Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
From Utah, With Love
Mia Love, 37, is running against incumbent Democrat Jim Matheson, 52, in a district created when the 2010 census gave a fourth representative to this booming state -- imagine Utah's growth if the federal government did not own 58 percent of the land.
Warning: Liberals on the Loose!
I, for one, was extremely upset about the storming of the American embassy in Cairo, Egypt. Perhaps I should be more specific. It wasn't the storming itself that angered me. We have all come to expect that sort of thing from the non-Israeli inhabitants of the Middle East. What pissed me off was that in the aftermath, the U.S. apologized. Apparently it is now our official policy to speak softly and carry no stick at all. I also fear that our response may act as precedence in other areas. For instance, it may now be incumbent on rape victims to apologize to their attackers.
Israel Is America's Shield
We are used to hearing that America defends Israel. President Obama assures Israel that he has their back. That may be convincing talk in the 'hood, but it rings hollow from this invertebrate administration to talk about anyone's back. Actually, we may have all that backward. It may well be that Israel that is defending us. Israel may yet prove America's Shield. All the usual chin-pullers and deep thinkers are warning of the parade of horribles that will descend on the world if Israel strikes Iran to prevent the mullahs from getting nuclear weapons. Why, says Georgetown University think tanker Anthony Cordesman, "a strike by Israel will give rise to regional instability and conflict as well as terrorism."
From The Comedy Store
Barack Obama will attend a fundraiser held by actor Jonathan Goldsmith, who plays The Most Interesting Man in the World on Dos Equis beer commercials. All the ads have to be re-shot. Now he says he doesn't always drink, but when he does, he drinks the Kool-Aid.
Bad News Abroad, Good News at Home
As part of the continuing success story that is the foreign policy of Barack Obama, the U.S. Ambassador to China, Gary Locke, found his car surrounded by protesters, blocked, and pelted with plastic water bottles. This, directly in front of the American embassy. He claimed he felt he was never in any danger and the Chinese have "expressed regret" and, the U.S. State Department has expressed the same exact level of outrage as it has exhibited in the attacks on other Embassies around the world. Which is to say, none.
Two Justice Department Officials Leave Over Damning Fast & Furious Report
But report doesn't go far enough.
Eddie Haskell Brooks
New York Times columnist David Brooks is the Eddie Haskell of the Fourth Estate. Like the two-faced sycophant in "Leave It to Beaver," Brooks indulges in excessive politeness while currying favor with political authority. He prides himself on an oily semblance of maturity and rational discourse. But the phony "conservative" back-stabber, who has spent the last four years slavering over Barack Obama like a One Direction groupie and trashing the tea party like an MSNBC junkie, isn't fooling anyone. Lately, Brooks has been given to dispensing passive-aggressive advice to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. His column this week titled "Thurston Howell Romney" called Romney "a kind, decent man" -- and then shredded him to pieces as a "country club" elitist who "doesn't know much about the culture of America," "knows nothing about ambition and motivation," and is "running a depressingly inept presidential campaign."
Islamic Exceptionalism
The "enlightened" who claim a firm grip on the steering wheel of Western civilization see the future through a lens in which man becomes ever more perfectible as outdated religious creeds fade away. And thus the irony. For all the contempt these cosmopolitans show for religion, there is one faith beyond public rebuke. Call it Islamic exceptionalism. Public Enemy No. 1 right now is the man who made a ridiculously shoddy YouTube video titled "The Innocence of Muslims." This man and his so-called "film" have been blamed with a very broad brush for every riot and protest across the Mideast. It is all so ... impossible. This video sat unwatched for months until an Egyptian television station decided to promote it as some kind of global insult. Not you, not anyone you know and not anyone they know ever heard of this. But when the "Arab street" decided to stage riots outside American embassies, our government derided "continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims -- as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions."
Media Bias and the 47 Percent
The narrative of the Romney campaign as portrayed by most major media last week has been one of a tone-deaf, elitist candidate. In a presidential race as tight as this one -- the Gallup daily tracking poll Thursday showed the candidates tied at 47 percent -- the media potentially can tip the balance for or against a candidate in a decisive way. Most outlets ran with the stories suggesting Romney was describing 47 percent of American voters as government-dependent slackers who pay no taxes. In fact, Romney suggested nothing of the sort. The videotape of Romney's remarks received publicity after James Earl Carter IV -- grandson of former president Jimmy Carter -- promoted the tape through the left-wing magazine Mother Jones. It turns out, the version of the tape available via Mother Jones was edited, with important sections left out.
Useful Idiots
WASHINGTON -- Ever since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2012, the Obama White House has sought to lay blame for deadly and destructive anti-American attacks in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and more than two dozen other countries on someone else. The O-Team -- and the perpetrators -- have had a lot of help from the "useful idiots" in the mainstream media. The disinformation campaign being waged by the Obama administration over the cause of this violence would be comedic but for the fact that six Americans have been killed and dozens have been injured. From the perspective of many "covering this story," the global jihad we're witnessing is mostly the fault of an incompetent "filmmaker," and the "spontaneous outrage" is over a "provocative video." Notably, the same is being said about protests against French diplomatic posts in the Middle East because "obscene cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad" were published in a French magazine. What's really obscene is the way all of this has been covered by the potentates of the press -- particularly the events in Cairo, Benghazi and Afghanistan.
