Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, August 8, 2013
Don't Confuse Whoopi & Co With the Facts
As news reports have been exposing new chinks in the armor of Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe on a nearly daily basis, talking heads on the left have been amping up their incendiary rhetoric in an attempt to cast Republican Ken Cuccinelli as a fire-breathing bogeyman.
Sociopaths and Democrats
WASHINGTON -- As Ariel Castro, the convicted kidnapper, rapist and baby killer, shuffled off in chains to the hoosegow, I thought why was there so little reportage or commentary about his idiotic statement made in an Ohio courtroom. Is it because the man himself is so repugnant? Is it because his transgressions against society are so repulsive? I think it is both and one thing more. Americans have heard all this claptrap before. We are familiar with the rumblings of a sociopath. A sociopath, in plain language unadorned by the psychiatrists' hocus-pocus, is a person who does not know right from wrong, at least as regards his own behavior.
Floating Conservatives
STAVANGER, Norway -- The several hundred conservatives on the National Review's summer cruise, which I was asked to attend as a speaker, are united in what they don't like about the Obama administration and congressional Democrats, but divided on the best strategy for winning the Senate in 2014 and the White House in 2016. On a panel titled "The State of the GOP and Conservatism," Bob Costa, the magazine's Washington bureau chief, asks if anyone agrees with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who thinks Republicans should be willing to shutdown the government over the issue of defunding the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Excuse Me? GOP to Blame for ObamaCare?
The Affordable Care Act -- aka ObamaCare -- is off to a very rocky start, and according to the law's biggest defenders, the blame falls squarely at the feet of Republicans. It's an odd claim. Republicans did not write the law. They did not support the law. And they are not in charge of implementing it. Yet, it's got to be the GOP's fault, right?
The One Who Would Reinvent Detroit
DETROIT -- This city is the broken tooth in Michigan's smile. Nevertheless, the preternaturally optimistic governor, from whom never is heard a discouraging word, cheerfully describes his recent foray with a crew cleaning up a park in a particularly, well, *challenging* neighborhood: The weeds, says Gov. Rick Snyder, were so tall you could not see the sidewalks, or even the playground equipment. Concealed in the underbrush were some old tires. And a boat. And, he notes with an accountant's punctiliousness about presenting a complete record, they also found "a body." Never mind. Now another block of an almost cadaverous city has been reclaimed.
The American Pill Bug
We all run across the pill bug in our gardens. At the first sign of danger, the tiny paranoid crustacean suddenly turns into a ball -- in hopes danger will have passed when he unrolls. That roly-poly bug can serve as a fair symbol of present-day U.S. foreign policy, especially in our understandable weariness over Iraq, Afghanistan and the current scandals that are overwhelming the Obama administration.
Bill O'Reilly Is Smarter Than Lawrence O'Donnell
After attacking Bill O'Reilly's history last week, I'll defend his sociology this week. On Monday, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell ridiculed Fox News' O'Reilly for saying that single motherhood is responsible for the the high black crime rate. O'Reilly said, quite correctly: "The reason there is so much violence and chaos in the black precincts is the disintegration of the African-American family. Right now, about 73 percent of all black babies are born out of wedlock. That drives poverty. And the lack of involved fathers leads to young boys growing up resentful and unsupervised. And it has nothing to do with slavery. It has everything to do with you Hollywood people and you derelict parents."
When Will They See That This Is One Bad Recovery?
How's the left-wing, ivory-tower, we-know-best elitist Obamanomics working for you? Here's the news. First-quarter gross domestic product numbers for 2013 were recently revised -- downward from 1.8 percent to 1.1 percent. For perspective, four years into the recovery from the last deep recession in '81-'82, the economy grew at 4.1 percent. What about the declining "labor force participation rate"?
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Priebus Takes on Media Bias
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus is doing the right thing. He's making the national media's blatant partisan bias a prominent issue right out of the gate to Campaign 2016. Priebus sent a letter to CNN president Jeff Zucker and NBC Entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt demanding they cease efforts to air promotional Hillary Clinton films on their airwaves, or he'll seek to stop any effort to allow presidential debates on their networks. "It's appalling to know executives at major networks like NBC and CNN who have donated to Democrats and Hillary Clinton have taken it upon themselves to be Hillary Clinton's campaign operatives," the RNC chair declared.
