Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
'Unbroken' the Film
I wanted to like the movie because I love the book. Laura Hillenbrand's bestseller, "Unbroken," is a classic. While I had heard reports that the turning point in the book never made it to film, I attended a pre-release screening with an open mind. Audiences are told "Unbroken" is a "true story." It is true, as far as it goes, but the story is incomplete. There have been many World War II stories told in film depicting triumphs of personal courage and survival. The story of Louis Zamperini is one such story, but with an added dimension. Zamperini, who died earlier this year at age 97, came home an angry man. He became addicted to alcohol and cigarettes and verbally abused his young wife as he wrestled with his inner demons. The skeleton of his story is in the film -- the plane crash at sea while on a rescue mission; the 47 days floating on a raft before being picked up by a Japanese ship and thrown into a prison camp; the relentless torture and eventual liberation at the end of the war.
Kim Jong-Un, Movie Critic
I've had some bad months in my life, but none has been quite as gruesome as the one that Sony just endured. First, there was the leak of those embarrassing emails in which uber-producer Scott Rudin trashed Angelina Jolie, and Sony head Amy Pascal made racist comments about Obama's taste in movies. Ms. Pascal made it even worse by then going to Al Sharpton, begging him for dispensation. Frankly, I'd fire her for that alone. If Rudin and Pascal have one reason to envy me, it's that I can never be embarrassed by leaked emails. You see, whenever I have a politically incorrect thought to share, I don't waste it in an email; I work it into an article. Anyway, as bad as the leaks were, the studio made things worse when it backed down in the face of North Korean threats. I guess Sony was afraid that Kim Jong-un was going to have his pal Dennis Rodman set off stink bombs if "The Interview" was released. Frankly, judging by earlier Seth Rogen comedies, I'm sure this one didn't need any help when it came to stinking up movie houses.
All Life Matters: Jahi McMath's Journey
"Jahi McMath is ALIVE." The very first column I filed in 2014 exposed the plight of a beautiful young girl, the same age as my daughter, whom medical experts declared "brain dead" after a routine tonsillectomy gone wrong. Are you ready for the rest of the story? Doctors told Jahi's mom, Nailah Winkfield, that her child's organs would "shut down" and her brain would "liquefy" if kept on life support. Hostile hospital administrators in Oakland moved to pull the plug on Jahi. Medical officials callously referred to Jahi as "dead, dead, dead" and dismissed the child as a "body." Smug critics mocked and hounded the family to give up and let go. Jahi's life, they concluded, was worthless.
Blame Game in New York Cop Killings Shows a Demonization Double Standard
Going by objective standards of reason and fairness, Al Sharpton is not to blame for the assassination of two New York City cops over the weekend. Nor are New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, President Obama or any of the protesters and activists they supported, encouraged and allied themselves with. Going by what we know, the only person to blame is the man police identified as the killer, Ismaaiyl Brinsley. This is the standard I've upheld in this space for years, when one madman after another has killed and maimed in the name of one cause or another. It's also been necessary to uphold this standard when madmen have killed for no political cause whatsoever, but politicians and journalists have been determined to claim otherwise.
The State Department's Naughty List
After President Barack Obama decided to normalize relations with Cuba, The New York Times reported last week, he "instructed Secretary of State John Kerry to begin the process of removing Cuba from the list of states that sponsor terrorism." If that sequence seems backward to you, you are giving the State Department's list more respect than it deserves. The list, created in 1979, triggers onerous trade and financial restrictions under three federal statutes. It is supposedly reserved for countries that have "repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism." But the State Department has sole discretion to make that determination, and once a country is on the list, it stays there, regardless of its government's actions, until the State Department decides to take it off.
The Coming Pension Meltdown
For outrageous government scam of the year, it's hard to compete with the news of the supersized public-employee pensions in California. If you haven't already heard: In 2013, an assistant fire chief in Southern California collected a $983,319 pension last year. A police captain in Los Angeles received nearly $753,861. Talk about a golden parachute. The report on Golden State government pensions contains a list that runs pages and pages of hundreds of "public servants" who have hit the pension jackpot with annual pensions of a half-million a year. It's like they're playing the game "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" With taxpayer money. By some estimates, the unfunded pension liabilities in California have eclipsed $750 billion, which means that in a few years, residents will be paying their already-highest in the nation income and sales taxes not for roads, bridges, schools and public safety but for retired employees living like Daddy Warbucks.
