Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
No Reason to Give Thanks?
This week is Thanksgiving, and the mad Christmas shopping scramble has already begun. As relatives descend, it's all too easy to focus on the shopping, cooking, and cleaning that underlie holiday preparations. In the process, we forget what we're celebrating. We're too busy getting ready for, then serving, then cleaning up from Thanksgiving to actually give thanks.
Report Debunks Sandy Hook Misconceptions
Last December, less than a week after Adam Lanza murdered 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., the New York Post described his "eerie lair of violent video games," where he "obliterated virtual victims ... until the virtual became a reality." The Post reported that the troubled 20-year-old "was enthralled by blood-splattering, shoot-'em-up electronic games." The official report on the massacre, released this week by State's Attorney Steven Sedensky, paints a more complicated picture. It casts doubt on the significance of Lanza's gaming habits, as well as several other theories about why he did what he did or how he could have been stopped.
Masking Totalitarianism
One of the oldest notions in the history of mankind is that some people are to give orders and others are to obey. The powerful elite believe that they have wisdom superior to the masses and that they've been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Their agenda calls for an attack on the free market and what it implies -- voluntary exchange. Tyrants do not trust that people acting voluntarily will do what the tyrant thinks they should do. Therefore, free markets are replaced with economic planning and regulation that is nothing less than the forcible superseding of other people's plans by the powerful elite.
Hail to the Panderer in Chief
"I'm not a particularly ideological person," President Obama told an audience of donors in Seattle over the weekend. He added (in Reuters' words) that "pragmatism was necessary to advance the values that were important to him." This is an old refrain of Obama's. As he said in his first inaugural, "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works."
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Thanksgiving and Liberty
In the dim reaches of long ago, Americans observed a quaint custom. They called it Thanksgiving, or something of the sort. The custom arose on account of their supposing, often against hard evidence -- weather, war, famine, pestilence, etc. -- there were things for which to be thankful and that, accordingly, thanks were to be rendered. Which meant, by common consent, that the designated recipient of the thanks in question was God.
Mary Cheney, Liz Cheney and Left-Wing Hate
There are individual haters on the right and individual haters on the left. But there is no large-scale hatred in the United States of America today that compares with the hatred of the left for the right. Whereas the right regards the left as wrong -- even destructively wrong -- the left regards all those on the right as evil. Sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted -- these are typical descriptions of the right made by the most respected names on the left. This hatred is what enabled MSNBC's Martin Bashir to broadcast -- reading from a teleprompter, meaning that it was not spontaneous -- that Sarah Palin deserves to have someone defecate into her mouth. (He later offered a serious apology.)
Iran, a Dangerous ObamaCare Diversion
Does anyone with credibility like this deal Obama's team made with Iran? I'm not seeing much encouragement as I scan the news covering the subject. Ask yourself this: What was so urgent about securing a deal that will allow Iran to pursue nuclear development in exchange for our releasing the sanctions? Did you do a double take on that formulation? You should have.
A Victory for Iran
Ninety percent of the American opinion elite will fall for the old "historic breakthrough" conceit every time. The appeal of getting enemies in a room together, where they will shed their animosity and "reason together," is so profound that nothing as tiresome as experience can diminish its allure. Don't talk to Secretary of State John Kerry or President Barack Obama of the League of Nations (which enjoyed such success ensuring world peace) or the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the 1928 treaty that outlawed war as an instrument of national policy. Fifty-four countries, including all the major belligerents of World War II, signed the pact.
Random Thoughts
Random thoughts on the passing scene: Many people take pride in defying the conventions of society. Those conventions of society are also known as civilization. Defying them wholesale means going back to barbarism. Barbarians with electronic devices are still barbarians. After the government shutdown crisis, the one thing that Congressional Democrats and Republicans finally agreed on was to kick the can down the road a few more months, so that we can go through all this again -- and perhaps again after that.
