Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
A Humanitarian Crisis That Can Be Solved
For a group of 4,000 Iranian refugees currently living in Iraq, a United Nations report this week could prove crucial in determining whether they will live as virtual prisoners in the desert or be able to build new lives in freedom elsewhere. The refugees are members of a controversial Iranian dissident group, the Mujahedeen-e-Khalk (MEK), which is currently listed on the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations list. That listing itself is controversial. The United Kingdom, the European Union and a number of other nations have removed the group from their lists of terrorist organizations, and the U.S. may soon be forced to do so as well. A successful suit by the MEK resulted in a recent order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit requiring Secretary of State Hillary Clinton either to delist the group or produce evidence that the organization remains a current and credible threat to American interests. But until the issue is resolved, the fate of the MEK members living in Iraq remains precarious.
The Most Business-Despising President in History
President Obama's "you didn't build it" gaffe just defined the 2012 campaign. It succinctly encapsulates the president's prejudices about the public versus the private sector. Though the president has frequently mouthed platitudes in praise of enterprise, his suspicion and contempt for business has always percolated just beneath the surface. Of course, the president is partially correct, in a banal sort of way. Yes, roads, bridges, firefighters and teachers are essential prerequisites to establishing an environment in which business can operate. So are peace and freedom -- for which we must thank the military. But the president doesn't understand that a critical aspect of good government -- and an essential ingredient for stimulating economic growth -- is not just roads but *rules of the road*. As economist John Taylor reminds us, steady, predictable and permanent rules permit business owners -- and individuals -- to plan for the future.
Co-Sponsoring Your Success
"If you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. ... If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." -- Barack Obama The president's defenders have claimed he either misspoke last week at a Roanoke, Va., campaign event or that what he said is true. Both defenses have merit. Obama surely didn't mean to say something that politically idiotic so plainly. And it's true that no man's accomplishments are entirely his own. We're all indebted to others, and we all rely on government to provide some basic things. Only the straw-men conservatives of Obama's imagination yearn for an America with no roads and bridges.
A Slow Reader's Lament
Beaches aren't my thing, and reading on beaches even less so. I've never understood how anyone can enjoy a book in the midst of all that sand, glare, and greasy suntan lotion. For reading ambiance, I'll take an easy chair in an air-conditioned room , and leave the damp swimsuits and gritty beach towels to those who appreciate them. On the other hand, I love the special summer reading lists that newspapers and magazines publish as beach season approaches each year. I love the expanded book sections that appear before the holiday season every winter too. For that matter, I love perusing book reviews and leafing through publishers' catalogs and nosing around in bookstores. And as my wife discovered when she met me, my idea of interior decoration is books on bookshelves, preferably floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall. (Her preferences run more to lovingly tended plants, clustered together with rain-forest-caliber density. Negotiations are ongoing.)
Obama's Rhetoric
Barack Obama's great rhetorical gifts include the ability to make the absurd sound not only plausible, but inspiring and profound. His latest verbal triumph was to say on July 13th, "if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own." As an example, "Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." Let's stop and think, even though the whole purpose of much political rhetoric is to keep us from thinking, and stir our emotions instead. Even if we were to assume, just for the sake of argument, that 90 percent of what a successful person has achieved was due to the government, what follows from that? That politicians will make better decisions than individual citizens, that politicians will spend the wealth of the country better than those who created it? That doesn't follow logically -- and certainly not empirically.
The New York Times' Obsession With Mormonism
Doing the Obama campaign's dirty work for them.
Don't Eat Campaign Dirt
Dirty political campaigns are as old as the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are said to have thrown the first mud at each other in the presidential election of 1800. Jefferson accused his old pal -- who was then president -- of being a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal and a tyrant. Adams returned fire, calling his vice president and challenger Jefferson "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father." I don't know what the average citizen of 1800 thought about those lies and name-calling, which have been an ugly fixture of our politics ever since.
Democrats' Ideal Voter: Illegal Alien, Single Mother, Convicted Felon
Before taking the oath of office, Barack Obama vowed to fundamentally transform the United States. He has certainly done so. For example, Obama has: -- destroyed the job market; -- sent billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street, companies overseas, his campaign contributors and public sector unions; -- forced the passage of a wildly unpopular national health care law on a purely partisan vote; -- come out for gay marriage; -- refused to enforce laws on illegal immigration; -- eliminated the work requirement for welfare. How can a country that elected Ronald Reagan have Obama tied in the polls with Mitt Romney?
Stop Whining About 'Racist' Voter ID and Get Granny to the Polls
Photo voter ID laws, according to Attorney General Eric Holder, are a "poll tax." "Many of those without IDs," Holder recently told the NAACP, "would have to travel great distances to get them -- and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them." Photo voter ID opponent Keesha Gaskins, senior counsel in the Brennan Center's Democracy Program, writes: "While these laws are allegedly passed to secure elections, they impact communities of color in ways only reflected in our Jim Crow past. Looking at voter ID laws alone, we know that although 11 percent of Americans lack government-issued photo ID, 25 percent of African-Americans, 16 percent of Hispanics and 18 percent of elderly voters do not have this form of ID. ... Hopefully our country will never again see the kind of internal bloodshed we saw during the Civil War -- but we are now seeing a war on voting that can only be compared to the dark, discriminatory past of the Jim Crow era."
