Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, March 14, 2014
Don't Blame Putin; Blame Russia
I'll let the experts churn out opinions on what should be done about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But it does appear that many of them refuse to accept a number of truths about the world. Take these, for instance: 1) Most people do not shares our values. 2) Most people don't even understand our values. 3) Authoritarianism is often more popular than freedom. 4) Democracy and liberalism are not the same. I argue the latter point -- not coincidentally! -- in detail in my new book, "The People Have Spoken (And They Are Wrong): The Case Against Democracy." Russian President Vladimir Putin may face international disapproval from the West over his Crimean actions, and he may even have to deal with some short-term ineffectual sanctions; but at home, he's enjoying his highest approval ratings in years. Yet we act as if Putin is acting alone. Before the invasion, the respected Levada-Center found that 65 percent of respondents approved of Putin's leadership.
Ban Bossy, No Way
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook chief operating officer and feminist proselytizer, wants to ban the "b" word -- bossy, that is. She has launched a campaign along with Girl Scouts of the USA CEO Anna Maria Chavez (no relation) to discourage using the word to describe girls or women who happen to show "leadership qualities." Count me out. Apparently, Sandberg felt the sting of the "b" word at some point in 9th grade when a teacher advised a student not to be friends with Sandberg because she was "bossy," according to an interview she gave on ABC News. Now she believes the use of the word is one of the factors that leads girls to become less interested in pursuing leadership positions by middle school.
Jim DeMint's Little Platoons Versus Big Gov't
Liberals view the term "compassionate conservatism" as an oxymoron. How could it not be so? they ask. After all, conservatives are greedy, and conservatism feeds that greed at the expense of the poor. It is preposterous for liberals to believe this because if it were true, conservatism would be not just wrong; it would be evil. Some liberals want to demonize as reckless the traditional entrepreneurial spirit of America. Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation, will have none of it and is taking that notion head-on into the media with his new book "Falling in Love With America Again." DeMint is championing the "little platoons" that meet human needs at the neighborhood level and judging their effectiveness against that of big government redistributing our wealth through an enormous, inefficient bureaucracy.
My Message to Girls: Be Bossy!
A bunch of aggrieved women led by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg launched a high-profile "public service campaign" this week to "ban" the word "bossy." Sandberg, Beyonce, Victoria "Posh Spice" Beckham and first lady Michelle Obama have joined femme forces to combat this phantom menace. In their rarefied world, it's a "very negative experience" and a crippling act of gender discrimination to be called bossy. "This isn't a word we should use," Sandberg complained on National Public Radio. To which I say: Oh, buck up.
Sebelius Plays Hide and Sneak
Kathleen Sebelius heads up HHS, not the CIA -- but with all the secrets she's keeping on ObamaCare, it can be tough to tell the difference. Earlier this week, the agency's cover was blown on yet another clandestine operation to change the health care law -- a change so classified that the media didn't notice until this week, when the Wall Street Journal blew the story wide open. It seems the individual mandate, which forces people to buy health insurance or pay a penalty, was suspended by the White House last week without so much as a peep to the media. Instead, the administration buried the news in a technical bulletin on a totally unrelated rule -- stunning reporters and confusing Americans who the change was meant to help. "Keep in mind," writes the Journal, "that the White House argued at the Supreme Court that the individual mandate to buy insurance was indispensable to the law's success, and President Obama continues to say he'd veto bipartisan bills that would delay or repeal it."
How to Stop Putin
The president of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council challenges critics of President Obama's Ukraine policy by saying "What are you going to do, send the 101st Airborne into Crimea?" Not exactly subtle. And rather silly, considering that no one has proposed such a thing. The alternative to passivity is not war but a serious foreign policy. For the last five years, Obama's fruitless accommodationism has invited the kind of aggressiveness demonstrated by Iran in Syria, China in the East China Sea and Russia in Ukraine. But what's done is done. Put that aside. What is to be done now?
Obama, in His Sole Discretion
With each passing day, President Barack Obama, leftism personified, demonstrates that leftism is characterized by anything other than the human compassion it claims as its exclusive possession. I've always said leftists are about not compassion or treating people with sensitivity and respect, much less equally, but control and bullying, all with an arrogant, mean-spirited air of superiority.
