Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, May 22, 2015
Can Hillary Clinton Reverse the Six-Year Decline in Democratic Turnout?
Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 by running as a different kind of Democrat from previous nominees. Hillary Clinton, Anne Gearan of The Washington Post reports, is hoping to win the presidency in 2016 by running as the same kind of Democrat as the current incumbent. There's a certain logic in that. President Obama did win twice, while the five pre-Clinton Democratic nominees lost five of the six previous elections. But maybe it's too logical. There's also magic to presidential elections, something no arithmetic formula can capture. It's not clear that a 69-year-old Hillary Clinton in 2016 can inspire the enthusiasm that the 47-year-old Obama did in 2008. Camp Clinton's assumption is that their candidate can count on and expand Obama's "coalition of the ascendant" (The Atlantic's Ronald Brownstein's term). In particular, "non-whites" are an inevitably increasing share of the electorate, and Clinton strategists expect that share to grow from 28 percent in 2012 to 31 percent next year.
Keeping Watch in Washington
Hundreds of pastors descended on our nation's capital [yesterday] for FRC's annual Watchmen on the Wall conference, representatives of what we believe is the determining edge of the future of our nation. "The mission of our Watchmen on the Wall ministry is simple," said Dr. Kenyn Cureton, FRC's Vice President of Church Ministries, "We champion pastors to transform America ... because the problems we face in America today ... are spiritual at their heart and core, and the demand of the hour is for spiritual leadership to step up and engage." With 60 percent attending for the first time, we're encouraged that so many of our nation's spiritual leaders are engaging on the important spiritual and cultural issues of our day. Author, professor, and systematic theologian, Dr. Wayne Grudem encouraged these ministers with a charge to exert significant Christian influence on government. Offering a biblical and historical overview, Grudem reminded pastors "from the earliest days of the Christian church, Christians have influenced government for good."
Will Accomplishment Deficit Be Hillary's Undoing?
There are plenty of reasons to believe 2016 will be a very ugly election year. Here's one more. Bloomberg Politics convened a focus group of Iowa Democrats. Nearly all loved Hillary. "She's a bad mama-jama," said one female participant. Bad mama-jama is good, by the way. The woman explained that Clinton is "not afraid to step up" or "afraid to say, 'No. I don't want to do it that way. I'm going to do it this way.'" Another participant insisted that Clinton is a "better woman than I am" — a great standard for selecting a president, to be sure — because of Clinton's ability to weather various scandals and humiliations. The awkward part came when Bloomberg's Mark Halperin asked the room, "What did she accomplish that you consider significant as secretary of state?"
A Smorgasbord of Head-Shakers
Other than about a billion things, I'm feeling pretty upbeat about the current state of our nation under the leadership of those whose worldview and priorities I simply cannot fathom. I would prefer not to be negative — even less so to be pessimistic and, still less, cynical — but current trends warrant serious concern. In the end, it's not negative, pessimistic or cynical to point out egregious conditions, especially if your aim is to alert your fellow citizens to the gravity of the problems and help ignite conditions that would put in place a plan to reverse this insanity. Let me just give you a few things currently in the news that have me shaking my head.
Disaster Du Jour, Part I
Sometimes I think the AGW crowd is like a swarm of locusts, moving from field to field. It's actually a great strategy because there's always going to be some location on earth where some kind of extreme is occurring — though, in most places, the weather is tranquil the majority of the time. If it wasn't, there wouldn't be so many people on the planet, which I suspect is another agenda that drives all this. Simply find a place where a rare event is occurring, then blast headlines that claim it's because man is destroying the planet. It's disaster du jour. The West Coast drought is bad, and in some places as bad as we have seen in the time of accurate records. But low lake levels are not being helped by atrocious planning or policies that value smelt over people (example: allowing a river that could be used for farming and civilian water supplies to not be properly utilized to protect a creature called the Delta smelt).
You Want Hypotheticals? Here's One
Ramadi falls. The Iraqi army flees. The great 60-nation anti-Islamic State coalition so grandly proclaimed by the Obama administration is nowhere to be seen. Instead, it's the defense minister of *Iran* who flies into Baghdad, an unsubtle demonstration of who's in charge — while the U.S. air campaign proves futile and America's alleged strategy for combating the Islamic State is in freefall. It gets worse. The Gulf States' top leaders, betrayed and bitter, ostentatiously boycott President Obama's failed Camp David summit. "We were America's best friend in the Arab world for 50 years," laments Saudi Arabia's former intelligence chief. Note: "were," not "are."
How Obama Radically Transformed America's Patent System
Patent law is not something most Americans are passionate about or have ever contemplated — which is exactly why the Obama White House and Congress got away with making radical changes to our time-tested traditions of protecting the fruits of entrepreneurial inventors' labor. It's yet another progressive horror story of abandoning what works in the name of what's politically trendy. For left-wing saboteurs and their Big Business GOP enablers, this means throwing our unique patent system and its constitutional underpinnings under an 18-wheeler. So-called "patent reform" proposals continue to plague Capitol Hill. But like health care "reform" and education "reform," these government cures are worse than any purported disease. As part of his ongoing bid to "fundamentally transform" America, President Obama signed the Orwellian-titled America Invents Act (AIA) in 2011. If truth-in-advertising laws applied to politicians who front massively complex bills that do the opposite of what they proclaim to do, these hucksters would be jailed for their patently fraudulent "reform" legislation. Co-sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, the law was marketed as a job-creation vehicle that would relieve a backlog of an estimated 700,000 patent applications and crack down on patent "trolls" supposedly abusing the system through frivolous litigation against alleged infringers.
