Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
America's Big Choice
What happens when a free people decides it was never free to begin with? What happens when a nation decides that individual liberty is a myth, that the endless vicissitudes of life form an impenetrable wall to success, that we are all controlled by outside forces? We despair. We turn to the power of the masses. This is where almost half of America currently stands. It came out this week that Mitt Romney made this claim back in May, and he was exactly right. That doesn't mean that every American who doesn't pay federal income tax -- veterans, recipients of Social Security -- has given up the American dream. But it does mean that the vast majority of Americans who, on net, receive government benefits and beg government for more, have given up on that dream.
Middle East Madness
Last week, Muslim mobs took to the streets to murder the American ambassador in Libya and three of his staffers. American embassies were attacked from Egypt to Yemen. Embarrassed White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice insisted that these assaults were just reactions to an insensitive video circulating on the Internet that disparaged Islam. As embassies burned, we were assured that there was no animosity directed at America in general, or at this administration and its foreign policy in particular.
Close Down Those Embassies
WASHINGTON -- Allow me to offer a suggestion as to how our government might avoid the slaughter of our personnel in diplomatic installations around the Islamic world by mobs. It seems to me most probable that insults to the Prophet Muhammad appear regularly in the modern world. After all, insults against revered figures in the world's other major religions pop up all the time. As for Islam, a book such as Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" can be published anywhere. A thirteen-minute anti-Islamic video can arrive on YouTube, and my guess is there are others that have and will appear there. In some obscure land, far from the major media, a cartoon is published perhaps with the Prophet in an absurd pose. Why not a simple slur on Facebook? Who can control Facebook? Will a slur found there set off the mobs next time? And what constitutes a slur? These Islamic mobs keep changing their standards. What was a minor lapse of taste yesterday becomes a cause for terrible indignation today.
Obama's First Term Is Like Roosevelt's Dismal Second
People, not least himself, have often compared Barack Obama to Franklin D. Roosevelt. You know the narrative. He came to office in a financial crisis and proceeded to take government action to revive the economy and expand government to help the little guy. That narrative was developed by great New Deal historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and has been an article of faith among liberal Democrats ever since. Expand government, and the people will love you. Except that it hasn't worked out exactly that way. Most Americans don't much love the stimulus package or Obamacare. That's why you didn't hear much about them at the Democratic National Convention.
Feeling Our Infantilism
WASHINGTON -- In every year divisible by four, the dominant superstition of American politics -- faith in the magic of presidential words and deeds -- reaches an apogee that feeds national narcissism: Everything that happens anywhere is about us, is a response to something America did or did not do, and can be controlled by a president doing -- even just saying -- something. This self-absorption was evident as Mitt Romney and the Obama administration sparred about violence directed at U.S. facilities in the Middle East and elsewhere. Romney called this the fruit of administration weakness; the administration blamed it on a video. It would require exquisitely precise intellectual calipers to gauge which idea is silliest.
Obama vs. Romney
For openers, I don't believe any national poll that claims Obama is running ahead of Romney. For one thing, Obama has been in office for nearly four years. As the incumbent, if he's not scoring above 50%, it's highly unlikely he is going to carry the state. Right now, his poll numbers are below 50% in 37 states, and hover at only 51% in Washington and 50% in Minnesota. Another factor that must be considered is that a lot of people still don't know his opponent. Right now, Romney's poll numbers are lower than they should be simply because a lot of people are judging him on no other basis than Obama's negative ads.
The Fallacy of Redistribution
The recently discovered tape on which Barack Obama said back in 1998 that he believes in redistribution is not really news. He said the same thing to Joe the Plumber four years ago. But the surfacing of this tape may serve a useful purpose if it gets people to thinking about what the consequences of redistribution are. Those who talk glibly about redistribution often act as if people are just inert objects that can be placed here and there, like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design. But if human beings have their own responses to government policies, then we cannot blithely assume that government policies will have the effect intended.
Seven Weeks
Yesterday marked the seven weeks to go mark before the MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION IN MY LIFETIME. I have been voting since 1968 ...
Media Matters: Obama Administration Mouthpiece
The Department of Justice and media "monitor" coordinate attacks against administration enemies.
Outnumbered: Presidential Voters Exceeded Full-Time Workers by 14 Million
In November 2008, the Americans who turned out to vote in the presidential election outnumbered the Americans who turned out to work full-time by more than 14 million. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 118,423,000 Americans worked full-time in November 2008. According to the University of California at Santa Barbara's American Presidency Project, 132,645,504 people turned out to vote in that month's presidential election. The presidential election voters outnumbered the full-time workers by 14,222,504.
Obama's America
As anti-American riots and murderous attacks continue to erupt across the Middle East, America's response will be dictated by a man that few Americans really know -- Barack Obama. It's time to change that. A new movie, 2016: Obama's America, is doing just that, breaking box-office records in the process. Who would have thought a documentary, in the midst of a tight economy, would draw record crowds to America's theatres?
