Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, February 15, 2013
Did the Left Create Chris Dorner?
Last week, former LAPD officer Christopher Dorner went on a murderous rampage throughout Southern California, shooting seven people, including five members of law enforcement, killing three. Before he went on his spree, Dorner wrote a manifesto praising liberal policies on gun control, media personages including Piers Morgan and Chris Matthews and politicians including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But the bulk of Dorner's manifesto centered on his hatred for the police department from which he had been fired in 2009. He claimed in the manifesto that the LAPD "has not changed since the Rampart and Rodney King days. It has gotten worse." He accused the LAPD of widespread racism and brutality. And he traced the LAPD's racism to broad societal racism: "My first recollection of racism was in the first grade at Norwalk Christian elementary school ... I made a life decision that I will not tolerate racial derogatory terms spoken to me." He continued: "I am here to change and make policy."
Pull the Plug on Hagel
Chuck Hagel's nomination to be secretary of defense is in trouble -- as it should be. The former Republican senator has so much baggage, it is amazing that the administration hasn't dumped him, as they did Susan Rice when her proposed nomination ran into trouble. Unfortunately, having won that battle, the GOP may be in weaker position to defeat another Obama nominee. And Rice, her misstatements about the attack on Benghazi notwithstanding, would have been a less dangerous cabinet member than Hagel. Hagel has made clearly anti-Semitic statements before public forums time and again. If his target had been, say, blacks or Hispanics, he'd have been forced to withdraw. Just try that on for size.
Presidents and Promises
YORBA LINDA, Calif. -- On Tuesday evening, Feb. 12, a capacity crowd filled a replica of the White House East Room for a presentation at the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum. After that, they stood in line to buy autographed copies of my latest New York Times best-seller, "Heroes Proved." All of them heard: "Lyndon Johnson sent my brother and me to war in Vietnam. In his first address to our nation as president, Richard Nixon promised to bring us home. We're alive today because he kept his word." After the event, I listened to a rerun of our current president's addressing the nation. The contrasts between the two men's words -- and their consequences -- could not be more dramatic.
HBO Hates Popes, Loves Kennedys
Pope Benedict XVI shocked the world on Monday morning by announcing he would resign at the end of February. For Catholics, there was sorrow and there was gratitude for a Holy Father who taught with such distinction and worked with such care to safeguard the church's theological traditions. But there are those people who hate the Catholic Church, and they are ecstatic. Take documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, a man who clearly thinks he is holier than the Pope. He told the Daily Beast that Benedict is a "criminal." This helps explain why he's made a documentary for HBO, the home of toxic God-haters like Bill Maher.
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Deceit or Ignorance? You Be the Judge
The recent blizzard in the Northeast was called first by Weatherbell.com on February 3, the Sunday before the storm. I pulled out maps of the infamous Lindsay Storm of February 9-10, 1969 and then compared this storm to it -- *5* days in advance. At that time, other forecasts for Friday in the blizzard impacted areas were for highs between 40-45 with a *CHANCE* of rain or snow. A chance of rain or snow and a high between 40-45 does not describe what happened, just as forecasts out to sea with Hurricane Sandy as a subtropical storm 4 days before doesn't, either. Because of such things, the "unexpected" nature that the public was lead to believe in supplies fertile soil for those who drive the AWG propaganda machine and put forth misinformation about these storms.
Obama Continues Radical Social Engineering of the Military
Same-sex domestic partners receive benefits at the expense of married heterosexual couples.
Just Say Yes to Gridlock
Playing half the government against the other half is the only thing keeping its power in check.
White Liberals Tell Black Lies About Civil Rights
Liberals ignored my book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama throughout the fall. Now that I'm safely home from my book tour, they feel free to jabber on about their make-believe history of the civil rights movement with abandon. In the hackiest of all hacky articles, Sam Tanenhaus, the man responsible for ruining The New York Times Book Review, has written a cover story in The New Republic, titled: "Original Sin: Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people." MSNBC has been howling this cliche for a decade -- or, as MSNBC's Chris Matthews said of Tanenhaus' article, "a bold headline"! Being interviewed by a giddy Matthews -- who has no black friends, employees or neighbors -- Tanenhaus announced the startling fact that once, long ago, some Republicans supported civil rights!
State of the Union: Failure
Our failure in chief gave us his annual blurred vision of America again Tuesday night. Based on his State of the Union message, Barack Obama's eyesight is as ideologically impaired as ever. Despite four years of failure, he still sees only one road America can go down to regain its economic health. Not down the capitalist road of free enterprise and liberty that made us the richest country in history. He wants to continue down the socialist road to more federal government -- which means more Obama taxes, more Obama spending, more Obama debt and more Obama government programs to fix problems government programs caused in the first place.
Sam Tanenhaus's Problem Continues
WASHINGTON -- It has happened again. Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review referred to by Paul Krugman the other day as "a long-time conservative," has essayed in the New Republic the modern conservative movement, and traced us all back to John C. Calhoun. I suppose our point of origin could have been more sinister. Sam could have traced us back to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the former Confederate General who went on to be an early member of the Ku Klux Klan, but John C. Calhoun is bad enough. Of course, Calhoun is no kind of modern conservative. He is not even a typical conservative of the 19th century, at least outside the South. He would have made heavy weather of it in the North in the company of such conservatives as the Adamses or even the Virginia founders such as George Washington.
Why Do Societies Give Up?
Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline? Hundreds of reasons have been adduced for the fall of Rome and the end of the Old Regime in 18th-century France. Reasons run from inflation and excessive spending to resource depletion and enemy invasion, as historians attempt to understand the sudden collapse of the Mycenaeans, the Aztecs and, apparently, the modern Greeks. In literature from Catullus to Edward Gibbon, wealth and leisure -- and who gets the most of both -- more often than poverty and exhaustion implode civilization One recurring theme seems consistent in Athenian literature on the eve of the city's takeover by Macedon: social squabbling over slicing up a shrinking pie. Athenian speeches from that era make frequent reference to lawsuits over property and inheritance, evading taxes, and fudging eligibility for the dole. After the end of the Roman Republic, reactionary Latin literature -- from the likes of Juvenal, Petronius, Suetonius, Tacitus -- pointed to "bread and circuses," as well as excessive wealth, corruption and top-heavy government.
Recycling Old and Failed Ideas
President Obama's approach to so-called "climate change" appears to include recycling old ideas. In his State of the Union address, the president recycled the idea of spending more on education, though we are still getting unsatisfactory results. A fact he inadvertently acknowledged by saying we're not keeping up with other countries in science and math. He maintained there are tens of thousands of jobs available but companies can't fill them because public schools aren't teaching students what they need to know. We spend huge sums on education already, so money and achievement must not be related.
The Brevity of Silent Cal
WASHINGTON -- Before Ronald Reagan traveled the 16 blocks to the White House after his first inaugural address, the White House curator had, at the new president's instruction, hung in the Cabinet room a portrait of Calvin Coolidge. The Great Communicator knew that "Silent Cal" could use words powerfully -- 15 of them made him a national figure -- because he was economical in their use, as in all things. Were Barack Obama, America's most loquacious president (699 first-term teleprompter speeches), capable of learning from someone with whom he disagrees, he would profit from Amity Shlaes' new biography of Coolidge, who she calls "our great refrainer" with an "aptitude for brevity," as when he said, "Inflation is repudiation." She says that under his "minimalist" presidency, he "made a virtue of inaction." As he said, "It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones." During the 67 months of his presidency, the national debt, the national government, the federal budget, unemployment (3.6 percent) and even consumer prices shrank. The GDP expanded 13.4 percent.
There Is No World Currency War
All this chatter about a so-called global currency war is utter nonsense. All that is happening is the Japanese are wisely taking steps to increase liquidity and depreciate their vastly overpriced yen. They are doing this in order to avoid deeper and deeper deflation. That deflation will sink the Japanese economy for years to come if remedial actions are not taken. Among all the big economies, none needs quantitative easing more than Japan's. All the Japanese have done so far is make cheap loans to banks, but with no concerted QE. But QE *is* coming this spring, when Prime Minster Abe appoints a new Bank of Japan head man. Mostly through jawboning, the Abe government has lowered the yen in round numbers from about 77 to the dollar to roughly 93 to the dollar. It's about a 20 percent change. Long overdue. My guess is the yen will wind up around 120 to the dollar as the year progresses.
Dorner -- Another Angry Fatherless Black Man With a Gun
My new book, "Dear Father, Dear Son," talks about the No. 1 social problem in America -- children growing up without fathers. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote "The Negro Family: A Case for National Action." At the time, 25 percent of blacks were born outside of wedlock, a number that the future Democratic senator from New York said was catastrophic to the black community. Moynihan wrote: "A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken homes, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations about the future -- that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure -- that is not only to be expected, it is very near to inevitable." Today, 75 percent of black children enter a world without a father in the home.
The Language of Weasels
Some group or other recently voted on words and terms they would like to see banished in 2013. The top five vote-getters were "trending," "spoiler alert," "superfood," "guru" and, predictably, "fiscal cliff." I must confess that I had not been overly aware of "guru" in 2012 and had not heard a single reference to "superfood," which would explain why I have no idea what it means. And while I think that pepperoni pizza fits the description, I have a hunch that whatever TV chef was tossing the term around willy-nilly doesn't. I'm guessing it will turn out to be some overpriced item like truffles, which nobody would have the slightest interest in if it sold for a dollar-a-pound and didn't require trained pigs to dig it up. As you might have guessed, I have my own list. I would do away with "distinguished" when referring to a politician. And I mean any politician. So far as I'm concerned, the word is employed far too often and applied far too generously to people who do nothing more than vote for a living. In a sane world, it would only be applied to military heroes, firemen and conservative columnists, especially those residing in such left-wing bastions as California.
Obama's Gangster Government Operates Above the Law
Presidents' State of the Union addresses are delivered in the chamber of the House of Representatives in the Capitol. The classical majesty of this building where laws are made symbolizes the idea that we live under the rule of law. Unfortunately, the 44th president is running an administration that too often seems to ignore the rule of law. "We can't wait," Barack Obama took to saying after the Republicans captured a majority in the House and refused to pass laws he wanted. He would act to get what he wanted regardless of law. One example: his recess appointments in January 2012 of three members of the National Labor Relations Board and the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Not a Long, Nor a Long-Lasting Speech
"The state of the Union," the President reported last night, "is stronger." He said, to prove his point, we have more created new jobs, sold more American cars, bought less foreign oil, and are sending fewer soldiers into battle. That is like saying (on the day pitchers and catchers officially reported to Spring Training sites) that a batter going 4-for-4 has raised his batting average by .100 percentage points, without pointing out he was batting .053 and is now batting .153.
U.S. Strategy: Put More Women in Afghan Army
When NATO published a "media backgrounder" on Afghan security forces in October 2010, the U.S.-led alliance was adamant that as the Afghan National Army (ANA) grew to the point where it would be able to defend its own country, it would also need to increase the women in its ranks. "This growth must result in an inclusive army," said the NATO document. "This requires future effort in building a cadre of female soldiers, as well as ensuring an ethnically balanced army. Currently there are 301 women in the ANA, of which 166 are officers." A year later, The New York Times ran a story about a female cadet training to be an officer in the ANA.