Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, December 18, 2014
The Rules of War Need Updating
The attack on a cafe in Sydney, Australia, by a self-described Islamic cleric with a long police record, left two hostages dead, along with the cleric, one Man Haron Monis. He was an Iranian refugee who enjoyed the hospitality and protection of the Australian government. That incident, which was televised worldwide, was quickly eclipsed by the murder of 145 people at an army-run school in Peshawar, Pakistan. Many of the dead were children. Press reports said Pakistani Taliban fighters burned a teacher alive in front of children and beheaded some of them. A Taliban spokesman said they were exacting revenge for a major operation by Pakistan's Army to clear Taliban strongholds in the North Waziristan tribal area near the Afghan border.
'Racial' Cop Stories That Didn't Make the Cut
In 2012, according to the CDC, 140 blacks were killed by police. That same year 386 whites were killed by police. Over the 13-year period from 1999 to 2011, the CDC reports that 2,151 whites were killed by cops -- and 1,130 blacks were killed by cops. Police shootings, nationwide, are down dramatically from what they were 20 or 30 years ago. The CDC reported that in 1968, shootings by law enforcement -- called "legal intervention" by the CDC -- was the cause of death for 8.6 out of every million blacks. For whites the rate was was .9 deaths per million.
Are Drone Strikes More Defensible Than Torture?
There are lots of hypocrisies surrounding the recently released executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA's detention and interrogation program. But they pale in comparison to the current Democratic silence about President Barack Obama's policy of targeted drone assassinations. Since 2004, drones have killed an estimated 2,400 to 3,888 individuals in Pakistan alone, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London. An estimated 345 to 553 individuals in Yemen have been killed in drone strikes over the same period. The BIJ reports that the Obama administration has "markedly stepped up the use of drones. Since Obama's inauguration in 2009, the CIA has launched 330 strikes on Pakistan -- his predecessor, President George Bush, conducted 51 strikes in four years."
The High Cost of Cheap Labor
The only reason that Ronald Reagan signed the first amnesty bill back in 1986 wasn't really because the Democratic Congress promised to build a fence at the border. After all, he'd been around when the Democrats reneged on the promise made to Nixon that if he agreed to pull the troops out of Vietnam, they would continue to arm and fund the South Vietnamese. He did, and naturally they didn't. The real reason Reagan signed the amnesty bill is because American business always wants the cheapest labor it can get its hands on. In the short term, it probably looks like a good deal all around. After all, the price of labor is always passed along to the consumer. However, in the long run it's a bad deal because most of those people are low wage earners, and the American citizen is eventually going to be stuck with the tab for their housing, health care, food stamps, schooling and, far too often, incarceration. In the end, we're all a lot better off paying an extra few cents for a head of lettuce or a few extra bucks for a meal.
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
The Obama Rule: Can I Get Away With It?
Call it the Obama rule. When will our president do something he wants to do that the Constitution or morality prohibits? When he can get away with it. President Barack Obama did not move forward with his unilateral action on immigration before the midterm elections, because he was worried he would pay too high a price. Additional congressional Democrats might have lost, and more Democrats would have blamed him for the losses. He moved forward with his unconstitutional action after the elections because he calculated -- correctly -- that Republican congressional leaders would let him get away with it.
Jeb Bush: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Waterboy
Allow me to unite America's left, right and center in just three words: No, Jeb, No. Former GOP Florida governor Jeb Bush made the obvious official this week when he announced on Facebook that he's "actively exploring" a 2016 White House run. Of course, he's running. That's what inveterate politicians do. Well, I hate to break it to Jeb Inc. There's no popular groundswell for Bush Part III. None, zip, nada. Independents, progressives and conservatives are all weary of the entrenched bipartisan dynasties that rule Washington and ruin America. Only in the hallowed bubble of D.C. and New York City elites does a Jeb Bush presidential bid make any sense.
Wise Warren and Crazy Cruz
Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Elizabeth Warren are polar opposites, a Tea Party conservative and an Occupy Wall Street socialist. Then there are the similarities: Both were elected in 2012, both have Harvard on their resume and both are mentioned as presidential material. But the media's read of the two demonstrates an unquestionable slant. Both senators have shaken up the Senate over heavy spending and regulation. When Warren does it, she's promoted as a profile in courage, standing up for fairness. When Cruz does it, he's a selfish brat causing meltdowns.
Iran Nuclear Talks Resume: Is It Jaw-Jaw or War-War?
Winston Churchill famously said "Jaw-Jaw is better than War-War." He was right, of course. But with Iran, the mullahs have made War-War *while* engaging us in Jaw-Jaw. They have played us along with these nuclear talks. Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the President of the National Council of Resistance of Iran. This extended transcript is worth the time to study. The stakes could not be higher. This is the voice of Iran's freedom front. It's been said that Iran's mullahs with a nuclear weapon is "1,000 times more deadly" even than ISIS.
If Waterboarding Works, Does That Make It Morally Acceptable?
In an interview on Sunday, NBC's Chuck Todd asked former Vice President Dick Cheney whether he is "OK" with the fact that a quarter of the suspected terrorists held in secret CIA prisons during the Bush administration "turned out to be innocent." Todd noted that one of those mistakenly detained men died of hypothermia after being doused with water and left chained to a concrete wall, naked from the waist down, in a cell as cold as a meat locker. Cheney replied that the end -- to "get the guys who did 9/11" and "avoid another attack against the United States" -- justified the means. "I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective," he said.
