Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Aiming at the Wrong Targets
Back in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a highly controversial paper entitled "The Negro Family: A Case for National Action." In it he warned that "there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future -- that community asks for and gets chaos." It is precisely that chaos the forms the center of gun violence in the United States.
Obama's Orwellian Inaugural Address
On Monday, President Barack Obama delivered a monumental address to the nation. It wasn't monumental in terms of rhetoric -- in fact, it wasn't even memorable. It was monumental because it signaled for the first time just how grand Obama's ambitions for the left are. No longer is the left content to wage a war against Constitutional principles on behalf of a Marxist philosophical system. Now they will attempt to convince the American people that Constitutional principles dictate Marxism. Obama opened his address by quoting the Declaration of Independence: "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The Declaration of Independence sets forth a vision of limited government designed to avoid tyranny. But Obama, employing all the linguistic slight-of-hand in his multitudinous bag of tricks, had a plan to turn the Declaration inside out.
Rotten to the Core: Obama's War on Academic Standards (Part 1)
America's downfall doesn't begin with the "low-information voter." It starts with the no-knowledge student. For decades, collectivist agitators in our schools have chipped away at academic excellence in the name of fairness, diversity and social justice. "Progressive" reformers denounced Western civilization requirements, the Founding Fathers and the Great Books as racist. They attacked traditional grammar classes as irrelevant in modern life. They deemed ability grouping of students (tracking) bad for self-esteem. They replaced time-tested rote techniques and standard algorithms with fuzzy math, inventive spelling and multicultural claptrap. Under President Obama, these top-down mal-formers -- empowered by Washington education bureaucrats and backed by misguided liberal philanthropists led by billionaire Bill Gates -- are now presiding over a radical makeover of your children's school curriculum. It's being done in the name of federal "Common Core" standards that do anything but raise achievement standards.
Do We Want Better Enforcement of Misguided Gun Restrictions?
"The single most important thing we can do to prevent gun violence and mass shootings," President Obama said last week, "is to make sure those who would commit acts of violence cannot get access to guns." Toward that end, he wants to require background checks not just for sales by federally licensed firearms dealers (as under current law), but for all gun transfers except those between relatives. This idea seems to be the most popular of Obama's gun control proposals, supported by nine out of 10 respondents in a recent CBS News poll. Yet it is unlikely to stop mass shootings, and enforcing it would require the sort of surveillance that has long been anathema to defenders of the Second Amendment, exposing millions of peaceful people to the threat of gun confiscation and criminal prosecution.
Shopping Around for a Better Life
Thanks, California! Thanks for your monstrous spending and absurd regulatory overreach! America needs you. We need Connecticut and Illinois, too! We need you the way we needed the Soviet Union, as models of failure, to warn us what happens if we believe those who say, "Government can." Moving to California was once the dream for many Americans. Its population grew at almost triple the national average -- until 1990. Then big government, in the form of endless regulation and taxes, killed much of the dream. In the last decade, 2 million people left California. Many of them moved to Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington or Wyoming. More on what makes those states special in a moment.
Experts Aren't Deities
Let's look at experts. Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was a mathematician and scientist. Newton has to be the greatest and most influential scientist who has ever lived. He laid the foundation for classical mechanics, and his genius transformed our understanding of science, particularly in the areas of physics, mathematics and astronomy. What's not widely known is that Newton spent most of his waking hours on alchemy; his experiments included trying to turn lead into gold. Though he wrote volumes on alchemy, after his death Britain's Royal Society deemed that they were "not fit to be printed."
Good Sense and Gun Control
In the early 1980s, transit officials in Washington couldn't figure out why traffic on the Beltway would grind to a near halt every day around the exact same time. The usual explanations didn't fit. Then it was discovered that a single driver was to blame. Every day on his drive to work, this commuter would plant himself in the left lane and set his cruise control to 55 mph, the posted speed limit, forcing those behind him to merge right, and you can imagine the effects. To his credit, this driver came forward in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post. The man's name was John O. Nestor. He explained that the left lane was great; less traffic, less merging -- why not ride it into work every day? Besides, he wrote, "Why should I inconvenience myself for someone who wants to speed?"
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Remaking America With Barack Obama
There's an upside, naturally, to the power grab ("We are made for this moment, and we will seize it."), the president announced to the whole world Monday. The upside comprises of two parts: the now-we-know part and the ain't-likely-to-happen part. What we now know is that an unabashed president elected by a slight majority of his countrymen means to go full throttle with the "progressive" agenda as his collaborators in the major media commonly owers identify the liberal agenda in its advanced form. "We understand," said Barack 0bama, "that outworn programs are inadequate to the needs of our time. So we must harvest new ideas and technology to remake our government." Whoa. Wait. "Remake the government"? That's what goes on here? Who knew, last November?
A First Term of Failure on Race Issues
Will four more years of Obama bring more economic devastation to the black community?
