Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
War Is Like Rust
War seems to come out of nowhere, like rust that suddenly pops up on iron after a storm. Throughout history, we have seen that war can sometimes be avoided or postponed, or its effects mitigated -- usually through a balance of power, alliances and deterrence rather than supranational collective agencies. But it never seems to go away entirely. Just as otherwise lawful suburbanites might slug it out over silly driveway boundaries, or trivial road rage can escalate into shooting violence, so nations and factions can whip themselves up to go to war -- consider 1861, 1914 or 1939. Often, the pretexts for starting a war are not real shortages of land, food or fuel, but rather perceptions -- like fear, honor and perceived self-interest.
The Operatic Governor
TRENTON, N.J. -- Coyness is not part of Chris Christie's repertoire, which does not stress subtlety, delicacy and intimation. New Jersey's governor is more Mickey Spillane than Jane Austen and his persona, which sometimes is that of a bulldog who got up on the wrong side of the bed, is so popular he seems to be cruising toward re-election this November and does not deny that he might look beyond that. His budget for 2013 calls for spending less than did the state's 2008 budget. He has vetoed a tax on millionaires three times. He has scrapped, exuberantly, with public employee unions. In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, 41,000 families are still homeless. Nevertheless, 61 percent of his constituents think the state is on the right track, compared to 27 percent who thought so when he entered office three years ago. His 74 percent job approval includes 56 percent of Democrats and 78 percent of independents. This in a state where only 29 percent view the Republican Party favorably. And New Jersey is one of just three states (with New York and Maryland) in which Barack Obama improved upon his 2008 margin of victory (18 points, up from 16).
Lessons From the Ancient Mayans
SANTO TOMAS DE CASTILLA, Guatemala -- Where is that, you ask? Generally this column comes to you from Washington, D.C. or New York City. Occasionally it comes from London or Paris. Today it carries the dateline of a seaport in Guatemala, and if it were written a day ago or two days hence it would carry the dateline of Belize. It is freezing up north. The inclement weather has driven me to tropical parts. Global warming sounds more and more agreeable to me and, frankly, if you have your wits about you, to you, too. The frozen remains of palm trees have supposedly been found in the melting ice of the poles. Well, that is good news. Bring together a village of Eskimos and notify them of the so-called perils of global warming and, my guess is, they would all become vociferous advocates of anthropogenic climate change. Think of it? Wearing a bikini in the North Pole. That is progress!
Better Tools for Immigration Reform Than in 1986
Yesterday, as Barack Obama called for a bipartisan immigration bill in Las Vegas and Sen. Marco Rubio called for one on Rush Limbaugh's program, the chances for passage look surprisingly good. But in some quarters -- mostly from the right, but also from liberals like blogger Mickey Kaus -- comes a complaint that deserves to be addressed. We tried this once already, they say, in the 1986 immigration act. We were told that in return for legalization of illegal immigrants we would get tough border control and strict enforcement against employers who hired illegals. We got the amnesty, these folks say, but we didn't get effective border control or workplace enforcement. We got instead a huge flow of illegals, who number 11 million now.
My Personal Beef With the GOP
Although I have devoted most of the 1,200 articles I've written over the past decade to deriding Democrats, I wouldn't want anyone to get the idea that I don't have my share of problems with Republicans. I'm not merely referring to the lack of guts they so often display in Congress or the way they let things slide from 2001-2007 when they controlled everything in Washington, D.C., and instead of pushing forward a conservative agenda, spent most of their time trying to cozy up to the likes of Ted Kennedy and proving they could waste our tax dollars nearly as well as liberals. Speaking of money, on this one occasion, I won't spend a lot of time chastising wealthy conservatives for blowing their loot trying to promote some mediocrity in the primaries when they should be buying up newspapers and TV stations. It seems pretty obvious that we can't rely entirely on blogs and talk radio to get our message out.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Still Leading From Behind
In another example of his highly developed strategy of "leading from behind," President Barack Obama gave a speech in Las Vegas coming out in favor of Immigration Reform just a day after a group of Senators announced the outlines of a bipartisan plan for Immigration Reform. Get used to this. In his first four years in office, President Obama pretended he had nothing to do with almost anything going on with the economy or in foreign policy. If it was going badly -- whatever "it" might have been -- it was all George W's fault. Or the Republicans in Congress. Or both. If it was going well -- whatever "it" might have been -- it was a first person victory "I did it," or "My administration did it."
Stonewalling Benghazi Into Irrelevancy
The Obama administration's modus operandi for defusing scandals.