Has America Lost Its Grit?
Amy Chua, the "Tiger Mother" who launched a thousand panic attacks among ambitious but lenient parents, is back with an almost-great book about why some groups achieve spectacular success in America while others languish. Written with her husband Jed Rubenfeld (both are law professors at Yale), "The Triple Package" examines a number of groups who've succeeded in this country and advances a thesis about why groups (and nations) prosper or decline. The success of Asian-American immigrants (this principally includes people from China, Japan, Korea and India) is legendary. Less familiar is the bounding achievement of Nigerian immigrants. Though they account for only 0.7 percent of the black American population, they comprised 25 percent of the blacks at Harvard Business School last year. Nigerian immigrants are estimated to be 10 percent of America's black physicians. The average family income of Nigerian immigrants is not only above the black average, but above the national average as well.
Thursday, March 13, 2014
De Blasio's War on Minority Education
The Democratic political machine versus the students.
Fighting Back Against Explicit Content
Even if you weren't one of the 28.2 million Americans watching the 2014 Grammys last month, you probably caught wind of the controversy over Beyoncé's raunchy performance of her song "Drunk in Love," featuring her husband Jay-Z. Perhaps it was her lingerie-like outfit or her chair dancing or the part where Jay-Z grasped her rear, but this was one of those moments when parents find themselves putting their hands over their children's eyes -- or flipping to another channel. Beyoncé, a mother of a 2-year old, raked in tons of media attention for that performance. Some of the publicity was negative. The Daily Mail quoted many parents who expressed their disappointment via Twitter: "It's a sad day when our kids can't even watch the Grammys." Forbes noted that Beyoncé, a self-claimed feminist, "could have used her power to show that a woman doesn't need to be a stripper to succeed."
Rand Paul Gets It
I disagree with some of Rand Paul's more libertarian positions, especially on social issues. And I'm certainly not endorsing him or anyone else to be the Republican nominee for president at this time. But Sen. Paul of Kentucky did two things recently that won my favor. He showed the 2,500 conservative activists at the CPAC conference last weekend that he understands what the GOP must do if it wants to take the Senate this fall and win back the White House. And then on Monday he wrote a good column for Breitbart.com calling for his fellow Republican presidential wannabes to, as the headline said, "Stop warping Ronald Reagan's foreign policy."
Right-Wing Mobs? Say It Isn't So, Conservatives!
When I wrote a book about mobs and group-think a few years ago, I could honestly say that mob behavior existed exclusively on the left in America -- unless you count Oakland Raiders tailgate parties, which I do not. As described in Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America, the distinctive characteristics of the mob mentality include: -- Slogans as arguments ("Bush lied, kids died!" "Keep your laws off my body!" "You can't hug a child with nuclear arms"); -- Imperviousness to facts (e.g., the left's refusal to abandon repeatedly disproved canards about Reagan's tax cuts causing the deficit, the Aug. 6th PDB (President's Daily Brief) stating anything relevant about 9/11, and Valerie Plame being an "undercover agent"); -- Acceptance of contradictions (I haven't heard a cavil from MSNBC about Obama's expansion of the Afghanistan war, use of drones and continued operation of Guantanamo -- all deemed "war crimes" in the Bush administration); and -- Extreme emotional attachment to their leaders combined with a passionate hatred of putative enemies (the burning and decapitations of Bush in effigy, books and movies about Bush's assassination -- even as liberals' publicly discuss their sex fantasies about Clinton and Obama).
At Air Force Academy, Fight and Flight
At the U.S. Air Force Academy, jets aren't the only thing taking off. So is a campus-wide rebellion against the forces of political correctness. Frustrated by the school's decision to scrub a Bible verse from one of the dorm whiteboards, cadets decided to take matters into their own hands. In a show of defiance, Bible verses started popping up on dry erase boards throughout the dorms -- outraging the anti-Christian "tolerance" police at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. This latest controversy boiled over earlier this week, when MRFF insisted that a verse from Galatians, posted on a cadet's personal hallway whiteboard, somehow created a "hostile environment." He pressed for the cadet -- and any officer(s) who ignored the display -- to be punished for "misconduct."