'Fiscal' Conservatism Needs 'Social' Conservatism
For some years now, we have been told about a major division within American conservatism: fiscal conservatives vs. social conservatives. This division is hurting conservatism and hurting America -- because the survival of American values depends on both fiscal and social conservatism. Furthermore, the division is logically and morally untenable. A conservative conserves all American values, not just economic ones. By "social conservatism," I am referring to the second and third components of what I call the American Trinity -- liberty, "In God We Trust" and "E Pluribus Unum."
Obama's Lincoln Presumption
He swore his oath of office on Abraham Lincoln's Bible. He has asked to give the State of the Union address on Lincoln's birthday. He rode to Washington in 2009 on a train route similar to Lincoln's in 1861. He has compared his critics to Lincoln's critics. He confides to admirers that he likes to read the handwritten Gettysburg Address that hangs in the Lincoln Bedroom. Barack Obama is inviting the world to compare him not just to good presidents but to the greatest in American history. There can be majesty in invoking past presidents and the Founding Fathers. But Obama's quotations and allusions in his inaugural address served only to highlight the flatness of his own prose. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," he intoned, repeating the echoing words of the Declaration of Independence. What followed was: "Today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they've never been self-executing." Clunk. "Self-executing" is a word best left to legal documents. It has as much poetry as a filing cabinet. As for "never-ending journey," it's a phrase that belongs in the juvenile fiction section -- if there.
Beware of Those Advising GOP To Unilaterally Disarm
Isn't it ironic that Republicans keep receiving advice to be more conciliatory and work with President Obama while President Obama not only is receiving the opposite advice but fully intends to be even more divisive in his second term? On "Meet the Press" last week, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said: "There's also a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the (Republican) party. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities." That is outrageously false, but lest you think hypersensitivity to race is all that's bothering Powell, he made clear that he also has a problem with the GOP's policies. He said: "In recent years, there's been a significant shift to the right, and we have seen what that shift has produced: two losing presidential campaigns." A shift to the right? You've got to be kidding. Why isn't Powell concerned about Obama's uber-leftism?
Do Gun Control Laws Control Guns?
The gun control controversy is only the latest of many issues to be debated almost solely in terms of fixed preconceptions, with little or no examination of hard facts. Media discussions of gun control are dominated by two factors: the National Rifle Association and the Second Amendment. But the over-riding factual question is whether gun control laws actually reduce gun crimes in general or murder rates in particular. If, as gun control advocates claim, gun control laws really do control guns and save lives, there is nothing to prevent repealing the Second Amendment, any more than there was anything to prevent repealing the Eighteenth Amendment that created Prohibition.
Roe v. Wade at 40
At last week's signing of "executive actions" designed to combat gun violence in America, President Obama, flanked by schoolchildren, said, "...when it comes to protecting the most vulnerable among us, we must act now." There's no doubt that children, especially schoolchildren, are vulnerable to all kinds of threats, but are they "the most vulnerable," as the president claimed, or is there another category of human life that qualifies for that designation? Forty years after a Supreme Court majority opened the door to legalized abortion, the number of aborted babies has reached roughly 55 million. Think of that. Fifty-five million potential what -- doctors, athletes, mothers and fathers who would add branches to family trees?
Monday, January 21, 2013
Inauguration Day
For foreigners, the only thing nuttier than watching the way we elect our Presidents is watching the way we inaugurate them. For a nation that wears its egalitarianism not just as a badge of honor, but (as we saw this past November) almost as a requirement for office, the pomp and circumstance involved in a modern U.S. Presidential inauguration would have moved Louis XIV to modesty. Both parties face the same issue: Looking for the balance between demonstrating a public outpouring of interest, if not affection, for the person preparing to take the oath of office without giving your political opponents any more ammunition than necessary.
Leftists Rally to Support Iran's Genocidal Quest for Nukes
Marxist-Leninist group founded by former U.S. attorney general promotes "Hands Off Iran" petition.
Are MLK's Christian Values Welcome Today?
What was once understood as religion and tradition is now called bigotry and pushed off the stage.
The Man
Baseball great Stan Musial died over the weekend. He was 92. He will be missed. In September 2007, I was invited to make a speech to a civic group in St. Louis. I told the person who invited me I would come on one condition: that I could meet baseball great Stan Musial. "That's no problem," he said. "We are members of the same sports club." I forget what I said in the speech -- and the audience probably has long forgotten, too, -- but I will always remember having lunch with Stan Musial. Stan regaled me with baseball stories.
GOP Puts Spotlight on Feckless Senate Democrats
Have the House Republicans come up with a winning strategy on the debt ceiling and spending cuts? Or just a viable one? Maybe so. They certainly need one that is at least the latter, if not the former. Barack Obama is up in the polls since the election, as most re-elected presidents have been. The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows him with 52 percent approval and 44 percent disapproval. Other public polls have similar results. In contrast, the NBC/WSJ poll reports that only 26 percent have positive feelings about the Republican Party and 51 negative feelings. Toward Speaker John Boehner only 18 percent have positive feelings and 37 percent negative feelings.