Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
The New Normal
Washington, D.C. -- This week's revelation about the president's authorizing covert action in Syria should not have come as a surprise to anyone. On Wednesday, August 1, CNN carried a breathless report sourced to "U.S. officials" that our beloved Nobel Peace Prize recipient in the Oval Office "has signed a covert directive authorizing U.S. support for Syrian rebels battling President Bashar al-Assad." According to the story, which was picked up by dozens of other outlets within hours, "The secret order, referred to as an intelligence 'finding,' allows for clandestine support by the CIA and other agencies." Given the torrent of self-adulatory leaks since the O-Team arrived in Washington three and a half years ago, this should have been the non-story of the month. But the mainstream media fell for it faster than Missy Franklin could swim 100 meters. That's just what the O-Team wanted -- and has come to expect.
Race Isn't the Problem for Obama
The president of the AFL-CIO is worried that President Obama is doing poorly among white, working class, male voters -- and he plans on putting 400,000 of his troops in the field in six key states to change the equation. Recent polls show the president doing poorly with white males with less than a college education. Mitt Romney leads the president among white males voters by more than 2-to-1 in a recent Washington Post poll, with the president favored by only 28 percent of this demographic group. Other polls show similar results. Republicans have won a majority of white males' votes in most recent elections; but the president has slipped significantly among this cohort from his last race. In 2008, Obama carried 39 percent of white male votes.
Capitalism Did It
A young Chinese man is under arrest for a rampage killing in Liaoning province. The knife-wielding 17-year-old reportedly killed eight people, including two relatives of his estranged girlfriend, and wounded five others. Terrible story. But Agence France-Presse, in an account widely circulated by Yahoo and other news outlets, knew just whom to blame: capitalism. AFP explained, "Violent crime has been on the rise in China in recent decades as the nation's economy has boomed and the gap between rich and poor has expanded at an alarming rate.
Successful School Curriculum Under Attack
As a longtime school choice advocate, I am always in favor of giving parents the tools they need to ensure their children receive a high quality education, which is necessary to compete in today’s global marketplace. And as a visiting professor of law at Liberty University and former associate professor at Xavier University, I know how a rigorous education is critical for students to be prepared to get the most value out of their time at college. Therefore, I am disturbed by a recent development in states such as Idaho, where members of the school board are questioning the worth of this program despite its value to students. Or in New Hampshire, where fringe activists claiming to be members of the Tea Party are supporting bills to shut down a rigorous education program.
Dr. Obama, Your Patient, America, Is Not Ready for Hospice
We must reject President Obama's death verdict on America's future. It is ailing under his policies, but it is not too late; it will recover. Obama ran on a platform of unmitigated optimism -- a promise to usher in a brighter day for America. But there could hardly be a greater contrast between his pledge and his performance in office, between his commitment to the nation and his current abandonment of all hope. He has breached his contract with the electorate and must be fired. It isn't just that Obama's policies have failed; it's that he has essentially given up and is asking us to accept a lesser America going forward, as if resigned to the fatalistic belief that America has begun an inevitable and unavoidable decline.
De-Bushing Romney
This is shaping up to be the second election in a row that's about someone who isn't on the ballot: George W. Bush. In 2008, Barack Obama won in no small part by turning the election into a referendum on President Bush and by claiming that a John McCain presidency would amount to a third Bush term. Since then, Obama's presidency has been one long run-on sentence of blaming his predecessor, only occasionally punctuated with complaints about Europe, ATMs, the GOP Congress, Fox News and tsunamis. Like a general fighting the last war, Obama is going with what's worked for him in the past. And the thing is, it might work for him in the future.
Romney's Excellent Trip
WASHINGTON -- At the outset of his recent foreign trip, Mitt Romney committed a gaffe. In answer to a question about the Olympics, he expressed skepticism about London's preparations. The response confounded and agitated Romney supporters because it was such an unforced error. The question invited a simple paean to Olympic spirit and British grit, not the critical analysis of a former Olympic organizer. Soon that initial stumble was transmuted into a metaphor for everything that followed. The mainstream media decided with near unanimity that the rest of the trip amounted to a gaffe-prone disaster.
Want Hope? Make a Change
President Obama was supposed to be all about hope and change. But after almost four years he's squeezed the hope out of most of us. A new Rasmussen poll is the latest proof that the only hope of getting out of our economic ditch is to fire the hopeless guy in the White House who keeps digging it deeper. Since early 2009 Rasmussen has been asking two questions that serve as a good barometer of what people think about both our present and our future.
Tea Party Staying Power: The Ted Cruz Victory
What the Republican candidate's primary win tells us about the grassroots movement.
