Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Killing the Goose
Killing the goose that lays the golden egg is one of those old fairy tales for children which has a heavy message that a lot of adults should listen to. The labor unions which have driven the makers of Twinkies into bankruptcy, potentially destroying 18,500 jobs, could have learned a lot from that old children's fairy tale. Many people think of labor unions as organizations to benefit workers, and think of employers who are opposed to unions as just people who don't want to pay their employees more money. But some employers have made it a point to pay their employees more than the union wages, just to keep them from joining a union.
Watch the Governors
We know Romney was too conservative in the primaries and too moderate in the general. We know Romney didn't run enough ads in the Spring then ran too many ads in the Fall. We know Republicans depended too much on their turnout operation and too little on messaging. We know Republicans depended too much on messaging and too little on their turnout operation. We know the GOP and the Super PACs were too focused on fundraising and we know the Obama campaign raised more than enough money. We know ... well, you know what we know. We know Republicans lost the Presidency and did significantly worse in the U.S. Senate than anyone might have believed. But we also know that Republicans held their own in the U.S. House (losing only single-digit seats in the face of a really bad night); and actually gained a Governor to make the current total of Republican Governors a 30 out of the 50 available.
Our Kids Are Doomed. Give Them a Twinkie
Why we need to stop worrying about the future: there is none.
Incumbents Forever
As a candidate for lieutenant governor in 1982, John Kerry assured the voters of Massachusetts that he wasn't seeking the position as a mere "stepping-stone" to higher office. But just one year into his four-year term, he announced his candidacy for the US Senate seat that Paul Tsongas was vacating because of illness. Few people held Kerry's broken commitment against him. In part that was because nobody had believed it in the first place (*all* candidates for lieutenant governor seek the position as a stepping-stone). But it was also because everyone knew what Kerry knew: If he passed up the chance to run for the position Tsongas was relinquishing, it might be years before it opened up again. So Kerry jumped into the Senate race and won. Sure enough, the seat has been occupied ever since.
Alas, E Pluribus Pluribus
Not being conversant in Latin, I may have bungled the title, but I figure that if "e pluribus unum" means one out of many, what we have turned into is an America that the Founding Fathers would never recognize. When you look at the election map, we more closely resemble the Balkans than the America that used to lie between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Even if, like me, you wonder what happened to those two million Republicans who saw fit to vote for John McCain, but decided to stay home this time alphabetizing their canned goods, there's no getting around the fact that Obama has managed to expand on FDR's base. Whereas Roosevelt managed to win four elections by appealing mainly to blacks, Jews and union members, Obama has cobbled together those three blocs along with Hispanics, homosexuals, single women, Asians, Muslims and college students.
Both Sides Must Give Ground to Avoid Fiscal Cliff
In his first formal press conference in months, Barack Obama showed that getting re-elected can increase a president's confidence and combativeness. He staked out tough stands on several issues, especially on the looming budget negotiations. Looking ahead to the "fiscal cliff" on Dec. 31, when the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts expire and sequestration cuts government spending sharply, Obama demanded $1.6 trillion of increased revenues as part of any budget bargain. That's twice the number he and Speaker John Boehner agreed on in the grand bargain talks in the summer of 2011.
CFPB Needs a Day in Court
There can be unseemly exposure of the mind as well as of the body, as the progressive mind is exposed in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a creature of the labyrinthine Dodd-Frank legislation. Judicial dismantling of the CFPB would affirm the rule of law and Congress' constitutional role. The CFPB's director, Richard Cordray, was installed by one of Barack Obama's spurious recess appointments made when the Senate was not in recess. Vitiating the Senate's power to advise and consent to presidential appointments is congruent with the CFPB's general lawlessness.
UC Irvine Student Government Approves Anti-Israel Boycott
One of the most hostile campuses in the nation for Jewish students.
Sexting With the Stars
For two months, the so-called mainstream media all but ignored the Sept. 11 terror attack in Benghazi, Libya that resulted in four dead Americans. What actions the Obama administration took before, during and after the bloody assaults on the U.S. consulate and a CIA outpost should have been a legitimate election issue. ... Now that the election is decided, the Fourth Estate is on the story.
O'Reilly, Obama & Oh, Brother!
Recently, Bill O'Reilly conducted one of his unscientific polls. The question put to his conservative viewers was whether they were able to maintain friendships with liberals. Apparently, 79% of the respondents boasted that they were able to do so. I'm with the 21% who can't. Keeping in mind that the question only asked about friends and not relatives, those people one can't avoid no matter how hard you try, I have to ask myself what sort of friendships the 79% had in mind. Clearly it's not a relationship that places any importance on values and character. Perhaps these "friendships" imply nothing more than a word we use to describe a group of guys getting together to bowl, play poker or shoot a round of golf. It certainly doesn't involve a mature concern over America's economy, security or future.
