Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Sunday, November 16, 2014
Liberals Already Trying to Re-write the History of the Obama Presidency
The Obama presidency is a failed presidency. He has presided over one of the slowest economic recoveries in history. His foreign policy has been a disaster. ObamaCare is a mess. And it's hard to lay the blame off on anyone else. The president didn't make Republicans part of any of his decisions and most of the time he ignored congressional Democrats as well. To make matters worse, Barack Obama is the most polarizing president we have had in the past 60 years. What makes that so strange is that we were all promised something completely different.
A Murderer's Warped Idealism
Western reflection about human nature and the politics of the human condition began with the sunburst of ancient Greece 2,500 years ago, but lurched into a new phase 70 years ago with the liberation of the Nazi extermination camps. The Holocaust is the dark sun into which humanity should stare, lest troubling lessons be lost through an intellectual shrug about "the unfathomable." Now comes an English translation of a 2011 German book that refutes a 1963 book and rebukes those who refuse to see the Holocaust as proof of the power of the most dangerous things -- ideas that denigrate reason. The German philosopher Bettina Stangneth's "Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer" responds to Hannah Arendt's extraordinarily and perversely influential "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil."
America Is Tied to the Train Tracks
During the silent movie era, every villain eventually tied every heroine to the railroad tracks. Just in the nick of time, the hero would gallop up on horseback and free her just before the 4:20 out of Joplin came barreling through. Once in a while, it would be Rin Tin Tin who untied the knots with his teeth, a trick not even Tom Mix ever mastered. These days, the progressives have hogtied America and it grows increasingly unlikely that either man or beast would be able to rescue her.
Saturday, November 15, 2014
Marriage Is Pro-Growth
The greatest economic challenge of our time is how to restore economic growth. Over the past dozen years, average real growth has slowed to 1.8 percent annually, under both Republican and Democratic presidents and congresses. It's a bipartisan problem. And it's a new one. For the past 50 years or so, the American economy grew at just less than 3.5 percent per year. But we're now experiencing one of the longest slow-growth periods in the past 100 years. Excluding the Great Depression, I bet it is the longest slow-growth period in a century.
From The Comedy Store
Barack Obama flied to Asia this week where he attended summits in Australia, Burma and China to discuss world trade and regional stability. There's another reason why the president decided to go halfway around the world. If he goes any farther he starts coming back.
Friday, November 14, 2014
Truthy: The Tax-Funded Speech Monitoring and Suppression Project
One professor’s million-dollar campaign against conservatives, courtesy of the taxpayer.
Cynical Politics Drives President's Actions
President Obama is expected to act in the next few days to grant legal status to millions of illegal immigrants, fulfilling a promise he made before the election. Giving legal status to people who have lived and worked in the United States for a decade or more, paid taxes, kept out of trouble, contributed to their local economies, and raised children who are American citizens is the right and moral thing to do. But the right thing to do is not necessarily legal when it means bypassing Congress -- and Obama's decision has as much to do with politics as it does morality.
One Nation Under Godlessness
Cheating. Bullying. Cybersexting. Hazing. Molestation. Suicide. Drug abuse. Murder. Scanning the headlines of the latest scandals in America's schools, it's quite clear that the problem is not that there's too much God in students' lives. The problem is that there isn't nearly enough of Him. With the malfunction of moral seatbelts and the erosion of moral guardrails, too many kids have turned to a pantheon of false gods, crutches and palliatives. They're obsessed with "Slender Man" and "Vampire Diaries." Alex from Target's hair and Rihanna's tattoos. Overpriced basketball sneakers and underdressed reality stars. Choking games and YouTube games. Gossip and hookups. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat.
The US-China Climate Change Deal Is Terrible; Fortunately, It Doesn't Matter
At a Beijing news conference, President Barack Obama called a new China-United States climate deal a "historic agreement." Grist assures us that the "new U.S.-China climate deal is a game changer." Bloomberg Businessweek concurred, explaining "why the U.S.-China emissions pact could be a climate change breakthrough." Vox took it even further and declared, "Obama's climate deal proves China is the biggest foreign policy success of his presidency." (Which may be true. And sad.) The rest of the media, unsurprisingly, offered comparable takes on the deal. I guess that when you're on the lookout for good news, any morsel will do. But there are two problems with treating the deal as big news. 1) We're not really doing anything we weren't going to do anyway. 2) Neither is China.
The Gruber Confession
It's not exactly the Ems Dispatch (the diplomatic cable Bismarck doctored to provoke the 1870 Franco-Prussian War). But what the just-resurfaced Gruber Confession lacks in world-historical consequence, it makes up for in world-class cynicism. This October 2013 video shows MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, a principal architect of Obamacare, admitting that, in order to get it passed, the law was made deliberately obscure and deceptive. It constitutes the ultimate vindication of the charge that Obamacare was sold on a pack of lies. "Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage," said Gruber. "Basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass."
The American Public Gets Smart
So Jonathan Gruber thinks the American people are stupid, does he? Gruber is a complete nobody to most Americans, but his face should be on a Most Wanted poster in every Post Office. He was one of the chief architects and cheerleaders for ObamaCare, aka the fraudulent Affordable Care Act that Republicans should be working overtime right now to repeal, not fix or reform. Gruber exploded into the news cycle this week because of some things he said publicly last year about how Democrats were able to slip ObamaCare past the trusting citizenry.
Stupid Is as Stupid Votes?
