Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
U.S. Vets Dying for Obama's Attention
Nothing says "thanks for your service to our country" like serial abandonment. But that's the most some veterans can hope for under this administration, which may be at the heart of one of the worst cases of medical neglect America has ever seen. "We need a new sense of urgency," Barack Obama insisted back in 2007, on the hundreds of thousands of veterans waiting for health care. Turns out, it's actually the man who campaigned on the issue who needed the urgency more. Despite warnings from the Bush administration, the GAO in 2012, and just last year from House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller (R-Fla.), it seems President Obama hasn't lifted a finger to help the thousands of former military members waiting months for medical attention through the VA -- and in 40 of those cases, dying before they received it.
HHS Confirmation Hearings: 49,000 Words, Zero on Abortion-Drug Mandate
Two Senate committees held hearings this month on the nomination of Office of Management and Budget Director Sylvia Mathews Burwell to succeed Kathleen Sebelius as secretary of Health and Human Services, the federal agency most responsible for overseeing implementation of Obamacare. In these two hearings, according to transcripts published by CQ Transcriptions, the senators and the nominee spoke approximately 49,000 words. Not one of these words directly addressed the contraception-sterilization-abortion-inducing drug regulation that Sebelius issued under Obamacare and that is now the target of more than 90 lawsuits. The closest anyone came was Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, who told Burwell he was going to ask her a question in writing in "regard to abortion coverage transparency for insurance plans offered in the federal exchanges."
Jon Stewart Abandons 'Sanity'
Just before the 2010 midterms, Comedy Central star Jon Stewart drew a large crowd to Washington to celebrate a "Rally to Restore Sanity." He gave a closing speech, intended to be inspirational and not comical, on how "we can have animus and not be enemies." The same man who succeeded in convincing CNN to cancel "Crossfire" in 2004 because its squabbles were "hurting the country" felt the need to sermonize about overdoing caricatures of our political opponents on television. This raises the question: Does this man watch his own show? "The country's 24-hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems but its existence makes solving them that much harder," Stewart proclaimed in his address.
E.U.'s Top Court Endorses Censorship of Embarrassing Facts
Since the European Union's top court endorsed "the right to be forgotten" last week, Google has received more than 1,000 requests to remove links to embarrassing information from its search results. BBC News reports that the complainants have included a suspended university lecturer, an actor who had an affair with a teenager, a politician irked by an article about his behavior while in office and "a man who tried to kill his family." According to the European Court of Justice (ECJ), national data protection agencies and judges are supposed to weigh the competing interests in each of these cases and decide which will prevail: the right to be forgotten or the right to know. This misbegotten decision illustrates the threat to freedom of speech posed by an amorphous, free-floating right to privacy, unmoored from contracts, property rights or constitutional restrictions on government action.
Michelle Obama's Control-Freak Lunch Program
Look out, everyone: The nation's school lunch lady, Michelle Obama, is mad. With her federal nutrition program under fire across the country and now on Capitol Hill, Mrs. Obama put out a "forceful" call to arms this week to "health activists," according to The Washington Post. She's cracking the whip. Her orders are clear: There must be no escape. The East Wing and its sycophants zealously oppose any effort to alter, delay or waive top-down school meal rules. Big Lunch must be guarded at all costs. Progressives blame kid-hating Republicans and greedy businesses for the revolt against Mrs. Obama's failed policies. But the truth is right around the corner in your students' cafeterias. Districts are losing money. Discarded food is piling high. Kids are going off-campus to fill their tummies or just going hungry.
America's Budding Tyrants
From the Nazis to the Stalinists, tyrants have always started out supporting free speech, and why is easy to understand. Speech is vital for the realization of their goals of command, control and confiscation. Basic to their agenda are the tools of indoctrination, propagandizing, proselytization. Once they gain power, as leftists have at many universities, free speech becomes a liability and must be suppressed. This is increasingly the case on university campuses. Back in 1964, it was Mario Savio, a campus leftist, who led the free speech movement at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, a movement that played a vital role in placing American universities center stage in the flow of political ideas, no matter how controversial, unpatriotic and vulgar. The free speech movement gave birth to the hippie movement of the '60s and '70s. The longhair, unkempt hippies of that era have grown up and now often find themselves being college professors, deans, provosts and presidents. Their intolerance of free speech and other ideas has become policy and practice on many college campuses.
