Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
Pope Francis, the Climate and Leftism
One of the rarest and most important things a pope does is issue encyclicals. In the eight years of Pope Benedict's papacy, he issued three encyclicals. In the 27 years of Pope John Paul II's papacy, he issued 14 encyclicals. Since his ascendancy to the papacy in March 2013, Pope Francis has issued one. But Pope Francis is about to issue an encyclical to the world's 5,000 bishops and 400,000 priests that tells us a great deal about him, about Latin America and, most of all, about the influence of what has been the most dynamic religion in the world for the last hundred years.
There's More to Life Than Politics
Politicians do politics because they can't help it. It's what they do: their whole reason for existence. A public man -- or woman -- can no more help legislating and campaigning and back-scratching and log-rolling and fundraising than -- than what? Than a writer on politics can stop bloviating and prophesying. I state the comparison with a degree of shame. We're all in this together -- politicos and pundits. We love the game, and that's too bad, for everybody. These reflections come to mind on account of the Great Political Repositioning now underway in Washington due to Republican takeover of the Senate and the opportunity to stick it, after all these years, to the president. You can tell from the purity tests going around how deep is the exasperation -- left and right -- with what the last six years have produced.
Correcting the Revisionists on the Reagan Record
My daughter asked me my opinion on an article she read in Vanity Fair attempting to debunk the presidential record of Ronald Reagan. I happily responded. The writer of the piece is veteran liberal commentator Michael Kinsley, who used to be a regular on William F. Buckley Jr.'s "Firing Line" and CNN's "Crossfire." It's not as though he appeared out of nowhere, studied the evidence anew and shared a novel theory. He's been dissing Reaganomics for decades along with other Democrats and liberals, whose only recourse is to distort the Gipper's phenomenal record.
Mario Cuomo: The Rhetoric and the Record
How precious in the sight of progressives was one of their saints, Mario Cuomo, the three-term governor of New York who died last week at age 82. He was a model of progressivism and a gifted rhetorician. In most media accounts, references were made to two speeches Cuomo delivered in 1984, one at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco where Walter Mondale was nominated for president, and the other at the University of Notre Dame where Cuomo spoke about abortion and the "proper" role of religion in politics.
The 'Equality' Racket
Some time ago, burglars in England scrawled a message on the wall of a home they had looted: "RICH BASTARDS." Those two words captured the spirit of the politicized vision of equality -- that it was a grievance when someone was better off than themselves. That, of course, is not the only meaning of equality, but it is the predominant political meaning in practice, where economic "disparities" and "gaps" are automatically treated as "inequities." If one racial or ethnic group has a lower income than another, that is automatically called "discrimination" by many people in politics, the media and academia.
Family Fragmentation: Can Anything Be Done?
How big a problem is family fragmentation? "Immense," says Mitch Pearlstein, head of the Minnesota think tank Center of the American Experiment. "The biggest domestic problem facing this country." So big he went out and interviewed 40 experts of varying ideology across the nation and relayed their answers in his book "Broken Bonds: What Family Fragmentation Means for America's Future." That's the good news. The bad news is that none of the experts is confident he has an answer, and neither is Pearlstein. What is family fragmentation? The facts are easy to state. About 40 percent of babies born in America these days are born outside of marriage. That's true of about 30 percent of non-Hispanic whites, more than 50 percent of Hispanics and more than 70 percent of blacks.
Monday, January 5, 2015
Optimism for 2015
Politics and the economy are both looking up. President Obama's big-government spending, planning and executive-branch overreach were crushed at the polls. Elections matter. The GOP has been rejuvenated. Republican governors will lead the way. And the Republican majorities in the House and Senate haven't been this big since the 1920s. They know what to do -- develop a positive agenda: Pro-growth tax reform and spending limits. Pro-energy. Pro-King Dollar and Fed monetary reform. Pro-health-care choice. Pro-immigration reform. Pro-marriage. Pro-family. An American renaissance is in the making. Let the GOP put its best policy foot forward. If Obama vetoes the growth reforms, so be it. The 2016 agenda will be set for a Republican presidential victory.
The Narrative vs. the Truth
I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but as a writer who recognizes the need of reaching as wide an audience as possible, I consider it a necessary evil. Yet I also recognize something else: Facebook might best be referred to as Narrative Central in that it is a repository for countless numbers of "true" stories that are anything but.
Get off Steve Scalise's Case
If you want to identify a serious potential leader, someone committed to getting America back on track as a free and prosperous nation under God, just check the intensity of efforts of those on the left to try and destroy the reputation and career of that individual. The more time and energy liberals invest to destroy someone, you can bet that this is someone who loves America, what it stands for, and who can make a difference. Latest case is attacks on Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) because he spoke, in 2002, to the European American Unity and Rights Organization, a white supremacist group founded by racist David Duke.
Obama's 12 Biggest Accomplishments of 2014
Obama had a better year than you might think. After all, he didn't burn the White House down.