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
There Is No Law Against the Presence of Christmas
There are at least two things you can count on when it comes to Americans and Christmastime. One is that they like to put up Nativity scenes. The other is that they don't like being told what to do, especially by outsiders. So you can imagine how the residents of an Indiana town feel about a Wisconsin-based atheist group demanding that they remove the Nativity scene they have displayed by the Franklin County Courthouse every holiday season for the past 50 years. Never mind tradition. Forget the fact that most of the residents of Brookville, Indiana, like the Nativity scene and want it up. The Freedom From Religion Foundation is here to out-Grinch the Grinch with a patently absurd message: the Nativity scene violates the separation of church and state.
The Worst Sin
The Ten Commandments is the most morally influential piece of legislation ever written. To give a good idea of how relevant each of the ten is, take the third commandment, one of the two most misunderstood commandments (the other is "Do not Murder," which I explained previously). Is there such a thing as "the worst sin" -- one sin that is worse than all others? In fact, there is. I am aware that some people differ. They maintain that we can't declare any sin worse than any other. "To God, a sin is a sin," is how it's often expressed. In this view, a person who steals a stapler from the office is committing as grievous a sin in God's eyes as a murderer.
The Proofs of the Christmas Pudding
Bethlehem. Ah. Yes. There we were as a matter of fact, and not many weeks ago, either. Also at Nazareth. Also -- of course -- at Jerusalem, where everybody goes who goes to the Holy Land, with a sense of immense events and occasions to be taken in, the more so as Christmas draws near. I can say this about the Holy Land: Its rocks and crevices and seas and flaming sunsets prove nothing to those who have declared themselves immune to the proofs pointed to for the past couple of millennia in terms of the baby known to history as Christ the Lord. You drive past a hillside reported as the hillside occupied by those shepherds summoned by angels to attend the newborn child in his manager. Was it the place or wasn't it? Who knows? Who knows for that matter, pious claims notwithstanding, where the baby himself lay? If he lay anywhere. If there was a baby at all.
The Rape on Campus Epidemic
The total discrediting of Rolling Stone's story on rape at the University of Virginia has shined a light on one of the least palatable features of American life: the so-called epidemic of rape on campus. Authorities from Barack Obama on down have cited the phony statistic that one in five college women is raped. Phony because it's based on a 2007 survey conducted in two Midwestern schools not of a random sample, but of a small number of self-selected respondents and includes unwanted touching and kissing as "sexual assault." A Department of Justice survey released this month presents a different picture. Between 1995 and 2013, it reports, an average of 0.61 percent of female students were raped or sexually assaulted every year -- 2.4 percent over four years, not 20 percent. Moreover, DOJ reports, that rate has been declining significantly in recent years, in line with a national decline in violent rape.
The Cross Was Preceded by the Cradle
God became a man to save us from our sins, which he did finally and completely on the Cross. We commemorate his death and resurrection on Easter, but his suffering on our behalf began much earlier than that. We would do well to remember that at Christmastime, when we celebrate our savior's birth. Seminary professor Bob Tuttle, in his 2006 book, "Shortening the Leap," puts that in perspective poignantly: "The Jesus of glory still bears the marks of the Incarnation, and not just in his hands, his side and his feet, but in his navel, because the suffering began in the manger, not on the Cross."
Who's Responsible?
The cold-blooded murder of two New York City policemen as they sat in their car is not only an outrage but also a wake-up call. It shows, in the most painful way, the high cost of having demagogues, politicians, mobs and the media constantly taking cheap shots at the police. Those cheap shots are in fact very expensive shots, not only to the police themselves but to the whole society. Someone once said that civilization is a thin crust over a volcano. The police are part of that thin crust. We have seen before our own eyes, first in Ferguson, Missouri and then in other communities, what happens when there is just a small crack in that crust, and barbarism and arson burst out.
Cuba Libré!
Is it possible to hold two seemingly contradictory thoughts about the president's decision to partially end the half-century embargo against Cuba? Can one agree with conservative critics, from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), to Rush Limbaugh about how the Castro brothers are, apparently, getting everything they want and how the U.S. gets nothing but promises from a repressive regime that lies -- and still back the president's decision? I will try. President Obama's foreign policy has been one of retreat and coddling of tyrants with no positive results for the U.S. But perhaps without realizing it, his decision to remove some of the restrictions on travel to Cuba for some Americans, to allow the purchase of some Cuban products and open the possibility that American businesses might soon return to the island may be the diplomatic equivalent of the joint U.S.-Israeli project that slowed Iran's progress toward manufacturing a nuclear weapon.
