Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
If America Is Mars and Europe Venus, How Is Europe Doing?
"Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus," wrote Robert Kagan in "Of Paradise and Power," published in 2003, just as the United States went into Iraq. Americans, he wrote, see themselves in "an anarchic Hobbesian world," where security and a liberal order depend on military might, while Europe is "moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and co-operation." A dozen years later, Europeans and not a few Americans have been asking how well Mars has been working out for America. But Americans and an increasing number of Europeans should also be asking -- when they think enough about it to ask -- how Venus is working out for Europe. Not so well, is the obvious answer. If America's economic growth has been sluggishness, with high unemployment and withdrawal from the work force, most of Europe hasn't been growing at all, with unemployment, especially among the young, remaining perpetually high in much of the continent.
The Hillary Cover-Up and the End of Democracy
On Monday, The New York Times reported that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton never -- not once -- used her official State Department email address for her official communications. Instead, she utilized a private email account, effectively protecting her emails from public scrutiny. The Washington Post then broke the news that Hillary had registered her email address the same day her confirmation hearings for secretary of state began. In other words, Hillary knew she would be secretary of state conducting official business, and coincidentally opened a private email account at the same time to guard her from Freedom of Information Act requests. Sure, Hillary Clinton has a nasty history with crucial documents going missing -- she is the only first lady in American history fingerprinted by the FBI, and the FBI found missing documents with her fingerprints on them in the White House personal quarters. But the media SuperFriends quickly activated to protect Hillary. Glenn Thrush of Politico tweeted that Hillary must have relied on incompetent staffers and lawyers. Ron Fournier of National Journal tut-tutted that this made her "no better" than Republicans. Of course, the media also ignored Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman handing millions to the Clinton charity just before Hillary's big run.
Bibi Grand: Netanyahu Hits the Right Note on Iran
"America and Israel share a common destiny." And it is that destiny that drove Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the lectern of a joint session of Congress in what history may describe as one of the most important speeches of a generation. It took a foreign leader, standing in the halls of American power, to remind us who we are and where our nation's roots reside: in the biblical faith of his ancient land. From his first mention of Esther to the closing message from Moses, our Judeo-Christian heritage was more prominent today than it has been in the last six years. "Tomorrow night, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, we'll read the Book of Esther," the Prime Minister said. "We'll read of a powerful Persian viceroy named Haman, who plotted to destroy the Jewish people some 2,500 years ago. But a courageous Jewish woman, Queen Esther, exposed the plot and gave for the Jewish people the right to defend themselves against their enemies." While the President tries to erase our identity as a Christian nation, the Jewish people look to their rich history as a source of meaning and guidance. Israel was under attack then, as it is now.
Raping Culture
A new documentary calls colleges like Harvard and Notre Dame "The Hunting Ground," where rapists prey on women. A bipartisan group of senators demand new rules to "curb campus sexual assaults." Apparently, new laws are needed because at colleges, sexual assault is "epidemic." Rape is so common that there is a "rape culture." I hear that a lot. It is utter exaggeration. Fortunately, AEI scholar Christina Hoff Sommers is around to reveal the truth. "This idea of a rape culture was built on false statistics and twisted theories about toxic masculinity," she says.
Unchecked Checkpoints
A Federal Appeals Court Gives a Pass to Unconstitutional Harassment by Border Cops
Obama's War on Transparency
On Inauguration Day 2009, the White House website declared President Obama's administration would become "the most open and transparent in history." By the end of the next day, Obama had issued high-profile orders pledging "a new era" and "an unprecedented level of openness" across the massive federal bureaucracy. This has become a cosmic joke. The entirety of the Obama era is marked by secrecy, obfuscation and, if all else fails, sheer dishonesty. Even allies in the network news acknowledged on Tuesday it was a damaging story that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had never used a public email account during her four-year tenure at Foggy Bottom.
Why Would an Ayatollah Build Secret Uranium-Enrichment Facilities?
Would Pope Francis build a secret uranium-enrichment facility? The question is absurd. But would Iran's Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, build one? The answer: No, he has built at least two. On Sept. 25, 2009, during a G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, Obama, then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy and then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown held a joint briefing. "We are here to announce that yesterday in Vienna, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France presented detailed evidence to the IAEA demonstrating that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been building a covert uranium enrichment facility near Qom for several years," said Obama, according to the White House transcript.
