Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Asian-Bashing Dems and Doormat Minorities Who Enable Them
Harry Reid is a bigoted Beltway corruptocrat with an interminable case of diarrhea of the mouth. The feeble-minded coot stuck his foot in that mess of a mouth again last week at the Las Vegas Asian Chamber of Commerce. But as mortifying as the Senate Majority Leader is, there's an even worse spectacle: Asian-American liberals who keep giving top Democrats and their partisan operatives blanket passes. Reid clumsily offered his assessment of the success and intelligence of business leaders of Asian descent at the gathering. "I don't think you're smarter than anybody else, but you've convinced a lot of us you are," he babbled. You put those uppity Asians in their places, Hater Harry!
Blacks Must Confront Reality
Though racial discrimination exists, it is nowhere near the barrier it once was. The relevant question is: How much of what we see today can be explained by racial discrimination? This is an important question because if we conclude that racial discrimination is the major cause of black problems when it isn't, then effective solutions will be elusive forever. To begin to get a handle on the answer, let's pull up a few historical facts about black Americans. In 1950, female-headed households were 18 percent of the black population. Today it's close to 70 percent. One study of 19th-century slave families found that in up to three-fourths of the families, all the children lived with the biological mother and father. In 1925 New York City, 85 percent of black households were two-parent households. Herbert Gutman, author of "The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925," reports, "Five in six children under the age of six lived with both parents." Also, both during slavery and as late as 1920, a teenage girl raising a child without a man present was rare among blacks.
Green Monster
Thanks, Environmental Protection Agency! You've required sewage treatment plants, catalytic converters on cars and other things that made the world cleaner than the world in which I grew up. Good work. Today, America's waterways are so much cleaner that I swim in New York City's once-filthy Hudson River -- right beside skyscrapers in which millions of people, uh, flush. The air we breathe is also cleaner than it's been for 60 years. In a rational world, environmental bureaucrats would now say, "Mission accomplished. We set tough standards, so we don't need to keep doing more. Stick a fork in it! We're done."
Those Who Go Unsung
The vast majority of Americans have never met Phil Weinberg. But that isn't because he's unimportant. It's because he *is* important. Like millions of Americans who toil largely in anonymity, participating daily in acts of courage and generosity, Phil has never been on CNN or Fox News; while he subscribes to The Wall Street Journal, he's never had his picture dot pixelated. That's because he, like so many other Americans, is too busy making the country work. Phil was born at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston in 1951, just down the block from Fenway Park, and grew up a diehard Red Sox fan (of course). He began working as a kid, selling papers on a street corner for eight cents a pop, shoveling snow for neighbors. He headed his junior congregation while still a kid at Hebrew school -- where his future wife, Cheryl, saw him, although she had no clue she'd end up marrying the tall, goofy guy who was leading services.
The Literal War on Drugs
The Promiscuous Use of SWAT Teams Is a Bigger Problem Than Armored Vehicles on Our Streets
If 'Evil' Doesn't Apply to Islamic State, What Does?
I never liked it when George W. Bush used the term "evildoers" to describe al-Qaeda and other terrorists. A lot of other people objected as well, but for different reasons. I didn't like the term because it always sounded to me like he was saying "evil Dewar's," as in the blended Scotch. (This always made some of Bush's statements chuckle-worthy -- "We will not rest until we find the evil Dewar's!") I prefer single malts, but "evil" always seemed unduly harsh. The more common objection to "evildoers" was that it was, variously, simplistic, Manichean, imperialistic, cartoonish, etc. "Perhaps without even realizing it," Peter Roff, then with UPI, wrote in October 2001, "the president is using language that recalls a simpler time when good and evil seemed more easy to identify -- a time when issues, television programs and movies were more black and white, not colored by subtle hues of meaning."
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Pulling Back the Curtain on 'Phony Scandals'
The current level of government secrecy is unprecedented
What Economic Recovery?
President Obama was doing a little jig on the tables last week at the White House – figuratively, or course – when we got a decent jobs and GDP report. Mr. Obama even chided those who would dare question his economic stewardship by saying: "Since I have come into office, there's almost no economic metric by which you couldn't say that the U.S. economy is better and that corporate bottom lines are better. None." Oh really. Well, you could have fooled the American people. The disconnect between the way Washington and Wall Street describe the state of the economy, and how real Americans feel its impact, is as wide as the Grand Canyon. A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds that 64% of Americans are "dissatisfied" with "the state of the economy" versus only 35% "satisfied." And 71% of Americans think the country is "on the wrong track."
Our Own Way -- That's All We Want
Yes, let's just go off and do things our own way -- because our own way is, in the circular reasoning of the modern age, our own way. As for the vote in Scotland next month, I exercise my right as a Scot in residence across the great water (because of the irreversible choices of long-dead ancestors) to declare myself: Nae!!! Nivver!!! The haranguers for independence are daft. Their little Highland fling deserves to fall flat. As for the modern tendency to disassociate, to move apart from, to cease collaboration with, to center intellectual activity within tighter and tighter bounds -- that's not going away. Community, and the partial submersion of crotchets and quirks and inner visions, lacks a future. We're right; everybody else is wrong -- that's the future.
The Republican Racist Myth
The unsinkable Charles B. Rangel appeared on C-SPAN over the weekend. Why unsinkable? Well, the House of Representatives censured the New York Democrat in 2010 by a vote of 333 to 79 (when the body was still majority Democrat) for violating 11 ethics rules and "bringing discredit to the House." The New York Times called it a "staggering fall" for the senior Democrat. But fall-schmall, he's since been reelected and will retire at his leisure. While chatting with Brian Lamb, Rangel dropped a few falsehoods as casually as cigar ash. This isn't to pick on Rangel. He's just illustrative. His assertion -- that the Republican and Democratic Parties "changed sides" in the 1960s on civil rights, with white racists leaving the Democratic Party to join the Republicans -- has become conventional wisdom. It's utterly false and should be rebutted at every opportunity.
