Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, June 19, 2014
The Hard Lessons of Iraq
Nearly 5,000 of our fine men and women died in Iraq. Who's going to explain Iraq to their loved ones now? Who's going to explain why, if it was so important that we had to go to Iraq in 2003, we just walked away? Iraq is back in our living rooms every night. Only this time, it's not a prime-time miniseries about how American military superiority topples the bad guy and democratizes a brutal dictatorship.
Can America Be Saved?
Although I am by nature an optimist, I must admit that even I have begun to suspect that our nation's best years, like my own, are behind us. As some of you will recall, just prior to the 2012 presidential election, I wrote that I was confident America could survive another four years of Obama, but I wasn't at all certain it could survive an electorate that would provide him with four more years. I still feel that way, and the thought that Hillary ("What difference does it make?") Clinton could be next in line, chills my bones and curdles my blood.
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Ignorance Is Privacy
A Ruling Against Warrantless Tracking Assumes People Don't Know How Cellphones Work
How Fatherhood Made Me a Better Person
My baby daughter has ruined me. I'm not typically known for being the most openly emotional person. On the incredibly rare occasions in which I find myself crying -- typically when the last track of "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" pipes through the car stereo (why would you leave the Hundred Acre Wood, Christopher Robin, you dolt?!) -- my wife revels in it. The first time it happened, she turned to me, grinning gleefully, and exclaimed, "You *do* have feelings!" At least, that's how it was until Leeya was born. Now I'm a wreck.
No Intervention in Iraqi Civil War Without Congressional Authorization
On Jan. 12, 1991, with 370,000 U.S. troops already deployed near Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, and a U.N. deadline for Saddam Hussein to withdraw from that country only three days away, the U.S. Congress voted on whether to authorize President George H.W. Bush to use force to reverse Iraq's annexation of its neighbor. The Senate voted 52 to 47 for war -- with Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa among those voting no and Democratic Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee among those voting yes. The House voted 250 to 183 for war -- with three Republicans voting no and 86 Democrats voting yes.
Chris Matthews, Meet Chris Matthews
Ronan Farrow, considered the "boy wonder" of cable hosts by MSNBC executives, interviewed his colleague Chris Matthews on June 11 over the stunning primary defeat of Eric Cantor. Farrow was shocked that the winner, David Brat, had dared to campaign among the tea party rabble, being the professor he is: "Is it rare to see that kind of brazen intellectualism, particularly in populist candidates like this?" Translation: How did he win among knuckle-dragging Virginia racists with that spiel? In response, Matthews unleashed something almost as unexpected as the Cantor defeat. He came to the tea party's defense. "I don't think you can assume that the liberals are smarter than the conservative professors. I think that's crazy talk," he said.
A Fed-Up Veteran Blasts VA's 'Lie, Delay, Deny' Abyss
As Obama administration officials pivot like haywire jewelry-box ballerinas to divert attention away from the nationwide Veterans Affairs disgrace, a reader who has been fighting the system urged me to urge Capitol Hill and the American public to stay focused. This former Special Forces soldier and medic served his country for 25 years. He worked in the health care field managing military field medical clinics. "I know how health care is supposed to run, even in austere or low-budget environments," he says. And in his nightmarish, ongoing experience, the VA is an epic, deadly, monstrous failure. He minces no words: "They're getting billions of dollars, and they treat veterans like s-t. There's no accountability, no buy-in, among civilian unionized employees. We mean nothing to them. It's like going to the DMV for your health care."
Here Comes Tomorrow
Ray Kurzweil -- inventor of things like machines that turn text into speech -- has popularized the idea that we are rapidly approaching "the singularity," the point at which machines not only think for themselves but develop intellectually faster than we. At that point, maybe we no longer talk about "human history." It will be "machine progress," with us along for the ride -- if machines keep us around. Maybe they'll keep us in a zoo, like we do with our monkey ancestors. Scientists and ethicists are beginning to wrestle with the question of how to make sure artificial intelligence, when it arrives, is nice to us.
Marriage and the 'Wrong Side of History'
Thousands of Americans will rally in Washington, D.C., at a March for Marriage on Thursday in support of "the simple and beautiful message," to quote Brian Brown, that "marriage between one man and one woman is unique and critical for our society." Brown is president of the National Organization for Marriage, the event's lead sponsor. Don't he and his supporters know that they're on the Wrong Side of History?
IRS Experiences the Agony of Delete
For the Obama administration, the Year of the Computer Glitch just produced the most convenient one of all. Late Friday, while people were leaving to celebrate Father's Day, the government announced the mother of all mistakes: an "inadvertent" deletion of all the relevant IRS targeting emails. Even for the Obama administration, which no one would accuse of technological competence, the coincidence is tough to swallow. Losing two years of Lois Lerner's emails, the IRS chief at the heart of the conservative targeting scandal, seems a stretch even for a White House as inept as this one. Yet that's exactly what the government insists happened after a computer crash in 2011.
Slavery Reparations
Calls for slavery reparations have returned with the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations" in The Atlantic magazine (May 21, 2014). In making his argument, Coates goes through the horrors of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination. First off, let me say that I agree with reparations advocates that slavery was a horrible, despicable violation of basic human rights. The gross discrimination that followed emancipation made a mockery of the guarantees of the U.S. Constitution. I also agree that slave owners and slave traders should make reparations to those whom they enslaved. The problem, of course, is that slaves, slave owners and slave traders are all dead. Thus, punishing perpetrators and compensating victims is out of the hands of the living.
