Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Monday, July 20, 2015
A Nobel Prize for an Ignoble Deal?
Moments after it was announced that the United States and its allies had reached a nuclear deal with Iran, the drums began beating for a Nobel Peace Prize. Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, tweeted happily: "I think the work of the Nobel Committee ... this year just got much easier."
Liberalism Is a Narcotic
Karl Marx was convinced that religion was the opiate of the masses. That, no doubt, was the reason he decided to make a religion of his screwy economic theory. Surely it must have occurred to him that if people were willing to accept improbable miracles on faith, they might also be convinced that economic policies that fly in the face of reality and human nature could also gain a foothold. And he was right, in spite of the fact that his notions have failed time and again all around the world, inevitably ending in the tyranny by the few and the enslavement of the many. Nothing, we've been told, succeeds like success. But as socialists and communists have shown for the past century, thanks to the terminally gullible, occasionally nothing succeeds like failure.
Shameful: Planned Parenthood's Week Response
What do you have to do to lose your government funding these days?
Sunday, July 19, 2015
The Sneaky Way Lawmakers Use to Get Around the Earmark Ban
In the midst of the horrifying allegations that Planned Parenthood has been selling organs of aborted babies, there's been at least a bit of good news from Washington.
More on Licensed to Kill
Conducting remote control warfare with the use of drones, far away from any combat zone is a practice that didn't start under Barack Obama. But he has carried it out to an extent that goes far beyond anything ever seen before.
Saturday, July 18, 2015
Life Without Parole Is No Substitute for Death
An argument regularly advanced by opponents of the death penalty is that incapacitation doesn't require execution. Life imprisonment without parole is sufficient, they say: Put the most dangerous murderers behind bars and keep them there forever. But "lock 'em up and throw away the key" is a delusion. Life without parole is no replacement for the death penalty when it comes to protecting innocent lives. Understandably, many find it reassuring to believe that there is a way to protect the public from the worst killers without requiring the state to kill. National surveys find a preference for locking up murderers for life. In the most recent, a Quinnipiac University poll released in June, 48 percent of respondents said a person convicted of murder should be sentenced to life without parole; only 43 percent preferred death. But the last few weeks have provided vivid reminders that life sentences and high-security cells are no guarantee that deadly criminals have been removed from society for good.
Shameful: Planned Parenthood's Week Response
What do you have to do to lose your government funding these days? Try believing in natural marriage or running a pro-life charity. But defraud taxpayers, cover-up child sexual abuse, botch abortions, and scavenge babies for body parts, and you're untouchable. Or at least you used to be. After a breezy lunch conversation about selling baby organs, Planned Parenthood's invincibility is being put to the ultimate test, along with the resolve of lawmakers to stand for human decency. Decades of lies and corruption have all come to a head this week after Cecile Richards's group was accused of running a black market of baby parts. Out of the mouth of the organization's own senior medical director, more than two million Americans have watched the President's closest ally talk about changing their abortion procedures (often at risk to the mother) to protect — not the woman's or baby's interests, but Planned Parenthood's.
Trump Thumps the Pundits
It seems to me that when crazy white people like Adam Lanza, James Holmes and Dylann Roof, occasionally shoot a bunch of other white people, liberals will inevitably insist that stricter gun laws need to be enacted. But when 10 or 15 black people are shot by other black people on a typical weekend in Chicago, the poster city for gun control laws, liberals are as quiet as very shy mice. It makes me wonder if they really don't believe that black lives matter all that much. Furthermore, when an illegal alien shoots and kills an American citizen — as happened in San Francisco recently, when a schmuck who'd been deported five times after committing seven felonies, murdered a young woman — liberals, not to mention other GOP presidential contenders, responded by telling Donald Trump to shut up.
Friday, July 17, 2015
Jihad on U.S. Troops Is Not a 'Circumstance'
Four U.S. Marines, barred from carrying weapons at naval training facilities despite explicit ISIS threats against our military, are dead in Tennessee. Another service member and a Chattanooga police officer survived gunshots after Thursday's two-stage massacre allegedly at the hands of 24-year-old jihadist Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus called the terrorist's spree "insidious and unfathomable." President Obama bemoaned the "heartbreaking circumstance" in which the murdered Marines found themselves. "Unfathomable"? Not if you've been paying attention. Islam-inspired hate crimes against our troops have continued unabated since the Obama White House first dismissed the 2009 Fort Hood massacre as "workplace violence."
Liberal Theory of Justice Doesn't Support Abortion
I wonder what John Rawls would think of the market for fetal livers. The great liberal philosopher isn't quite a household name, but his influence on contemporary American liberalism and political philosophy is hard to overstate. Before his death in 2002, Rawls was arguably the foremost proponent of "distributive justice." In "A Theory of Justice," he offered a thought experiment. Imagine you and a group of other people were in a kind of metaphysical limbo, tasked with designing a society from scratch. But you exist behind what Rawls called a "veil of ignorance." You will be "born" — "placed" is probably a better word — into that society, but you don't know where on the socio-economic ladder you will land. You don't know whether you will be born a man or a woman, black or white, young or old.