Good News
Are you worried about the future? It's hard not to be. If you watch the news, you mostly see violence, disasters, danger. Some in my business call it "fear porn" or "pessimism porn." People like the stuff; it makes them feel alive and informed. Of course, it's our job to tell you about problems. If a plane crashes -- or disappears -- that's news. The fact that millions of planes arrive safely is a miracle, but it's not news. So we soak in disasters -- and warnings about the next one: bird flu, global warming, potential terrorism. I won Emmys hyping risks but stopped winning them when I wised up and started reporting on the overhyping of risks. My colleagues didn't like that as much.
The Peculiar Madness of 'Trigger Warnings'
Trigger warning: I am going to make fun of "trigger warnings." Of course, if you're the sort of person who takes trigger warnings very seriously, you probably don't read this column too often. So maybe my mockery will miss its target, sort of like making fun of the Amish on the Internet -- it's not like they'll find out. In fairness, the Amish are actually very impressive people. Even though some Amish communities are more tolerant of technology than the stereotypes suggest, their Anabaptist puritanical streak leaves me cold. On the whole, I like modernity. I may not love every new fad of the last few centuries, but mark me down as a fan of refrigeration, Netflix, modern dentistry, universal suffrage, the internal combustion engine and all that stuff.
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
On Kreg's List, Real Conservatives Wanted
The courts aren't the only ones making a judgment call on marriage -- so are American voters. And in the court of public opinion, the outcome isn't nearly as one-sided. With gavels striking down state amendments faster than you can say "judicial activism," most Americans haven't budged from their support of natural marriage. If anything, the more openly liberals attack, the stronger the opposition becomes. A new survey of battleground districts shows that a majority of voters are solidly in the pro-marriage camp, edging out the far-Left by four points. While the media looked the other way on the first two polls (Rasmussen's and FRC's), it will have a difficult time doing so here. This latest survey, commissioned by Politico, is already catching the attention of the chattering class, which wrongly assumed the debate was dead and buried. Unlike other outlets, Politico's questioning was fairly straight-forward, asking simply, "Do you support or oppose allowing same-sex couples to marry?"
Inspiring Patriotism That Is 'Informed'
Children can be taught to embrace Founding ideals
Backwash of the '60s
The news about all the disinvited commencement speakers -- at Brandeis, at Smith College, at Haverford -- grabbed America in an unexpected and gratifying way. Yes, something *was* amiss! Students were telling their elders to shut up, and -- this was the gratifying part -- the public feedback was strictly negative: enough so that the replacement speaker, at Haverford, for the beaten-down Robert J. Birgeneau, ex-chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, called the protesters and their faculty backers "immature" and "arrogant." Which they are and were, of course; the question being, where did the protestors get their sense of entitlement to push around supposedly smarter people than themselves? It's in the cultural water, one is afraid. We've been on this track for around half a century -- the track of immature, arrogant claims to moral superiority, based on nothing but given credence by people with more professional authority than moral courage or common sense.
Hillary's Health Matters
Karl Rove, the bete noir for Democrats (and some Republicans), has dared to raise questions about Hillary Clinton's health. The New York Post first reported a conversation between Rove, former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Dan Raviv of CBS News about Mrs. Clinton's fall and concussion in December 2012. Rove was quoted as saying, "Thirty days in the hospital? And when she reappears, she's wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what's up with that." Bill Clinton defended his wife saying she is "in better shape" than he is, but confirmed that it took "six months" of "very serious work" to recover from her concussion. A State Department spokesperson said it was 30 days. Which is it?
Margaret Thatcher of India?
