Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
The Jihadists' Eternal Plan
Here's the first and last rule of Islamic jihad: If at first you don't succeed, plot, plot again. 9/11 wasn't the first. 9/11 won't be the last. It's not "fear-mongering" to face reality. These head-chopping, throat-slitting, bloodthirsty hijackers -- of planes, freedom and civilization -- have conspired for decades to inflict modern mass murder on the West. Their homicidal mission is spectacular destruction in the name of the Koran. Never forget: Eternal Muslim hatred of infidels didn't start with George W. Bush. Or George Herbert Walker Bush. Or Ronald Reagan. Or the creation of Gitmo. Or the birth of Israel. Or the Twin Towers. Or the Khobar Towers. Or Lockerbie. Or the U.S.S. Cole. Or Fort Hood. Or the Beirut Marine barracks bombings. Or the bombings of the U.S. embassy in Africa, the bombing of U.S. military headquarters in Riyadh and the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi.
Journalists in Screech Advocacy Mode
It is amazing the degree to which the media can politicize -- always from a leftist perspective -- just about anything in the news. No matter what the issue, there's the spin, always the spin, especially in the "analysis" reports where "journalists" go in screech advocacy mode while projecting a sober, dispassionate evaluation. Burger King announced that it could no longer abide by our corporate tax rate, the highest in the industrial world, and was moving to Canada, so ABC's Diane Sawyer decided this was a betrayal of the company's civic responsibility, stating that Burger King now stands "accused of doing something a lot of Americans question: defecting, heading north of the border to Canada, and saving a lot of tax money." Chris Matthews channeled his inner Abbie Hoffman to savage Burger King backer Warren Buffett for daring to wish a profit for his investors. "We used to call these guys 'pigs' back in the Sixties. They only liked America because it was a good place to make money."
The Global Map, 2017
Barack Obama pledged to radically transform America when he took office. He didn't stop at America. President Obama's greatest legacy may be the radical reshaping of the global map. Fast forward three years. Here's where we stand. Given Europe's failure to stand up to Russian aggression in Crimea, Russia's borders have expanded to include Eastern Ukraine, northern Kazakhstan and larger portions of Moldova. As of 2014, Russia had consolidated its hold on Transnistria, the Eastern region of Moldova, which is heavily Russian; Russia had annexed Crimea; Russia had placed troops inside Eastern Ukraine.
Ending Evil vs. Defending the Country
Do the Islamic State's Crimes Justify Obama's New War?
Hold On, Mr. President
"Do you have a strategy now, Mr. President?" asked the cover of the Daily News next to a photo of the second American journalist to be beheaded by the terrorist group ISIS. The impulse to "do something" to counter such evil is strong. But why do we assume that government doing something is always an improvement over government doing nothing? In domestic policy, encouraging government to act leads to nonsense like the "stimulus spending" that created boondoggles such as Cash for Clunkers.
Upholding America's Honor in a Dangerous World
"I should have anticipated the optics," President Obama said by way of acknowledging that golfing right after making a statement about the beheading of James Foley looked bad. "Part of this job is also the theater of it," he said. "It's not something that always comes naturally to me. But it matters." For those who remember that this is the same guy with the Greek pillars, the campaign stop in Berlin, the newly minted "seal" of the president-elect, it was an odd confession. Obama likes theater just fine; he just doesn't like having to read from a script not of his choosing. That is probably why it took him so many tries to come up with the right words for what we will do about the Islamic State. One wonders whether he looked at the prepared remarks, turned to Valerie Jarrett and asked, "What's my motivation?"
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
What Is the Ex-Im Bank Hiding?
It seems the Export-Import Bank of the United States is once again putting up walls to keep the duly-elected representatives of the American people from getting a look at their inner workings. Ex-Im Chairman Fred Hochberg recently dashed off a letter to U.S. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Patrick McHenry in which he dismissed the committee's request to interview Ex-Im officials, shying away from what he called "the inherently adversarial nature of transcribed interviews." The Ex-Im Chairman also defended the Bank's practice of making heavy redactions to the documents they have deigned to turn over to the committee. He did, however, offer to provide "additional information if you have questions about particular redactions." This, apparently, is a man who thinks having committee staff pick out every single blacked-out word or phrase is a good use of their taxpayer-funded time. Or maybe, because he knows how prevalent these redactions are -- as Chairman Hensarling put it, "more redactions than answers" -- this is simply another attempt to slow-walk any investigation into the Ex-Im Bank's affairs.
A Society Sickened by Welfare
America can no longer afford the current level of government largesse
The Fed Can't Fix the Economy
A strange thing happened at the Federal Reserve Bank's summer-end conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo. Usually these are boring affairs, but liberal protesters crashed the party this time, and demanded that the Fed help the poor by holding interest rates close to zero and injecting more dollars into the economy. An exchange between Reggie Rounds of Ferguson, Mo., and Fed vice chairman Stanley Fischer tells the whole story: Mr. Rounds: "We're desperately needing a stimulant into this economy." Mr. Fischer: "That's what the Fed has been trying to do and will continue to try to do."
Free Speech or Flee Speech in the U.S. Senate?
Congress may have spent a month back home, but Senate leaders obviously didn't learn anything while they were there. With just 10 days left for legislative business, Harry Reid's chamber will have plenty of voters to answer to about why their leaders didn't deal with the crises at hand -- on the border, in the Middle East, and with the economy. Instead, the party desperately trying to prove it can still be trusted to lead the Senate is making the opposite case with dead-end proposals like Sen. Tom Udall's (D-N.M.). Despite the more urgent things on the Senate's to-do-list, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) isn't giving up on his party's First Amendment rewrite, S.J. 19, and insists on wasting valuable time on a politically-driven stunt that tries to limit the accountability Congress has to voters. Under Sen. Udall's resolution, liberals are pushing to strip political speech out of the First Amendment and put it under a separate legislative box where Congress -- the objects of that speech -- can regulate it.