Worse Than We Could Have Imagined
When you write a column, as did I two weeks ago, headlined "The worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history," you don't expect to revisit the issue. We had hit bottom. Or so I thought. Then on Tuesday the final terms of the Iranian nuclear deal were published. I was wrong. Who would have imagined we would be giving up the conventional arms and ballistic missile embargoes on Iran? In *nuclear*negotiations? When asked at his Wednesday news conference why there is nothing in the deal about the four American hostages being held by Iran, President Obama explained that this is a separate issue, not part of nuclear talks.
Hillary Clinton's Economics: Suddenly It's 1947
Like it or not, Hillary Clinton is the single individual most likely to be elected the next president. So it's worthwhile looking closely at and behind her words when she deigns to speak on public policy, as she did in her July 14 speech on economics. It contained quite a bit of chaff as well as some wheat. There were laments about the nation's current economic woes, without mention that they come in the seventh year of a Democratic administration; a few policies first advocated by Republicans (Jack Kemp's enterprise zones); and proposals that she admits are "time-tested and more than a little battle-scarred." But laced throughout the sterile verbiage is an assumption that was more widely shared by policy elites and ordinary American voters in 1947, the year Hillary Clinton was born, than it is today, 68 years later. That is the assumption that government is capable of solving just about every problem.
Obama: Witting or Witless?
A question has hung in the air since Barack Obama first moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and began his "fundamental transformation" of this country: Did he intend harm, or was he merely so blinded by ideology that he could not see the damage his policies were creating? The Iran deal provides an answer. At his press conference, our duplicitous leader chose to call black white and claim that the deal does the opposite of what it does — allow Iran to get nuclear weapons, albeit after a decent interval. We are deep into Orwellian territory now. "War is peace. Ignorance is strength." Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is crowing that Iran achieved all of its objectives and the U.S. none.
Leave the Department of Education Behind
Two weeks before the 1980 presidential election, the Associated Press published a story explaining that the two major-party candidates were "poles apart on education issues." Carter, the story reminded readers, was the Founding Father of the federal Department of Education. "The fate of the Department of Education, the $14-billion federal agency elevated to Cabinet status less than six months ago, may hang in the balance on Election Day," said the story. "Republican Ronald Reagan," it said, "hopes to dismantle the agency, which was created following a promise that Jimmy Carter made to the National Education Association in seeking and winning the union's support four years ago."
Media Fail to Expose Planned Parenthood
Once again, a courageous group of pro-life activists has produced a damning sting video of Planned Parenthood, and this one has exposed the most outrageous behavior yet. This isn't the abortion conglomerate protecting pimps or statutory rapists as they seek abortions. This is the selling of the organs of babies after they've been killed. The video will chill you to the bone. It cannot be described as anything but what it is: evil. A group called the Center for Medical Progress posed as tissue buyers with Dr. Deborah Nucatola, senior medical officer with Planned Parenthood, and filmed her casually, almost dispassionately discussing over a salad and wine how she and her colleagues carefully crush baby corpses to preserve intact organs for sale. Profiting off the sale of fetal tissue is a felony.
Why Can't Obama Treat Iran as He Treats Republicans?
Query: If President Obama's nuke deal with Iran is so wonderful, why do the major parties in Israel oppose it? Why was Obama so excited about making a deal that, based on his previous positions, he would have opposed earlier? This agreement is baffling on multiple grounds, even for Obama. What is the urgency for the United States to enter into such a lopsided deal with a rogue nation that doesn't have a fraction of our negotiating leverage? Why can't Obama deal with Iran's leaders the way he deals with Republicans? Is he trying to validate conspiracy theorists convinced that he's the Manchurian candidate? Have you ever noticed that there is an inverse relationship between the wisdom of an Obama policy and his defensiveness concerning it?
Let's Face It; Planned Parenthood Is Evil
In America, it's illegal to donate money to a candidate without first reporting it to the government. Even then, if you give more than is permissible, you could end up in jail. In this country, you can't add trans fats to your foods or smoke cigarettes in your own bar. Here, Little Sisters of the Poor can't tell the state they'd rather not buy condoms, and bakers can't tell a couple they'd rather not participate in their wedding. But it's completely legal to kill an unborn baby for convenience and then sell its parts for cash. Let's forget the legality of the issue for a moment. And let's forget religion and politics, if that's possible. Let's forget the disconcerting economic incentives inherent in these types of transactions and ask: What kind of person nonchalantly describes "crushing" the life from another living being — a being that might already be named and loved, a loss that might have a tremendous negative impact on a person or family or community — over a glass of wine and some giggles?
Planned Parenthood Travels the Organ Trail
For years, Planned Parenthood has fought against late-term abortion bans. And now we know why. The earlier babies are aborted, the less profitable their parts are. That's just one of the nauseating revelations from the undercover video that has the President's closest allies in crisis mode. Three days and two million YouTube hits later, Planned Parenthood is in full-blown crisis mode after a three-hour recording implicated Cecile Richards's group in a ring of baby organ harvesting. Now the organization, which has always touted every service *but* abortion, is being forced to talk about a savage side business that treats aborted babies as if they were junkyard cars being scavenged for parts. It's a difficult reality to swallow, even for the group's cheerleaders. Texas Monthly's Erica Grieder, a long-time advocate of Planned Parenthood, says both sides of the debate should be horrified by what they've seen. "From a pro-life perspective ... the discussion in the video is morally appalling, obviously. But I don't think many pro-choice people would disagree."
