Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Are Facts Obsolete?
Some of us, who are old enough to remember the old television police series "Dragnet," may remember Sgt. Joe Friday saying, "Just the facts, ma'am." But that would be completely out of place today. Facts are becoming obsolete, as recent events have demonstrated. What matters today is how well you can concoct a story that fits people's preconceptions and arouses their emotions. Politicians like New York mayor Bill de Blasio, professional demagogues like Al Sharpton and innumerable irresponsible people in the media have shown that they have great talent in promoting a lynch mob atmosphere toward the police. Grand juries that examine hard facts live in a different world from mobs who listen to rhetoric and politicians who cater to the mobs.
Return of the 1960s
In 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama signified that he represented a sea-change in the nature of American politics. Obama proclaimed that as a member of the younger generation -- born in 1961, at the tail end of the baby boom -- he no longer wanted to participate in the stale and tired politics of the 1960s. Instead, he wanted to thrust America forward into a "different kind of politics," one beyond the "psychodrama of the baby-boom generation -- a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago -- played out on the national stage." Like most of what President Obama said, this turned out to be a lie. President Obama isn't merely a reflection of 1960s politics. He represents a return to those ugly politics: the nastiness of anti-cop sentiment, the divisiveness of generalized anti-Western foreign policy, the idiocy of a war between the sexes and against the exclusivity of the traditional family structure. President Obama isn't representative of a new breed. He is the child of the 1960s politics he once claimed to abhor.
NPR's Morning Cuddle With Obama
In the fall of 2007, President Bush offered an interview on race relations to National Public Radio correspondent Juan Williams, but NPR declined the invitation. Ellen Weiss, the news boss at the time (who was deposed in the controversy after she fired Williams three years later), demanded that an NPR anchor do the interview. The Williams interview with the president aired on Fox News, and not on NPR. That sense of feisty independence does not extend to President Obama. When he grants an interview to an NPR anchor, it has all the dramatic tension and hostility of a cappuccino klatch with the D.C. Young Democrats.
Ringing Out the Year With Liberal Double Standards
Many conservatives finished the year angry about the same thing they were angry about at the beginning of the year: liberal double standards. As I write this, GOP House Whip Steve Scalise is in hot water over reports that he spoke to a group of racist poltroons in Louisiana 12 years ago. Whether it was an honest mistake, as Scalise plausibly claims, or a sign of something more nefarious, as his detractors hope, remains to be seen. But one common response on social media is instructive. Countless conservatives want to know: Why the double standard? Barack Obama was friends with a domestic terrorist, Bill Ayers. His spiritual mentor was a vitriolic racist, Jeremiah Wright. One of his administration's closest advisers and allies is Al Sharpton, a man who has inspired enough racial violence to make a grand dragon's white sheets turn green with envy.
Tuesday, December 30, 2014
Small Groups of Volunteers Can Help in Ways Big Gov't Can’t
"What can we do to help?" Americans have been asking this question in one form or another from our very founding. For much of our history, the answer has come in the form of individual efforts, not government programs. Fortunately, even in the age of big government, Americans still feel the urge to help. They ask what they can do. They volunteer. They do it, of course, in times of tragedy. After Hurricane Katrina, for example, Americans nationwide opened their homes to families who had lost everything. Hundreds of thousands went to the Gulf Coast to clean up and rebuild.
What Is a Year of Life Worth? Part II
In making decisions about medical care everyone should factor in cost—patients, doctors health insurance companies and government. Consider two alternative procedures, A and B. If for each $1,000 spent on procedure A, patients gain one extra month of life whereas using procedure B costs $2,000 for the same gain, A should be preferred to B. By making the efficient choice we free up money to meet other health and non-health needs. There remains this problem, however: what if the person who makes the decision about cost is different from the person who realizes the gain. That is what gives rise to charges of "rationing" and "death panels."
Comparing the Two Most Republican Houses in 70 Years
Before Christmas, Arizona finished its 2nd Congressional District recount, showing Republican Martha McSally beating incumbent Democrat Ron Barber by 167 votes. This means there will be 247 Republicans in the House in the 114th Congress -- one more than was elected to the House in the 80th Congress in 1946. It's the most Republican House since the one elected in 1928, a year when very few of today's voters were alive. But while the party numbers are almost precisely the same in the Houses elected this year and 68 years ago, the composition of the two parties' caucuses (the Republicans call theirs a conference) is sharply different.
