Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, April 25, 2014
Liberal Pundits of the World, Unite!
As I write this, Thomas Piketty's book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" is No. 1 on Amazon.com. It's been deemed an "important book" by a bunch of smart people. Why not? It validates many of the preconceived notions progressives have about capitalism: Inequality is growing. Mobility is shrinking. Meritocracy is dead. We all live in a sprawling zero-sum fallacy. The book has also sparked nonstop conversation in political and media circles. Though it's best to let economists debunk Piketty's methodology and data, it is worth pointing out that liberal pundits and writers have enthusiastically and unconditionally embraced not only a book on economics but a hard-left manifesto.
Obama's Dirty Watchdogs
The Obama administration doesn't have watchdogs. It has whitewash puppies. The president's Chicago bullies have defanged true advocates for integrity in government in D.C. from day one. So the latest report by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Operations Committee on corruptocrat Charles K. Edwards, the former Department of Homeland Security inspector general, isn't a revelation. It's confirmation. Investigators found that Edwards compromised the independence of his office by socializing and sucking up to senior DHS officials. "There are many blessings to be thankful for this year," the sycophantic Edwards wrote to the DHS acting counsel on Thanksgiving 2011, "but one of the best is having a friend like you." Geez, get them a room.
Rand Casts a Paul Over Life Debate
Republicans are still months away from kicking off the presidential race -- and that's a good thing for front-runners like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who could use the extra time to hone their messaging. In four years, the Kentucky leader has won over plenty of fans for his solid record on a whole range of issues, including life. But today, it isn't his record that's concerning people -- it's his rhetoric. Wednesday, in a sit-down with former Obama insider David Axelrod, Sen. Paul surprised a lot of conservatives with his nonchalant attitude on abortion and his role in ending it. As president, Axelrod wanted to know, how hard would his White House push to overturn *Roe v. Wade*? The Senator's answer: not much. With the country so evenly divided on the issue, he thinks an incremental approach is best. "I think the debate is about when life begins," said the lead sponsor of the Senate's Life at Conception Act. "Is it okay for an eight-pound baby to be aborted one week before delivery?"
What Race Preferences Hide
Sonia Sotomayor is a wonderful role model. Truly. Through hard work, brains and rare self-discipline at an early age, she was able to overcome poverty and family dysfunction to become what she is today. She was diagnosed at the age of 7 with Type 1 diabetes, and because her father was an alcoholic and her mother a full-time nurse, it fell to her to manage the daily insulin injections and testing that are part of the required treatment. The image, in her memoir, of a small girl dragging a chair to the stove so she could sterilize her syringes before school is poignant indeed. Any person attempting to overcome hardship can look to Sotomayor for inspiration. But as she demonstrated in her long, impassioned dissent in the case of Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, the experience of benefiting from race preferences has left her prickly and defensive on the subject. As others, including her Supreme Court colleague Justice Clarence Thomas, have argued, that kind of gnawing insecurity is one of the consequences of preferences. Others are never sure if you've achieved your position entirely on merit, and neither are you.
High Court Stops Short of Ending Racial Quotas and Preferences
Schuette v. BAMN shouldn't have been a hard case. The Fourteenth Amendment outlaws racial discrimination. Racial quotas and preferences are, by definition, racial discrimination. Fifty-eight percent of Michigan voters in 2006 voted to prohibit racial quotas and preferences in admission to state colleges and universities. As Justice Antonin Scalia asked in his concurring opinion in Schuette v. BAMN, announced April 22, "Does the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbid what it expressly requires?" He went on, "Needless to say (except that this case obliges us to say it), the question answers itself."
Finally Getting It Right on Affirmative Action
Every once in a while a great, conflicted country gets an insoluble problem exactly right. Such is the Supreme Court's ruling this week on affirmative action. It upheld a Michigan referendum prohibiting the state from discriminating either for or against any citizen on the basis of race. The Schuette ruling is highly significant for two reasons: its lopsided majority of 6-2, including a crucial concurrence from liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, and, even more important, Breyer's rationale. It couldn't be simpler. "The Constitution foresees the ballot box, not the courts, as the normal instrument for resolving differences and debates about the merits of these programs."
