Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
The Price Paul Ryan Has Paid
The Caligulan malice with which Donald Trump administered Paul Ryan’s degradation is an object lesson in the price of abject capitulation to power. This episode should be studied as a clinical case of a particular Washington myopia — the ability of career politicians to convince themselves that they and their agendas are of supreme importance.
Is Personal Responsibility Obsolete?
Among the many disturbing signs of our times are conservatives and libertarians of high intelligence and high principles who are advocating government programs that relieve people of the necessity of working to provide their own livelihoods. Generations ago, both religious people and socialists were agreed on the proposition that “he who does not work, neither shall he eat.” Both would come to the aid of those unable to work. But the idea that people who simply choose not to work should be supported by money taken from those who are working was rejected across the ideological spectrum.
Obama, Immigration Propaganda and Our National Identity
Just when you think the Hollywood left might be showing some independence from the Obama White House, it once again falls in line to mouth its propaganda. Just kidding. No one believes that Hollywood leftists think independently. Fox News reports that the White House has drafted a social media script on immigration for its Hollywood zombies to disseminate. You may recall that the White House furnished gun control talking points for its Tinseltown puppets earlier this year.
Neither Candidate Is Getting the Immigration Issue Right
No contemporary political issue has been more controversial, or has been subject to more dubious analyses, than immigration. Take Donald Trump’s endlessly repeated promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. As I’ve pointed out, that is attacking a problem that no longer exists or that has diminished greatly. Net migration from Mexico to the U.S. was around zero between 2007 and 2014. But Trump’s critics also miss something. Walls can actually work. The wall along the border near San Diego worked well enough a dozen years ago that many migrants crossed into the Arizona desert instead. It may not be feasible to build a wall along the Rio Grande in Texas, but the border there can be patrolled more effectively than it is now.
Obama Blames the Right
Barack Obama waded into the San Jose controversy on Friday. Incredibly, he blamed political violence on conservatives. Speaking at a fundraising event in Miami, Obama condemned the violent left-wing demonstrators who attacked Trump supporters at a rally last week. But he added, “It is very important for us to . . . not slip into some of the bad habits that currently manifest themselves in the other party.” Obama warned progressives to avoid resorting “to some of the same kinds of tactics they’ve [conservatives] been engaging in for quite some time.”
Clinton’s and Sanders’ Plan to Destroy 10 Million Jobs
The liberal green groups ?are celebrating the “victory” of putting America’s major coal producers out of business — to say nothing of the tens of thousands of miners placed in unemployment lines. Several thousand more mining jobs were lost last month. Now to get their next homicidal high, the leftists have turned their ambitions on the oil and natural gas industries. Here is how Lena Moffitt, director of the Sierra Club’s Dirty Fuels campaign, recently explained the grand, green vision: “We are doing everything we can to bring the same expertise that we brought to taking down the coal industry and coal-fired power in this country to taking on gas in the same way ... to ensure that we’re moving to a 100 percent clean energy future.”
Seizing D-Day
Thirty-two years ago today, President Ronald Reagan stood above the rocky crags of Normandy, France and commemorated the largest and most significant military operation in the 20th Century. To the brave men who survived D-Day, he said, “You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet, you risked everything here. Why? ...What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love... You all knew that some things are worth dying for.”
Bernie Sanders, the Non-Jewish Jew and Non-American American
If you want to understand Sen. Bernie Sanders, this is what you need to know: He is the quintessential modern identity-free man. He is a non-Jewish Jew and a non-American American. In Sanders’ speeches and interviews, there is virtually no mention of his being a Jew (unless he’s asked about it), and — what’s truly amazing for an American presidential candidate — there are few mentions of America, except to lament American inequality, Wall Street corruption and other American evils.
Rep. Justin Amash Is Wrong on Transgender ‘Discrimination’ Policy
Two weeks ago 42 Republicans voted to endorse President Barack Obama’s transgender agenda. They did it by voting for the Maloney amendment, which affirmed Obama’s 2014 executive order barring “discrimination” on the basis of “sexual orientation and gender identity” in the private employment policies of federal contractors.
Monday, June 6, 2016
Should You Need the Government’s Permission to Work?