Hillary and Your Family
Hillary Clinton finally faced down her critics on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week. She fired back at Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) when he tried to get her to acknowledge that the entire story of an anti-Islamic video inflaming mobs who then murdered Amb. Chris Stevens and three other brave Americans in Libya had been, to put it charitably, wholly unsubstantiated. All along, Hillary had acted as if this was someone else's issue. She was, after all, the Secretary of State who gets "1.43 million cables come into my office" a week. They're all addressed to me, she petulantly shot back. Now, just for a moment, let's consider that statement. Can she really mean she has put in place no system for determining what she must see? She describes a process she allowed to stay in place for four long years that apparently is like drinking from a fire hose. No, that would be *1.43* fire hoses. The military has a standard protocol for distinguishing routine cables from those that deserve higher priority and those that are urgent. An imminent threat to American lives would seem to justify an *urgent* category, wouldn't you think?
Freedom? In Japan, Conservatives Don't Mention It
Tokyo -- When Japan's Liberal Democratic Party stormed back to power in last month's parliamentary elections, news stories in the West described the landslide as a resounding victory for conservatives in a vote driven by economic anxiety. Voters in 2009 had replaced the long-ruling Liberal Democrats -- the more conservative party, its name notwithstanding -- with a left-leaning coalition that had failed to pull the country out of a prolonged decline. Now the electorate had shifted decidedly rightward, and a conservative former prime minister, Shinzo Abe, was back in the saddle. Was Japan having a Tea Party moment?
When the 49ers Played at Kezar
When I was a boy in the 1960s, my father had nine season tickets to the San Francisco 49ers, and on Sundays in the fall would often bring as many as seven of his 11 children to see the team play at Kezar Stadium. Kezar was at the southeast corner of Golden Gate Park, adjacent to the Haight-Ashbury District. In 1967, there was probably no greater side-by-side contrast of the diverging trends in American culture than between the people inside that stadium, watching a game played on grass, and the people outside the stadium, smoking grass. At the age of 9, I followed pro football -- that is, the fate of the 49ers -- with passionate intensity. I did not care about the extraordinarily odd and presumably transient people on the other side of the stadium wall. I assumed the only way they could have a long-term impact on my world was if, say, one of them, driving stoned, ran me over in his Volkswagen bus.
Obama Demagogues Immigration
President Obama is a uniquely gifted demagogue. An orator of unparalleled skill supported by a gushing media, Obama has yet to present a major policy proposal geared toward solving specific problems. But he has won elections. And he has done so by implying -- over and over and over again -- that his opponents are morally deficient. It is truly astonishing just how thin President Barack Obama's playbook is. Since his re-election, Obama has boiled down that playbook to one play, which he runs with the regularity of a team quarterbacked by Mark Sanchez. It usually involves children. It always involves moral indignation. It invariably involves urgency calls for action. Action now. Action yesterday. Action overdue. The content of the action doesn't matter. All that matters it that those who oppose action are the bad guys.
Amnesty Gang Throws Law-Abiders Under the Bus
President Obama and the bipartisan Gang of Eight in Washington who want to create a "pathway to citizenship" for millions of illegal aliens have sent a message loud and clear to those who follow the rules: You're chumps! Have you patiently waited for months and years for the State Department and Department of Homeland Security to slog through your application? You're chumps! Have you paid thousands of dollars in travel, legal and medical fees to abide by the thicket of entry, employment, health and processing regulations? You're chumps! Have you studied for your naturalization test, taken the oath of allegiance to heart, embraced our time-tested principle of the rule of law, and demonstrated that you will be a financially independent, productive citizen? You're chumps!
No 'Playing Gotcha' With Obama
Did you see that hard-hitting report on "60 Minutes" Sunday, the one that charged that one of our nation's most famous leaders and role models is a shameless liar, a ruthless intimidator and even "incinerator" of enemies, a man who operates like the Mafia? No, that wasn't the interview with Barack Obama alongside Hillary Clinton. It was an interview later in the same show about the drug-enhanced bicyclist Lance Armstrong. That's CBS News for you -- a guy who pedals a bike through France is hammered as if he is the most powerful man in the world, while the most powerful man is treated like a lovable celebrity -- because that is precisely how they feel. The agenda of "60 Minutes" should remind viewers that CBS CEO Les Moonves attended a glitzy Obama/DNC fundraiser in Beverly Hills last June, where he admitted the obvious: "Ultimately, journalism has changed ... partisanship is very much a part of journalism now."