Is the election of a pro-business, pro-American, growth-oriented prime minister in the world's largest democracy good news or bad news for the world's oldest democracy? We in that oldest democracy are currently governed by the Democrats, a party that has more in common with the defeated Congress party in India than with the victorious Bharatiya Janata Party. You could tell that the White House was less than overjoyed at the election of Narendra Modi when the spokesman recited boilerplate praise of a "free and fair election." Are there sensitivities regarding this particular small-government guy? Sure. India is not Indiana. The man who has just been elected prime minister was until recently included on a list of people prohibited from entering this country by the State Department.
Racial Rhetoric Inflames Rather Than Unites
I am at a loss to understand what constructive purpose first lady Michelle Obama (and Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and others) hopes to achieve by constantly talking about the race issue. Last Friday, Michelle Obama chose to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling -- in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional -- by reminding graduating high-school seniors in Topeka, Kansas, that racism is still alive and well in America today. Mrs. Obama said: "No matter what you do, the point is to never be afraid to talk about ... the issue of race, because even today, we still struggle to do that. ... This issue is so sensitive. It's so complicated, so bound up with a painful history."
Britain's Political Stalemate Resembles America's
British politics has a familiar look to Americans, with a center-right Conservative Party and a center-left Labour Party resembling America's Republicans and Democrats. Britain's parliamentary system, however, presents a contrast with the U.S. Constitution on the surface. A prime minister whose party has a majority in the House of Commons can pass any law he or she likes, since members of Parliament almost always vote on party lines. The House of Lords can delay or amend legislation, but can be overridden by a Commons majority. The monarch theoretically has a veto, but it has not been exercised for hundreds of years and is unthinkable today.
Piling on Cliven Bundy
For a few days, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy was a heroic figure to a great many conservatives. Then, overnight, he became a pariah. There were some people, aside from Harry Reid, who suggested he should have to ring a little bell whenever he went out in public, and announce his presence by repeating, "Unclean! Unclean!" Now I grant that there was no good reason for him to open his yap about the urban blacks residing in North Las Vegas, just as there was no reason for those two Republican knuckleheads running for the Senate in 2012 to shoot off their mouths about rape. But, aside from the fact that Mr. Bundy is not the most eloquent of speakers, what did he say that was so terrible? I mean, it's not as if he spent three years lying about our being able to keep our doctors and our health insurance just so he could shove his disgusting signature piece of legislation down our throats.
Poverty and Snow Storms
Many years ago, in upstate New York, there was a lady who was caught in a fierce snow storm that produced conditions called a "whiteout." That's when the snow is falling so thick and fast that all you can see in any direction is just sheer white. This lady wandered around in the storm, struggling to try to get home, but there was no way for her to know where home was. Eventually she collapsed in the snow and died -- something like 50 feet from her home that she could not see. All too often that image comes back to me when I see so many people in poverty wandering off in all directions, either alone or following some of the many local or national messiahs -- often not very far from a way out of their poverty but, like the lady who died in the snow storm, unable to see the way.
Monday, May 19, 2014
Comprehensive Con Job
Words are slippery things, and perhaps the most slippery words on the planet at the moment are "comprehensive immigration reform." I say slippery because while Democrats and their media allies have long been in favor of legalizing millions of illegal immigrants, Americans are now supposed to believe that conservatives in general, and tea party types in particular, are ready to hop on the reform bandwagon as well. Yet the devil as they say, is in the details. And the details suggest that the definition of comprehensive immigration is becoming as malleable as it gets, in order to skew survey results that make it appear a majority of Americans want some form of amnesty.
Putin Out and Proud
The Wall Street Journal recently showed Vladimir Putin in Crimea. There was the saturnine Slav in an unusually ebullient mood. He was standing in front of a banner ostensibly celebrating the victory of the USSR in what Russians still call "The Great Patriotic War" against Hitler in 1945. Of course, some would argue that the only reason Vladimir Vladimirovich appeared before the large red banner with its Communist Hammer and Sickle insignia is for historical accuracy. Those victory banners from 1945 have a long history in Russia. Defenders of Putin's public association with the symbols of Soviet power might say it is rather like us celebrating America's victory at Fort McHenry in 1814 with a fifteen-star, fifteen stripe "Star-Spangled Banner."