Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Thatcher's Enemies
In Britain they are mourning the death of Margaret Thatcher. They are also celebrating. Celebrating? Yes, celebrating.
'Central Park Five,' Graphically Told
WASHINGTON -- From Tom Paine's "Common Sense" to Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," American history is replete with examples of printed words accelerating social justice. Still, from Mathew Brady's 1862 photo exhibit of "The Dead of Antietam" to the televised fire hoses and police dogs in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 to the cameras that brought Vietnam into American living rooms, graphic journalism has exercised unique power to open minds and hence shape history. It may do so Tuesday evening when PBS broadcasts "The Central Park Five," a meticulous narrative of a gross miscarriage of justice. There were abundant dystopian aspects of New York City in the 1980s when crime, crack and AIDS produced a perfect storm of anxiety about the fraying social fabric. This was the context -- a city on edge -- when on April 19, 1989, a 28-year- old white woman who worked on Wall Street went for a jog after dark in Central Park. She became a victim of what was immediately called "wilding," a word probably unknown by the four blacks and one Hispanic, ages 14 to 16, who were arrested and charged with raping her and beating her nearly to death.
Saturday, April 13, 2013
Why America Is on Life Support
Anyone who watched Mitt and Ann Romney being interviewed on Chris Wallace's Sunday morning show and didn't regret that they aren't ensconced in the White House, instead of the Obamas, has a very weak grasp on reality. When even Bill O'Reilly, who was busy telling his viewers just a few short months ago that Barack Obama was a nice guy and didn't have a socialist bone in his body, has finally seen the light, I say that any Republican who sat home last November because he didn't think Romney was conservative enough or because he couldn't bring himself to vote for a Mormon, should take himself out behind the woodshed and give himself a good tanning.
Obama's Growth-Busting Budget
No matter how you slice the Obama budget pie, the inescapable fact is that the president wants to get rid of the roughly $1 trillion budget-cutting sequester and substitute in a $1 trillion-plus tax hike. In other words, more spending, more taxing. Growth-busting. The GOP should just say no.
From The Comedy Store
Lady Margaret Thatcher was eulogized Monday as a great woman and as a champion for liberty. Her era was so different from today's. President Obama expressed his sorrow for the passing of the Iron Lady and sent his condolences to her husband, Iron Man.
Friday, April 12, 2013
Springtime in Old Town
Lots of dribs and drabs to talk about today. First of all there this kerfuffle about someone taping a political staff meeting with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell in which they discussed the mental/medical problems that Ashley Judd (at that time a potential opponent for the Senate seat) has been through. Someone -- apparently a Left Wing political group out of Kentucky (who knew?) -- was responsible for the taping, but the popular press has made it sound as if this was the McConnell equivalent of the Watergate crew rifling through the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist; that McConnell's team had used untowardly methods to find this out.
The Obama Budget and the Appearance of Reform
WASHINGTON -- Well, at least we're starting to get the procedure right. Washington has rediscovered the beauty of the boring. It's called "regular order," using the normal, routine, constitutional process to arrive at, for example, a budget. Normal had disappeared during the Obama years. Republicans duly submitted annual budgets, which the president then used for target practice, most famously demagoguing Paul Ryan's 2011 budget as un-American. Meanwhile, the Democratic-controlled Senate simply stopped producing budgets for four years. And the ones the White House put out were so preposterous that, for example, the 2011 version was rejected by the Senate 97-0.
Then and Now
WASHINGTON -- Ten years ago this weekend, our Fox News team was racing north from Baghdad to Tikrit with the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines. They knew what needed to be done and had a plan for doing it, and all Griff Jenkins and I had to do was cover it and stay out of the way. Given what I'm doing this weekend, covering the war was less demanding, somewhat better-organized and perhaps less dangerous. This weekend, our youngest daughter is getting married. A decade ago, all I had to do was be in the right place at the right time, get good footage during a gunfight, prepare a report, interview some eyewitness participants, hook up our tiny satellite transceiver, dial up Fox News in New York and file our story. Most of the time, it worked flawlessly -- even when Iraqi soldiers surrendered to Griff in the midst of a live broadcast.
Who's More Demeaning Than Brad Paisley?
Country music star Brad Paisley is either an idiot or a genius. If he wrote the song "Accidental Racist" to stir a whirlwind of (mostly bad) publicity, he's a genius. But the negative cultural consensus strongly suggests he should have never been dumb enough to try to write a racial-harmony song. Paisley performed the song as a dialogue with rapper LL Cool J, now a star on the CBS drama "NCIS: LA." He says he wrote the song when he felt he had to defend wearing a T-shirt celebrating the country band Alabama, a shirt with the Confederate flag on it. In the song, he tries to suggest to a black man he met that the flag just says he's a fan of the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Object Lesson: 'Temporary' Amnesty Never Dies
Does America lack "compassion" and "humanity" for uninvited foreigners? Quite the contrary. While open-borders activists rail against "injustice" and demand new "pathways to citizenship," official U.S. policy rewards countless line-jumpers with permanent residency and taxpayer-subsidized benefits. Case in point: the massive "Temporary Protected Status" (TPS) program run by the Department of Homeland Security. In theory, as the DHS website describes it, the Secretary of Homeland Security "may designate a foreign country for TPS due to conditions in the country that temporarily prevent the country's nationals from returning safely, or in certain circumstances, where the country is unable to handle the return of its nationals adequately." Those conditions include hurricanes, environmental catastrophes, civil war, epidemics and other "extraordinary and temporary conditions."
