Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, March 6, 2015
Why Marco Rubio Is Strongest Possible Nominee
It has become conventional wisdom that Republicans are blessed with a talented crowd of potential candidates this cycle. Fine. But here's my case for why only one of them is likely to win the general election. Forget the triumphalism that followed 2014. It will do the GOP exactly as much good in 2016 as its remarkable success in 2010 did it in 2012. The off-year electorate is different. Republicans begin the race for 270 Electoral College votes at a structural disadvantage. California, New York, Illinois and other large Democratic states deliver reliable EC votes. In the past six presidential races, Republicans have averaged just 211 electoral votes, while Democrats averaged 327. Among swing states -- Colorado, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Virginia -- all are seeing increases in their minority voters and decreases in white voters.
Is Obama a Patriotic Christian?
I think the way you answer that question, which is really a combination of two questions, depends entirely on how you define a patriot and a Christian. Obviously those who believe that even the lies that Obama has told about Benghazi, the IRS targeting of conservatives and ObamaCare, were well-intentioned will defend his patriotism, just as those who take him at his word accept his claims to being a Christian. On the other hand, those of us who have not had our brains washed, rinsed and blow-dried, do not accept that which is blatantly false. How can someone who has spoken incessantly about America's sins, apologizing for our history and insulting our allies – going so far as to exile the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office – be regarded as a patriot?
Email Scandal Won't Doom Hillary, but Supporters Should Feel Uneasy
Historically, the Clintons have proved to be politically indestructible. To paraphrase the movie "Aliens," to truly destroy the Clinton Industrial Complex, you'd have to nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. Given that alone, I doubt that the unfolding controversy over Hillary's email schemes spells her doom. The basic details are as follows: In 2009, a week before she started her job as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had a personal Internet server registered at her home address. She then used her own domain name, "clintonemail.com," to conduct all of her business -- for the State Department, but also presumably the Clinton Foundation and other matters, be they nefarious or high-minded.
Most Members of Congress Share Netanyahu's View
If anyone had any doubts that most members of Congress oppose the Obama administration's proposed nuclear deal with Iran, they can put them aside after viewing the response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech before Congress Tuesday. Fifty-some Democratic members chose not to attend. Joe Biden arranged to be out of town, and Barack Obama let it be known that he didn't even have time to watch on television. But the House chamber was packed, the galleries were filled and Netanyahu was interrupted multiple times not only with applause but boisterous cheers. In negotiations with Iran, continued beyond two previously proclaimed deadlines, Obama has dropped demands that Iran disassemble centrifuges needed to produce nuclear weapons material. And he has proposed a 10-year time limit on the deal.
Netanyahu's Churchillian Warning
Benjamin Netanyahu's address to Congress was notable in two respects. Queen Esther got her first standing O in 2,500 years. And President Obama came up empty in his campaign to pre-emptively undermine Netanyahu before the Israeli prime minister could present his case on the Iran negotiations. On the contrary. The steady stream of slights and insults turned an irritant into an international event and vastly increased the speech's audience and reach. Instead of dramatically unveiling an Iranian nuclear deal as a fait accompli, Obama must now first defend his Iranian diplomacy. In particular, argues The Washington Post, he must defend its fundamental premise. It had been the policy of every president since 1979 that Islamist Iran must be sanctioned and contained. Obama, however, is betting instead on detente to tame Iran's aggressive behavior and nuclear ambitions.
Top U.K. University Blacklists Israeli Academic Institutions
Britain’s School of Oriental and African Studies joins the Jew-hatred parade.
Obama's Ongoing Assault on the Constitution
One of the many reasons constitutional conservatives consider President Obama a threat to the Constitution is his disdain for the separation of powers, illustrated most recently in his plan to bypass the Senate in making an arms deal with Iran. The Framers understood that throughout history, the real threat to God-given liberty had been centralized, unchecked governmental power. As such, they crafted our system in a way to limit the consolidation of that power, especially in the federal government. They did this in a number of ways, including establishing a system of federalism, which divided powers between the federal and state governments. They also specifically enumerated powers granted to the federal Congress and added the Bill of Rights, which expressly restricted Congress' encroachment on a panoply of individual liberties and also included the ninth and 10th amendments, which reserve powers to the states and the people.
