Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
The Media's Softness for Sanders and Socialism
At the start of the Democratic presidential race, the media viewed the contest as a cakewalk. The compassionate and gloriously wonky Hillary Clinton faced no one who could be viewed as her equal. Game over. When Sen. Bernie Sanders made noises about running against her, nobody thought he could be the actual Democratic nominee. He was old, he was cranky, and he wasn't even a Democrat. The conventional media wisdom had it that Sanders would be a healthy deterrent to the Clinton tendency to crawl toward the corporatist middle. On NPR, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne saw it as positive: "Let's list two names who we don't get to talk about, Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas. This is the most serious socialist candidacy for president since they ran. But Bernie Sanders has a long list of particulars that he wants to put on the table, and I think by shifting the campaigns to economics, he will generally help Democrats."
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
Hillary Clinton Discussed Prosecuting Republicans for Classification Violations
There are a lot of twists and turns in this one, but pay close attention to what a Hillary Clinton confidant advised her to do in response to some of the actions by congressional Republicans. When you have Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary Clinton, Eric Cantor and David Petraeus mentioned in one government document, it's time to pay close attention.
NASA Bans the Word 'Jesus'
The name of Jesus is not welcome in the Johnson Space Center newsletter, according to a complaint filed on behalf of a group of Christians who work for NASA. The JSC Praise & Worship Club was directed by NASA attorneys to refrain from using the name "Jesus" in club announcements that appeared in a Space Center newsletter. "It was shocking to all of us and very frustrating," NASA engineer Sophia Smith told me. "NASA has a long history of respecting religious speech. Why wouldn't they allow us to put the name Jesus in the announcement about our club?"
Hide Your Daughters — Here Comes Draft Registration
In the blink of an eye, we've gone from opening combat jobs to women to Republican presidential candidates endorsing registering women for a draft. Hide your daughters — our deluded and cowardly political elites are a clear and present danger to common sense. A proposal from the chief of staff of the Army and the commandant of the Marine Corps to require that women register with Selective Service seemed at first like an effort to highlight the absurd endpoint of the rush to women in combat, but top Republicans duly saluted and fell in line.
Bernie and Hillary's America
Watching last Thursday's debate between Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders one might have thought a Republican had been in the White House for nearly eight years. Hearing their complaints about the economy (bad), discrimination (rampant), health care (too many without it), unemployment (too many not working, or working at low-paying jobs), it appeared hope had died and change is all we have left in our pockets. To hear these two ultra-liberals tell it, we are a horrible, miserable, evil nation. We are bigots, we are greedy because we won't surrender more of our income to the government gods, we hate anyone who isn't white, male and heterosexual, and we want to deport everyone who isn't a Christian.
GOP's Platoon of Accomplished Governors Falls Flat With Voters
The Iowa caucuses may have only muddied the waters in the race for the White House, but they did almost definitively decide one thing: The next president will not be a governor. That's an amazing revelation because, just one year ago, the smart money was betting that the next president would be a Republican governor. The governors were supposed to be the GOP's talent pool. If the nominee wasn't going to be Jeb Bush, the former two-term Florida CEO with a sterling job performance, voters would surely look to Wisconsin's Scott Walker, the conservative warrior for financial sanity and labor reform, or the policy wizard Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.
Toxic Words
During this election year, we are destined to hear many words that are toxic in the way they misrepresent reality and substitute fantasies that can win votes. One of these words is "entitlement." To hear some politicians tell it, we are all entitled to all sorts of things, ranging from "affordable housing" to "a living wage." But the reality is that the human race is not entitled to anything, not even the food we need to stay alive. If we don't produce food, we are just going to starve. If we don't build housing, then we are not going to have housing, "affordable" or otherwise.
How History Shapes the New Hampshire Primary
Benning Wentworth is not a name you'll run across in New Hampshire primary coverage. But he arguably did as much as anyone else to establish the political culture — or cultures — of America's first-in-the-nation primary state. Wentworth was governor of New Hampshire from 1741 to 1766, the longest-serving colonial governor, and with his father he successfully lobbied to make New Hampshire, surrounded by Massachusetts and its Maine territory, a separate colony. This insulated New Hampshire's religiously diverse seacoast and backwoods from Massachusetts' Puritan busybodies — and from its customs and tax collectors.
Fear Not, My Secular Friends
It amuses me that certain people are convinced that Christians are angry scolds but totally miss the humorlessness and angst of certain Christophobic secularists. When I wrote the book "Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity," secularists panned the notion that Christians, being in the majority, could be the subjects of systematic discrimination. I found that an odd argument, especially from people who routinely argued that women are victims of gender discrimination.
You Don't Know What Obama Said at the Mosque
If you seek to understand Barack Obama and his views, the best place to go is his speeches. But you have to read them in their entirety, not rely on hearing them or on the media's summary of them. When you do, you realize how often what Obama says is morally and intellectually confused and even untrue. The most recent example was his speech last week at a mosque in Baltimore. In addition to reassuring Muslim Americans that they are as American as Americans of every other faith — President Obama spoke a lot of nonsense, some of it dangerous.
NARAL vs. Doritos?