Collapse of the Cairo Doctrine
WASHINGTON -- In the week following 9/11/12 something big happened: the collapse of the Cairo Doctrine, the centerpiece of President Obama's foreign policy. It was to reset the very course of post-9/11 America, creating, after the (allegedly) brutal depredations of the Bush years, a profound rapprochement with the Islamic world. On June 4, 2009, in Cairo, Obama promised "a new beginning" offering Muslims "mutual respect," unsubtly implying previous disrespect. Curious, as over the previous 20 years, America had six times committed its military forces on behalf of oppressed Muslims, three times for reasons of pure humanitarianism (Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo), where no U.S. interests were at stake. But no matter. Obama had come to remonstrate and restrain the hyperpower that, by his telling, had lost its way after 9/11, creating Guantanamo, practicing torture, imposing its will with arrogance and presumption.
Free Speech Isn't the Problem
"No One Murdered Because Of This Image." That was a recent headline from The Onion, the often hilarious parody newspaper. The image in question is really not appropriate to describe with any specificity in a family newspaper. It's quite simply disgusting. And, suffice it to say, it leaves nothing to the imagination. Four of "the most cherished figures from multiple religious faiths were depicted engaging in a lascivious sex act of considerable depravity," according to The Onion, and yet "no one was murdered, beaten, or had their lives threatened, sources reported Thursday."
As Mr. Obama's World Turns
It's been twenty years since Vice President Dan Quayle left town. He was hooted and booted out of office. The press had a field day with his misspelling of "potatoe," or rather, potato. What a dunce, they wrote. Of course, that is standard treatment for conservatives, Christians, or anyone else who doesn't go along with the right thinking, which is to say, the left thinking legions of progressivism. No sooner had the former vice president left Washington for the greener golf courses of Arizona than social scientist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead took to the pages of *The Atlantic*. In April, 1993, she bravely wrote: "Dan Quayle was Right."
Mitt Video an Opportunity, Not a Scandal
So what about the Democrats' would-be tempest about Mitt Romney's alleged 47 percent gaffe? Is there any "there" there? Mitt's statement was made at a private fundraiser, where he was trying to explain that his message of reducing taxes would obviously not resonate with the 47 percent of Americans who are not paying income taxes. It's purely logical; you aren't going to entice those who aren't paying taxes with promises of lower taxes. The statement was hardly shocking or unique. For years, we've heard the axiom that once the body politic of any nation freely votes itself money from the public trough, the nation's days are numbered. In fact, the adage is so common we don't know for sure where it originated. I've heard it attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Jefferson and others.
Obama's Against Mob Violence -- by Americans
President Obama does worry about a mob mentality. It's just unfortunate that he so often thinks he sees it in his own countrymen. The administration's response to the attacks on our embassies and the murder of our diplomats last week was familiar. The president condemned the murders and promised to bring the perpetrators to justice. But he was also careful to add that the "Libyans acted responsibly by carrying Ambassador Stevens' body to the hospital." There is now a video of a mob finding Stevens's body, and it's ambiguous. Some shout "Allahu Akbar" and pump their fists in the air when they discover the nearly lifeless body of the ambassador. The New York Times explains that they were praising God because they discovered that Stevens was still breathing. Maybe. The clip leaves room for other interpretations. The point is that Mr. Obama, before all the facts were known -- "shooting first and aiming later" if you will -- was at pains to highlight friendly behavior by the Libyans. Why? Did he fear that Americans might become too angry?
Arizona Begins Enforcing Immigration Law -- for Now
But pro-illegal alien crusaders are gearing up for a fight.
The Blamer in Chief
Barack Obama has become America's blamer in chief. He and his administration spent last weekend blaming the explosion of violence against America in the Middle East on a moronic anti-Muhammad video that's been on YouTube for months. His United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice made the rounds of the Sunday morning news shows, where she made an absolute idiot of herself. Apparently auditioning for the secretary of state job in -- God forbid -- a second Obama administration, Rice insisted that the "spontaneous" Islamic rage that killed our ambassador in Libya and three other Americans was caused not by the failures of her boss but by an amateur movie made by some nut in California.
Elitist, Out-of-Touch Media Complain Romney Not Regular Guy
Only our totally unbiased watchdog media could turn the burning of U.S. embassies in countries where Barack Obama had recently supported mob revolts into Mitt Romney's blunder. Journalists couldn't risk having Obama's campaign slogan "Osama is dead" being amended with "and so is our ambassador." After our ambassador to Libya was murdered in a preplanned, coordinated attack on our embassy last week, preceded by an attack on our embassy in Egypt (and followed by attacks on our embassies in Yemen, Indonesia, Tunisia and Lebanon), Romney criticized the Obama administration for "sympathizing with those who had breached our embassy in Egypt." He was referring to a statement put out by our Cairo embassy before the ambassador's murder, criticizing an American filmmaker whose YouTube trailer was the alleged provocation for the attacks. Attacks that happened to occur on the anniversary of 9/11.
Distractions and Diversions
There's another video, this one of Mitt Romney speaking to donors at a fundraiser in Boca Raton. The video was reportedly "leaked" by James Carter IV, the grandson of former President Jimmy Carter. How appropriate. It apparently was saved for the most politically opportune moment and then published by the liberal Mother Jones Magazine in hopes of causing maximum damage to the Romney campaign. It's all part of the Democrats' attempt to distract attention from the president's failed record. But the Obama campaign has had to deal with a "leak" of its own recently, namely the release of a 14-year-old audio recording of remarks supposedly made by then-Illinois State Sen. Obama at a conference in Chicago. "...I actually believe in redistribution," he said, "at least at a certain level, to make sure everybody's got a shot." Will this statement derail the president's re-election campaign?
