Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Starting All Over Again
WASHINGTON -- Conservatives should jauntily sing as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers did in a year in which the country's chin was on the ground. Conservatives are hardly starting from scratch in their continuing courtship of an electorate half of which embraced their message more warmly than it did this year's messenger. The election's outcome was foreshadowed by Mitt Romney struggling as long as he did to surmount a notably weak field of Republican rivals. His salient deficiency was not of character but of chemistry, that indefinable something suggested by the term empathy. Many voters who thought he lacked this did not trust him to employ on their behalf what he does not lack, economic understanding.
Don't Go Wobbly, GOP
In the fierce headline debate over the so-called fiscal cliff, our newly re-elected president argues that "a majority of Americans agree with (his) approach." That approach, according to the president, is "to combine spending cuts with revenue -- and that means asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more in taxes." Well, that's not exactly what the exit polls said. To the question "Should taxes be raised to help cut the budget deficit?" only 33 percent answered "yes," while 63 percent responded "no." Isn't that interesting? But nobody's talking about this exit-poll nugget.
From The Comedy Store
Cleveland police report that a convenience store robber in suburban Warren took the cash from the cashier and told him to vote for Obama. The robber is really sorry now. As soon as he put the cash in his pocket Obama declared him rich and took it all.
Will Republicans Ever Win the Presidency Again?
Will Republicans ever win the presidency again? In the aftermath of the reelection of the worst president since James Buchanan, the question must be asked. Clearly, the Republican Party is on the downswing. But why? There are two easy answers. Neither of them is correct. The first answer is advanced by proponents of liberalism. They say that the 2012 election was an ideological election, the seminal, long-awaited decision of the American public to fully embrace their inner socialists. This argument posits that Mitt Romney was an extreme conservative, Barack Obama was an extreme liberal, and the American people cast their lot with the liberal.
Another Day of Infamy
The most surprising thing about the election is that I, generally the most cynical of men, gave too much credit to the American people. Although I only lost a ten dollar bet on the election, I was sorely tempted to wager a lot more. Fortunately, I couldn't afford to risk it, even on what I regarded as a pretty sure thing. The truth is that when Dick Morris began talking about a Romney landslide, I began to entertain doubts. I've never forgotten the way that Bill O'Reilly's favorite oracle insisted in 2010 that Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina were going to trounce Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer. But I figured that even a blind pig sometimes stumbles across an acorn and a broken clock is right twice every 24 hours.
A Third Party
During the Q & A section of my speech to the Chamber group here last night, someone asked what I thought about the concept of a third party to counter the influence of the right wing of the Republican Party. If there were a true independent third party in the U.S. House and Senate of, say, 10 percent of the membership that would mean 43 Members in the House and 10 Senators. It is unlikely that either Republicans or Democrats would have enough votes to organize either Chamber without the buy-in of the independents.
Changing Demographics? More Like Enduring Ignorance
By now, you've heard from most of the chattering classes as to why Democrats in general, and Barack Obama in particular, did so well on election night. You've heard about changing demographics, an opportune storm, media malfeasance, etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseam. Let me make it much simpler. On election night, for the umpteenth time, I went to the local food mart, and gave the high school kid working the register a five dollar bill for something that cost $2.32. She punched it into the computer, after which I gave her the thirty-two cents. By now, most of you know where this is going: the dazed look, alternating between the change and me, as if I'd handed her the Dead Sea Scrolls and demanded a translation on the spot. Of course if I'd used that analogy to make light of the moment, it wouldn't have mattered: these kids aren't just mathematically illiterate, they wouldn't know what the Dead Sea Scrolls are either -- unless it was the name of a new app for their I-phones.
A Victory for Creatures of the State
The Progressives won on Tuesday. I don't mean the people who voted Democrat who call themselves "progressive." Though they won, too. I mean the Progressives who've been waging a century-long effort to transform our American-style government into a European-style state. The words "government" and "state" are often used interchangeably, but they are really different things. According to the founders' vision, the people are sovereign and the government belongs to us. Under the European notion of the state, the people are creatures of the state, significant only as parts of the whole.
Answer the Questions
TAMPA, Fla. -- This is the hometown of U.S. Special Operations Command -- at nearby MacDill Air Force Base. This headquarters dispatches our military's special operators -- Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines -- on missions in the most difficult and dangerous places on earth. It's also the place where "action officers" are burning the midnight oil -- but not necessarily planning new targets for our Navy SEALs. Apparently, a "good number" of SOCOM's staff members are busy preparing responses to the batches of inquiries about what really happened in Benghazi, Libya -- before, during and after the terror attack on the night of Sept. 11-12 that resulted in four dead Americans. Answers have been slow in coming. Three days after the assault, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the FBI would investigate the attack as a criminal matter, not as an act of war. For reasons left to our imagination, the FBI didn't move fast enough, so the Obama administration appointed a special review board to develop a "full picture" of all that transpired at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.
Hollywood Won 2012?
The television industry loves to claim that all of the sex, violence and foul-mouthed language it displays has zero harmful effects on children. On the other hand, they would never dream of telling their advertisers that their paid messages on TV have no effect. So does the entertainment industry have an impact or doesn't it? The answer is that Tinseltown certainly has an effect, and when that effect is felt in the political arena, the hell with pretending they don't. They openly celebrate. After the 2012 election, the surprising (if narrow) victories for liberals drew a thumbs-up commentary from former Washington Post reporter Sharon Waxman at The Wrap website. She credited Hollywood.