The Private Sector, Not Obama, Created This Recovery
It only took six years, but we're finally starting to see the U.S. economy kick into gear. This isn't a story of government-directed growth, but the opposite -- Washington's role in the economy starting to shrink after years of Obama administration activism. The private sector is starting to take over. Let's start with the positive news. Economic output soared in the third quarter at a rate of 5 percent. That comes on top of 4.6 percent growth in the second quarter. It appears that the U.S. economy has clawed out of its anemic 2 percent growth rut of the past five years and that we are now shifted into a higher gear with 3 percent-plus as the new normal.
White Racism Has All but Vanished From U.S. Politics
The temptation to play the race card is one that President Obama and his surrogates have too often found irresistible. Think of Attorney General Eric Holder's claim last summer that criticism of the Obama administration is fueled by "racial animus," or Vice President Joe Biden's warning to a largely nonwhite audience in 2012 that Mitt Romney was "going to put y'all back in chains" if he won the White House. Recall Obama himself, predicting that Republicans would demonize him because "he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." Yet there are also times when the president heeds the better angels of his nature, and declines to stoke racial resentments.
I've Got Their Numbers
I began going to movies when I was about four years old. I still recall that two of the first ones I ever saw back in Chicago were an Abbott & Costello comedy and a pirate movie involving galley slaves. That was 70 years ago, and although my love affair with the movies didn't have a particularly auspicious beginning, it even managed to survive a 13 year period during which I reviewed them, first for the UCLA Daily Bruin and then for Los Angeles magazine. To suggest, in the words of Cole Porter's "It Was Just One of Those Things," that the love affair was too hot not to cool down is putting it mildly. Over the past 25 years, I have rarely liked more than one or two movies a year. By this time, I would probably stop seeing new ones altogether except that, because of my membership and voting privileges in the Writers Guild, the studios continue to send me a batch of DVDs at year's end.
Sunday, January 4, 2015
The Senator to Watch in 2015
Standing at the intersection of three foreign policy crises and a perennial constitutional tension, Bob Corker, R-Tenn., incoming chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, may be the senator who matters most in 2015. Without an authorization for use of military force (AUMF) tailored to novel circumstances, America is waging war against an entity without precedent (the Islamic State). Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons during negotiations that should involve congressional duties. And Russia is revising European borders by force and, like Iran, is the object of a U.S. experiment testing the power of economic sanctions to modify a dictator's behavior. As Congress weighs its foreign policy role regarding these three matters, Corker treads the contested terrain between deference to presidential primacy in foreign policy and the need for collective wisdom and shared responsibility.
How the Laffer Curve Changed America's Economy
It was 40 years ago this month that two of President Gerald Ford's top White House advisers, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, gathered for a steak dinner at the Two Continents restaurant in Washington with Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski and Arthur Laffer, former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget. The United States was in the grip of a gut-wrenching recession, and Laffer lectured to his dinner companions that the federal government's 70 percent marginal tax rates were an economic toll booth slowing growth to a crawl. To punctuate his point, he grabbed a pen and a cloth cocktail napkin and drew a chart showing that when tax rates get too high, they penalize work and investment and can actually lead to revenue losses for the government. Four years later, that napkin became immortalized as "the Laffer Curve" in an article Wanniski wrote for the Public Interest magazine. (Wanniski would later grouse only half-jokingly that he should have called it the Wanniski Curve.)
Saturday, January 3, 2015
Thank Gridlock for Economic Turnaround
The Obama Boom is finally here. Gross domestic product grew by a healthy 5 percent in the third quarter, the strongest growth we've seen since 2003. Consumer spending looks as if it's going to be strong in 2015. Unemployment numbers have looked good. Buying power is up. And the stock market closed at 18,000 for the first time ever. All good things. So what happened? Here's David Axelrod on Twitter: "Note: The quarter before Obama took office, the U.S. economy SHRUNK by 8.9 percent, worst since 1930. Last quarter it GREW by 5 percent, best since 2003." Note: Contrasting the most severe quarter of your predecessor's with the best one in your six-year presidency -- one filled with extravagant and unmet economic promises -- may strike you as a bit hackish. But let's go with it.
Paging Eric Holder
If the cops are as racist as the idiots in the streets keep claiming, why is it we never see Asians or black immigrants from the Caribbean rioting and complaining about police brutality? With all the people of color residing in America, why is it always and only native-born blacks who take to the streets complaining of mistreatment? Could it possibly have anything to do with the violent crime rate and the lack of parental discipline found in their community that leads to so many unpleasant interactions between the police and young black thugs? Furthermore, if things are as oppressive as they claim, why do we never see a mass migration to Canada or Mexico? The only blacks we ever see leaving the U.S. are those like convicted cop killer Joanne Chesimard, who leave, seeking asylum in Cuba.
Truth Is, There's No One Behind the Wheel
There's an old joke in the newspaper business, now immortal on the Internet: "The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand the New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie chart format. ... The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country, and they did a far superior job of it, thank you very much. ..."
From The Comedy Store
Obama enjoyed a round of golf in Hawaii on Christmas day with the prime minister of Malaysia. They rented carts, played a round and had lunch and drinks afterwards. The prime minister wanted to pick up the check, but Obama would not hear of it and charged it to our grandchildren.
Friday, January 2, 2015
The 'Good War' Obama Surrendered
Thousands of American lives squandered as the Radical-in-Chief oversees the triumph of the enemy.