Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Saturday, May 31, 2014
President Obama, Meet Chancellor Bismarck
When Sen. Barack Obama went to Berlin in 2008 and proclaimed himself a "citizen of the world," he was acclaimed by hundreds of thousands of young Germans. They were as excited as many young Americans were by this avatar of Hope and Change. The candidate chose an odd backdrop for his address, however. Mr. Obama spoke in front of the Berlin Victory Column. It is an impressive monument to be sure, but it commemorates the lightning victory of Prussia in a lightning war against its unoffending little neighbor, Denmark.
From The Comedy Store
The White House released the CIA station chief's name on Obama's flight to Afghanistan. A reporter saw it and tipped off the president. It was the first time the president could say that he learned of a White House scandal from the press with any zeal and credibility.
Friday, May 30, 2014
Can Americans Be Trusted to Oversee School Lunches Themselves?
First Lady Michelle Obama gives us the answer.
Why VA Service Won't Improve
Here's a not-so-bold prediction: After the press loses interest in the Veterans Affairs scandal, after the investigations have been completed and one or two officials have resigned, nothing will change. Is this cynicism? Not really. It comes down to one's view of how much government can achieve by bureaucratic, top-down management. The progressive project has limitless faith in the capacity of wise managers to run complex systems for the benefit of all. Untainted by the profit motive, bureaucrats can deliver services equitably and efficiently. Every liberal/progressive program has the effect of taking decision-making away from individuals, communities and local governments, and centralizing it in Washington.
Trigger Warning Warning
Have you heard about "trigger warnings," the latest thought control lunacy that has found its way onto college campuses? I weep for our children as they try to navigate the insanity in our society fronting as being protective of their interests. Trigger warnings are disclaimers that are attached to literature or other content to alert students to potentially traumatic subject matter the literature may contain. The most common types of warnings to date have reportedly involved rape, sexual abuse and mental illness. Until recently, the warnings were mostly on feminist-oriented Internet message boards and blogs, but now they've gravitated to some of our universities, many of which never found a kooky idea they didn't embrace.
Emptiness at West Point
It is fitting that the day before President Obama gives his grand West Point address defending the wisdom and prudence of his foreign policy, his government should be urging Americans to evacuate Libya. Libya, of course, was once the model Obama intervention -- the exquisitely calibrated military engagement wrapped in the rhetorical extravagance of a nationally televised address proclaiming his newest foreign policy doctrine (they change to fit the latest ad hoc decision): the responsibility to protect. You don't hear R2P bandied about much anymore. Not with more than 50,000 civilians having been slaughtered in Syria's civil war, unprotected in any way by the United States. Nor for that matter do you hear much about Libya, now so dangerously chaotic and jihadi-infested that the State Department is telling Americans to get out.
Mass Killers Hold Culture – and Country – Hostage
Can we please stop holding the country hostage to crazy people? Every year a tiny number of mentally ill people go on horrific killing sprees. It just happened in California. I won't name the person because I think the media attention lavished on these horror shows encourages some of these young men -- and they are almost all young men -- to seek fame or validation through bloodshed. In an entirely human response, we get spun up into a frenzy of finger-pointing. In the aftermath of the Gabby Giffords shooting, many of the country's leading journalists and politicians suggested the former congresswoman was shot because of the "violent" political rhetoric of Sarah Palin, Rep. Michele Bachmann and other Tea Party-affiliated politicians. It was beyond stupid and slanderous. It was also utterly devoid of evidence. (The culprit was a severe paranoid schizophrenic who abused drugs.)