Obama's Signature Move: Unsealing Private Records
Mitt Romney presents one enormous problem for Barack Obama's campaign: No divorce records. That's why the media are so hot to get their hands on Romney's tax records for the past 25 years. They need something to "pick through, distort and lie about" -- as the Republican candidate says. Obama's usual campaign method, used in 100 percent of his races, has been to pry into the private records of his opponents. Democrats aren't going to find any personal dirt on the clean-cut Mormon, so they need complicated tax filings going back decades in order to create the illusion of scandal out of boring financial records.
Will Democrats End Marriage as We Know It?
When the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) passed in Congress in 1996, the vote was bi-partisan and overwhelming. In the House, the tally was 342-67. Only the farthest left of Democrats and a handful of Republicans voted against it. A *majority of Democrats supported marriage*. In the Senate, the vote was even more lopsided and bi-partisan, 85-14. *Again, most Democrats backed marriage*. In both houses of Congress, the DOMA passed with such strong margins that President Clinton could clearly see the measure had better than "veto strength." That is, if he had vetoed the Defense of Marriage Act, Congress could have passed it over his veto. That would have required 67 votes in the Senate and 292 votes in the House. Bowing to the inevitable, Clinton signed the bill.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Now the Liberals Covet the Corpses of Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan
Partisan Divide: Eggheads Get What They Wished For
"Answered prayers," Saint Teresa of Avila is supposed to have said, "cause more tears than those that go unanswered." Especially, I fear, the answered prayers of political scientists. These days, you hear academics and pundits bemoaning hyperpartisanship of our politics. It has never been worse, some say. This shows a certain ignorance about history. Go back and read the things that John Adams' and Thomas Jefferson's partisans were saying about each other in 1800. Or reflect on the fact that Aaron Burr, Jefferson's first vice president, and Andrew Jackson, the first president to call himself a Democrat, both killed men in duels.
President Obama: You're No Bill Clinton
The Obama re-election team must be in panic mode. The president is stuck in a virtual tie with Mitt Romney in some polls and behind him in others, so in desperation it has reached out to the Big Dog, Bill Clinton, for help. Clinton will speak next month at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., in a Wednesday night position often reserved for the vice presidential nominee. Obama and Clinton have not had the most cordial relationship, but when you're drowning, your feelings about the lifeguard matter less than his ability to keep you afloat. And Obama is a sinking man.
100 Days Is a Long Time
The presidential election is about 100 days away. President Obama and Mitt Romney are roughly even in the various polls, with Obama holding slight leads in the key swing states. A lot can happen in 100 days or thereabouts. Napoleon, for example, went from ignominious exile at Elba to triumph in Paris to utter defeat at Waterloo. South Korea was lost and then saved by Gen. Matthew Ridgway in about 100 days of winter in 1950 and early 1951. In 1948, supposedly doomed incumbent President Harry Truman went from 17 points down in the polls to a victory margin of 4.5 percentage points on Election Day.
In Praise of Racial Profiling
In the wake of the Supreme Court's split-decision regarding Arizona's immigration law, the term, "racial profiling," is being tossed around like an old beach ball at an L.A. Dodgers game. You would think the term was synonymous with whippings and lynchings the way liberals carry on. The only thing it's synonymous with is commonsense. To suggest otherwise is just plain silly. For instance, if your car breaks down in the middle of the night and you spot a group of young urban blacks standing nearby, are you seriously going to tell me that you don't feel threatened? Are you going to insist that you wouldn't consider yourself to be in any greater danger of being beaten, robbed or killed, than if they were members of the Hare Krishna community playing tambourines and chanting, or a bunch of towheaded teenagers who had just exited from a Bible study group?
The Democratic Party Fascists Take Over
Let's say that you own a business. And let's say that as a person of faith, you decide to use the profits from that business to support, at least in some small part, traditional marriage. Now let's say that your political opponents find your position stunning and launch a boycott against your business. So far, no harm, no foul. It may be irritating that your political opponents choose to make your personal political predilections the basis of a crushing economic attack. But it's their right. But now let's say your political opponents are in government. And let's say they use the power of their office to shut down your business -- not because you violated any law or broke any regulation, but because they don't like your position on traditional marriage. This would be fascism.
In the Company of Madison
WASHINGTON -- Ted Cruz's victory in Tuesday's Texas Republican runoff for the U.S. Senate nomination is the most impressive triumph yet for the still-strengthening tea party impulse. And Cruz's victory coincides with something conservatives should celebrate, the centennial of the 20th century's most important intra-party struggle.
That's Why They Hold the Elections
There is much gnashing of Punticratical teeth in Your Nation's Capital over how NBC is presenting the events that they paid about $1.1 billion to present. I've tried the iPad apps but I can't make any sense of them, so I am reduced to flipping through the channels (who knew Bravo was an NBC network?) to catch Field Hockey, or Boxing on one of the cable nets, or the omnipresent Beach Volleyball on the broadcast mother ship. I would rather there were more action and less back-stories, but at 65 years old, I am WAY out of "the demo" NBC and its sponsors are looking for, so I recognize I don't have a vote.