Obama Goes to War
Wasn't that a good one about the president promising an executive order on immigration -- only he discovered the time wasn't quite right, what with an election coming on, so he pivoted to the Islamic State, which he is promising to degrade and destroy in two or three years, only ... ? The "onlys" tend to get you when they accumulate too fast: attempted cover for broken promises and stalled undertakings. This might be another way of saying, does Barack Obama, hours after kicking the immigration can down the road, really expect the world to take with profound seriousness his renewal of the terror war he denounced when others were waging it?
Will Justice Do Justice in Ferguson?
It has been over a month since Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Mo., and we have yet to hear the police officer's version of events. Was Officer Darren Wilson badly injured in his scuffle with Brown? Did Brown attempt to seize the officer's weapon? Did Wilson have reason to fear for his own life? None of these answers has been forthcoming, which is odd and, frankly, suspicious. There are many possible explanations for the tragic death of Brown ranging from justifiable self-defense by Wilson to bad judgment by both parties and all the way to racially motivated murder. But the news that Eric Holder's Justice Department is undertaking an investigation hardly instills confidence that the truth will ever be known.
1,400 English Girls Raped by Multiculturalism
Last week, it was revealed that between 1997 and 2013, at least 1,400 girls -- in just one relatively small English city (Rotherham, population 275,000) had been raped by gangs of men over the past decade. As summarized in a British government inquiry: "It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators."
Why I Wrote 'Jesus on Trial'
In case you haven't heard, despite all the noise we've been trying to make about it, I have a new book out, "Jesus on Trial: A Lawyer Affirms the Truth of the Gospel," and I'm excited about it. It is on Christian apologetics, which means it defends the Christian faith and its truth claims, but it also includes my personal journey from skeptic to believer and a discussion of basic Christian doctrine. What good is it to believe that Christianity is true if you don't have some idea what it stands for? Why would I, a lawyer and political columnist, change course in this book and write about religion instead of politics? Well, to be honest, I wasn't sure I should write about this subject when I first considered the idea, because I wasn't sure that as a layman, I had the required credentials to undertake such a task.
Obama's Delusions Dispelled? Well, We Can Hope for Change
"If you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling apart," President Obama told Democratic mega-contributors last month in one of the 400-plus fundraisers of his presidency. But not to worry. "The world has always been messy," he said. "In part, we're just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through." Like being beheaded by Islamist terrorists. Or having your country invaded by Russian soldiers. The president gives the impression of trying to reassure not so much his audience, as himself. For this is not what he expected for his presidency. The world was not supposed to fall apart. It was supposed to come together, as he assured thousands at Berlin's Tiergarten in 2008 that their wall had come down because "there is no challenge that is too great for a world that stands as one."
The McDonnell Verdict
The soap opera that played out in Richmond these last weeks and ended with the convictions of former Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, on multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy charges is a tragedy for them, their children and the voters of Virginia. By most objective standards, McDonnell did a good job as governor. He took a deficit left by his predecessor and turned it into a surplus without raising taxes or cutting essential services. But a jury found that he and his wife also served themselves, using his office to get sweetheart loans and other favors in exchange for access and the promotion of a commercial product by their benefactor, Jonnie Williams, who avoided indictment by testifying for the prosecution.
Success or Failure?
Those people who say that President Obama has no clear vision and no clear strategy for dealing with the ISIS terrorists in the Middle East may be mistaken. It seems to me that he has a very clear and very consistent strategy. And a vision behind that strategy. First the strategy -- which is to get each crisis off the front pages and off television news programs as quickly as he can, in whatever way he can, at the lowest political cost. Calling ISIS a junior varsity months ago accomplished that goal. Saying before the 2012 elections that "bin Laden is dead" and that terrorism was defeated accomplished the goal of getting reelected.
War & Peace
I used to think that the only way the various factions in the world would ever unite is if earth were being attacked by alien life forms from outer space. No longer do I believe that even a Martian army could do the trick. I'm not even convinced that such an invasion would unite Americans, let alone Russians and Ukrainians, Israelis and Palestinians or Muslims and civilized people. Americans are so divided that conservatives and liberals can't even agree that the butchers in ISIS should be confronted and exterminated. But, then, we Americans have a history of ostrich-like isolationism. There were tens of millions who saw no good reason to go to war with Nazi Germany even after Hitler had spent over three years gobbling up our allies in Europe and obliterating the Jewish population. If we hadn't been attacked at Pearl Harbor, which led FDR to declare war on Japan, which, in turn, led Germany to declare war on us, today all of Europe not ruled by Russia would probably be under the Nazi boot.
Monday, September 8, 2014
To the AGW Crowd: Is It Really Worth the Cost?
After 18 years of the magic "pause," are climate alarmists aware of where they have pushed the nation? For the record: Saying "pause" is the height of arrogance. First, it assumes the global temperature will start to rise again by the same people who said it would keep warming. Secondly, there has been a small, but perceptible cooling trend in the last 10 years.
An 'LBJ Law' for Kentucky?
"My policy on cake," the ebullient Tory mayor of London, Boris Johnson, once remarked, "is pro having it and pro eating it." Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator and potential GOP presidential aspirant, has hopes of embracing a similar policy on running for office. Kentuckians, to their credit, aren't buying it. Paul was elected to the US Senate in 2010, and he has said clearly that he intends to run for reelection in 2016. But almost from the moment he took office, he has also shown every sign of wanting to run for president in 2016. And that poses a problem: Kentucky law explicitly bars individuals from running in a regular election for two offices simultaneously: "No candidate's name shall appear on any voting machine or absentee ballot more than once."