In some precincts, this is what passes for a joke about libertarians: “Ayn Rand, Rand Paul, and Paul Ryan walk into a bar. The bartender serves them tainted alcohol because there are no regulations. They die.” The humor there eludes me, but it must work for someone: That alleged witticism has garnered tens of thousands of Twitter “likes” and retweets.
Grievances for Sale
If I ever decided to get into the retail trade, I wouldn’t want to sell cars, clothes or electronics. I’d want to open a market where people could go shopping for grievances. I wouldn’t even have to pay for advertising. Word of (loud) mouth would be enough, and best of all, I’d have ready buyers in every strata of society, in every city and town in America.
Sunday, June 5, 2016
School Sends Sheriff to Order Child to Stop Sharing Bible Verses
A public school in California ordered a seven-year-old boy to stop handing out Bible verses during lunch — and it dispatched a deputy sheriff to the child’s home to enforce the directive. “This is a clear, gross violation of the rights of a child,” said Horatio Mihet, a Liberty Counsel attorney representing the first-grader who attends Desert Rose Elementary School in Palmdale. They are also representing his parents, Christina and Jaime Zavala.
The Right to Work
I wish the Founding Fathers had added one more amendment to the Bill of Rights. It should have read: *Congress shall pass no law restricting the right to work.* For the first 100 years or so, the amendment would have been unnecessary. Local governments put lots of restrictions on what workers could do. (More on that below.) But the federal government largely kept a distance from the labor market until the 20th century’s Great Depression. Since then it’s been Katie bar the door.
Britain, Too, Is Infected With Political Silliness
Misery loves company, so refugees from America’s Republican Party should understand that theirs is not the only party that has chosen a leader who confirms caricatures of it while repudiating its purposes. Jeremy Corbyn, the silliest leader in the British Labour Party’s 116-year history, might kill satire as well as whatever remains of socialism.
Saturday, June 4, 2016
San Jose Welcomes Illegals but Not Trump Supporters
San Jose is supposed to be a sanctuary city. Illegal aliens are welcome — but Donald Trump and his supporters are not. A violent crowd of mostly Spanish-speaking thugs waving Mexican flags brutally attacked Americans in San Jose Thursday night. They targeted supporters of Mr. Trump, leaving them bloodied and battered. One guy was sucker-punched. Another was smashed in the face. A woman was pelted with bottles and eggs.
Donald Trump, the GOP Id
Even Donald Trump’s defenders on the right are hard-pressed to argue that he is conservative. He is, nonetheless, a kind of conservative dream candidate. Few politicians in memory have so powerfully tapped into and expressed the conservative id, which has long yearned for a Republican politician willing to heap the verbal abuse on the Clintons and, especially, on the media that they so manifestly deserve.
Jumping in Fleet First to Save the Military
Which is more dangerous: facing ISIS or flying the equipment there? These days, it’s a toss-up. Thanks to eight years of neglect, the military that was once the envy of the world has been reduced to dilapidated fleets and aircraft that probably pose a greater risk to our troops than the enemy itself. That’s what we get under a president more concerned about who our service members sleep with than the resources they have to do their jobs.
Reality Strikes Back
Two days ago, Barack Obama was bragging about how good the economy supposedly was and blaming right-wing media for talking it down. Based on [Friday’s] jobs report, Obama might order drone strikes on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh’s EIB headquarters! Experts expected that at least 160,000 new jobs were created last month. Reality struck back with a vengeance [Friday] morning. According to the Labor Department’s report, only 38,000 new jobs were created last month — the worst level of job creation in at least five years.
An Addictive Society
There are various forms of addictions that are rampant in America today. The most obvious one involves illegal drugs. It’s bad enough that millions of our citizens have chosen to not only turn themselves into moral and physical cripples, but help finance drug cartels and Islamic jihadists. I mean, they can plead ignorance, but where do they think the blood money goes?
Better Homes and Guardians
Five score and two years ago, Robert Frost wrote “Mending Wall,” a poem seeking to extract wisdom from stony New England soil. It begins: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” While he didn’t have Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric in mind, our former poet laureate expressed the fundamental concern of our modern age. If we’re all members of one human family, why are there still barriers between people, and how can we begin to knock them down?