Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Sex and the Military
The headline on the front page of the New York Times said it all: "Women in the Senate Confront the Military on Sex Assaults." In a triumphalist article showcasing the growing numbers of women on the Senate Armed Services Committee, "one of the Senate's most testosterone-driven panels," the story line presents female Senators attacking male military officials over charges of sexual assaults against women in the armed forces.
We Can't Trust Obama
The contradictions at the heart of the Obama presidency are finally out in the open. As a result, a man who came into office hell-bent on restoring faith in government is on the verge of inspiring a libertarian revival. There have always been (at least) two Barack Obamas. There is the man who claims to be a nonideological problem-solver, keen on working with anybody to fix things. And there is The One: the partisan, left-leaning progressive-redeemer.
Unnecessary Tragedy
Last week a federal judge ordered Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to allow 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, to be moved to the adult lung transplant list. That gives her a better chance of receiving a potentially lifesaving transplant. Sarah Murnaghan's fate should force us to examine our organ transplant policy. There are more than 88,000 Americans on the organ transplant waiting list. Roughly 10 percent of them will die before receiving an organ. These lost lives are not so much an act of God as they are an act of Congress because of its 1984 National Organ Transplant Act, as amended, which prohibits payment to organ donors.
Obama's Definition of 'Smarter Enforcement': None
Welcome to Opposite World again. As the U.S. Senate geared up yesterday for the Gang of Eight illegal alien amnesty bill debate, President Obama goaded Capitol Hill to pass what he called "smarter enforcement, a pathway to earned citizenship and improvements to the legal system" of immigration. Bullcrap. The White House has already bulldozed a traffic-jammed superhighway for immigration law-breakers by executive fiat. Obama and his open-borders pals pay lip service to fairness and the rule of law for the cameras. But behind closed doors and beyond the reach of public accountability, they've already paved the way for mass deportation waivers. Read their actions, not their lips. The official White House operating policy is: No illegal alien left behind. "Smarter enforcement" means no enforcement.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Traitor
If Edward Snowden shouldn't be punished for violating the Espionage Act, then what spy can we punish?
Keeping Us Safe From Obama
It would be nice to write a column in praise of President Obama for his vigorous conduct of the war on terror -- to praise his willingness to look for "dots" to connect amid all the electronic noise of the communications web. It would be pleasantly nonpartisan to observe that some conservatives are being hypocritical -- denouncing Obama for surveillance of millions of Americans while they were content to permit President Bush to do similar things without protest, just as many liberals are doing the reverse. Three glaring obstacles stand in the way: One is the memory of the casual smears candidate Obama directed at President Bush. The second is the rank abuse of power his administration has demonstrated, which undermines one's trust that the trove of information the government is sifting will be used only to disrupt possible terror attacks. The third is the administration's pattern of lying -- which undermines any reassurances the president proffers that "nobody is listening to your telephone calls."
A Christian Minister Opposes 'God Bless America'
If you were a Christian minister who was given the opportunity to write an op-ed piece for the Washington Post, what subject would you choose? War and peace? The decline in faith among America's young people? The increasingly empty pews in mainstream Protestant churches? The ethical decline in society? Or any of myriad other morally and religiously troubling issues? Well, not if you were a Methodist minister named James P. Marsh, Jr. For this man of the cloth, the issue troubling him so much that he had to write about in the Washington Post was ... people standing and singing "God Bless America" at Washington National baseball games.
When Government Can't be Trusted
Without the slightest hint of irony, President Obama said last week, "If people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress, and don't trust federal judges, to make sure that we're abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here." Yes we are, because more and more of us don't trust government. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, "trust in the federal government remains mired near a historic low, while frustration with government remains high." Furthermore, notes Pew, a "majority of the public says that the federal government threatens their personal rights and freedoms."
21st Century Morality, Writ Frighteningly
The 29-year-old computer technician who spilled U.S. surveillance secrets all over the floor last week explained himself in an interview with the Guardian newspaper in England. Note, please, the boldfaced type that ensues. "**I** don't want to live in a society that does these sorts of things (conduct wide surveillance to prevent terror attacks). **I** do not want to live in a world where everything **I** do and say is recorded. That is not something **I** am willing to support or live under." See how simple it is? **I** don't like the look, the smell, of the thing. **My** mind is made up. Don't agree? That's your problem, according to the worldview of Edward Joseph Snowden, a very 21st-century moralist -- the jerk.
