Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Monday, July 4, 2016
32 Years After 1984
We shouldn’t adopt too superior an attitude when condemning Islamic theocracies such as Iran. I’m not suggesting they don’t have it coming, just that we aren’t all that different. It’s more a matter of degree and, of course, the foolish things that each side deems sacred, though equally foolish, are worlds apart. Ours has become a society that frowns on diversity of opinion, while ballyhooing diversity on college campuses, by which the Left means racial quotas. In the blink of an eye, we have devolved from being a democratic republic to being a totalitarian state with a theocracy based on a religious belief in green energy, along with a conviction that blacks and illegal aliens hold the moral high ground and that the source of the world’s evil is the Caucasian race.
Alexander Hamilton and American Independence
As we celebrate the 4th of July, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical “Hamilton” is lionizing the life and legacy of Alexander Hamilton. “Hamilton” won 11 Tony Awards, including best musical, a Grammy Award for best musical theater album, the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and the Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History. “Hamilton” is likely to “become one of the biggest critical and commercial hits in Broadway history” and will go on a national tour in 2017. Miranda’s musical is inspired by his reading of Ron Chernow’s 2004 best-selling book “Alexander Hamilton.”
Sunday, July 3, 2016
Hillary’s One Good Idea — Before She Ruined It
Hillary Clinton is proposing a child care income tax credit — mainly to pay for daycare for working moms. There already is a credit in the tax code. Clinton would expand that subsidy by tenfold or more, leading to a massive, new entitlement. It would remove any incentive parents have to find more economical ways of meeting their children’s needs and it would subject working women to high marginal tax rates — penalizing them harshly for working more and earning more.
1776 Was Amexit
Two hundred and forty years before Brexit, there was Amexit, also known as the American Revolution. In terms of historical consequence, the Brexit vote and the American Revolution don’t occupy the same universes, but they are connected by a belief in popular sovereignty and a refusal to be governed by a remote authority with only an attenuated mechanism — if that — for representation. In Brexit, the British people decided that their Parliament should trump the governing machinery of the EU, and in our Revolution we decided that our Colonial assemblies should trump the governing machinery of the British Empire. Both acts exhibited a punctiliousness about government by consent that struck critics as unreasonable and even dangerous.
The Corrupting Crusade Against ‘Corruption’
The progressive drive to broadly define and thoroughly eradicate political “corruption” has corrupted politics. But discord is not altogether pandemic in Washington, and last week a unanimous Supreme Court, in this term’s most important decision, limited the discretion prosecutors have to criminalize politics. Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell was sentenced to prison for unseemly behavior. He accepted from a Virginia businessman gifts and loans valued at more than $170,000. The businessman wanted McDonnell to help promote his dietary supplement business, including by helping him persuade state universities to study its products.
Saturday, July 2, 2016
Ashamed to be an American? Towns Crack Down on American Pride
The Star-Spangled Banner survived the rocket’s red glare and bombs bursting in air only to face a modern-day threat — silly town ordinances and petty bureaucrats. I’m not sure if it’s an epidemic of anti-American nincompoopery sweeping across the fruited plain or if it’s a general lack of common sense. Maybe it’s both. I’ll let you be the judge of that.
Common Sense: Here Today, Pentagon Tomorrow
LGBT Pride Month officially ended yesterday, but under this president, it’s never-ending. Members of our military know that all too well, as an entire nation woke up this morning to a future force that no one will recognize. Just days before the Fourth of July, very few people are celebrating Obama’s revolution, an eight-year crusade to radically sexualize and undermine the military and with it the broader culture. The final piece of that puzzle came [Thursday], as an uncomfortable Secretary Ash Carter announced that the ban on transgenderism had officially ended — and with it, the era of peak military readiness. Despite strong objections from top Pentagon leaders, the president decided to shelve the military’s real mission in favor of his radical objectives.
Green Energy Policies May Haunt Democrats This Fall
Who is working overtime to paint themselves into the biggest political corner of this election cycle? Democrats obviously don’t recognize it yet, but they have placed themselves in an inescapable trap with extreme positions on energy and the environment — irresponsible positions that have fragmented their party and could easily produce dire consequences for Democrats at the polls in November.
Who Are We as a Nation?
Whenever someone comes up with a sensible suggestion regarding guns, urban blacks, illegal aliens or Muslims, or, God forbid, dares to point out the constitutional limits on executive power, I can count on some high-profile Democrat stating: “That is not who we are as a nation.” And because being a Democrat calls for a sheep-like subservience to the herd, once one of them bleats anything, you can count on all the other lambs chiming in. The House Democrats attempted to remind people of the Civil Rights movement by staging a sit-in. They even, to their shame, sang a few bars of “We Shall Overcome.” But mainly they chanted like banshees about gun control laws. In the end, they were more reminiscent of the union members in Wisconsin who stormed the state capital a few years back to display their anguish over Gov. Scott Walker digging in his heels and refusing to cave to their demands, which would have bankrupted the state.