Obama's Income Inequality Scam
One of the many ironies surrounding President Obama is that for all his harping on income inequality -- his most recent obsession designed to stir Americans against one another -- his policies have exacerbated it. Obama, the self-professed bipartisan uniter, is never content to seek remedies to improve opportunity for all Americans. He has to have villains. His community organizing training and his disposition compel him to pit us against one another. No matter what the stated reason for his latest policy craze, almost everything he does is in service to his quest to fundamentally transform America from a society of freedom, opportunity and industriousness to one of government-mandated outcomes and dependency.
Thursday, April 24, 2014
What You Won't Read in the Papers About the 'Central Park Five'
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is demanding a quick settlement of the lawsuit brought by the five men convicted of one of the most sickening crimes in the city's history: the attack on the Central Park jogger in 1989. The plaintiffs are demanding $50 million apiece -- for going to prison for a rape that they committed, as detailed in Chapter 13 of "Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Destroying America." Abner Louima got $5.8 million for a shockingly brutal police assault on him, and he was just an innocent bystander. The "Central Park Five," as PBS documentarian Ken Burns has dubbed them, aren't exactly Emmett Till (as Burns would have you believe). Even if they were innocent of the Central Park rape, which they aren't, the reason they were originally arrested was that they were rampaging through the park, assaulting people.
IRS: Bad to the Bonus
Whoever said "cheaters never prosper" obviously didn't work at the IRS! There, it seems employees do a great job of collecting everyone's taxes but their own. As if Americans needed another reason to seethe over the agency, government officials are pulling the curtain back on even more corruption. The latest bombshell comes courtesy of the Department's Inspector General, who is exposing the IRS for doling out almost $3 million in bonuses to employees with "disciplinary issues" that span everything from fraud and abusing agency credit cards to owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes. (Apparently, the agency was too busy targeting conservatives to trouble with their own tax returns.) "Employees' tax problems," the Inspector General writes, "included 'willful understatement of tax liabilities over multiple tax years, late payment of tax liabilities, and underreporting of income."
American Proud
It was nice to be away from politics for a week. It was even nicer to be in the great city of Boston for six days to celebrate the running of the 118th Boston Marathon. Watching the race with a million people — and meeting so many wonderful Bostonians — was an incredible experience. A year after two domestic terrorists killed three and maimed 260 others watching the famous race, 32,530 runners set out for the finish line on Monday. Most of the runners were there this year for a special reason — to show up and show the world their resiliency and defiance.
John Paul Stevens Proposes New Constitutional Amendments
Honestly, unless you are a big government liberal, how many people think the federal government should have more power than it already exercises over its citizens? Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, 94, thinks the Constitution needs at least six amendments in order to bring the country more in line with what he believes is good for us. He outlines them in his new book, "Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution." It is a revealing look into liberal thinking and the ideological opposite of radio talk show host Mark Levin's book, "The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic." More about that in a moment.
Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter, R.I.P: Triple Murderer Who Fooled Hollywood
Rubin "Hurricane" Carter has died. Sympathetic obituaries say things like "wrongfully convicted" or "exonerated." But the black middleweight-title-contending boxer was neither. Carter, in 1966, murdered three people. But Hollywood later made a movie, "Hurricane," in which Denzel Washington brilliantly portrayed Carter as a wrongfully convicted near-saint, hounded mercilessly by a determined, racist detective. Excellent moviemaking, but it adds more sludge to the widely held notion of the "racist criminal justice system" that supposedly "warehouses" black males for no reason other than wrong place, wrong time, wrong skin. So, what really happened that night in Paterson, N.J., when three people were shot and killed? Why did Carter get prosecuted? Was Carter, as the media continue to say, an "innocent man" who was "wrongfully convicted"? Did the courts "exonerate" him?
