Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, June 10, 2016
A Blueprint for Balance
Which takes up a greater percentage of the federal budget — national defense or entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare? Even if you picked the right answer (entitlements), you may be surprised by the gap between the two. National defense accounts for 16 percent of the federal budget. Entitlements? 52 percent. Social Security alone dwarfs defense spending, taking up 24 percent. That’s right: One out of every four dollars spent at the national level goes toward the mammoth New Deal program. Medicare, Medicaid and other health care spending gets 28 percent of every federal dollar.
Bernie’s Army of Freeloaders
It’s time for Bernie Sanders to step down. His young supporters will be disappointed for the rest of their lives, but it’s time for Bernie to join the cast of “Saturday Night Live.” He fought hard and if nothing else he showed the America people how to deliver a speech full of stale socialist ideas with a lot of honesty and pizzazz. Hillary and Trump are vying to get Bernie’s enthusiastic army to enlist on their side. Trump is hallucinating. Hillary is only dreaming.
In the Matter of Paul Ryan
The morning after, the nation awakes asking: What have we done? Both parties seem intent on throwing the election away. The Democrats, running against a man with highest-ever negatives, are poised to nominate a candidate with the second-highest-ever negatives. Hillary Clinton started with every possible advantage — money, experience, name recognition, residual goodwill from her husband’s successful 1990s — yet could not put away until this week an obscure, fringy, socialist backbencher in a country uniquely allergic to socialism.
Hillary Born a Female, but What Difference, at This Point, Does It Make?
Could it be possible that an increasing number of voters are tiring of liberals stuffing identity politics down our throats? True or not, we must keep hope alive. The liberal media, from The New York Times to the liberal blogs — apart from Bernie Sanders enthusiasts — are ecstatic that Hillary Clinton has finally shattered that penultimate glass ceiling and has only one more level to go before she captures the ultimate prize. At the same time, there’s some evidence that Clinton’s anointment is a bittersweet pill. I mean, is this really the woman feminists want to represent them in this vaunted achievement? Do even Clinton’s most ardent supporters regard her as an iconic figure anymore?
Going to Extremes to Start a Conversation
Conversations! Glorious conversations! What more can you ask for? The other day, former CBS News darling Katie Couric was speaking at an event organized by something called “TheWrap.” Specifically, at its “Power Women Breakfast” in New York. (That is exactly the kind of event I’d expect Couric to be at, and I don’t even know what it is.) She was asked about the scandal swirling around her anti-gun-documentary — specifically, the fact that she deceptively edited a gun rights group’s response to a question to make the members seem like dangerous idiots.
Terror in Tel Aviv
You don’t need a calendar to know that it is Ramadan. Faithful jihadists are demonstrating their devotion all over the world as they attack and kill infidels. [Wednesday] in Israel, two Palestinians targeted a popular open-air shopping district in Tel Aviv for a disgusting attack. After ordering drinks at a restaurant, the terrorists stood up and started shooting at pointblank range. Four people were killed and 16 were wounded. Hamas leaders immediately praised the attack as “heroic,” proudly claimed the terrorists as members of the Islamist group and vowed “more surprises.”
Stay on Target
Target’s slogan is “Expect more.” And when it comes to safety, customers do. That’s why Americans are so upset with the company’s outrageous April policy that threw open the changing room and bathroom doors to anyone of either sex. Almost immediately, angry calls started streaming into to stores, eventually ballooning into a nationwide protest of more than 1.3 million people. If other CEOs were considering similar changes, they saw the heat Target was taking and backed off.
Let the Games Begin
The three major political parties have their candidates now for the general election. The ad war is starting in earnest. The most qualified of the three candidates is a two term Republican governor of New Mexico whose running mate is the former Republican governor of Massachusetts. They’ll be the Libertarian ticket.
The Culture of Death’s Love Story?
It’s maddening to watch a movie trailer resplendent with engrossing and alluring screenshots projecting a terrific flick, only to learn after paying the price of admission that you’d watched the totality of the movie’s value. That’s not misleading; it’s good advertising. But sometimes movie studios are just plain guilty of false advertising. The new movie “Me Before You” looks to be an inspirational love story. A lower-class woman in England is hired to take care of a young man who recently became a quadriplegic after being hit by a car. He inspires her to live a fuller life; she inspires him to find the joys he can still realize from his wheelchair.
The Liberal Case Against Peter Thiel Is the Worst Kind of Hypocrisy
We recently discovered that Peter Thiel, the libertarian billionaire co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook, bankrolled wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuits against the blog network Gawker Media. Now, as someone who considers himself a near-absolutist on free speech, I’m open to hearing arguments for why we need tort reform in these sorts of cases or why Hulk Hogan’s suit undermines free expression. But so far, the media’s hysteria about Thiel’s third-party legal funding has been unconvincing, especially when we consider who’s making the arguments.
