Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
After Paris, Empty Symbolism
The instant online symbol of global support for Paris after last week's attacks was a roughly rendered peace symbol with an Eiffel Tower in the middle of it. The French designer Jean Jullien sketched it as soon as he heard the news of the atrocity. He called it "Peace for Paris," and it immediately became a sensation on social media. Its success is a sign of the times. We have become experts at treacly online mourning. We take grotesque atrocities and launder them into trite symbols and slogans that are usually self-congratulatory and, of course, wholly ineffectual. The 19th-century author William Dean Howells once said, "Yes, what the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending." On social media, the happy ending is the widely shared and tweeted image or hashtag.
After Paris, Obama's Abandonment of Leadership
On Nov. 12, President Barack Obama said of ISIS: "What is true is that from the start, our goal has been first to contain, and we have contained them." On Nov. 13, ISIS-connected terrorists left 129 people dead and 352 wounded in Paris. ISIS naturally dominated Obama's Monday press conference at the G20 summit in Turkey. Yet although the president used the words "leader" and "leadership" fourteen times, the concept was, ironically, absent from his remarks. Speaking with as much passion as an instructional video on waste reclamation, he doubled down on his legacy of inaction, infighting and incompetence.
No Passport for Terror
Language is not a barrier in communicating the international outrage over the multiple terror attacks on innocent civilians in Paris on Friday. As French citizens mourned the deaths of over 130 people, leaders of other nations began rethinking their policies regarding refugees and how to deal with their own citizens who have traveled to fight alongside of ISIS. At least two of the suspected terrorists in Friday's attack had fought and trained with ISIS terrorists in Syria. As this information comes to light, Americans are rightfully asking what steps leaders in Congress are taking to ensure Americans' safety, since the policies of the Obama administration are escalating the risk.
The Left and the Attack on Paris
The left's reactions to the terror attack on Paris are in keeping with its tradition of getting almost everything wrong. Take Bernie Sanders, for example. At the Democratic presidential debate, one day after the Paris attack, the democratic socialist candidate made this observation about al-Qaida: "I would argue that the disastrous invasion of Iraq, something that I strongly opposed, has unraveled the region completely, and led to the rise of al-Qaida and to ISIS."
Hey, Donald Trump: Wages Aren't Too High!
Outside the massive Milwaukee theater, the venue of last Tuesday's fourth GOP presidential debate, were the noisy protesters marching for a hike in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. They held up signs that read, "Fight for $15." Inside the great hall, Donald Trump, who boasts of having a net worth as high as that of many small nations, is asked by debate moderator Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business Network whether he favors raising the minimum wage. Of course, the only sane answer to that is no.
Obama's Pathological Blindness
It's hard to believe we twice elected a president who refuses to defend the United States. I think people who used to dismiss our criticism of President Obama as extreme are now realizing just how naive they were. On the morning before the ISIS terrorist attacks in Paris, Obama was bragging that ISIS is contained. Are you kidding me? Even before the attacks everyone knew ISIS was on the march and couldn't possibly be contained. What have you done to contain them, by the way? And why are we even talking about "containment" instead of wholesale destruction of a known enemy? What is Obama's strategy?
Clueless Before, After and Now
On Thursday, President Obama said this about ISIS: "We have contained them. I don't think they're gaining strength." Twenty-four hours later, ISIS massacred and wounded hundreds of people in Paris. At 5:45 ET Friday evening, Obama took to the airwaves again and said this about the supposedly contained ISIS: "This is an attack not just on Paris, it's an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share."
An Unhappy History Seems to Be Repeating Itself
Riots in black neighborhoods. Rebellions on campus. The news these past few months and particularly in the past week has been full of stories that remind us, as William Faulkner wrote a little more than half a century after the Civil War, "the past is never dead. It's not even past." We're seeing something that looks eerily like the recurrence of events that led, half a century ago, to the destruction of much of our cities and much of our campuses.
Paris, Brussels, and 21st Century Europe
Some time ago a former student emailed me a video clip that I now show my Major European Governments course. It's a five-minute news piece by Dale Hurd of CBN News, a conservative Christian outlet — the rare kind of place where you see reports like this. The piece was on radical Islam in Europe, specifically in Belgium, and it was based on Hurd's interview with a Muslim leader in Brussels, the very heart of modern Europe, of secular Europe, of the European Union, and of everything Islamic fundamentalists despise about Europe.
Massacre in Paris
Just hours before the terrorist attacks in Paris last week, for which ISIS has claimed responsibility, "Good Morning America" broadcast an interview with President Obama. In it, the president told host George Stephanopoulos, "I don't think they're gaining strength. What is true is that from the start, our goal has been first to contain and we have contained them. They have not gained ground in Iraq, and in Syria they'll come in, they'll leave, but you don't see this systemic march by ISIL across the terrain."