Time for Introspection, but Not Surrender
Has the nation gone irreversibly blue? Did intraparty disunity sabotage Mitt Romney's presidential quest? Or is there some other explanation for the nation's re-election of a president with the worst record in decades? I received an email from a brilliant conservative friend who wonders whether Republicans can ever win another election and thus whether the nation is forever lost. I ran into a college student at church the Sunday before the election, and despite his strong conservatism and high intelligence, he admitted confusion about the candidates' respective positions after the presidential debates. My first reaction after the election verdict was to fear both that America's financial collapse is now inevitable and imminent and that America's implosion is inevitable because the election seemed to reveal that the majority of Americans no longer embrace America's founding principles.
The Hope-a-Nomics Disaster: One Company's Horror Story
President Obama promises to move the country forward with his recycled pledge of five million green jobs. But in the real world, small businesses are struggling to stay afloat as they deal with the fiscal wreckage of this administration's disastrous venture socialism. Here's the tale of just one Colorado company victimized by the Obama Department of Energy (DOE). Colorado Distribution Group is a privately held storage and shipping company based in Denver. Thanks to hope-a-nomics, its warehouse is saddled with nearly 7,000 pallets of federally subsidized solar panels (one-third of which are completely spoiled and unsalable), along with related detritus such as broken glass and stray module parts.
One Big Failure
The pundit world will now eviscerate Mitt Romney, a man who, had he garnered just a few hundred thousand more votes in a few key districts, would have been hailed as political genius. Instead, his every fault will be examined, his mistakes magnified and his defeat decreed to be, in retrospect, inevitable. Romney was not my first choice. I had been hoping for Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels. But in the course of the long campaign, I had come to admire Romney immensely. Everyone who is now picking over his bones should remember that he was a conquering hero after the first debate. I grieve mostly for the country in the wake of Obama's victory, but also a bit for Romney. He deserved to win. He would have been a good president. And this much is certain -- the assassination of his character by the Obama machine was disgusting. Obama won ugly. We should never forget that. This too is likely: If Romney had won and Republicans had carried the Senate, the United States would be poised for an economic boom, a return to world leadership, a workable reform of health care and a mature and responsible resolution of the entitlement crisis.
GOP Folly
There may be no single, simple explanation why Mitt Romney lost the election this week -- but clearly the perception that the GOP is anti-Hispanic didn't help. For years, I've been warning my fellow conservatives that their position on immigration would be costly, not just politically but for the economy as well. The election results definitively proved the former. The Hispanic vote was decisive in denying Romney a win in Colorado, Nevada, Florida and possibly Virginia. Without winning more Hispanic votes, the Republican Party may be doomed to permanent minority status. Hispanics are the fastest growing population in the country. As a group they are younger, have slightly higher birthrates and greater longevity than other groups (80.6 years compared to 78.1 years for non-Hispanic whites), which means the demographic shifts to more Hispanic and fewer non-Hispanic white voters will only increase over time, even if all immigration were halted today.
The Way Forward
WASHINGTON -- They lose and immediately the chorus begins. Republicans must change or die. A rump party of white America, it must adapt to evolving demographics or forever be the minority. The only part of this that is even partially true regards Hispanics. They should be a natural Republican constituency: striving immigrant community, religious, Catholic, family-oriented and socially conservative (on abortion, for example). The principal reason they go Democratic is the issue of illegal immigrants. In securing the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney made the strategic error of (unnecessarily) going to the right of Rick Perry. Romney could never successfully tack back.
George Soros Enmeshed in Bribery Scandal
Is the radical billionaire colluding with the government of Guinea to seize private mining assets?
GOP Turns Sure Victory into Defeat
Wait until next year -- 2016, that is. That's what disappointed Republican spinners kept saying Tuesday night as they watched Mitt Romney's hopes crash and burn in swing state after swing state. How many times did I hear a Republican talk about how their party's deep bench of future all-stars will return it to power in Washington in four years? But all the Ryans, Rubios, Bushes, Haleys and Christies in America can't put the GOP -- or the country -- back together again.
Don't Blame Romney
We spent billions of dollars and billions of words on an election to switch from President Obama, a Democratic Senate and a Republican House to President Obama, a Democratic Senate and a Republican House. Every election predictor was wrong, except one: Incumbents usually win. Republicans have taken out a sitting president only once in the last century, and that was in 1980 when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. Sadly, Reagan's record remains secure.
The Election ... The Election of 2014
Washington -- Jimmy Carter is redeemed! The grinning dunce of yesteryear, who grew into the anile doddering figure of today, lecturing the civilized on all manner of statecraft, has been replaced by the saturnine gaunt prophet, Barack Obama. His sorry performance these past four years he lays to the administration of George W. Bush. The next four years will be a replay of the last four years, and an even graver crisis will confront us then with the domestic economy in a funk and foreign potentates all laughing at us. The Prophet Obama has demonstrated that you can preside over a wobbly economy and be re-elected. Apparently it is not "the economy, stupid," as James Carville told us. You can suffer a foreign policy disaster (even in the midst of a campaign) and it will be ignored. Jimmy could have been re-elected in 1980 if it were not for the miracle of Ronald Reagan. Had the Republicans nominated a perfectly nice man, say a successful businessman who earned a fortune as large as John F. Kennedy or Franklin D. Roosevelt inherited, Jimmy would have won re-election and the economy would have continued to founder in stagflation and he would have been sending helicopters out into the desert to be destroyed; possibly he would be sending the fleet to be destroyed.