When Blacks Voted 80% Dem, Malcolm X Called Them 'Chumps'
When blacks gave 80 percent of their vote to the Democratic Party in 1964, black activist Malcolm X called them "political chumps." White voters, X said, "are so evenly divided that every time they vote, the race is so close they have to go back and count the votes all over again. Which means that any bloc, any minority that has a bloc that sticks together is in a strategic position. Either way you go, that's who gets it." Yet Democrats, said Malcolm X, failed to deliver on a promised and much anticipated new civil rights bill, knowing the party could still count on their blind support in the next election.
Is Obama Walking the Trail Blazed by Nixon?
What would a president do if he were furious over criticism, or felt that his noble aims justified most means of attaining them? Answer that by comparing the behavior of Richard Nixon to that of an increasingly similar Barack Obama. Nixon tried to use the Internal Revenue Service to go after his political enemies -- although his IRS chiefs at least refused his orders to focus on liberals. Nixon ignored settled law and picked and chose which statutes he would enforce -- from denying funds for the Clean Water Act to ignoring congressional subpoenas.
Putin on the Ritz
Ever since Vladimir Putin decided to restore the former Soviet Union, I have admired his restraint. I'm serious. I mean thus far, all he's done is venture a little way into Georgia and, as of this moment, into a small section of Ukraine. Surely, judging by the response from Obama and the various garden gnomes heading up the nations affiliated with NATO, I see no good reason why he hasn't taken back Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the eastern section of Germany or all of Europe, for that matter. Obama's defenders like to say that it wouldn't matter who was in the Oval Office because Putin would do whatever he likes because he's Putin. I beg to differ. It was Obama who refused to supply Poland and the Czech Republic with promised missile defense systems because he didn't wish to irk Russia's dictator. It was also Obama who let Putin get away with consorting with the mullahs in Iran and Assad in Syria. And that was after decreasing our nuclear arsenal at Putin's request. Every school kid knows all too well that if you give in to a bully even once, he'll just keep taking your lunch money.
Getting Satisfaction
Every year we are subjected to lists. Forbe's magazine lists the world's wealthiest individuals. Time magazine lists the most "influential" people, though real influence is difficult to define or quantify. What I've never seen is a list of satisfied people, much less stories about how they attained satisfaction. Arianna Huffington is trying to fill that gap. One of the world's biggest Type A personalities, Huffington, who launched The Huffington Post in 2005 and whose picture appears alongside celebrities, politicians and business icons, is now asking a question popularized in an old song by the late Peggy Lee: "Is that all there is?"
The Benefits of Prudence
In September 1958, a future columnist, then 17, was unpacking as a college freshman when upperclassmen hired by tobacco companies knocked on his dormitory door, distributing free mini-packs of cigarettes. He and many other aspiring sophisticates became smokers. Six years later -- 40 years ago: Jan. 11, 1964 -- when the Surgeon General published the report declaring tobacco carcinogenic, more than 40 percent of American adults smoked. Today, when smoking is considered declassee rather than sophisticated, fewer than one-fifth do. In June 1971, a New York couple decided their Bon Vivant brand vichyssoise tasted strange so they put aside their bowls, too late. Within hours he was dead and she was paralyzed from botulism poisoning. And within a month Bon Vivant was bankrupt, proof of the power of health-related information to change Americans' behavior.
An Academic Fraud Exposed
From time to time, I put down my duties of writing about politics and other human follies and pick up a book, often a book of poetry, often by W. B. Yeats. The other night I read Yeats' poem "The Fiddler of Dooney." It is a little masterpiece, but then Yeats wrote so many masterpieces. It begins: "When I play on my fiddle in Dooney, Folk dance like a wave of the sea; My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet, My brother in Mocharabuiee." And on it dances for a few more stanzas, delighting the eye and the ear and the mind. Yeats obviously chose each word with the utmost care and gave his words a structure that was finely disciplined -- good show W. B.!