Despite Thomas Piketty, Voters Reject Economic Redistribution
The opinion pages, economic journals and liberal websites are atwitter (a-Twitter?) these days over French economist Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century." Left-wingers cite Piketty's statistics showing growing wealth inequality -- though some have been challenged by the Financial Times -- in support of Piketty's policy response, huge taxes on high incomes and accumulated wealth. One suspects that many of his fans have another agenda in mind. They'd like to gull a majority of the 99 percent to vote for parties that would put their friends in control of an engorged state apparatus. There they could stamp out fossil fuels in favor of renewables -- and get all those overweight suburbanites out of their vulgar SUVs and into subways, and out of their ticky-tack subdivisions and into gleaming mid-20th century modern high-rises. (Actually, there is a great city like that: Moscow.)
No, the Supreme Court Doesn't Need Term Limits
Some of you may believe partisanship is a healthy organic reflection of genuine disagreement in the nation, but for the well-known political scientist Norm Ornstein, there is nothing more devastating than inaction. Nothing. So years after lamenting the existence of partisanship, he's come up with another way to deal with our dawdling government: term limiting Supreme Court justices. In the old days, you see, Supreme Court decisions were often unanimous. These days, there are too many close calls and too many overturned laws. This has nothing to do with the unconstitutionality of the legislation Congress happens to be passing these days but everything to do with the emergence of something called "ideology." How do we stop it? More politics.
HBO's Dreadful Reagan Lie
It's been 10 years since Ronald Reagan passed away, but one horrible myth about him will not die. When he passed, The Advocate magazine published an essay by radical gay playwright Larry Kramer titled "Adolf Reagan." The rant began: "Our murderer is dead. The man who murdered more gay people than anyone in the entire history of the world, is dead. More people than Hitler even." In Kramer's fever swamp of a brain, Reagan caused AIDS. He reveled in its fatalities. Now HBO is honoring Kramer's unceasing hatred by making a TV movie out of his hate-filled 1985 play/jeremiad "The Normal Heart." The movie ends with a "historic" note bashing Reagan some more: "President Ronald Reagan mentioned AIDS publicly for the first time Sept. 17, 1985, vowing in a news conference to make AIDS research a 'top priority.' Reagan's proposed budget for 1986 actually called for an 11 percent reduction in AIDS spending. By the end of 1986, there were 24,559 reported deaths." (Which is higher than all the Jews murdered by the Nazis?)
The Data-Mining Body Monitors in Our Schools
Like millions of other American parents, my husband and I received a warning letter from the BMI police last week. Our active, healthy 8th-grade daughter is "very lean," according to her school-administered "Fitnessgram." The national student body monitors think this is a public health problem. The obesity report card lectured that because our daughter's body-mass index is "very low," we "should make certain" that she "is eating a healthy diet that includes the appropriate number of calories." Thanks, geniuses. We had no idea such measurements were taking place, and we wondered whether we were alone in objecting to this unsolicited Nanny State dispatch. We're not.
The Obama Doctrine
In President Barack Obama's egocentric world, everything -- civil war in Syria, Russian power grabs in Ukraine, Chinese claims to Vietnamese and Japanese territory in the South China Sea, and peace in the Middle East -- revolves around him. Has there ever been a more self-absorbed commander in chief in our nation's history? Not that one could imagine listening to the president talk this week about his role -- and, by extension, the role of the United States of America -- in the world. The president took the occasion of the commencement address to West Point on Wednesday to define the Obama Doctrine, which occupies pretty much any position the president deems fit on any given foreign policy or defense issue at any given time, including reversing a position when he feels like it.
The Forced Amendment: Dems Push for Constitutional Re-Do
Senator Chuck Schumer is a lot of things -- but James Madison, he is not. Don't tell that to the New York Democrat, who, along with Sen. Mark Udall (D-N.M.), thinks he understands freedom better than the author of America's Bill of Rights. Two hundred twenty-three years after the First Amendment went into effect, Senate liberals are trying to put an expiration date on political speech. While most Americans were firing up their grills last weekend, Sen. Udall was lighting a match under Senate Democrats to get a vote on his Joint Resolution 19. And if it's successful, the National Archives will need more than bomb-proofing to protect America's founding documents.