The IRS Email Scandal: Where's the Outrage?
"Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency's tea party controversy." That's the opening sentence of the Associated Press story on the IRS's claim that it lost an unknown number of emails over two years relating to the agency's alleged targeting of political groups hostile to the president. But note how the AP casts the story: The investigators -- Republican lawmakers -- are outraged.
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
The Out-Box
Because simply keeping track of all the absurdities that make our lives so troubling makes my in-box expand to its breaking point, I occasionally have to clear it out. So consider this a spring cleaning. For openers, I would suggest that in the wake of the spineless administrators at Rutgers uninviting Condoleezza Rice to deliver this year's commencement address, it's time for conservatives to quit behaving like Charlie Brown, who never seems to catch on that Lucy Van Pelt is going to snatch away the football just before he kicks it. In the future, conservatives should insist on a $50,000 cashier's check when they agree to speak at a college. If they get to say their piece, the check is returned to the college. Otherwise, it gets cashed.
The Disastrous Tenure of 'Obama’s Enforcer'
Holder’s stint as attorney general has been driven by politics and incompetence
Leave Business-Bashing to the Liberals
The Eric Cantor debacle in Virginia last week demanded a storyline, which was no heavy lifting. In the GOP primary a political newbie had wiped the floor with the majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. Bring on the analysts to find the narrative in the rebuke administered, a rather remote if hard-working political power broker linked more frequently -- here comes the dichotomy -- with Wall Street than Main Street. Cantor, on these terms, updated Cardinal Wolsey's Shakespearean lament from "Henry VIII": "Had I but served my district with half the zeal/I served the Chamber of Commerce he would not in mine age/Have left me naked to mine enemies."
Andy McCarthy's Faithless Execution
My good friend Andy McCarthy has another book out, "Faithless Execution," which couldn't be timelier in view of the deplorable state of current events in America. Though I have been a consistent critic of President Barack Obama's -- decrying his lawlessness and his disastrous and destructive policies -- I have always replied in the negative when people have asked me whether Republicans should pursue impeachment against him. My response has never been based on any doubt that Obama has committed impeachable offenses. Rather, it has been my painful awareness that impeachment is more a political matter than it is a legal one, and enormous political obstacles would surely prevent the successful conclusion of such a pursuit.
When Is a Scandal Not a Scandal?
President Barack Obama has flouted the law again and again -- unilaterally rewriting the health law at least 18 times since passage; changing immigration law by executive fiat (after having explained that to do so would be beyond the scope of his constitutional authority); dictating that union claims should trump creditors in the General Motors and Chrysler bailouts; altering the welfare laws by regulation; making recess appointments when Congress was not, in fact, in recess; and many more. After each arrogation of power, critics have protested, "He can't do that!" Yes, he can -- because there is nothing to stop him. What Obama has done is plainly unconstitutional, but there is no magic buzzer that sounds when a public official violates his oath to uphold the Constitution. Lightning bolts do not issue from the heavens staying the errant executive. The only guardrail that keeps our leaders from abusing their power is the vigilance of the people. Key to that vigilance is the press -- so much the worse for us.
Credit Cards Have Expiration Dates; Laws Should Too
The great state of Minnesota, you'll be glad to learn, is no longer interested in the size and color of your bug deflector. The legislature in St. Paul recently scrapped the 1953 law regulating that automotive accessory, one of almost 1,200 antiquated or bizarre laws that Governor Mark Dayton recommended repealing as part of a major legislative "unsession." Among other changes: Minnesotans have been liberated from the ban on possessing more than two hen pheasants, the penalty for distributing berries in the wrong-sized container is history, and it is now legal to coast with your car's gears in neutral. "We got rid of all the silly laws," one state official told the St. Paul Pioneer-Press. That was probably overstating things, given the more than 46,000 laws that Minnesota lawmakers have enacted over the years. Still, the pruning of 1,200 pieces of deadwood is no small achievement.
Little Spat on the Perry
Everything's bigger in Texas -- including political scrutiny. If anyone knows that, it's Texas Governor Rick Perry. The longtime Lone Star has taken his share of lumps from the press, despite a popular 14-year run that positioned the state as one of the most financially solvent in the country. Regardless of Texas's success, the media isn't eager to cut the former presidential candidate any slack -- as evidenced by this week's ridiculous overreaction to Perry's statement on homosexuality. Speaking in San Francisco of all places, the Governor was asked about the decision by state Republicans to support reparative therapy for people with unwanted same-sex attractions. Never one to back away from the issue, Governor Perry made an argument liberals despise -- that homosexual behavior is a choice.
A Bitter After-Taste
The news from Iraq that Islamic terrorists have now taken over cities that American troops liberated during the Iraq war must have left an especially bitter after-taste to Americans who lost a loved one who died taking one of those cities, or to a survivor who came back without an arm or leg, or with other traumas to body or mind. Surely we need to learn something from a tragedy of this magnitude. Some say that we should never have gone into Iraq in the first place. Others say we should never have pulled our troops out when we did, leaving behind a weak and irresponsible government in charge.