Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Donald Trump and the Cult of Personality
"Power," Henry Kissinger once told The New York Times, "is the ultimate aphrodisiac." Kissinger might amend that statement today: Now, fame is power, and thus replaces power as the ultimate aphrodisiac. In fact, fame isn't just an aphrodisiac — it's the ultimate nepenthe, a drug causing forgetfulness. The more famous our politicians are, the more we neglect their positions and character. No wonder the most admired woman in America is criminal Hillary Clinton, the most admired man is criminal Barack Obama, and the second-most admired man is loudmouth Donald Trump.
American Hostages Freed
Every American celebrates the release over the weekend of five Americans held by Iran. Let's call them what they were — hostages. Predictably, President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry were trumpeting the exchange as evidence of the value of their diplomatic strategy.
The Media's Cockeyed Political Spectrum
To hear the press tell it, the Republican Party has gone so far to the right that Ronald Reagan wouldn't recognize it. But the Democratic Party is at this moment on the cusp of forsaking Hillary Clinton for a self-described socialist who wants America to be exactly like Sweden. So precisely which party is making a historic tilt toward a new extreme?
Blacks and the Confederacy
Last July, Anthony Hervey, an outspoken black advocate for the Confederate flag, was killed in a car crash. Arlene Barnum, a surviving passenger in the vehicle, told authorities and the media that they had been forced off the road by a carload of "angry young black men" after Hervey, while wearing his Confederate kepi, stopped at a convenience store en route to his home in Oxford, Mississippi. His death was in no small part caused by the gross level of ignorance, organized deceit and anger about the War of 1861. Much of the ignorance stems from the fact that most Americans believe the war was initiated to free slaves, when in truth, freeing slaves was little more than an afterthought. I want to lay out a few quotations and ask what you make of them.
Economic Myths
Hillary Clinton: "Of course we want to raise the minimum wage!" Donald Trump: If we trade with China, "they suck us dry ... take everything. We get nothing!" Bernie Sanders: "Ordinary Americans are working longer hours for lower wages." But it's not true! Politicians are so ignorant about economics. On his blog, Cafe Hayek, George Mason University professor Donald Boudreaux says his main job is showing students that much of what they believe about economics is wrong. I wish he taught presidential candidates.
Republicans Need Their Own Bernie Sanders in 2016
As the political landscape started to crystallize at the onset of the 2012 election, I wrote a column making a comparison to the election of 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected. My point then was that the common ground of these two elections was the fracturing of Americans' most basic sense of what the nation is about. The 1850s saw the collapse of the Whig Party and the birth of the Republican Party. The Democratic Party fractured into two and ran two separate candidates. The Republican Lincoln was elected with just 39 percent of the popular vote.
Can Congress Get Its Swagger Back?
According to the Constitution, the legislature is the first and most powerful branch of government. And yet, many believe — on the left and the right — that the institution has atrophied. By all accounts, House Speaker Paul Ryan is eager to change that. He has his work cut out for him. At the Republican congressional retreat in Baltimore last week, I participated in a panel discussion about how to revive Congress' traditional role. It was off the record, but I can certainly repeat a story I told.
Trump Is Right About Cruz's Presidential Eligibility
During last week's Republican presidential debate, Ted Cruz said it's "really quite clear" he is eligible to run for president even though he was born in Canada, because his mother was a U.S. citizen. His rival Donald Trump insisted "there is a serious question" as to whether Cruz qualifies as "a natural born citizen," one of the constitutional requirements for the presidency.
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Congressional Travel Cover-Up at Pentagon
It isn't only Barack Obama that deserves scrutiny for abuse of taxpayer-funded travel. Your Judicial Watch is the leader (or the only one in DC) investigating and litigating for information on the cost of Barack Obama lavish travels. The known total expense to the American taxpayers thus far for all Obama travel is now $70,880,035.78. But the Air Force luxury planes are used for more than Barack Obama and his Executive Branch entourage. These planes are also at the beck and call of Congress who loves using the planes to fly all over the world.
The Menacing World Economy: Will 2016 Be 1914 All Over Again?
In the summer of 1914, the few who had any sense of what was about to happen to the world had no idea how long it would take for their fuzzy contemplations to unfold. The German Army had been preparing for a European war for some time, including a planned invasion of France detailed down to almost an hour-by-hour execution schedule. What followed was four years of horrific bloodshed that killed 10 million and wounded 20 million more. Following that was a Spanish influenza epidemic that killed an estimated 50 million more. Following that was a global depression that ended with the German hyperinflation of 1923. If you lived in Germany, your life was literally on the edge of existence for almost eight years.
Could Obama's Nuke Deal Unleash Iran's Apocalyptic Muslims?