Discrimination Is Not the Issue
Fifty years after the passage of civil rights laws outlawing discrimination based on race, ethnicity and sex, blacks, Hispanics and women still earn less than white men. In many circles, this fact alone reinforces the belief that discrimination is widespread and only greater government intervention will solve the problem. But might there be other reasons to explain the earnings gap between whites and minorities and between men and women? Yes, according to a provocative new book by economists June O'Neill and Dave O'Neill. "The Declining Importance of Race and Gender in the Labor Market" makes a persuasive argument that factors other than discrimination are to blame.
Conversation Starters Paisley, Paul Are Taking Their Lumps
Are Brad Paisley and Rand Paul the bravest men in America? Er, no. At least not by my lights. But maybe the country singer and the first-term senator are contenders for that title according to the attorney general of the United States, Eric Holder. In 2009, Holder famously declared in a speech that America is a "nation of cowards" because it refuses to talk about race "enough." What constitutes enough race talk in our private time seems like a hard thing to quantify, and I'm not sure Holder has any idea how to do it either. Holder was hardly the first, nor will he be the last, liberal to call for a national conversation on race. It is one of the mossiest locutions in modern America. I sincerely doubt an hour goes by where the phrase or something similar -- "frank dialogue," "much-needed discourse," etc. -- isn't uttered or written by some editorialist, college professor or television host.
Of Lunatics and Asylums
We tell ourselves, we parents of college-bound kids (not to mention ordinary citizens), that American campuses really aren't as bad as all that, that students can avoid the most tendentious indoctrinators and that the press tends to exaggerate. And then we read headlines like "Kathy Boudin Teaching at Columbia" and sharp reality once again punctures the comfortable cushion of denial. I'm not speaking personally because I'm among the hyper-vigilant and politically obsessed. I read the newsletters of the National Association of Scholars, a group of academics who bravely battle campus attempts to suppress free speech and free inquiry. I scan the press for news of academia. But most Americans, I'd guess, while knowing that college faculties are dominated by liberals, don't realize quite how extreme or how deeply corrupt our campuses have become.
Better Never Than Late
The old adage "better late than never" might not apply in the case of President Obama's tardily filed budget. It's one thing to habitually arrive late for scheduled appearances selfishly to build suspense and annoy those in attendance, but it's another to present this document two months late and after both the House and Senate have passed their own respective budgets. Why did he wait so long that he would necessarily create chaos in the process? Does he not think budgetary matters are important enough to postpone vacations and golf outings when we are on the brink of national bankruptcy?
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Liberals Go Crazy for the Mentally Ill
Obama has been draping himself in families of the children murdered in Newtown. MSNBC's Martin Bashir suggested that Republican senators need to have a member of their families killed for them to support the Democrats' gun proposals. (Let's start with Meghan McCain!) In a bizarre version of "A Christmas Carol," CNN's Carol Costello fantasized about "a mother who lost her child," showing up and knocking on Sen. Rand Paul's door, saying, "Please don't do this!" The victims of gun violence are the left's latest "human shields" -- a term coined by me in Godless: The Church of Liberalism -- for their idiotic ideas. At least it's not the godawful Jersey Girls this time.
Taking the 'Pulse' of Missile Defense
The U.S. is still vulnerable to an electromagnetic catastrophe
Remembering Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher, who served as prime minister of Britain from 1979 to 1990, is most famous for teaming up with my father Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II to peacefully end the Cold War and bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union. But at home, the "Iron Lady's" intellect, political will and love of freedom and capitalism also saved Britain from its long, slow death by socialism. Prime Minister Thatcher freed up Britain's economy by deregulating business, privatizing government-owned industries and breaking the back of the powerful unions that were smothering her country to death.
Up Is the New Down
A news you can use column: • during an Equal Opportunity training brief for a Pennsylvania Army Reserve unit, Evangelical Christianity was number one on a list showing examples of "religious extremism." Catholicism was also named, along with the Jewish Defense League, the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints, Al Qaeda, Hamas, the Ku Klux Klan, Sunni Muslims, the Nation of Islam -- and Islamophobia. Army spokesman George Wright contended the presentation was "an isolated incident not condoned by the Dept. of the Army."
Five Decades of Lies Help Dems Create Monolithic Black Vote
As recently as 1956, nearly 39 percent of blacks voted Republican in that year's presidential election. After the Civil War, Abe Lincoln's Republican Party easily carried the black vote -- where blacks were allowed to vote. Unwelcome in the Democratic Party, most blacks voted Republican and continued to do so through the early part of the 20th century. It wasn't until 1948, when 77 percent of the black vote went to Harry Truman, who had desegregated the military, that a majority of blacks identified themselves as Democrats. Yet, as a percentage of the party, more Republicans voted for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did Democrats. For his key role breaking the Democrats' filibuster and getting the act to pass the stalled Senate, Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen, a conservative from Illinois, landed on the cover of Time magazine. President Lyndon Johnson called Dirksen "the hero of the nation." The Chicago Defender, then the country's largest black daily newspaper, applauded Dirksen's "generalship" for helping to successfully push through the bill.