Broken Families Dragging Down Growth
Are Republican politicians trying to frame a policy agenda stuck in a Reagan rut? A good case can be made that they are -- or have been. Tax cuts have been a staple of Republican platforms since Jack Kemp persuaded Ronald Reagan to back a 30 percent tax rate cut in the 1980 campaign. Republicans, with some Democratic support, passed cuts for everyone under Reagan and George W. Bush. But the heavy emphasis was on tax cuts for high earners. They contribute to economic growth by stimulating entrepreneurship and encouraging innovation, the argument goes.
Obama's Munich
Seeking to create an analogy with the deal the United States negotiated with Iran to supposedly limit further production of its centrifuges, Secretary of State John Kerry chose to recall disarmament agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union. A better analogy would be the 1938 Munich Pact, which gave Hitler part of Czechoslovakia in the vain hope that war could be avoided. It is worth noting that several of the nations that were signatories in Munich, namely Germany, France and Britain, are also part of the current deal with Iran.
Keep Calm and Kerry On?
The Senate may not be the only ones going nuclear under the Obama administration. This weekend, the White House rounded out its embarrassments at home with a dangerous one abroad by plowing ahead on a six-month pact whose only cheerleader is the country it aimed to subdue: Iran. Against the advice of trusted Middle East allies, Congress, and even his own party, President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry agreed to rollback $6 to $7 billion in economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for President Hasan Rouhani's word that his country would curb its nuclear weapons program.
Monday, November 25, 2013
The Fatal Conceit of ObamaCare
I have lined up my Christmas presents this year for our President, Barack Obama, and for his Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius. I will send them both a copy of the last book written by one of greatest economists of the last century, and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, F.A. Hayek. The book is called The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism.
ObamaCare: A Grand Teaching Opportunity
Last week, many pundits and politicians on the right were gleeful, believing that ObamaCare, in all its hubristic and over-reaching glory, signaled the demise of progressivism. Even the progressives thought so, which is why the execrable Harry Reid (D-NV) exercised the nuclear option in the Senate, and the Obama administration announced a "breakthrough" deal with Iran that is nothing of the sort.
A Pro-Terror Rally on a Palestinian Campus
They weren't wearing swastika armbands or chanting "Sieg Heil!" during the Islamic Jihad rally this month on the campus of Al-Quds University. They didn't need to. Everything about the event reeked of fascism and anti-Semitic bloodlust. Demonstrators at the Palestinian school paraded in paramilitary gear, with massed black flags, mock assault weapons, and arms extended in Nazi-style salutes. There were banners lionizing suicide bombers, and hand-drawn Israeli flags on which students trod. Islamic Jihad -- long identified as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union -- posted photos of the rally on its website. In one, students representing dead Israelis sprawl on the ground as black-clad jihadists brandishing weapons stride past.
An UNconventional Approach to Abortion, Parents' Rights
Judging by the ObamaCare mess, Congress has enough to worry about without adding U.S. sovereignty to the mix. But in the Senate, where inefficiency is an art form, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is choosing to waste more of the chamber's time on an international treaty that could be one of the greatest threats to parents' rights that no one knows about.
Counting Down to Armageddon
Although I can sympathize with those who want Kathleen Sebelius's head on a pike, just as I can sympathize with those who would like to see Eric Holder replaced as the attorney general, both groups are ignoring the fact that Obama would merely replace them with puppets who were just as bad or, if humanly possible, even worse. This is the same schmuck, let us keep in mind, who replaced Leon Panetta with Chuck Hagel and Hillary Clinton with John Kerry.
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Was Kennedy a Conservative?
The idea that John F. Kennedy was really a conservative, rather than the liberal icon he is so often depicted as, is the thesis of a new book by Ira Stoll. The idea is seconded by George Will in a column in The Washington Post. Are they correct? Before examining the case, let me make an important distinction. I seem to be one of the few writers who sees conservatism and liberalism as sociologies, not ideologies.