Thursday, March 5, 2015
House Broken: Boehner Rolls Over on DHS Funding
[Tuesday's] House session felt like a tale of two Congresses. After one of the greatest foreign policy speeches in a generation, members got back to business. But the same defiance and resolve that filled the chamber just hours earlier seemed to exit the chamber when Benjamin Netanyahu did. Instead of building on that momentum, House leaders let it slip away in a familiar -- but staggering -- show of capitulation on an issue that could be the defining one in 2016. After months of promises and saber rattling over the President's illegal amnesty order, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) raised what is becoming his trademark white flag and gave President Obama the funds to continue running the Department of Homeland Security, illegal actions and all. Proving the Establishment is more focused on the media than their employers -- voters -- Boehner decided to throw away the political leverage he had in the illegal immigration debate and bring up a "clean" Homeland Security funding bill for a vote.
The Great, Amazing, Incomparable Stan Evans Is Dead
*"If and when Congress votes on a new immigration bill -- whatever the "triggers," timetables or other provisos -- the real issue to be decided will be the same as it has been from the beginning. That issue is whether the Republican Party, dazed from a daily pounding by the Washington press corps, will agree to commit political suicide by enfranchising 11 plus million illegal aliens on U.S. soil, the vast majority of whom will soon be casting Democratic ballots."* So wrote the great M. Stanton Evans, who passed away on Tuesday. Having been at the forefront of the movement to draft Ronald Reagan and defeat the Evil Empire, Evans had recently turned to the next greatest danger for America: immigration. As I'm sure you've read by now, Evans helped kick off the American Conservative Union's first-ever CPAC in January 1974 and invited Gov. Ronald Reagan to speak. (This was back when CPAC mattered.)
The Challenge: Your Personal Past
How many of us have boxes or hard drives filled with pictures and home videos -- those precious moments we captured on film because we wanted to always remember; yet we've rarely, if ever, looked back? How many of us have kept journals in which we've written prayers about our hopes and fears, but have never returned to see which were answered? You've left behind a paper trail of some sort as you've gone through life. And if you're like most Americans, you're probably actively collecting, adding bits and pieces as you go, because you feel, on some level, that it's important to.
Cleaning Up the Boondoggles
Readers of this column are familiar with my argument that a conservative tide is sweeping the country, contrary to the mainstream media. In the off-year elections of 2010 and 2014, the gains made by conservatives have been substantial in governors' mansions and in state legislatures. To be sure, they have been substantial in Washington, too, at the House and Senate level, but I would argue that they have been more consequential at the state level. There, old conventions that have been in place since the left-wing 1960s are being heaved out, and a clamor of protest is being heard from the evicted. It can only get worse. Since the late 1960s, state universities have established departments and "learning" centers that have nothing to do with education and everything to do with advocacy for a certain narrow points of view -- say minority studies, feminist studies, advocacy for the poor, the people with eating disorders, the chronic bedwetters -- that sort of thing. State governments, too, have allowed taxpayers' dollars to be skimmed off into similar projects. Now state governments, recently taken over by conservative Republicans -- possibly even by tea partiers -- are closing down such boondoggles and provoking howls of indignation from the so-called aggrieved.
Ethanol: The GOP-Supported Rip-Off
Can someone explain why the "party of limited government" continues, with a straight face, to support ethanol? Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa says about the heavily subsided product, "Everything about ethanol is good, good, good." Really? Really? Really? Supporters of ethanol -- which we make from corn -- say it reduces our dependence on foreign oil, is cheaper and aids the environment because it burns cleaner than non-blended fossil fuels. In 1996, The New York Times wrote: "At a time when Congress has been overhauling the nation's systems of agricultural subsidies, and public officials across the country have considered huge cuts in benefits to big corporations, ethanol has been untouched. Largely through the efforts of (then soon-to-be 1996 GOP presidential nominee Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas), it has remained one of the most subsidized American industries."
Putin's Russia Is a Gangster Regime
"I'm afraid Putin will kill me," Boris Nemtsov told a Russian website on February 10. He was dead before the month was out. The charismatic opposition leader, a former deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, was assassinated in the heart of Moscow on Friday night as he walked over a bridge near Red Square, only yards from the Kremlin walls. The killing, it seems clear, was a professional hit. Nemtsov was shot four times in the back by gunmen who escaped in a precisely timed getaway car, the murder unrecorded by nearby security cameras, which were mysteriously turned off -- all in a section of the Russian capital that normally teems with security personnel and surveillance. It was a calculatedly shocking crime, the highest-profile assassination since the Stalin era, and Vladimir Putin's propaganda machine immediately moved to exploit it. The Russian ruler said he would personally oversee the inquiry into Nemtsov's killing, which his press aide described as a "provocation" intended to make the government look bad. With almost unfathomable cynicism, government investigators speculated that one of Russia's best-known liberal democrats might have been martyred by his own allies in a bid for sympathy.