Obama Is Not King
Watching President Obama's inaugural, I was confused. It looked like a new king was being crowned. Thousands cheered, like subjects worshipping nobility. At a time when America faces unsustainable debt and terrible economic troubles, why such pomp? Maybe it's because so many people tell themselves presidents can solve any problem, like fairy-tale kings -- or gods. Before America's first inauguration, John Adams suggested George Washington be called "His Most Benign Highness." Fortunately, Congress insisted on the more modest title, "President." At his inaugural, President Obama himself said, "The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few."
What's an Assault Weapon?
Last week, Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced a new, supposedly improved version of the federal "assault weapon" ban that expired in 2004. But like that earlier law, which the California Democrat also sponsored, Feinstein's bill prohibits the manufacture and sale of guns based on characteristics that have little or nothing to do with the danger they pose. Although arbitrary distinctions are a defining characteristic of "assault weapon" bans, recent polls indicate that most Americans support them. New survey data suggest one possible explanation: Most Americans don't know what "assault weapons" are. Feinstein's bill would ban "157 dangerous military-style assault weapons" by name, along with other guns that meet certain criteria. A rifle is considered an "assault weapon," for example, if it has a detachable magazine and one or more of these "military characteristics": a pistol grip or forward grip, a grenade launcher or rocket launcher, a barrel shroud, a threaded barrel, or a folding, telescoping or detachable stock.
Whose Welfare?
If there is ever a contest for the law with the most grossly misleading title, the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 should be a prime candidate, because the last thing this Act protects is the welfare of Indian children. The theory behind the Indian Child Welfare Act is that an American Indian child should be raised in an American Indian culture. Based on that theory, a newborn baby of American Indian ancestry, who was adopted immediately after birth by a white couple, was at 27 months of age taken away from the only parents she has ever known and given to her father. Apparently the tribe has rights under the Indian Child Welfare Act. If this child were of any other race, a court would be free to decide the case on the basis of whatever was in the best interests of the child. Instead, the child is treated almost as property, contrary to the 13th Amendment that outlawed slavery.
Official Lies
Let's expose presidential prevarication. Earlier this year, President Barack Obama warned that Social Security checks will be delayed if Congress fails to increase the government's borrowing authority by raising the debt ceiling. However, there's an issue with this warning. According to the 2012 Social Security trustees report, assets in Social Security's trust funds totaled $2.7 trillion, and Social Security expenditures totaled $773 billion. Therefore, regardless of what Congress does about the debt limit, Social Security recipients are guaranteed their checks. Just take the money from the $2.7 trillion assets held in trust. Which is the lie, Social Security checks must be delayed if the debt ceiling is not raised or there's $2.7 trillion in the Social Security trust funds? The fact of the matter is that they are both lies. The Social Security trust funds contain nothing more than IOUs, bonds that have absolutely no market value. In other words, they are worthless bookkeeping entries. Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system, meaning that the taxes paid by today's workers are immediately sent out as payment to today's retirees. Social Security is just another federal program funded out of general revenues.
Soldier Girl Blues
What if, during the presidential campaign, Mitt Romney had accused President Obama of wanting to let servicewomen serve in combat? After all, Obama had hinted as much in 2008. What would Obama's response have been? My hunch is that he would have accused Romney of practicing the "politics of division" or some such and denied it. In any case, wouldn't an open debate have been better than putting women into combat by fiat? You'd think the folks who are always clamoring for a "national conversation" on this, that and the other thing would prefer to make a sweeping change after, you know, a national conversation.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
The New Normal of Rampant Dim-Bulbism
So I'm reading the Peggy Noonan, George Will and other conservative writers pitching the idea that Obama and the rest of his Marxist/socialist bunch have overplayed their hands, and it's just a matter of time until conservatism comes roaring back. Snap out of it, guys. Exhibits A, B, and C, aka the three biggest news stories that have captured the attention of the American electorate over the past three weeks, reveals the truth. Exhibit A is the Lance Armstrong/Oprah Winfrey confession-fest. A couple of multimillionaires getting down and dirty on Oprah's OWN TV network, complete with a tears-on-cue bit from the bicyclist, and a lot of pre-show promotion by the "Queen of Daytime TV" about how Lance was going "bring it." The only thing the Big O was looking for Lance to "bring" was decent TV ratings for her foundering network. Close, but no cigar. The numbers were impressive, but Lance the Liar finished second to Oprah's interview with deceased singer Whitney Houston's family members. One thing is certain: America has a fascination with drug addicts. And despite the semi-meager numbers, Lance was Topic A for the mainstream media.