Thursday, May 21, 2015
The False God of Politics
If you visit Mount Olympus, you will see scores of crumbling statues to false gods once worshipped by ancient Greeks. The same is true in Rome, where statues of political gods, notably those named Caesar, lay in ruins. We are more sophisticated today. Moderns don't bow to Zeus. Many of us, though, put our faith in the false god of politics, despite its track record of not being able to achieve all of the things we project upon it. The late comedian George Carlin may have put the blame for this where it belongs: "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups." In order to accurately judge an idea, policy, or individual "stupid," one must first have a standard by which stupid can be measured.
A Fourth to Be Reckoned With
If you're wondering what the most dangerous place for an African-American is, try the womb. More than 40% of black children are losing their lives to abortion before they start — but you won't hear that from the NAACP. In one of the more tragic ironies of liberalism, the longtime civil rights group has become a shill for the thing destroying its community: abortion on demand. Not only does the organization ignore the biggest killer in the black community — it won't tolerate others exposing it. And after two years in court, Ryan Bomberger can prove it. The Radiance Foundation's head, whose gripping testimony has transformed the way people think about abortion, has dedicated his life to telling the truth about the dark world of the abortion business. And the truth is this: that the abortion industry targets black children — and too many leaders of the community are silent about it. To help draw attention to that fact, Ryan took on the NAACP in a powerful piece called "NAACP: National Association for the Abortion of Colored People" about the organization's complicity in that agenda.
Knowing What We Know Now, Would You Say Jeb Bush Is Retarded?
Was Jeb Bush too busy watching telenovelas during his brother's presidency to remember the Iraq War? We went to war at such breakneck speed after 9/11, that, before the invasion, I was able to write approximately 30 columns about it, give five dozen speeches on it, discuss it on TV a hundred times and read 1,089 New York Times editorials denouncing the "rush to war." So I remember the arguments. Contrary to the fairy tale the left has told itself since Obama truculently gave away America's victory in Iraq, our argument wasn't that we had to invade Iraq because of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. And the left's argument certainly was not: "He doesn't have any WMDs!"
George Clintonopoulos!
What took so long? The question isn't whether George Stephanopoulos compromised his credentials as a "journalist" by failing to reveal his donations to the Clinton Foundation. The question is why, immediately after Stephanopoulos left the Clinton administration, ABC hired this partisan in the first place. In 1996, when ABC hired him, the initial press release said he would "serve both as a political analyst and as a correspondent." The "correspondent" role caused such an uproar — even in liberal mainstream media — that a few days later ABC quickly retreated: "I don't know how that got into the press release," said a spokeswoman. "He will not report the news." Then-ABC News Vice President Joanna Bistany said Stephanopoulos would be a commentator like ABC contributor William Kristol, Republican Dan Quayle's former chief of staff. "I view it the same way as Kristol," she said. "He has a point of view, a political persuasion." Bistany also said, "We want a mix of voices," assuring that Stephanopoulos wouldn't "do anything that has any appearance of conflict."
Congress Trying to Push Through a Program Shown to Hurt Workers
In recent weeks there's been a bit of controversy in Washington over an "alphabet soup" of legislation and tactics all dealing with trade issues. Amid the hubbub, Americans should be aware that Congress is working to bring back an expensive program that has been shown to hurt American workers — and they're trying to push it through by tacking it to important legislation. The Trade Promotion Authority is an agreement by the House and Senate with the president to "fast track" future trade bills and ensure they get an up-or-down vote in Congress. It is being brought up again to help along trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
The Withering of the Death Penalty
Without a definitive judicial ruling or other galvanizing event, a perennial American argument is ending. Capital punishment is withering away. It is difficult to imagine moral reasoning that would support the conclusion that an injustice will be done when, years hence, the death penalty finally is administered to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon terrorist who placed a bomb in a crowd and then strolled to safety. Sentencing to death those who commit heinous crimes satisfies a sense of moral proportionality. This is, however, purchased with disproportionate social costs, as Nebraska seems to be concluding. Nebraska is not a nest of liberals. Yet soon its unicameral (and officially nonpartisan) Legislature may send to the governor a bill, passed unanimously by its Judiciary Committee, abolishing the death penalty. The 49-member Legislature has voted for it twice, 30-13 and 30-16. Gov. Pete Ricketts, a Republican, vows to veto it.