Taylor Swift's Bad Investment
Pop star Taylor Swift has donated $50,000 to the New York City public school system. Swift, who was named the world's sixth most powerful celebrity by Forbes magazine, has commendably performed numerous acts of charity since moving into her $20 million Tribeca residence last year, including visits with sick children at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The age and cultural divide notwithstanding (she's 25, I'm not, and Elvis was my adolescent icon), I like Taylor Swift, but her money would have been better invested with much higher returns somewhere other than the dreadful New York City public schools, whose problems are not the result of insufficient funding. According to the Huffington Post, citing U.S. Census Bureau data, "New York spent $19,076 per student in the 2011 fiscal year, as compared to the national average of $10,560." In 90 of the cityâs public schools, Families for Excellent Schools found that not a single African-American or Hispanic student received a passing grade on state tests.
Stopping the IRS
Rep. Peter Roskam is now chairman of the Ways and Means subcommittee whose jurisdiction includes oversight of the Internal Revenue Service, and hence of Lois Lerner's legacy. He knows how interesting her career was before she, as head of the IRS exempt-organizations division, directed the suppression of conservative advocacy groups by delaying and denying them the tax exempt status that was swiftly given to comparable liberal groups. In 2013, Roskam, in a televised committee hearing, told the story of Al Salvi, who in 1996 was the Republican's Senate candidate against then congressman, now senator, Dick Durbin. Democrats filed charges with the Federal Election Commission against Salvi's campaign, charges that threatened to dominate the campaign's final weeks. Salvi telephoned the head of the FEC's Enforcement Division, who he says told him: "Promise me you will never run for office again, and we'll drop this case." So said Lois Lerner. After Salvi lost, FBI agents visited his elderly mother, demanding to know, concerning her $2,000 contribution to her son's campaign, where she got "that kind of money." When a federal court held that the charges against Salvi were spurious, the FEC's losing lawyer was Lois Lerner.
The Audacity of Weakness
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to Congress on Tuesday to warn Americans of the anti-Western threats from theocratic -- and likely to soon be nuclear -- Iran. Netanyahu came to the U.S. to outline the Iranian plan to remake the Middle East with a new nuclear arsenal. His warning was delivered over the objections of the Obama administration, which wants to cut a deal with Iran that allows the theocracy to continue to enrich lots of uranium. Netanyahu received a standing ovation for stating the obvious. Iran is currently the greatest global sponsor of terrorism. Tehran now has de facto control over four Middle East nations: Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. Iran has serially ignored all past U.S. deadlines to stop nuclear enrichment. It habitually misled U.N. inspectors. It threatens to spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
If Not Now ... When? Will the GOP Majority Ever Stand for Anything?
It is never the right time to do the right thing in Washington, D.C. The phrase I heard most often from Republican leadership while serving in the House and Senate was, "This is not the right time to have this fight." Whether the issue was balancing the budget, school choice, patient-driven healthcare, eliminating earmarks, raising the debt limit, ending big, crony handouts like the Export-Import Bank or any stand against the continued growth, favoritism and intrusion of big government, conservatives were always told to wait. Wait until conservatives have the majority. Wait until we have the White House. Wait until we are reelected.
It's Prime Time for Scott Walker, Whether He's Ready or Not
Any chef will tell you that you need great ingredients to pull off a great meal. Less discussed but just as true: You need to cook the ingredients in the right order. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has nearly all of the right ingredients to win the GOP nomination. He is popular among both anti-establishment activists and the big donors of the establishment. He has working-class appeal (desperately needed for the GOP), and he's battle-tested in his home state -- a state many believe the Republicans could finally pick off in a presidential election. The question is whether his timing is off. In countless discussions I had at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference -- as well as among people I've talked to who attended the Club for Growth meeting in Florida last weekend -- the concern for friends, and the hope for foes, is that Walker is peaking too soon.