What Ron Paul Gets Wrong
Congressman Ron Paul has just delivered his valedictory address in the House of Representatives. And he has told TV interviewers that the American Revolution was a wonderful example of *secession*. He's a much better OB/GYN, I'm sure, than he is a student of America's history. He could be cited for political malpractice. If the Founding Fathers and the Patriots who fought and won the Revolution were seceding, why is it that none of them ever called it secession? They certainly had the word back then. They invoked the well-known right of revolution. They had read their John Locke and their Montesquieu, to be sure, but they most often listened to sermons advocating independence -- especially those of the New England clergy.
From The Comedy Store
President Obama had his first press conference in eight months at the White House. Reporters asked the president why he didn't know that the FBI was investigating his CIA chief all year. He was so crushed that a White House reporter would ask him a real question that he broke down sobbing for the second time in ten days.
Hostess Brands on the Brink
If unions don't stop striking, "the company will probably liquidate everything in a matter of days."
Duck Soup
One of the great character-study movies of all time is the 1933 film Duck Soup starring the Marx Brothers. As President Rufus T. Firefly (played by Groucho) is interrogating a man named Chiolini (played by Chico) who is on trial for spying. There is this brief exchange as a General rushes in to announce that Sylvania, the country bordering Freedonia, is threatening to attack...
Winning the Defense Spending Debate
With no time to recover from a thorough election day whooping, Republicans in a lame duck Congress are facing an even worse budgetary nightmare than last year. And they only have two months to negotiate a solution with President Obama. Last time, as the Chair of the Balanced Budget Amendment campaign, fellow conservatives and I were urging Republicans to tie the unavoidable increase in the debt ceiling to a balanced budget amendment. Because it also prohibited tax increases, the amendment would have required balance to be achieved through necessary cuts throughout the federal government. But in the end, politicians did what you might expect: They punted the issue. And America will now face serious consequences.
Best Foot Forward?
Our large cruise ship sailed within view of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a gathering of conservatives sponsored by National Review magazine considered the wreckage of the 2012 election. Most of the writers and commentators on board agreed with Ralph Reed of the Faith and Freedom Coalition that the last thing conservatives need to do now is to form a "circular firing squad." But lessons must be learned. Was Mitt Romney, as some suggested, "our best foot forward" -- a highly intelligent, photogenic, generous, public-spirited, articulate man of great integrity whose loss can only be chalked up to the poor judgment of 2012's voters? Or was he, as Midge Decter described him, "the sort of person you'd love to have as your next door neighbor," but who couldn't inspire political passion?
The Malicious Mangling of the Virgin Mary
A Christian can be crushed gazing at the picture of Mary standing at the foot of the cross, watching her beloved son suffocate and die. But in that vision, she stands there for hours, patiently enduring her suffering. For two millennia, she has been a role model for Christians, a woman who practiced obedience in the most difficult of human circumstances, with fervent hope for what this sacrifice will offer all mankind as it struggles with sin. This is why it seems so hard to reflect that vision of patience when black-hearted "artists" practice character assassination on the Blessed Virgin Mary to strip her of every virtue: her patience, her obedience, her courageous love and her prayerful faith in God. On Nov. 13, Simon and Schuster launched a vicious little 96-page novella titled "The Testament of Mary."
How Conservatives Can Defeat Liberalism
Two weeks after the election, conservatives are still asking why Mitt Romney lost. That, however, is the wrong first question argues Charles R. Kesler in his new book "I am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism." We cannot fully understand Romney's defeat, implies Kelser, until we first understand why conservatives have lost the majority of policy battles over the past 100 years. Despite having won their share of Presidential elections, conservatives have not slowed the advance of the welfare state. Political pundits have blamed Romney's defeat on everything from Hurricane Sandy to inept get-out-the vote efforts, but the problem goes deeper. If conservatives are to get back on track, says Kesler, they must look to first principles, to the political philosophy, often invisible, that ultimately drives public policy. Kesler who is the editor of the influential Claremont Review of Books, shows how Woodrow Wilson and the early twentieth century Progressives silently overturned the principles of the American Founding. Kesler then traces out the liberal policies that logically, even inevitably, followed and are a major part of the contemporary liberal agenda.
Obama's Hostile and Evasive Presser
Obama's first post-election press conference, if you could call it that, tells us a great deal about his attitude and the approach he intends to pursue in his second term, which is the same failed policy mix on steroids. Obama's re-election, of course, gives him the right to pursue these policies, but it doesn't deny elected Republicans the right or relieve them of the duty to oppose them. If Obama can glean any intelligible mandate from his victory, it is that relentless negative campaigning, demagoguery, divisive identity politics, deceit and superior political strategists targeting essential voters and voting districts work. So it should be no surprise that Obama is taking that lesson to heart and is already applying the same strategies going forward.
Compassionate Conservatism Redux
I think I owe an apology to George W. Bush. William F. Buckley once noted that he was 19 when the Cold War began at the Yalta conference. The year the Berlin Wall came down, he became a senior citizen. In other words, he explained, anti-Communism was a defining feature of conservatism his entire adult life. Domestically, meanwhile, the right was largely a "leave me alone coalition": Religious and traditional conservatives, overtaxed businessmen, Western libertarians, and others fed up with government social engineering and economic folly. The foreign policy battle against tyrannical statism abroad only buttressed the domestic antagonism toward well-intentioned and occasionally democratic statism at home.