Jonathan Gruber Should've Been Time's Person of the Year
Jonathan Gruber should have been Time's Person of the Year. The magazine gave it to the "Ebola Fighters" instead. Good for them; they're doing God's work. Still, Gruber would have been better. Time's Person of the Year designation has lost a lot of its stature over recent years. Part of its decline can probably be attributed to the fact that it's come to be seen as an honorific. It was originally conceived to recognize the person who, "for better or for worse ... has done the most to influence the events of the year." So Adolf Hitler (1938) and Josef Stalin (1939 and again in 1942) qualified. In 2001, however, the editors couldn't bring themselves to bestow the title on Osama bin Laden, even though he certainly deserved it. (New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani got it instead for his heroic response to the evil deeds of the person who influenced the events of the year most decidedly for the worse.)
Should Profiling Be Banned?
Last week, the Obama administration announced new curbs on racial profiling by federal law enforcement. Before deciding whether this is good or bad policy, we might try to develop a description/definition of racial profiling or any other kind of profiling. A good definition of profiling in general is the use of an easily observed physical characteristic as a guess for some other, difficult-to-observe characteristic. The reason people profile is that information is costly and they seek methods to economize on information costs. One way to do that is through profiling.
Governing vs. Giving
It's the season for giving. That doesn't mean it's the season for government. Government creates loyalty in the minds of citizens by pretending to be Santa Claus, doling out gifts and favors. Politicians claim they help those unfortunates who aren't helped by coldhearted capitalism. The truth is, government gets in the way of charity, making it harder for people to help others and for the poor to help themselves. It also gets in the way of commerce, which is what *really* makes people better off.
The Suicidal Hashtags of the West
On Monday, Australian police stormed the Lindt Chocolate Cafe in Sydney, where an Islamist terrorist named Man Haron Monis had taken dozens of hostages and held them for 17 hours. Three people were killed, including Monis, and several others were wounded. Monis, an Iranian immigrant, had a long criminal record, including 40 charges for indecent and sexual assault, as well as an outstanding charge for accessory to murder in the killing of his ex-wife. Before his death, Monis requested an ISIS flag, and forced hostages to hold up the so-called Shahada flag, which proclaims in Arabic, "There Is No God But Allah, and Muhammad Is His Messenger."
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
The Christmas Spirit Can't Be Killed
Nothing brings out the unrelenting and self-righteous pettiness of the American left quite like Christmas. A courthouse Dallas, NC is the latest reminder. A nativity scene that has graced the Old Gaston Courthouse for the last 40 years has been removed, following complaints by a group of professional agitators known as the The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). The group prides itself as defenders of the constitutional separation of church and state, and as "an effective state/church watchdog and voice for freethought (atheism, agnosticism, skepticism)." The self-appointed watchdog part is certainly accurate, but the notion that this is a bunch of free thinkers is as phony as Hillary Clinton. Genuine free thinkers would be far more acquainted with a concept that stood this nation in good stead for more than two centuries: live and let live. For decades upon decades, those who believed in Christmas enjoyed such holiday displays, while those who didn't countenanced them with the kind of grace and tolerance that live and let live evinced.
Ph.D.'s and Other False Gods
I have been devoting my columns this month to the Ten Commandments because we need a fixed moral anchor to solve the problem of evil. And nothing is as effective as the Ten Commandments. Two weeks ago PragerUniversity.com released 11 five-minute video courses -- one for each Commandment and an introduction. It has received over two million views. Everything needed to make a good world is contained in these Ten Commandments.
Who's the 'Extremist' Around Here Anyway?
Among the journalistic takeaways from the late Congress' death frenzies is the equivocal plight of the two parties -- the grown-up deal makers in both cases squeezed by hardcore, do-it-our-way extremists. On the Republican side John Boehner beset by Ted Cruz, in the Democratic camp the pragmatic Hillary Clinton wing forced to contend with the true-believing fans of Elizabeth Warren. It is the strategy some of our friends in the liberal media may have seized on to take away the bitter taste of defeat at the polls. In this telling, the left-left MoveOn.org/Daily Kos faction, anti-military and pro-big government, has its right-wing counterpart in the "populist" social conservative/Tea Party coterie. The members of both movements groove on purity. "No compromise!" is their watchword, "never" their adverb of choice. Their feet are planted in intellectual concrete.
Christophobes March On
America's Christophobes have been plenty busy lately. Maybe the Christmas season makes them especially nervous. A few weeks ago, Atlanta Fire Rescue Department Chief Kelvin Cochran was suspended for a month without pay for the unforgivable sin of self-publishing a Christian book in which he expressed his disapproving views about homosexual behavior, among other things. City spokeswoman Anne Torres said: "We understand that (Cochran) was distributing the book to other employees. We are still not sure yet what the circumstances surrounding that are. ... The bottom line is that the (Mayor Kasim) Reed administration does not tolerate discrimination of any kind."
Tortured Reasoning
Critics and defenders of the harsh interrogation methods applied to captured terrorists can argue forever over whether those methods were "torture." But any serious discussion of a serious issue -- and surely terrorism qualifies as serious -- has to move beyond semantics and confront the ultimate question: "Compared to what alternative?" If you knew that there was a hidden nuclear time bomb planted somewhere in New York City -- set to go off today -- and you had a captured terrorist who knew where and when, would you not do anything whatever to make him tell you where and when? Would you pause to look up the definition of "torture"? Would you even care what the definition of "torture" was, when the alternative was seeing millions of innocent people murdered?
Gov. Mike Pence: National Government Is Not the Nation
If success at the state level were enough to recommend someone for president of the United States, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana would be among the frontrunners for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. According to the governor's office, Pence has "signed into law $643 million in annual tax relief: That includes: $313 million for hardworking Hoosiers, thanks to last year's 5 percent income tax reduction, the largest state tax cut in Indiana history." In addition, the state corporate tax rate was reduced from 6.5 percent to 4.9 percent, making it the third lowest in the country and contributing to Indiana's increase in the labor force, which, Pence's office says, has grown by more than 51,000 over the past year, five times the national growth rate.