On the Death of My Father
My father, Max Prager, died last week. Here are some thoughts on the death of a parent.
Obama's Staggering Blindness to Growing Terror Threat
One does not need to be Sun Tzu or George Patton to know that a nation must recognize an enemy before it can develop a strategy to defeat it. But one apparently does have to be someone other than President Barack Obama. Since he took office, Obama has spent considerable energy trying to convince us how peaceful and magnificent the religion of Islam is and how exceptional acts of terrorism springing from it are. He has also been telling us in words and deeds that such terrorism can best be prevented by overtures of peace and good will toward Islam, understanding that the root cause of this violence is poverty, and developing an action plan to address it.
If ISIS Attacks Again, What Will U.S. Do?
The Obama administration is reportedly considering airstrikes in Syria against the terrorist group ISIS. The New York Times quotes "a top national security adviser" to the president as saying the U.S. is "'not going to be restricted by borders' to protect its interests..." What about American cities? If ISIS attacks one or more U.S. cities, as it has threatened to do, what then? We can't bomb ourselves. How would we counter a nosedive in the stock market or the ensuing chaos and fear? The U.S. and Europe are vulnerable because of a false belief that we can somehow "convert" ideological and religious fundamentalists into pluralistic, tolerant people by exposing them to our way of life. So we let them into our nations. They build mosques, often with funding from Saudi Arabia, which practices and teaches a radical brand of Islam known as Wahhabism, and allow them to set up Islamic schools, at least some of which teach hatred of Jews, Christians and Western values.
Facts vs. Visions
The political left has been campaigning against the use of force since at least the 18th century. So it is not surprising that they are now arguing that heavily armed or aggressive police forces only inflame protesters and thus provoke violence. Statisticians have long warned that correlation is not causation, but they have apparently warned in vain. There is no reason to doubt that heavily armed police in riot gear may be more likely to show up where outbreaks of violence are expected. But when violence then breaks out, does that prove that it was the appearance of the police that caused it?
A Decent Lawyer Should Tell Liberals They're Fools
"About half the practice of a decent lawyer consists in telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should stop." So supposedly said Elihu Root, New York lawyer and secretary of war and of state, and U.S. senator from 1909 to 1915. Today it seems that many liberal "would-be clients" are in desperate need of what Root called "a decent lawyer." Take Texans for Public Justice, the so-called public interest group that has been pushing for the indictment of Gov. Rick Perry by a grand jury at the urging of special prosecutor Michael McCrum.
Inconvenient Truths
I had always thought that the greatest marketing strategy ever devised was the one the shampoo industry came up with when they advised people to shampoo, rinse and then repeat, thus doubling their sales. That one word, "repeat," was worth billions of dollars. But "Hope and Change," which was used to sell Barack Obama as a unifier was an even greater example of marketing legerdemain. For, far from unifying us, he has devoted every moment that he hasn't been golfing or fund-raising to dividing us. Franklin Roosevelt who, ideologically, had far more in common with Joseph Stalin than he had with Winston Churchill, succeeded in separating us along class and race lines, but he was a piker compared to Obama, who has added age, income, gender and religion, to the list of dividers.
Monday, August 25, 2014
There Is No California Comeback
News media from coast to coast are celebrating a "California comeback" after a near-decade-long Golden State economic collapse. But even this latest recovery may be much more fragile than has been reported, and the state's structural defects still imperil the left-coast economy. Certainly there are reasons for optimism. Tax collections were way up last year, and the state is balancing its budget after years of scrambling to close multibillion deficits with accounting gimmicks.
We Don't Have to Have More Fergusons
August 28, 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech on the mall in Washington, DC. One year later, a half century ago, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law. A half-century is a long time. Yet, as events in Ferguson, Missouri attest to, race remains a problem in America. Why? Change has swept our nation over these years. Technologies abound that no one would have dreamed of. And millions of black Americans have moved into the ranks of the upper middle class, the rich, and the super rich.
This Is No Time to Avert Our Gaze
Scarcely had ISIS posted its video showing the grisly beheading of American journalist James Foley than the rush to stifle it began. "Don't watch the video. Don't share it. That's not how life should be," entreated Foley's sister Kelly in a message on Twitter that was heavily retweeted. Thousands of social media users, some of them journalists, called for an #ISISMediaBlackout -- the hashtag quickly went viral -- and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo announced that the company was "actively suspending accounts as we discover them related to this graphic imagery." YouTube removed versions of the video posted on its site, invoking its policy on "gratuitous violence, hate speech, and incitement to commit violent acts."
The Effects of Obama-Steyer Extremism on American Workers and Families
Last fall the United States began, for the first time in almost 20 years, to produce more crude oil than it imported. Around that same time, the International Energy Agency altered its previous predictions to show that the U.S. would become the world's number-one oil producer by 2015, producing 11 million barrels of crude a day. The headlines -- and their implications -- were hard to miss. American energy was making a comeback in a huge way. Not only was the U.S. regaining its foothold in world energy markets, things were beginning to look pretty good here at home too. Oil and gas industry jobs increased by 40 percent between 2007 and 2013, a sharp contrast to the three percent job loss in the overall economy. Meanwhile, surging domestic energy production injected $476 billion into the U.S. economy in 2010 alone, filling state and federal coffers with needed revenue.