The radical pro-abortion group NARAL is, once again, doing its best to prove that the left denies the basic science of biology. Doritos aired an amusing Super Bowl ad showing a husband eating the famous nacho chips during his wife's ultrasound. Frustrated with her husband's inattentiveness, she has the expected reaction. But when her husband starts waving a chip around, the baby in utero starts following it. She wants one! ... That was too much for NARAL, which tweeted its condemnation of Doritos for "using #antichoice tactic of humanizing fetuses." What exactly does NARAL think a fetus is? Fetus is Latin for "bearing young," "offspring" or "young while still in the womb," all of which means human unborn baby.
When a Man Drafts a Woman
If you thought the Super Bowl was rough, you should have seen the contest the night before. Plenty of GOP presidential candidates took a bruising during Saturday's Manchester debate, the eighth of the Republican race. Voters who were looking for some clear points of distinction between the front-runners got their wish, thanks to Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). The Florida leader, who is fighting for a share of the evangelical support, didn't do himself any favors with his answers on the military draft. After some strong moments defending life ("I would rather lose an election than be wrong on the issue of life") and marriage ("I don't believe that believing in traditional marriage the way I do makes you a bigot or a hater"), Rubio stunned conservatives by announcing that he's in favor of the president's push to draft women.
How to Explain Sanders and Hillary?
Any casual observer whose views had not been warped by a half-century of media puffery might look upon the two Democratic front-runners with a combination of astonishment and fright. Naturally, the first question that leaps from one's mind is, how did a wispy-haired fossil straight from Marx Brothers' central casting, spouting socialist shibboleths at a grammar school level ever make it so far in American politics? This obviously leads to the next question about his competition, a cackling political shrew who smiles with "one hundred percent certainty" that her running as the country's first unindicted felon will not be interrupted by something as inconvenient as an FBI investigation. Who set this all up, for crying out loud? The public relations adjunct to that famous law firm, Dewey, Cheatum & Howe? With due apologies to Larry, Moe, and Curly — very intelligent and talented men, by the way — the question remains, how did this all come about?
Monday, February 8, 2016
Why in the World Does Anyone Want to Be President?
As we celebrate Presidents' Day in the midst of the 2016 campaign for the White House, it is fitting that we pause to ask why in the world anyone wants to be president of the United States. Arguably it is the toughest and most challenging job on the planet. The pressures presidents face are immense, and the scrutiny, second-guessing, and ridicule to which they are subjected is intense and never-ending. Those willing to pursue this office must either have very thick skin, a huge ego, the ability to ignore criticism, a strong conviction that they can make the world better through their service, or all of these things.
The Powerball, Mona Lisa & Me
The older I get, the fewer things I seem to understand. I'm not referring to my own declining mental faculties, but to the oddities of others and mine as well. For instance, when the Powerball prize money soared through the stratosphere recently, I bought a ticket. But I didn't really want to be a billionaire. For one thing, I've never envied a billionaire. I'm not sure if I've even liked any. Although the Koch brothers had struck me as being pretty down-to-earth straight-shooters, when I was putting together one of my books, I politely approached them to request an interview and I never received a response.
Ignoring Truth at Our Peril: Lessons From NASA
Thirty years ago, on January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger shattered out of existence. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, the most famous member of the panel assigned to study the disaster, argued that the estimates of reliability offered by NASA management were wildly unrealistic, differing as much as a thousand times from the estimates of the engineers, who had called for the mission to abort due to extreme cold. But management, determined to fly, ignored their advice, holding to fancy rather than facts.
For Americans, Global Freedom Is a Mission That Crosses Party Lines
Freedom House, the esteemed human rights and democracy organization, is out with the latest edition of its flagship publication, "Freedom in the World," an annual survey of political rights and civil liberties in every country on earth. The news is dispiriting. For the 10th year in a row global freedom declined, with 72 countries becoming less free, while 43 made gains. Of the world's 7.3 billion people, only 40 percent live in countries rated "Free," down from 46 percent a decade ago. Another 24 percent live in nations designated as "Partly Free," while the remaining 36 percent — more than one-third of the human race — suffers under the repressive regimes that rule countries deemed "Not Free."
Sunday, February 7, 2016
Relief of Poverty: Four Centuries of Futility
More than 400 years ago, the British adopted the Poor Law system, under which local communities were made responsible for the relief of poverty. For the next four centuries the Poor Laws were amended again and again, as the following argument went to and fro: Was the system providing necessary relief or was it in various ways interfering with the natural workings of the labor market by subsidizing idleness and encouraging indolence.
Muslims Don't Belong Here
I know why I don't want Muslims in America. What I don't get is why they'd want to be here. If I were a follower of Allah, wouldn't I wish to live where the Koran and Sharia law were dominant, and not in a country where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, with their emphasis on Judeo-Christian values, were the foundation of our government?
The Super Bowl's 60 Minutes of Damage
Settling unhappily into his Super Bowl seat, Himalayan high behind the end zone, Joe spots an empty seat low and on the 50-yard line. He descends to it and asks the man seated next to him why the wonderful seat is unoccupied. The man says, "Its mine. I was supposed to come with my wife, but she died. This is the first Super Bowl since 1967 we have not attended together." Joe says: "But couldn't you find a friend or relative to come with you today?" The man replies: "No, they're all at the funeral."