Going Bananas: A Case Study in Media-Manufactured Racism
Political correctness is a pathological disorder. You can't say "niggardly" or "black holes" or "chink in the armor" without provoking protests or risking your job. You can't invoke the Constitution or call illegal behavior "illegal" without being accused of hatred. And now, you can't goof around at a high school basketball game in silly costumes without the world accusing you of "racial insensitivity." Last week, thanks to hyperbolic grievance-mongers and irresponsible reporters, the students of Holy Spirit High School in Absecon, N.J., garnered international headlines and Internet infamy. "Shocking moment students at Catholic school dressed as monkeys and a banana and taunted black basketball players ... and DIDN'T get punished," the U.K. Daily Mail blared last week. "Students who taunted black players at New Jersey basketball game get warning, no punishment," USA Today decried.
College Campus Update
President Barack Obama wants Americans to dig deeper into our pockets to expand college education. Let's update college indoctrination done in the name of education. Cornell University assistant professor Russell Rickford, in a lecture titled "Ferguson: The Next Steps," told a packed auditorium: "Let's be very clear about what's going on. It's one every 28 hours. Dead black bodies in the street is a sacrifice America makes to the gods of white supremacy." He added: "The propertied classes leverage state violence to discipline, repress and contain them. America fears and despises all poor people." Blake Armstrong, a South Texas College psychology professor, equating the tea party to Nazis, told his class: "In 1931, which was really interesting, the Nazis -- people are kind of tired of them. They've been around since 1920, 11 years now. They've won seats. They're like the tea party! That's such a good example." Armstrong continued, "Don't tell anybody I said that, though."
Growing Up in California
Shortly after I turned six, my family left Chicago and moved to L.A. Because even at that age, the smell of wet woolens hanging in the kindergarten cloakroom was already a stench I found as unappealing as my mother's Friday night special, barley soup, I was happy to move to the land of eternal sunshine. In those days, California was the state that was to be the model for America's future. Its schools were the best, industry was booming, the San Joaquin Valley produced most of the nation's fruits and vegetables, Hollywood was still a magnet for the most talented people in the world and Republicans were winning most of the statewide elections.
Random Thoughts
When President Obama keeps talking about "violent extremists" in the abstract, you might wonder whether Presbyterians are running amok. The mainstream media seem desperate to try to find something to undermine Republican governor Scott Walker's rise in the polls. The worst they have come up with is that he didn't finish college. Neither did Bill Gates or Michael Dell. The Wright brothers didn't finish high school. Neither did Abraham Lincoln or George Washington. Have you noticed that there seem to be an ever growing number of things that we are not supposed to say in public?
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Prime Time: Netanyahu Pitches Congress on Iran
[Today's] message by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Capitol Hill may be one of the most important speeches in modern times. For the first time in more than six years, a leader standing before a joint session of Congress will speak with clarity about the threats in the Middle East and beyond. At the invitation of House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Prime Minister Netanyahu will argue against a possible nuclear agreement with Iran -- a top priority of the Obama administration and source of enormous tension between the two nations. The Prime Minister, who, as Quin Hillyer points out, spent more of his formative years on the U.S. mainland than Obama, seems to understand the crisis this President is so eager to ignore. "Yet Obama not only begrudges the Prime Minister the opportunity to make his case against this existential threat to his nation, but he conducts a diplomatic and political assault against Netanyahu of a ferocity rarely seen in the annals of American foreign policy... (The Prime Minister)... has spoken eloquently for decades in praise of the Western heritage of freedom and human rights. He also speaks and acts, quite obviously, to preserve security -- for Israel, of course, but more broadly for the civilized world."
A Democratic Republic Is a Terrible Thing to Lose
Is there anything the Obama administration, Democrats, their media allies and their fellow progressives hate more than the rule of law if that law doesn't accrue to their benefit? The long knives are out in force right now because on Wednesday, the Supreme Court is to begin hearing oral arguments in King v. Burwell, challenging a critical aspect ObamaCare. And as American Spectator's David Catron rightly points out what the Court will ultimately be deciding extends far beyond the healthcare bill. It will be deciding whether we remain a nation of laws, or become a nation of men. The law itself isn't debatable, and ironically it is former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's infamous words that return to haunt the American left. It was Pelosi who insisted Democrats would have to pass ObamaCare before Americans could find out what's in it. So the law passed and some Americans decided to take up Pelosi's challenge. What they discovered was states had the option of setting up their own health exchanges, or letting the federal government set them up. They further discovered that premium subsidies for millions of Americans were legally limited to those exchanges "established by the state." Once again, according to the law itself, those states refusing to set up their own exchanges would not be eligible for those subsidies, totaling more that $25 billion and affecting approximately 8 million Americans in the 34 states that refused to set up those exchanges.