Think Like a Liberal — or Else
What happens when the public does not wish to live out the utopian dreams of its elite leaders? Usually, the answer for those leaders is to seek more coercion and less liberty to force people to think progressively. Here at home, President Barack Obama came into power in 2009 with a Democratic Congress, a sympathetic press, and allies in Hollywood, academia, unions, and philanthropic and activist foundations. Yet all that support was not sufficient to ensure "correct" public attitudes about Obama's agenda on health care, entitlements, taxes, guns, abortion and cultural issues. In the 2010 midterm elections, the Democrats forfeited their majority in the House. In the 2014 midterms, they lost their Senate majority and also lost ground in state legislatures and with governorships across the country. Since early 2013, President Obama's approval rating has been consistently below 50 percent.
Prince Charles' Defense of the Patagonian Toothfish and More
Last week, Prince Charles, in all likelihood the next monarch of Great Britain, suffered a defeat. For 10 years he and his aides have resisted a concerted effort to make public certain letters written by him and sent to Prime Minister Tony Blair and several of his ministers. The British newspaper, The Guardian, had sought the letters — 27 written in 2004 and 2005 — under a Freedom of Information Act inquiry. Now Britain's Supreme Court has ordered that the letters be released to the public. So this is one the royals lost and the anti-monarchists at The Guardian won. Yet, asking as purely a cisatlantic spectator, I cannot for the life of me discern why The Guardian sought these letters in the first place; or, for that matter, why Prince Charles objected to making them public. Aside from one letter in which the Prince argued — rather boldly, I shall admit — that the protection of the Patagonian toothfish should be a government priority, none of the other letters dealt with anything of a sensitive nature. There was one apparently calling for the culling of badgers, so maybe animal rights activists would be alarmed. Yet they should also be proud of the Prince's solicitude for the famed toothfish of Patagonia. Hardly anyone stands up for the toothfish, or for Patagonia come to think about it. There were letters about farming, British beef, aesthetics and herbal medicine. Not even the animal rights lobby can oppose herbal medicine. I say let the Prince have his say.
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
The Benghazi-Syria Weapons Connection
How arms got into ISIS jihadists' hands — with Clinton and Obama's full knowledge.
Unraveling the Poverty Myths Obama Is Promoting
Our class warrior in chief was at it again last week complaining about our "ideological divides that have prevented us from making progress" in solving problems like poverty. Just when you thought you'd heard it all. Our most ideological president perhaps ever is arguing that there is too much ideology in Washington. Wow. Apparently an ideology is a firmly held belief that is held by other people — especially those on the right. In a discussion on poverty at Georgetown University, the president managed to blame the slow-growth economy and stagnant wages on everything from Ayn Rand (who promoted "cold hearted policies" and classified everyone as a "moocher") to California's Proposition 13 (which is responsible for the Golden State's dreadful schools). Everything has contributed to our current malaise except for his own failed policies.
The Tenn Commandments
Time doesn't just heal — it saves. Tennesseans are excited to see just how much, now that the state is officially part of the more than two dozen with abortion waiting periods. Under the new law, moms-to-be would have to visit the office for in-person counseling before returning two days later for the procedure. As part of that consultation, a doctor is required to tell them the age of their baby, the alternatives to abortion, and the risks of it. They'll also learn that if their infant survives the procedure, the medical staff will do everything they can to care for the child. Any doctor who fails to comply could face criminal charges and/or lose his license. For pro-lifers, Tennessee's move puts it just behind Oklahoma's new 72-hour waiting period — with Florida and North Carolina next in line to enact similar laws. As popular as the idea was in the legislature, it was even more so with locals. In a poll by Vanderbilt University, *only 28%* opposed the 48-hour waiting period. Planned Parenthood must have made up a good bit of that percent, since its spokesmen were out in full force blasting the bill as "embarrassing." Calling it a "sad day" for Tennessee, the group's Steven Emmert argued that postponing abortions two days was somehow an "emotional hardship" for women.
The Obama-Boehner-McConnell 'Fast Track' to a Poorer America
President Barack Obama is negotiating a multilateral trade agreement with the governments of 11 nations. These include Malaysia and Vietnam — as well as Japan, Brunei, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Peru. This so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership would govern most of the commercial relations between the nations that sign it. "With over 20 chapters under negotiation," explains a Congressional Research Service report published in March, "the TPP partners envision the agreement to be 'comprehensive and high-standard,' in that they seek to eliminate tariffs and nontariff barriers to trade in goods, services, and agriculture, and to establish or expand rules on a wide range of issues including intellectual property rights, foreign direct investment and other trade-related issues."
Shameless Stephanopoulos, Shameless ABC
It was outrageous for ABC News to promote Bill Clinton's spokesman George Stephanopoulos to the top of the political-anchorman heap. It was shameless to keep him there, even as Hillary Clinton keeps running for president. Conservatives never felt he was an appropriate choice, and never felt he sincerely attempted fairness and balance in his "journalism." This feeling should belong to every American now that it's out that Stephanopoulos donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation — run by Bill and Hillary — over the last three years. Given his background in the innermost circle of Team Clinton in the 1990s, these donations are either remarkably stupid or remarkably shameless. Stephanopoulos is not stupid. Given his inner-circle status, it's impossible to believe that he didn't know another Hillary presidential campaign was in the works, and that his donations over the last three years were going to underline every accusation that he is in the tank for the Clintons.