‘What the Fourth of July Means to Me’
It has not been easy writing these daily reports for the past few days, let alone the past seven years. The carnage of San Bernardino, Paris, Brussels, Orlando and Istanbul is a reminder that we are a nation and world at war against a radical ideology of hate and oppression. The Islamic supremacists we are fighting are the antithesis of everything our Founding Fathers risked their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to create and establish in this country.
Friday, July 1, 2016
Protectionism Won’t Make America Great
Donald Trump is an optimist. He believes there is nothing wrong with America that autarky can’t fix. Trump’s trade speech was a high-octane assault on the American free-trade regime that has been a matter of a bipartisan consensus for decades and a bulwark of the post-World War II international order — not to mention an article of GOP economic orthodoxy. Trump declared himself in favor of cut-rate AFL-CIO economics, and offers the same simplistic, conspiracy-tinged belief that the American economy is “rigged” as Bernie Sanders does. Indeed, if trade policy is all that mattered, the protectionist Ohio Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown should be on Trump’s VP shortlist as well as Hillary’s.
Job Number One — Destroy ISIS
How many more Istanbuls and Orlandos and Brussels do we need before we wake up and smell the gunpowder? ISIS started World War III years ago, but apparently no one in the Obama administration noticed. We’re in a bloody war with radical Islamic terrorism, but we’re not fighting in it. No one else in the West is, either. The United Nations, NATO, the Germans, the Israelis — they can’t do anything about ISIS and won’t. America must now do what it should have done years ago — take the lead and destroy ISIS. The world can no longer afford to wait for us to get off our butt.
No, Hillary, It Is Not Time to Move On
Am I fantasizing even to hope that Hillary Clinton will finally be held accountable for her lies and corruption — to say nothing of her actions in her role as bimbo-slayer for her libidinous husband? Perhaps so, but to borrow an underused cliche, hope springs eternal. Hillary has operated above the law for so many years that her disinclination toward humility has ripened into unbounded hubris, which was particularly on display in her comments about the recently released House Select Committee on Benghazi report on the tragedy in Libya.
Is Lynch Lying?
Washington is buzzing after news broke late [Wednesday] that former President Bill Clinton met privately with Attorney General Loretta Lynch earlier this week. The meeting reportedly took place Monday evening onboard a private jet at the Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, Arizona. According to CBS News, “President Clinton saw the attorney general on the tarmac and wanted to say hello, so he boarded her plane to talk.” I’m sure he had a lot on his mind that he wanted to discuss with the attorney general.
Why Do They Hate Hillary Clinton?
“Why do people hate Hillary Clinton so much?” a reporter from the Canadian Broadcasting Company asked me this week. I responded that the pitiless rancor of American politics today is out of all proportion to our real challenges — but it’s worth recalling how Hillary Clinton earned her miserable reputation. It was the flagrant and prodigious lies. She has arguably abused power, enriched herself and her family with blatant influence selling and betrayed an arrogant disregard for the normal rules.
Clinton and Lynch — Corruption, Not ‘Optics’
Attorney General Loretta Lynch tells us that her meeting with Bill Clinton aboard a private jet on the Phoenix airport tarmac was “primarily social” — you know, just two Democrats swapping stories about their grandkids and whatnot. The nation’s top law enforcement official and the former president and husband of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee — who is under federal investigation — had a talk. Rather than conceding that such a private encounter is at the very least a conflict of interest, Democrats preemptively complained about the “optics.” Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., for instance, told CNN that Lynch “should have steered clear” and that the meeting “sends the wrong signal.”
Brexit Due to Failure of Elites, Not Bigotry of Masses
Bigotry! Nativism! Racism! That’s what elites in Britain, Europe and here have been howling, explanations for why 52 percent of a higher-than-general-election turnout of British voters voted for their nation to leave the European Union. But there is plenty of bigotry, condescension and snobbery in the accusations and the people making them. And it’s incoherent to claim, as some do, that it’s undemocratic for voters to decide. That amounts to saying that ordinary people should be content to be ruled by their betters.
When Actors Hate Racist America
There are those boorish moments when a celebrity takes to the stage at an awards show to deliver leftist political drivel. We can’t decide which is worse: the predictable America-hating garbage or the journalistic hosannas that inevitably follow. The other day, “Grey’s Anatomy” star Jesse Williams launched into a Black Lives Matter-like sermon at the BET Awards when he won an award for his “humanitarian” work. When accepting the honors, Williams broke out the radical-leftist claptrap about this “invention” of abusive whiteness, exploiting all the creative blackness.
Military Readiness: Lost in Trans Elation
Just two days removed from the second major terror attack in two weeks, the Pentagon has an announcement. No, it isn’t about the United States’ new plans to fight ISIS in the wake of Orlando and Istanbul. Nor is to reassure the American people that their military is stepping up its mission against its Middle East enemies with the world on high alert. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The Only Way to Stop Hillary Clinton
What is most probable in 2016 and more obvious each day is that with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States. There is too much on the line for us to let that happen. The Supreme Court decisions in the past two weeks prove it. But to stop Hillary Clinton from becoming President, Republicans must stop Donald Trump from becoming the Republican nominee. Trump as the nominee makes it vastly more likely that Hillary Clinton will become president.