Academic Dishonesty
Many of the nation's colleges and universities have become cesspools of indoctrination, intolerance, academic dishonesty and an "enlightened" form of racism. This is a decades-old trend. In a 1991 speech, Yale President Benno Schmidt warned: "The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on our campuses. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind." Unfortunately, parents, taxpayers and donors have little knowledge of the extent of the dishonesty and indoctrination. There are several clues for telling whether there's academic dishonesty and indoctrination. One is to see whether a college spends millions for diversity and multiculturalism centers and hires directors of diversity and inclusion, managers of diversity recruitment, associate deans for diversity, and vice presidents of diversity. See whether colleges spend money to indoctrinate incoming freshmen with programs such as "The Tunnel of Oppression," in which, among other things, students call one another vile racial and sexual names in order to develop "oppression awareness."
I Like Gary Johnson
All political candidates call themselves freedom-lovers, but they are not. Neither major party really opposes government control of the economy or of our personal lives. I'm a libertarian because I see the false choice offered by political left and right: Democrats talk about personal liberty; Republicans talk about economic freedom. But what they do once in power belies their words. I say we're best off if government just leaves us alone to our peaceful cooperation with whomever we please. Let politicians *advocate* moral behavior. Let them give to charities. But leave government -- which is physical force -- out of it. That's why I like Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico. He's the Libertarian Party candidate for president. As governor, Johnson vetoed 750 bills, and yet he got re-elected in that blue state. I asked Johnson what it means to be a libertarian.
The Great Tax Divide
There was a time when Democrats and Republicans alike could talk sense about tax rates, in terms of what is best for the economy, without demagoguery about "tax cuts for the rich." Democratic presidents Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy spoke plainly about the fact that higher tax rates on individuals and businesses did not automatically translate into higher tax revenues for the government. Beyond some point, high tax rates on those with high incomes simply led to those incomes being invested in tax-free bonds, with the revenue from those bonds being completely lost to the government -- and the investments lost to the economy.
The Man Versus the Therapeutic State
The New York Times obituary for Thomas Szasz, who died this month at the age of 92, says his critique of psychiatry "had some merit in the 1950s ... but not later on, when the field began developing more scientific approaches." That's a paraphrase of historian Edward Shorter, whose judgment reflects the conventional wisdom: Szasz called much-needed attention to psychiatric abuses early in his career but went too far by insisting on a fundamental distinction between actual, biological diseases and metaphorical diseases of the mind. In fact, however, Szasz's radicalism, which he combined with a sharp wit, a keen eye for obfuscating rhetoric, and an uncompromising dedication to individual freedom and responsibility, was one of his greatest strengths. Beginning with "The Myth of Mental Illness" in 1961 and continuing through 35 more books and hundreds of articles, the maverick psychiatrist, driven by a "passion against coercion," zeroed in on the foundational fallacies underlying all manner of medicalized tyranny.
NBC and MSNBC, Networks of Wusses
On September 14 at Andrews Air Force Base just outside the Washington Beltway, President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton welcomed home the remains of four Americans killed at our consulate in Benghazi, Libya. It was a moment of national mourning. The president was presidential, Mrs. Clinton, dignified. But for some journalists, it was, quite strangely and inappropriately something to view only through the tacky lens of politics. On "Hardball," Chris Matthews was tingling away. It was an "amazing ceremony," he insisted. After an Obama clip, he said, "There was a moment in American history right there. Last week, when Obama spoke at the Democratic National Committee down in Charlotte, he said, 'I am the president.' Well, this week, he showed what it means to be president." This was a moment for pride?
Romney's 'Secret Video' and the Dem Politics of 'Squirrel!'
Democrats need to change their party mascot from the donkey to the squirrel. They divert the media's and the electorate's short attention spans with fleeting, fuzzy objects -- like the main canine character in the animated Pixar movie "Up," who was easily distracted from his main thoughts and serious duties by every last little moving trifle. Embassy attacks? Quick, find a squirrel! Warnings ignored? Squirrel! American troops killed by long-plotting jihadis exploiting security weaknesses? Squirrel! First Amendment sabotage by White House officials in the name of political correctness? Squirrel! Chronic joblessness, high gas prices, exploding dependency? Squirrel! Squirrel! Squirrel! As Election Day draws nearer, the Obama campaign and its surrogates in the Fourth Estate have infested the political arena with an army of tactical and rhetorical rodentia. One week, it's GOP presidential rival Mitt Romney's high school hijinks. The next, it's a heinous smear about Romney killing a steelworker's cancer-stricken wife.
Can 'Innocence of Muslims' Trailer Really Be That Potent?
The Obama administration's omnibus answer to why the Middle East (and now much of the Muslim world) is in near open rebellion against the United States: The video did it. The follow-up question no one seems to be asking is: "What if the administration's explanation is true?" White House Press Secretary Jay Carney insists the attacks in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere were a "response not to United States policy, and not to, obviously, the administration, not to the American people," but were rather a spontaneous "response to a video, a film we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting."
Picture of Al Qaeda Assassination Plot Emerges
Terrorists released after Qaddafi's overthrow allegedly responsible for deadly Libya embassy attack.
Note to Paul Krugman: Here's Real 'Eliminationist' Rhetoric
Have you noticed that the left regularly condemns alleged conservative "hate speech" but is almost completely silent on the most pervasive hate speech in the world? Take New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example. On Jan 8, 2011, in Tucson, Ariz., Jared Loughner murdered six people and gravely wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. That very day (published the next day), based on nothing, Paul Krugman wrote that the murders were a result of hate-filled rhetoric that saturates conservative and Republican life. "When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?