Prelutsky vs. Gallup
I'm wondering if I should become a professional pollster. For one thing, it must pay quite well, otherwise there wouldn't be so many people doing it. For another, whereas I trust my results, I'm not so sure about those other guys because they tend to be paid by people with a vested interest in the results, whereas I'm just a chap cursed with the curiosity of a cat. I mean, am I really expected to believe Gallup when he insists that 47% of Americans still think Obama is doing a bang-up job? Really? Is that why his party has lost 14 seats in the Senate and another 70 or so in the House over the past four years, along with several governorships and a slew of state legislatures? It's certainly not because the voters have been mesmerized by those two dullards, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell.
Random Thoughts
Now that Barack Obama is ruling by decree, he seems more like a king than a president. Maybe it is time we change the way we address him. "Your Majesty" may be a little too much, but perhaps "Your Royal Glibness" might be appropriate. It tells us a lot about academia that the president of Smith College quickly apologized for saying, "All lives matter," after being criticized by those who are pushing the slogan, "Black lives matter." If science could cross breed a jellyfish with a parrot, it could create academic administrators. Mitt Romney seems to be ready to try again to run for president in 2016. But most defeated presidential candidates who ran again lost again. There are much stronger Republican candidates available now than there were in 2012, including governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. At this crucial juncture in the nation's history, why run a retreaded candidate?
A Hopelessly Biased Screed Against Alleged Bias
Newsweek has outdone itself in its pre-Christmas issue with a vitriolic assassination of the Bible, under the title "The Bible: So Misunderstood It's a Sin," by Kurt Eichenwald. This isn't, by any measure, a balanced piece. It doesn't approach fairness. Eichenwald doesn't even attempt to hide his bias, though he seems oblivious to how it compromises his own fairness and objectivity and how hypocritical he is in condemning Bible believers for allegedly allowing their biases to influence them. It is an unusually long article, by which one might infer that Eichenwald and the magazine consider the subject a matter of major importance that must be addressed.
The Greatest Days of Your Life
In my fifth and final column on the greatest guide ever devised for a good world -- the Ten Commandments -- I offer my readers what may well be the best single thing you can do -- that you are probably not doing now -- to improve the quality of your life, your family's life and, ultimately, the life of our society. Many people -- even among those who revere the Ten Commandments -- do not think that the fourth commandment, the Sabbath Day, is particularly important, let alone binding. Once you understand it, however, you will recognize how both life-changing and world-changing it is.
America Interrupted
In the film, "Girl Interrupted," Winona Ryder plays an 18-year-old who enters a mental institution for what is diagnosed as borderline personality disorder. The year is 1967 and the country is in turmoil over Vietnam and civil rights. While lying on her bed one night and watching TV, she sees a news report about a demonstration. The narrator says something that might apply to today's turmoil: "We live in a time of doubt. The institutions we once trusted no longer seem reliable." As 2014 ends, the stock market is at record highs but our traditional institutions and self-confidence are in decline. A Pew Research Center study confirms one trend that has been obvious over several years. The "typical" American family is no longer typical. Just 46 percent of American children now live in homes with their married, heterosexual parents. Five percent have no parents at home. They most likely are living with grandparents, says the study.
Monday, December 29, 2014
This Student Lost His Gig at College Newspaper for Writing Something Politically Incorrect
Omar Mahmood, a junior at the University of Michigan, writes for both the mainstream campus newspaper, The Michigan Daily, and university's alternative conservative publication, the Michigan Review. At least he used to, until he became academia's latest victim of political correctness. Mahmood recently penned a brief satire of the "check your privilege" fad, claiming (tongue in cheek) that a system of right-handed privilege was oppressing left-handed people everywhere through daily right-handed "micro-aggressions" — a bit of jargon beloved by the progressive "social justice" crowd. The article was humorous, harmless and conservative.
What Is A Year of Life Worth?
If there is one thing most conservatives and liberals agree on it's that we should not consider cost in deciding whether people should undergo medical procedures that have the potential to save lives and cure diseases. Unfortunately, most conservatives and liberals are wrong. Declaring the idea of *cost effectiveness* a "forbidden topic in the health care debate," Aaron Carroll shows just how adverse we are to the idea of comparing money cost with health outcomes.