Debunking Balderdash
The oracles at the New York Times recently announced that, economically, our own middle class has fallen behind that of our neighbor to the north. I'm not sure what their intention was in sharing this bad news. Heaven knows they'd never think of laying the blame for this embarrassment at the feet of Barack Obama and his absurd economic policies, which have included destroying the world's preeminent health care system; extending unemployment benefits to the end of time; encouraging the EPA to do its best to regulate the oil and coal industries out of existence; and seemingly doing everything in his power to destroy capitalism. The two things that the Times neglected to mention by way of explanation was that, unlike the left-wing slacker in the White House, Canada is being led by a conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, who has lowered taxes and passed a balanced budget, which just happen to be two things that Obama would never even consider, lest the mere concept sent him to bed with a severe case of shingles.
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Mass Murder Knee-Jerks
You all know who he is. But I'm not going to repeat the name of the 22-year-old crazy person who stabbed or shot six young people to death near the UC Santa Barbara campus last week. I'm not going to quote from his insane 137-page "manifesto," either. It just spews his pathetic reasons for why he planned his murderous retribution against all the girls who had paid him no attention during his short and awful lifetime.
Don't Stigmatize Murderers!
Mass murder at a sunny college campus in a beach town would normally be considered "newsy," but Elliot Rodger's massacre at the University of California-Santa Barbara last Friday is getting surprisingly little press. This is not a good case for liberals: The killer was an immigrant, a person of color, and the majority of his casualties resulted from attacks with a car or knife. It makes as much sense to rant about the NRA as to blame the Auto Club of America or the National Knife Collectors Association. Rather, what we have is yet another mass murder committed by a schizophrenic -- just like those of Seung-Hui Cho, Jared Loughner, James Holmes and Adam Lanza.
Isla Vista Murders: What New Laws, What New Lessons?
Elliot Rodger's story is not one of an untreated, mentally ill, white mass-killer who illegally acquired fully automatic "assault weapons." This mixed white and Asian 22-year-old bought his firearms legally, did not use a long-arm or "high-capacity" weapon and had been in therapy since the age of 8. Half his murder victims were killed by knife. Several of the injured were run over by Rodger's car. None of the mental health professionals apparently felt that Rodger was a danger to himself or others. The police had recently conducted a welfare check on him at the request of his family. Rodger persuaded the police that he was fine.
Maternity Warden Awaits U.S. Newborn
Meriam Ibrahim may not be a United States citizen, but she seems to know more about courage than the administration leading them. Three times, the Sudanese mother of two was asked to deny her faith -- and three times she refused. Now, she and her toddler American son and newborn American daughter lie in a bug-infested prison cell -- a victim of the real war on women this President refuses to acknowledge. While U.S. liberals fight for "women's health care," their leader is letting a 27-year-old mother give birth to a premature baby girl in a dirty overcrowded jail without medical attention. If that's "championing women's rights," then the international community should consider itself warned. The same politicians who promised not to "close their eyes" on women's needs are obviously too busy fighting for free birth control and universal abortion to hear the cries of a two-day old baby girl, whose Christian mother is just months away from being flogged and hanged.
A Period of Peril on the East Coast
With the upcoming hurricane season right around us, I want to amplify a bit for you some of the background research we do along with why I am very concerned about the Eastern Seaboard in the coming few years. I think this cycle of concern has *not* reached what is a natural, forecastable peak, but I am going to show the relationship between the 1950's hurricanes and the coming cooling of the Atlantic Ocean. While it is starting now, the warmest water ends up near the East Coast while the cooling develops to the northeast. It happened very similar to this in the late '50s and '60s! I feel it's important our readers and objective people in the climate/weather argument understand how climatology is linked hand in hand to the weather. I have made past events the foundation on which I stand today to reach for tomorrow.
Horror in Pakistan: Pregnant Woman Stoned by Family
The latest in a rash of atrocities against women in the Muslim world.