Bibi at the Barricade
The White House opposes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking to Congress, but not because the speech has political implications, coming as it does just two weeks before Israel's March 17 election. If the administration truly had political concerns it would not have dispatched a team of Obama loyalists to Israel to help defeat Netanyahu. No, many believe the real reason the administration opposes Netanyahu's speech is because he will tell the truth about Iran's nuclear threat and the administration wants to cover up what could ultimately become a very bad deal. Iran wants nuclear weapons. And yet the U.S. is promoting the fiction that despite past behavior and the apocalyptic statements by its leaders, Iran will agree to stop its nuclear program. It will not.
The Honesty Gap
There may be some poetic justice in the recent revelation that Hillary Clinton, who has made big noises about a "pay gap" between women and men, paid the women on her Senate staff just 72 percent of what she paid the men. The Obama White House staff likewise has a pay gap between women and men, as of course does the economy as a whole. Does this mean that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both discriminate against women, that they are themselves part of the nefarious "war on women" that so many on the left loudly denounce? The poetic justice in the recent "pay gap" revelations is that the fundamental fraud in the statistics that are thrown around comes back to bite those who are promoting that fraud for political purposes. What makes such statistics fraudulent is that they are comparing apples and oranges.
Obama Smears Netanyahu, Coddles Iran
The Obama White House is in full war mode against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of our best ally in the Middle East, for accepting House Speaker John Boehner's invitation to speak before Congress, while it mollycoddles that region's most dangerous nation, Iran. No one crosses Obama without facing his wrath. No one dares. He is the president. All the administration's long knives are out. National security adviser Susan Rice is front and center. You would think she would be more circumspect after embarrassing herself on the Sunday talk show circuit peddling the administration's lie that the terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was prompted by an anti-Islam Internet video. But you would be wrong.
Moral Dumbing-Down
In a week when the Wall Street Journal's editorial page lectures the Republican Congress for tactical stupidity; and Israel's prime minister lectures the Obama administration, whose insiders lecture him back; and no one can believe Obama has believable plans for anything; and he can't believe anybody would believe such a thing -- with all this going on, who cares what goes on at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill? I really wouldn't care myself but for the appearance of a book about the university's apparent subservience to athletics and the dough that athletics brings in. I gather from Gregg Easterbrook's review in the aforesaid Wall Street Journal that Jay M. Smith and Mary Willingham, in "Cheated," tell a tale of significant dimensions, concerning the indifference of a putatively great university to the chicanery involved in sponsoring fake classes for athletes who can barely read. But who -- here's the point, don't you know? -- play football and basketball so superbly they earned UNC an average $30 million profit for the two sports last year.
Why Obama So Dislikes Netanyahu
There is no question about whether President Obama -- along with Secretary of State John Kerry and the editorial pages of many newspapers -- has a particular dislike of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But there is another question: Why? And the answer is due to an important rule of life that too few people are aware of: Those who do not confront evil resent those who do. Take the case at hand. The prime minister of Israel is at the forefront of the greatest battle against evil in our time -- the battle against violent Muslims. No country other than Israel is threatened with extinction, and it is Iran and the many Islamic terror organizations that pose that threat.
Monday, March 2, 2015
Why Does Obama So Oppose Netanyahu's Speech?
Susan Rice, President Obama's National Security Advisor, told TV talk show host Charlie Rose that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's upcoming speech before Congress about Iran is "destructive" to the relationship between the United States and Israel. What is going on? The National Security Advisor is just that – an advisor. It is not a cabinet post, nor a position of authority. It is not an appointment that requires confirmation of Congress. The president picks this individual to serve as a staff advisor on national security affairs. So who is Susan Rice to be hitting the media and defining the nature of relations between the United States and it's principle friend and ally in the Middle East – the only free nation in that part of the world?