Developing a Vision
"What do you want to be when you grow up?" It's the hallmark question of childhood. We ask wide-eyed little kids, expecting answers like "pilot," "astronaut" or "firefighter." It's not a bad question, but when it's the only one we ask, kids end up believing their identity belongs to their occupation. The real question we should be leading our children to consider is not *what*, but *who* do you want to become? The difference is subtle, but extremely significant. And so it is for us too. It's important for you to consider if the work you do defines who you are; or, if the person you are defines how you behave in the various roles of your life.
Obama's Keystone Cop-Out
American jobs and energy security sacrificed on the altar of radical ideals.
The Press Never Calls
My telephone is not ringing off the hook. No intriguing or inquiring emails have arrived on my computer. Yet, on Friday, a document drop from the Clinton Library revealed that years ago, in the 1990s, I was at the very heart of the "vast right-wing conspiracy." Now here we are almost a week later, and still no journalist, much less a historian, has called to ask me if I really was actively conspiring with the British press, select American newspapers, obscure right-wing political operators and, who knows, possibly foreign powers to create the gossamer of scandal over the Clinton White House. All this was reported in the documents. It has always struck me as curious how news stories are, or are not, reported in America. What standards must be met to land a story on the front page or even to decide that it is a story worth reporting at all?
The Adolescent President
Recently, Barack Obama -- a Demosthenes determined to elevate our politics from coarseness to elegance; a Pericles sent to ameliorate our rhetorical impoverishment -- spoke at the University of Michigan. He came to that very friendly venue -- in 2012, he received 67 percent of the vote in Ann Arbor's county -- after visiting a local sandwich shop, where a muse must have whispered in the presidential ear. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., had recently released his budget, so Obama expressed his disapproval by calling it, for the benefit of his academic audience, a "meanwich" and a "stink burger."
The High Cost of Liberalism: Part III
Income inequality has long been one of the liberals' favorite issues. So there is nothing surprising about its being pushed hard this election year. If nothing else, it is a much-needed distraction from the disasters of ObamaCare and the various IRS, Benghazi and other Obama administration scandals. Like so many other favorite liberal issues, income inequality is seldom discussed in terms of the actual consequences of liberal policies. When you turn from eloquent rhetoric to hard facts, the hardest of those facts is that income inequality has actually increased during five years of Barack Obama's leftist policies.
Reid Has Become a McCarthy for Our Time
We should ask Senate Majority Harry Reid (D-Nev.) the same question once posed to Sen. Joseph McCarthy by U.S. Army head counsel Robert N. Welch: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Reid is back in the news for denigrating the peaceful supporters of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, a popular critic of the Bureau of Land Management policy, as "domestic terrorists." McCarthy in the 1950s became infamous for smearing his opponents with lurid allegations that he could not prove, while questioning their patriotism. Reid has brought back to the Senate that exact same McCarthy style of six decades ago -- and trumped it.
America Is Barely Hanging On
I have heard for the longest time that ours is a nation of laws. So how is it that Barack Obama and Eric Holder haven't gotten the word? In 2014, it seems that they get to pick and choose which laws to enforce and which to ignore. And as if it's not bad enough that they turn a blind eye to laws dealing with illegal immigration, traditional marriage and drug traffickers, Obama gets to bypass Congress and revise his signature piece of legislation three dozen times. Then, for good measure, if anyone cries "Foul!," Holder and Obama pull out their matching His and Her crying towels and insist it's only because they're blacks.
Why Bundy Ranch Is Just the Beginning
This week, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, whose standoff with the federal government over taxes and land-use rights has captivated the nation, announced, "I don't believe I owe one penny to the United States government. I don't have a contract with the United States government." His legal case is problematic; the Bureau of Land Management certainly has jurisdiction over the federal lands on which his cattle graze. But his moral case is significantly stronger: paying taxes to a government that uses those tax dollars to restrict your activities on land your family has worked since the 19th century -- over a turtle, no less -- is sickening stuff. A government squeeze is a government squeeze.