For 2015: More Morality, Less Politics
At the close of the last century, British conservative historian Paul Johnson wrote "A History of the American People." He began his sweeping panorama of our history in a most extraordinary way. He posed, on the very first page, three probing "fundamental questions" about the United States. "First, can a nation rise above the injustices of its origins and, by its moral purpose and performance, atone for them? Second, "In the process of nation-building, can ideals and altruism -- the desire to build the perfect community -- be mixed successfully with acquisitiveness and ambition, without which no dynamic society can be built at all?" And third, "…Americans originally aimed to build an other-worldly "City on a Hill," but found themselves designing a republic of the people, to be a model for the entire planet. Have they made good their audacious claims?"
Be Less Romantic About the Past
For many people, Christmas and New Year's feel like anything but the most wonderful time of the year. Some find the long winter nights depressing. Others can't muster much merriment in the face of what can seem like an endless procession of bleak headlines. Still others yearn for the sweetness of auld lang syne, when life moved at a more humane pace, and concerns that generate such angst today -- global warming, identity theft, Islamist terror, campaign finance -- troubled no one's sleep. Well, for anyone who could do with some extra cheer, a book published 40 years ago -- "The Good Old Days — They Were Terrible!" -- brims with reminders of all the blessings we have to count.
Sunday, December 28, 2014
Jeb Bush's Hurdles
In 1968, a singularly traumatic year -- assassinations, urban riots, 16,899 Americans killed in Vietnam -- Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the ebullient Minnesotan, said his presidential campaign was about "the politics of joy." This was considered infelicitous. He was, however, right to insist that, whatever America's vicissitudes, the nation's premises explain its trajectory and validate cheerfulness. Similarly, after a 40-year-old Arizonan decided to try politics as a candidate for the Phoenix city council in 1949, he said: "It ain't for life and it might be fun." Barry Goldwater was right: Politics is supposed to be fun, and done right it is.
Is ObamaCare Causing Health Care Rationing?
The argument for Obamacare really boils down to one idea: people without health insurance won't get medical care. Or if they do get it, the care will be too little and too late. Insure everybody, we were told, and everyone will have access to high quality, timely care. But is that really happening? It may not be. Unless they were previously uninsured, people who are getting health insurance in the (Obamacare) exchanges are likely facing greater financial barriers to care than they were before the health reform was enacted.
I Hate the Sins & the Sinners
I have never understood why people ever feel compelled to say they hate the sin, but not the sinner. I believe it was Jesus who first said those words, so I suppose Christians want to present themselves in the best possible light in hopes of getting a place with a pool in Heaven. Even though I'm not a Christian, I'm certainly willing to grant that Jesus was a much nicer guy than I am. Still, it seems fairly obvious that without sinners, those pesky sins would quickly disappear. To my way of thinking, Barack Obama is the single biggest sinner in America. I don't believe that anything he says or does is in the best interests of our nation. Instead, everything comes down to partisan politics with this schmuck, whether it's attacking the police, refusing to green-light the Keystone pipeline or trashing the Constitution. On top of everything else, he sets a bad example for young people by being a hypocrite and a serial liar.
Saturday, December 27, 2014
Dear GOP: Show, Don't Tell
Hey, Jeb, Ted, Rand, Marco, Bobby, Chris and the dozen or more others I'm forgetting, here's something to write on your bathroom mirror in 2015 and beyond: The "P" in POTUS stands for "President," not "Pundit." I understand that the Seinfeldian faux-holiday Festivus is behind us, but I want to get at least this one grievance in for next year a bit early. Republicans have a tendency to tell, not show. They feel the need to explain why they are saying something, rather than work at simply saying what they need to say convincingly. I call it "reading your stage direction." The first president Bush was probably the worst sufferer of this political malady. The most famous example was when he was running against Bill Clinton in 1992. Clinton was probably the best faker of sincerity in modern American politics. Sticking with the Seinfeld theme, he followed George Costanza's dictum, "It's not a lie if you believe it." Clinton could convince himself that whatever he was saying was the truth, and that helped him sell himself as the Great Empathizer.