinction between a policy position and a moral struggle.
Fact-Checking a Memorial Service
In the aftermath of the violence of the past two weeks, I was genuinely rooting for President Obama to achieve the eloquence for which he has such an unearned reputation. If ever there were a moment that called for largeness of spirit, the racially motivated assassination of five officers following the disturbing and highly questionable police shootings of two black men by white officers was such a time. The bitterness and score settling by both left and right (portions of the right, under Trump, have joined the racial-grievance industry) is a dismaying rollback of the civic unity we’ve achieved over the past 50 years. The left shouts “Black Lives Matter” as if cops had declared open season on them, and the right denies that there is any case of police conduct that was not utterly justifiable.
ESPYs Go Lefty
Did you see the ESPY awards [Wednesday] night on ESPN? I was so impressed by that tribute to the men and women who serve and protect us. When they lit the stage in blue in honor of our police. . . Oh, wait, that didn’t happen. Instead, four athletes came out and offered a few remarks about the state of race relations in America. One recited the following names: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile as examples of “our reality.” Really? Seven people are representative of all of black America?
Events Roil the 2016 Campaign
“Events, dear boy, events,” the late British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan supposedly replied when asked what he most feared. And events can certainly make a difference, as was apparent this week: Prime Minister David Cameron moved out of No. 10 Downing Street and Theresa May moved in. This came after British voters, against Cameron’s advice and contrary to widespread expectations, voted to leave the European Union June 23. But the extraordinary machinations in London are not capturing American voters’ attentions as much as things happening over here. At the midpoint of a tumultuous and often surprising presidential campaign, with the nominees seemingly chosen (though some Republicans still hope to stop Donald Trump in Cleveland), two major events have roiled the American political landscape over the last week.
Dignity for the ‘Fetus’ in Texas
In the wake of the Dallas police murders, Hollywood liberals such as Lena Dunham have chosen to target ... action movie posters. On social media, Dunham boosted a crusade to remove the gun from Matt Damon’s hand in New York subway ads for the latest “Bourne Identity” movie. Since the left insists on diverting attention from the coldblooded murder of Dallas policemen, let’s turn instead to this other piece of Texas news that will put gun-hating, Planned Parenthood-boosting feminists like Dunham in the proper perspective. Bobby Ross Jr. at the blog Get Religion recently noted an article in the Houston Chronicle titled “The costly economics of fetus disposal.” Trouble-making conservative lawmakers in Texas are proposing a law requiring that “all fetal remains extracted at healthcare facilities ... be disposed of through burial or cremation, rather than sanitary waste disposal.”
A Win for Conscience in the House
America’s heart is still beating, even in a culture of death. [Wednesday] showed the strength of pro-life movement when the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Conscience Protection Act which was sponsored by Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) and was drafted by Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) to stop government discrimination against pro-life Americans who object to being forced to participate in abortion. Only one day after the Republican Party’s platform committee adopted a plank protecting conscience rights, the House of Representatives stepped in to do the same. This bill was simple in that it would make permanent an annual appropriations rider called the Weldon Amendment which bars federal funds, including funds to states, if the government discriminates against those who object to participating in abortion. It adds a private right of action to allow victims of such discrimination a chance to go to court.
Thursday, July 14, 2016
Obama Disses Police
President Obama’s speech at [Tuesday’s] memorial service for the five slain Dallas police officers had a number of good moments, as you would hope and expect of any president. Naturally, he praised their service. But it wasn’t long before his remarks took a sharp left turn. Obama again lectured the country about racism and ran through a check-list of the left’s political agenda. But my point isn’t about what the president said, it’s about what he failed to do. This president likes to spike the football. While presidents traditionally have tried to be bridge builders and respectful of their opposition, Obama has not been reticent when it comes to bragging about his accomplishments or even demeaning his opponents.