What's rarer than an honest politician? A lying one who admits it. That's essentially what ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber did in a viral video about the President's strategy for passing his signature policy. In it, he admits what shouldn't be news to anyone: that the legislation was built on a pack of lies and passed because too many Americans couldn't see through them. "Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage," Gruber said at a University of Pennsylvania lecture last year. "And basically, call it the 'stupidity of the American voter' or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass." The bill, he explains, was intentionally written "in a tortured way" -- not just to confuse voters, but the government agencies pricing out the policy. Raising the hackles of voters everywhere, Gruber arrogantly praised the ploy, [saying](http://dailycaller.com/2014/11/11/gruber-now-accusing-gop-of-trying-to-confuse-people-about-obamacare/), "It's a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter."
GOP Aims to Thwart Obama's Lawless Immigration Plans
It's hard to conceive of a presidential administration more cynical than one that would delay putting off issuing a lawless executive order on immigration until right after the congressional elections, but President Obama is doing just that. If he were sure the American public would support his unilateral action, he would not have hesitated to issue it prior to the elections, but he knew it wouldn't. Even if many people agree with the substance of his policy, which is hardly a foregone conclusion, he knows they don't agree with his method of thwarting the Congress, the Constitution and the rule of law.
How to Get Away With Sleazy Sex Scenes
While Obama's Federal Communications Commission obsesses over liberal concerns like the under-regulation of the Internet and whether "Redskins" is a profanity, broadcast television is sleazier than ever. As The Hollywood Reporter recently noted, "Nearly two months into the fall, it's clear that explicit jokes and boundary-pushing storylines are changing the definition of what sexual content is acceptable in primetime." For example, the Sept. 16 season premiere of the Fox sitcom "New Girl" featured star Zooey Deschanel repeatedly muttering "sex fist" as a motto for five friends all succeeding at casual sex after the last wedding of the summer. "Multiple fisting jokes followed," they reported.
Where Is the Carpathia?
When the Titanic sent out its SOS, it was the Carpathia that responded. Those who survived the disaster owed their lives to Captain Arthur Rostron who risked his ship, along with his own life and the lives of his crew, dodging icebergs for four long hours in order to rescue 705 people, too late to save the other 1,523. What puts me in mind of the gallant captain and his brave crew is that America is currently in icy and dangerous waters, thanks in good part to the man currently at America's helm. But one shouldn't give a pass to the millions of Americans who are only too happy to sit in the ship's lounge, oblivious to the danger, noshing on the hors d'oeuvres and listening to the band play "Nearer My God to Thee" while the sea water laps at their knees.
Is This the Political Map of the Future?
If you're a political junkie -- or at least if you're a conservative political junkie -- you've probably seen the map. It's a map of the United States showing the congressional districts won by Republicans in red and those won by Democrats in blue. It looks almost entirely red, except for some pinpoints of blue in major metropolitan areas and a few blue blotches here and there -- in Minnesota, Northern New Mexico and Arizona, Western New England, along the Pacific Coast. Of course, it's misleading. Congressional districts are of basically equal population, and Democrats tend to roll up big margins in densely populated areas. So while voters have elected at least 244 Republican congressmen and probably will end up with at least 247 -- more than in any election since 1928 -- the map overstates their dominance.
Thursday, November 13, 2014
Voters Are Giving You One More Chance, GOP
I'm sorry to have to tell you this, America, but Andrew Cotto is done defending you to his European friends at dinner parties. There's no use begging. You brought this on yourself -- as Cotto explains in his Salon.com article, "My American exceptionalism fantasy is over: How these midterms sealed the deal." You may not be aware, but Cotto is a novelist no one has heard of and also teaches creative writing at CUNY, so he's very big. More bad news from Salon.com: "O'Reilly is losing, and he knows it." That's why Republicans swept everything from U.S. senator to substitute-part-time-dog catcher. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted, Bill.
Cleveland Cavalier About First Amendment Rights
Coming soon to a city near you: Houston Mayor Annise Parker's totalitarian tactics! Pastors and churches beware: leaders in Cleveland, Ohio obviously didn't learn anything from [the controversy in Texas](http://frc.org/washingtonupdate/houstunned-pastors-vow-to-fight-mayors-sermon-grab), or they might have reconsidered their latest "transgender-inclusion bathroom and locker room ordinance." Starting today, the city is kicking off a round of meetings on the special rights measure that, like Houston's and others', would give locals the right to use any facility they want regardless of their biological sex. "We have to get out of the mindset that someone is going into the bathroom to attack," one city leader said in response to very real fears that the rule would be an open invitation to sexual predators.
Obama Is No Clinton
"I don't want to try to read the tea leaves on election results," said President Barack Obama following last Tuesday's historic defeat. Who's he kidding? A month earlier, the President was honest and accurate when he told a crowd at Northwestern University, "I'm not on the ballot this fall ... but make no mistake -- these policies are on the ballot, every single one of them." Fair enough. Republicans won governorships in Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts. As of now, with two races still undecided, Republicans gained seven seats in the Senate and at least 11 more seats in the House, with several races still undecided. Republicans now control 31 governorships, and Democrats control both state houses in only 11 states.
The Challenge: Homesickness
We've all felt that bittersweet longing for familiar places and people. Our experience of homesickness increases with age. The more places you visit and come to love, the less "at home" you feel in any one place. And the more people you come to cherish, the more often you miss someone. Perhaps those who can identify most with the term "homesickness" are those who have lost loved ones. It's more than a simple miss; an undeniable void is created at the departure of a loved one. Your world -- your home -- is altered and you know with final certainty that it will never return to the way things were.