Economics vs. 'Need'
One of the most common arguments for allowing more immigration is that there is a "need" for foreign workers to do "jobs that Americans won't do," especially in agriculture. One of my most vivid memories of the late Armen Alchian, an internationally renowned economist at UCLA, involved a lunch at which one of the younger members of the economics department got up to go get some more coffee. Being a considerate sort, the young man asked, "Does anyone else need more coffee?"
You'd Better Believe This Is Obama's America
Isn't it ironic that President Obama, having acquired the highest office in the land by agitating -- all his political life -- against privilege and discrimination, is now systematically wielding his executive power lawlessly to favor his friends and punish his enemies? We are witnessing an unmistakable pattern from Obama and those under his command of establishing different rules for different groups of Americans. I'm not just referring to his opportunistic championing of the "poor" and his vendetta against the "wealthy" or his relentless vilification of "fat cat banks," big corporations, private jet owners and the insurance, oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear power industries. It goes well beyond that.
Monday, June 10, 2013
What Happened to Just Quitting?
Edward Snowden is not a hero. He's a 29-year-old former security guard at the National Security Agency who ended up knowing way too much about what goes on at the NSA, CIA and probably the MIB (I know I've used that line before, but I still like it). Snowden, in case you -- like me -- spent about nine hours on I-95 yesterday driving up and back from Alexandria, Virginia to exit 137 on the Garden State Parkway to attend the graduation party for your favorite niece. And, instead of listening to WTOP (the all-news station in Washington, DC) until you came into range of WINS (the all-news station in New York City) you listened to the Audible.com version of the new Dan Brown book, "Inferno" you didn't know that Ed Snowden even existed until you got home and your personal Director of Standards and Practices filled you in ...
Closing the Wealth Gap With Personal Retirement Accounts
It's time to close the door on a bankrupt, antiquated Social Security system and give every working American the opportunity to build wealth and share in the American dream.
Battling Pygmies
Sometimes, I must confess, I almost feel like a bully when I ridicule so-called progressives. The old expression "Like shooting fish in a barrel" comes to mind. But, then, I merely have to remind myself that these fish happen to control the White House, the Senate, the Department of Justice and the IRS, and I don't feel so bad. Besides, how can one not ridicule Obama when he insists that federally-funded pre-school programs will lead to good-paying jobs down the line? Oh, really? As pre-school teachers, perhaps? In the meantime, as an inevitable consequence of this brainstorm, all privately-owned pre-schools will be put out of business.
The New Axis
Mikey Weinstein and his militant atheizers in MRFF (the so-called Military Religious Freedom Foundation) are boasting of their ability to crush any outbreak of Christian expression in the military. Mikey and MRFF proudly call CAIR their "allies." CAIR is the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR, as the former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy has noted, has close ties to Hamas. [*The Grand Jihad*, by Andrew C. McCarthy, p. 160.]
America Will Pay a Price for President Obama's Inaction in Syria
Barack Obama's appointments of Susan Rice as national security adviser and Samantha Power as ambassador to the United Nations have naturally triggered speculation about changes in foreign policy. Rice and Power have been proponents of humanitarian military intervention, a course that Obama followed, gingerly, in Libya -- "leading from behind," as one of his aides put it.
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Too Sweet to Kill
The steamboat conveying Andrew Jackson up the Ohio River toward his tumultuous 1829 inauguration had brooms lashed to its bow, symbolizing Old Hickory's vow to clean up Washington. But sweeping out Washington's Augean stables, like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, is steady work, so steady it never ends. Neither do the policies that cosset sugar producers.
Saturday, June 8, 2013
The Left: Guilty of Unrequited Stupidity
It goes against my grain to generalize about large groups of people, but when it comes to liberals and Muslims, I find it increasingly difficult to resist the urge. For instance, House Democrats, led by the thoroughly obnoxious Rep. Barbara Lee, have proposed a resolution calling on Congress to acknowledge that global warming could drive poor women to depend on "transactional sex" for their economic survival. Their reasoning, for want of a better word, is that global warming would lead to drought, and drought would inevitably lead to prostitution as food became scarce and more expensive.