Mourn Not the Post, but the Press
In the past week, The New York Times Co. announced it was selling the Boston Globe to Boston Red Sox owner John W. Henry and Washington Post Chairman Donald Graham announced Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos was buying the paper that Graham's family has run for decades. Both papers went cheap. The Times bought the Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion and is now selling it for $70 million. The price tag on the Post was just $250 million.
Three Forgotten Facts About the Ft. Hood Massacre
Finally. Four years after Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, Texas, and perpetrated the bloodiest massacre ever on an American military base, the self-confessed jihadist's court martial proceedings began this week. Have you forgotten?
Dr. Obama
On July 18, 2013, the city of Detroit declared bankruptcy. The story of Detroit's bankruptcy was simple enough: Allow capitalism to grow the city, campaign against income inequality, tax the job creators until they flee, increase government spending in order to boost employment, promise generous pension plans to keep people voting for failure. Rinse, wash and repeat. That's how a city with 1.8 million people in 1950 becomes a city with 700,000 in 2013. That's why a city that once served as a magnet for industry began thinking about requiring city employees to live within the city limits for seven years. And that's how Motor City turned into a location shoot for "28 Days Later".
Killing Giggles
Global average temperature has been flat for a decade. But frightening myths about global warming continue. We're told there are more hurricanes now. We're told that hurricanes are stronger. But the National Hurricane Center says it isn't so. Meteorologist Maria Molina told me it's not surprising that climatologists assumed hurricanes would get worse. "Hurricanes need warm ocean waters," but it turns out that "hurricanes are a lot more complicated than just warm ocean waters."
Would They Be Proud?
One can't imagine the fear in the hearts of the parents of those nine black students who walked past shouting placard-carrying mobs as they entered Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Each day, they were greeted with angry shouts of "Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate." In some rural and urban areas, during the school desegregation era, parents escorted their 5- and 6-year-old children past crowds shouting threats and screaming racial epithets. Often there were Ku Klux Klan marches and cross burnings. Much of this protest was in the South, but Northern cities were by no means exempt from the turmoil and violence of school desegregation.
The King and Queen of Creation
There were three thousand family members and guests at the Royal Wedding two years ago. In ancient Westminster Abbey, they heard the Bishop of London describe the meaning of marriage. Around the world, two billion people watched William and Kate take their vows. The Anglican Bishop's sermon is worth recalling.
Toward a Post-Racial Society -- or Maybe Not
Maybe it's time to acknowledge that we're all too stupid to talk on the subject of race.
Your Phone Is a Pocket Rat
Last month the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that police generally need a warrant to obtain information about the locations of cellphone users. Last week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit said just the opposite. The first decision was based on Article I, Paragraph 7 of the New Jersey Constitution, while the second was based on the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But those provisions are virtually identical, banning "unreasonable searches and seizures" of "persons, houses, papers, and effects." The crucial difference between the two decisions is the "third party doctrine," an increasingly alarming menace to privacy.
The GOP Isolationist Myth
They're back! The isolationist poltergeists that forever haunt the Republican Party. Or so we're told. In July, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) had a set-to over American foreign policy. Christie clumsily denounced "this strain of libertarianism that's going through parties right now and making big headlines I think is a very dangerous thought." It was clumsy in its garbled syntax but also in its ill-considered shot at "libertarianism." What he meant to say, I think, was "isolationist," and that is the term a host of commentators on the left and right are using to describe Paul and his ideas. Even the inestimable Charles Krauthammer sees in Paul the "return of the most venerable strain of conservative foreign policy -- isolationism."
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Pushing Back Against CNN & NBC's Hillary Propaganda
Will the networks take the RNC's threat of a boycott seriously?
Who's on the Run?
As recently as Monday, according to CBS News, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney continued the Obama Administration's Orwellian use of language by insisting that Al Qaeda is still "on the run" even though "We face an ongoing threat from al Qaeda and its affiliates." ... If anyone is on the run, it is Barack Obama chased by his own foreign policy.