The American Left Owns the NYPD Assassinations
"What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want it? Now!" The mob, representing the ultimate aspirations of a divide-and-conquer American left, got what it wanted. NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were executed by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, a career criminal with 19 arrests to his "credit." A criminal who made his intentions known on his Instagram page. "I'm Putting Wings on Pigs Today," the assassin wrote. "They Take 1 Of Ours . . . Let's Take 2 of Theirs." The post included a picture of the same silver automatic handgun used in the killings, and the same camouflage pants and blue sneakers Brinsley was wearing when he took his own life as police were closing in. The statements were filed under the despicable hashtag, #ShootThePolice, and two other hashtags referencing Eric Garner and Michael Brown. The two men represent the American left's latest narratives revolving around a nation full of racist out-of-control cops who target innocent black men. Make no mistake: this is an atrocity *wholly owned* by the American left.
Monday, December 22, 2014
The Great Lima Climate Change Shakedown
The global warming brigades from around the world gathered last week at a United Nations climate change conference in Lima to save the planet. The nations from across the planet were supposed to link hands and all would agree to slash their green house gas emissions. Instead the conference was a complete dud. That might be putting it charitably. The BBC described the final agreement as "a weak and ineffectual compromise" while green groups complain that it actually "weakens international climate rules." It turns out most of the nations of the world see the climate change issue as merely a shake down opportunity to leverage more aid money from American taxpayers.
A Happy Christmas for the Castro Regime
After five years in a Cuban dungeon, American aid contractor Alan Gross was finally freed Wednesday, his release part of a deal to restore full diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba. But there will be no freedom for the many thousands of Cuban citizens locked in the Castros' prisons -- not even after a US embassy is reopened in Havana. The United States has always had diplomatic ties with nasty regimes. In that sense, President Obama's announcement last week that he intends to normalize relations with Cuba merely adds another to the list. But Cuba isn't just another dictatorship. To begin with, it is the only remaining totalitarian state in the Western Hemisphere. The Castro brothers' regime "continues to repress individuals and groups who criticize the government or call for basic human rights," notes a recent Human Rights Watch summary of conditions on the island. "Officials employ a range of tactics to punish dissent and instill fear in the public, including beatings, public acts of shaming, termination of employment, and threats of long-term imprisonment."
It's All Black & White
When I saw all those people marching in large cities across America, tying up streets, bridges and even clogging up entrances to department stores, making Christmas gift shopping an even bigger headache than usual, it occurred to me how far racial relations have declined over the past six years. And it's all because race hustlers like Obama, Holder, Sharpton and New York City's Mayor Bill De Blasio, have tried to cash in on the unfortunate deaths of a couple of 300-pound thugs named Brown and Garner, who would still be alive if they hadn't tried to resist arrest for their crimes. A lot of people are at a loss when trying to figure out why blacks continue to elect those who kept slaves; who formed the KKK; who enacted and enforced Jim Crow laws; who maintained separate schools and lunch counters; who turned cities like Detroit into American versions of Hiroshima; who turned the dogs and fire hoses on them; but who nevertheless continue to vote for the party of George Wallace, Robert Byrd, Orville Faubus and Bull Connor.
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Is Liberalism Intellectually Bankrupt?
Howard Dean, who is thought to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, told reporters the other day that he supports our policy of using drones to kill people (and all those who happen to be near them) without warning. He also has no objection to the National Security Agency listening to his phone calls and monitoring his email. Donny Deutsch, the reliable voice of the left on "Morning Joe," told TV viewers that he supports the CIA's torture activities -- recently revealed in a Senate committee report. These views are very different from what one typically finds in the unsigned editorials of The New York Times -- causing one to wonder what exactly is happening to left-of-center thinking.
Kerry: Lose That Limp Shrimp Pink Tie!
Well, here's the problem. No wonder the U.S.-Iranian nuclear talks are going nowhere. Sec. of State John Kerry has had to kick the can down the road -- again. He just gave Iran another extension on the West's deadline to come to an agreement about Iran's drive for a nuclear weapon. Deadline? Red line? Dead red line? Secretary Kerry has entered into talks with Iran's Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif. These are the highest level contacts since the Ayatollah Khomeini sparked the revolution in 1979 that brought the Mullahs to absolute power in that Shiite nation. The media are duly impressed. It is historic. Has to be. After all, John Kerry is there.
Lighting Fuses in Oklahoma
Scott Pruitt enjoyed owning a AAA baseball team here, but he is having as much fun as Oklahoma's attorney general, and one of the Obama administration's most tenacious tormentors. The second existential challenge to the Affordable Care Act began here. In the first, decided in June 2012, the Supreme Court saved the ACA by reading it imaginatively. The court held that although Congress could not, in the name of regulating commerce, penalize people for not engaging in commerce (buying insurance), the penalty linked to the individual mandate actually could be considered -- although Congress did not so consider it -- an exercise of Congress' enumerated power to tax.