What the Stanford Rape Case Reveals
The phone has been ringing off the hook at Judge Aaron Persky’s chambers at the Santa Clara County court for the past several days. “Tell your judge he can go to hell, and I hope his kids get raped and he rots in hell,” said one caller. The judge and members of his family have received death threats — which seems to be the way America rolls these days. Just a suggestion: If you disapprove of something strongly, consider the words “shame,” “scandal” or “debacle.” Try not to commit a crime yourself in protesting a lenient sentence.
Bernie Sanders Wins, Even While Losing
Bernie Sanders is not going gently into that good night, at least not yet. After hearing Monday from the Associated Press that Hillary Clinton had clinched the nomination, after absorbing Tuesday night a solid defeat in the California primary and losses in three other states, Sanders was still pledging to go on campaigning for the District of Columbia’s 20 delegates in its primary next Tuesday and to fight on until the Democratic National Convention opens in Philadelphia July 25.
Cowpoke in Hot Pants Stirs Transgender Uproar at Texas BBQ Joint
When it comes to eating at a barbecue joint there’s an unspoken code of conduct. You don’t order salad, you don’t use a fork and if you’re a cross-dressing cowboy with an affinity for stiletto heels, you don’t use the ladies room. And that brings me to a story from the pages of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about a small-town barbecue joint that inadvertently found itself right smack in the middle of the big debate over transgender bathrooms.
Thursday, June 9, 2016
Not Trump or Clinton
Finally! Voters have another choice. The Libertarian Party nominated two socially tolerant but fiscally conservative former governors, Gary Johnson and Bill Weld. Weld? Isn’t the former Massachusetts governor just another Republican? He didn’t act like one when he and Johnson sat for an interview. “This is the dream ticket for me,” began Johnson. “He doesn’t look like a dream,” I responded rudely. “He’s not thought of by us libertarians as Libertarian.”
Trump Endorsement Not Enough to Help a Tea Party Turncoat
North Carolina Rep. Renee Ellmers campaigned as a Tea Party conservative. But when she got elected in 2011, voters quickly realized they had elected a phony. To paraphrase a great country music song, “Renee got the ring, Voters got the finger.” But thanks to redistricting, North Carolina conservatives got a heaping helping of payback on Tuesday night.
In the Fiscal Health Beauty Pageant, Everyone Loses
Many states are broke, even though their constituents don’t know it. The two main drivers of states’ fiscal problems are the bloated promises made by lawmakers to their public employees about health care and pension benefits and an unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of a problem. Whether the dodging of long-term obligations is done knowingly or inadvertently hardly matters. The results are still the same. Faulty accounting always comes back to hurt the people in the cities and states that have used it — for example, Puerto Rico, Detroit and Chicago.
Explaining Donald Trump
If there is one explanation for Donald Trump’s success it is this: Unlike most Republicans, he fights back. He may not have the late Muhammad Ali’s finesse, but he sees himself as more than capable of dealing a “knockout” punch to Hillary Clinton in November. That ought to be the goal of any GOP presidential nominee. During an interview in his Trump Tower office Monday, I asked about his temperament, a subject often raised by critics. Hillary Clinton recently said he shouldn’t be trusted with the nuclear codes and that he is so thin-skinned he might start a war.
The Life of the Mind Led in the Dark
Looking back through the years I have seen it all coming: the militant ignorance of students strutting across our college campuses today, the authoritarian style of the administrators, the mediocrity of the professors and the sheer goofiness of the students. It all came out of the late 1960s. Most of my fellow 1960s graduates went on to careers in the professions, commerce and industry. But some remained on campus, becoming professors, administrators and increasingly, as the years went on, swamis of identity politics. They established women’s studies programs, black studies programs and gay studies programs. Now, I assume, there are studies programs for people with eating disorders, transgender people who transgendered once again and people who only eat dirt.
What Sotomayor Said Was Worse
Donald Trump should apologize. It’s one thing to accuse a judge of bias. It’s another to refer to a judge — as Donald Trump did to the man presiding over the Trump University cases — as a “Mexican.” The judge, Gonzalo Curiel, happens to have been born in Indiana. But as far as Trump is concerned, this does not make him a Hoosier. Yet as Trump has doubled and tripled down on referring to the judge’s ethnicity as grounds for bias, his lawyers have, at least so far, not filed a motion for recusal.
Hillary Makes History
Well, she finally did it. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has become the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major political party. Clinton carried four of six states up for grabs [Tuesday] night, including California. Polls had shown the California race was essentially tied. But when the votes were counted, it wasn’t close. Clinton won the Golden State by 13 points — 56% to 43%. Clinton also won New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota. Sanders claimed victories in Montana and North Dakota.