Presidential Blather in Time of Tragedy
Race is what you make of it. For me I have made race a part of what social scientists once called the “melting pot,” by which they meant that differences — including ethnicity and race — were all melted down into one great variegated country called America. There might be different heritages and different sub-cultures mixed into the American melting pot, but once mixed together we were all Americans. Of course, however, through the years that American melting pot has been increasingly difficult to maintain, because various leaders — political leaders, education leaders, social leaders and simple charlatans — were energetically manufacturing ever more sociological differences to mix into the pot. They excogitated differences of gender, of generation, of sexual orientation and, oh, yes, of lifestyle. The differences were increasingly fanciful, but the liberals — for that is what the self-appointed leaders were — overburdened the melting pot.
Ignorance of Facts Fuels the Anti-Cop ‘Movement’
A new study by a Harvard economist, who happens to be black, finds cops *less* likely to use deadly force on black suspects vs. white. Angered by the deaths of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown, black men in Baltimore, Maryland, and Ferguson, Missouri, respectively, who died at the hands of the police, professor Roland Fryer Jr. said, “You know, protesting is not my thing. But data is my thing.” So he sought to answer the question. Do the police, in fact, use lethal force against black suspects more than they do against whites?
LGBT Activists Attempt to Hijack GOP Platform
When the gavel fell in Cleveland [Tuesday] evening, delegates at the Republican platform committee had succeeded in crafting one of the most conservative GOP platforms in modern times. Not all were celebrating the clearly enunciated conservative principles that underscored the party’s pro-military, pro-life, pro-natural marriage, pro-religious freedom stands. In the concluding moments of the platform gathering, a small group of delegates were engaged in an outright deceptive effort to derail the platform and potentially the convention. After repeated efforts to redefine marriage for the Republican party and interject special LGBT provisions in the platform, an effort was launched to create a Minority Report promoting items for an LGBT agenda, under the guise of creating a preamble for the platform from the 1860 Republican platform.
Making College ‘Free’ Will Only Make It Worse
Like Santa Claus and time travel, “free” college tuition sounds great in theory but doesn’t actually exist in real life. For much of the past year, Bernie Sanders’s promise to make public higher education free for all attracted multitudes of enthusiastic supporters to his presidential campaign. Last week Hillary Clinton embraced most of the Sanders proposal, paving the way for him to formally endorse her on Tuesday and, she hopes, to convince voters who #FeltTheBern in the primaries to back her in November.
May and Trump: A Replay of Thatcher and Reagan?
Is Britain’s new prime minister, Theresa May, Margaret Thatcher reincarnated? There are similarities. May is certainly as tough as the Iron Lady. As home secretary for longer than any of her predecessors, she has strongly opposed uncontrolled immigration. The Home Office introduced visa restrictions that require non-European Union immigrants living in Britain for fewer than 10 years to minimally earn the equivalent of about $47,000 USD, so as not to be a drain on social welfare programs. With Britain’s planned exit from the EU, that policy could be broadened to include all immigrants.
How the War on Drugs Fails Black Communities
As recent events have demonstrated, more than 50 years after much-delayed civil rights legislation was passed by Congress and signed into law, very different views on the persistence of racism still exist in America. According to the Pew Research Center, 38 percent of whites believe that “our country has made the changes needed to give blacks equal rights with whites,” but just 8 percent of blacks agree. Here’s something that all Americans should agree on: Many policies have a disproportionately negative effect on black families -- and, by extension, on all of us. The most insidious of them all, however, may be the war on drugs.
Enemies See America as Vulnerable Prey
Here is a sampling of some recent news abroad: A Russian guard attacked a U.S. diplomatic official at the door to the American Embassy in Moscow, even as NATO leaders met to galvanize against the next act of Russian aggression. The Islamic State continued its global terrorist rampage with horrific attacks in Baghdad and Istanbul. Iran rebuffed United Nations warnings and defiantly boasted that it will continue testing ballistic missiles. German intelligence believes that Iran, empowered by the release of $100 billion in impounded cash, is violating its recent American-led nonproliferation deal in an effort to import nuclear bomb-making technology.