It's a hybrid of Islamic radicalism that even scares Al Qaeda. New York Times best-selling author Joel Rosenberg calls it "Apocalyptic Islam." "Apocalyptic Islam doesn't want to simply attack us, it wants to annihilate us," Rosenberg told me during an interview broadcast on my podcast. "Apocalyptic Muslims like the leaders of Iran and the leaders of the Islamic State believe that we are living in the End Times and that it's their mission from Allah to bring about the end of the world as we know it."
Don't Thank Obama for Cheap Oil
The big fall-off-your-chair moment during President Obama's State of the Union address came when he proclaimed: "We've cut our imports of foreign oil by nearly 60 percent and cut carbon pollution more than any other country on Earth. Gas under two bucks a gallon ain't bad, either." Sure, Mr. President. Take a bow for the smashing success of the very domestic oil and gas industry that you have tried to destroy. Even Obama couldn't carry this off. The smirk on his face as he sang the praises of the oil and gas industry was unmistakable.
The Republican Race Heats Up While Hillary Clinton Falters
The race for president is accelerating in high gear, or, rather, the *races* for president — in the Republican and Democratic parties, in the Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary and primaries and caucuses to come. How's it going? Let's look at these separate races. The Iowa Republican caucuses: The polls show a two-way race here between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, with little room for an outsider to crash through to victory as Mike Huckabee did in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012. Each of the poll leaders has recently lobbed a cheap-shot attack on the other, and each slapped the other down in last week's Fox Business debate.
Seeing Bigots Under Every Rock
Remember when universities used to encourage freedom of academic inquiry and were seen as intellectual and social preparation for the transition into adulthood? I know; that was a long time ago — before the left infected these institutions. Everyone knows about the leftward slant of most American universities: their monolithic biases; their bent toward politicizing their curricula; and their practice of indoctrinating students. But increasingly the results of leftist community organizing — the toxins of political correctness — are seeping into university disciplinary rules.
Too Big to Fail: The Sequel?
Movie sequels are rarely as good as the original films on which they're based. The same dictum, it appears, holds for finance. The 2008 housing market collapse was bad enough, but it appears now that we're on the verge of experiencing it all again. And the financial sequel, working from a similar script as its original version, could prove to be just as devastating to the American taxpayer. The Federal National Mortgage Association (commonly referred to as Fannie Mae) plans a mortgage loan reboot, which could produce the same insane and predictable results as when the mortgage agency loaned so much money to people who had neither the income, nor credit history, to qualify for a traditional loan.
What Are Elections For?
After months of watching all sorts of political polls, we are finally just a few weeks away from actually beginning to see some voting in primary elections. Polls let people vent their emotions. But elections are held to actually accomplish something. The big question is whether the voters themselves will see elections as very different from polls. If Republican voters have consistently delivered a message through all the fluctuating polls over the past months, that message is those voters' anger at the Republican establishment, which has grossly betrayed the promises that got a Republican Congress elected.
Monday, January 18, 2016
Enough With the Darn Legacies
I'm not sure who will be elected in November, but I hope that whoever it turns out to be keeps one thing in mind: His or her legacy should be to leave the nation stronger, more prosperous and more in line with the Constitution than the day they moved into the Oval Office. The last few presidents, although each was elected to a second term, have done a really lousy job. Clinton, who reaped the benefits of a phony dot.com economy, gave up a fortune in gifts of coal and wheat to North Korea in exchange for a meaningless piece of paper promising to end their nuclear program.
Sunday, January 17, 2016
Seven Bad Habits of Highly Progressive People
It's been 50 years since the War on Poverty was launched and after all that time and trillions of dollars spent about one of every seven people in the country is still living below the poverty line. Everyone on the right and the left seems to agree: in the war on poverty, poverty is clearly winning. So what should be done? You may have noticed that Paul Ryan and the Republican presidential candidates were guests of the Jack Kemp Center in North Carolina the other day, trotting out their ideas on how to combat poverty.
'New York Values' vs. 'Duck Dynasty' Values
Liberals and the mainstream media are foaming at the mouth over the comment Senator Ted Cruz made Thursday night about "New York values." Now, all of us folks who are not New York City liberals know exactly what Senator Cruz was talking about — and it had nothing to do with the aftermath of 9/11. Senator Cruz was talking about cultural and political values. "Duck Dynasty" values versus Big Apple values.
Keep an Eye on Chris Christie
Iowa and New Hampshire together have just 1.4 percent of the U.S. population, which is actually why it is fine for them to begin the presidential selection process: Small states reward an underdog's retail politics. Chris Christie relishes such politics and has fresh evidence that voters are enjoying his enjoyment.