Stop the Bleeding
There was a painful irony when France's immediate response to the terrorist attacks in Paris was to close the borders. If they had closed the borders decades ago, they might have avoided this attack. Someone once said that the First World War was the most stupid thing that European nations ever did. Countries on both sides of that war ended up worse off than before, whether they were on the winning side or the losing side.
Monday, November 16, 2015
Obama Can't Rewrite Immigration Law, Even for the Better
During a speech about immigration in Chicago last November, President Obama was interrupted by hecklers demanding that he stop deporting illegal aliens. "You're absolutely right that there have been significant numbers of deportations," Obama replied. "But what you're not paying attention to is the fact that I just took action to change the law."
The English Language & Other Mysteries
I happen to love the English language, but I can see where others might not. Some people must look at such pitfalls as "its and it's," "whose and who's," "there and their," "for, fore and four," along with "to, too and two," and conclude the language was invented by a practical joker whose only motive was to trip them up. There are also words that have so many different meanings that it can take half a page in the dictionary to list them all. They end up as the linguist equivalents of those old time steamer trunks people used to pack before taking off on round-the-world voyages.
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Hawaii Is Holding an Election That Only Allows People of Certain Racial Background to Vote
It's bad enough having a state hold an election that is racially discriminatory. Now we have a judge willing to allow it to move forward. That would be federal district court Judge J. Michael Seabright (a George W. Bush appointee, surprisingly enough). He's refused to issue an injunction to stop an election in Hawaii to set up a separate government that excludes anyone who doesn't meet the state's definition of "Native Hawaiian." Seabright's deplorable decision in Akina v. State of Hawaii is on an emergency appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — which, unfortunately, doesn't always seem to believe in following Supreme Court precedent.
On Campus, a Freedom From Speech
Yale's president, Peter Salovey, dealt with the Crisis of the Distressing Email about Hypothetical Halloween Costumes about as you would expect from someone who has risen to eminence in today's academia. He seems to be the kind of adult who has helped produce the kind of students who are such delicate snowflakes that they melt at the mere mention of even a potential abrasion of their sensibilities.
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Models vs. Observations: Plotting a Conspiracy?
John Christy and I received an email today from Marcel Crok, who presented our satellite observations-vs-models graphs to the Dutch version of the American Physical Society (APS). He said there was considerable push-back about the way we plot the data — not from the society itself, but from global warming activist bloggers. I've heard these objections before, and mostly ignored them as uninformed and lame, since I've never heard one from an actual climate scientist. But apparently it's worthwhile to address the objections, since they seem to be lurking out there in the blogosphere.
Ben Carson and the Dan Rathers and Brian Williamses of Our Time
Last week, I wrote in this column that Dr. Ben Carson, a leading Republican candidate for the presidency, was an "American hero." I pronounced him thus even as the roof was falling in on his candidacy. Or was it? His numbers in the polls have held up. As the hullabaloo grew in the media, millions of dollars poured into his campaign from supporters all over the country. A week after it all began, the Carson campaign still appears formidable. Is his campaign really in trouble or has the crafty neurosurgeon-turned-presidential-candidate hit upon yet another tactic to win the election? Is he turning the maniacal nitpicking of the press to his political advantage?
A Scary Time for the GOP, What the Headlines Reveal
It's Friday the 13th and the GOP is afraid, very afraid. I know because The Washington Post told me so. A front page article this morning says that the party elders are hitting the "panic button" and see "doom" ahead if the leading "outsiders" — Donald Trump or Dr. Ben Carson — get the GOP nomination. Some of the insiders are so afraid that they are reportedly talking once again about drafting Mitt Romney to run again in spite of his repeated statements that he won't do so.
Swain's World
Universities are supposed to be a place to exchange ideas — not silence them. Tell that to Vanderbilt, where a hypersensitive student body is demanding the head of a conservative black professor for daring to challenge their opinion on politics. For Dr. Carol Swain, this institutionalized prejudice is nothing new. As an African-American woman, she's been threatened, protested, and verbally abused for exposing students to other views in one of academia's elite laboratories of radicalism.
Hell Is Empty
My title is half a line from Shakespeare's "The Tempest." The conclusion reads: "All the devils are here." More and more, as you look around the world or at our own political landscape, it seems to be the case that Satan has thrown open the doors and furloughed the worst offenders, perhaps following the lead of his friend and close associate, Barack Obama, who is doing his best to release killers, rapists and terrorists, from our prisons and from Guantanamo.