Return of a Weiner?
WASHINGTON -- I see that the stalwarts of Reform Politics throughout the city of New York have been given reason for hope and change. It is reported that former congressman Anthony D. Weiner (pronounced as you might expect) is testing the waters for a return to public life. He is mulling over a run for the mayor's mansion or perhaps a campaign for "public advocate." I am not really sure what a public advocate does, but Weiner has done things in public that are very daring, so I have no doubt he could handle the duties of a public advocate. You will remember that he left the House of Representatives when he was caught handling his private parts in photographs that he sent to women he did not know and repeatedly lying about it to his colleagues and the press. Well, now he is pondering a return to public office. He has been out of, I guess we would call it, the public eye for a little over a year, and as he told WNYC recently, "I paid a very high price...." He has become a stay-at-home dad to his six-month-old son, and when he does go out in public, he wears jeans, T-shirts and a baseball hat turned backwards. So he is contemplating another office of public trust. Whatever office he chooses to run for, you can count on his running as a Reformer. He has always been very progressive and was, in fact, a dreadful scold to the reactionary Republicans on Capitol Hill until those dratted pictures turned up. CNN would not even give him a show on the network, not even a late-night show. CNN gave former governor Eliot Spitzer a show after his imbroglio with a sex ring, but not Weiner.
Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Government
Stephen Covey, the management guru who died this week, would have had a hard time selling his books in Benjamin Franklin's America, or Abe Lincoln's. His best seller "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" would have been considered a self-evident truth, one drummed into earlier Americans by schools, churches and the Puritan ethic. Today, Covey's thoughts about how to become a success by applying principles with a proven track record seem innovative and cutting edge. His work is a rebuke to the notion that government can do it all for you. Contrast Covey's ethic with what President Obama said during a campaign stop in Roanoke, Va., last Friday: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." He mentioned roads and bridges as examples. Did he mean we should thank government for the structures because without them we might not be able to travel to a job interview, or to work? The subplot in the president's campaign remarks seems to be that none of us can make it without government. So what happens to those who do manage to succeed on their own? Are they to be taxed and regulated to death as a lesson to other upstarts?
Obama Believes Success Is a Gift From Government
Perhaps the rain made the teleprompter unreadable. That's one thought I had on pondering Barack Obama's comments to a rain-soaked rally in Roanoke, Va., last Friday. Perhaps he didn't really mean what he said. Or perhaps -- as is often the case with people -- when unanchored from a prepared text he revealed what he really thinks. "There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back," he began, defending his policy of higher tax rates on high earners. "They know they didn't -- look, if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
Blowing Up History
In the Arabic media, there are reports that Muslim clerics -- energized by the sudden emergence of Egypt's new president, Muhammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood -- are now agitating to demolish the Egyptian pyramids. According to agitated imams, the Pharaohs' monuments represent "symbols of paganism" from Egypt's pre-Islamic past and therefore must vanish. Don't dismiss such insanity so easily. Mali Islamists are currently destroying the centuries-old mausoleums of Sufi-Muslim saints in the city of Timbuktu, the historic site of early Islamic scholarship and jurisprudence. But perhaps the most recent regrettable Islamist attack on the past was the Taliban's 2001 dynamiting and shelling of the huge twin 6th-century A.D. statues of Buddha carved into a cliff at Bamiyan in Afghanistan. "We are destroying the statues," Taliban spokesmen at the time bragged, "in accordance with Islamic law, and it is purely a religious issue."
Things That Bug Me
I admit that I have a lower tolerance than most for those things that so many other, more patient people, dismiss as petty annoyances. What I can't figure out is why they aren't more like me. For instance, why is it that so many people continue to accept that Barack Obama is brilliant and a spellbinding orator? How is it that anyone, even people so dumb they intend to vote for him, can bear to sit through one of his boring, self-aggrandizing, speeches? Even Jimmy Stewart, at his folksiest, didn't pause three or four times during a single sentence. And talk about dumb, this is the schnook who referred to 57 states and the Austrian language, mispronounced "corps" as "corpse," and, lest there be any question about the state of his brain, recently announced that the private sector economy is doing just fine.
Polls & VPs
Donna Brazile and I did our very popular "He said; She said" act in Cleveland for legislators from the Midwest. We will take the act somewhat further on the road next week when we reprise it in Edmonton, Alberta for the Western Legislative Conference. The buzz among the political cognoscenti is how much damage the Romney campaign has suffered from the attacks on his time at Bain Capital. The problem is, there is no evidence -- thus far -- that the attacks have had any effect. In national polling the Real Clear Politics summary shows that if you average the six polls that were substantially or completely in the field after the June unemployment figures were announced, Obama leads by just 2.0 percentage points. Well within the margin of error. But, if you use the East German Theory of Political Polling -- throwing out the highest (Rasmussen Romney +3) and lowest (Reuters Obama +6) scores -- we are left with four polls: Obama leads in two by two percentage points, Romney leads in one by one percentage point and they're tied in the other for an overall average lead for the President of 0.75 percentage points.
Obama & Bain: The Ultimate Smear Campaign
Why Mitt Romney needs to wake up and go on the offense.
This Is the Obama Recovery
President Barack Obama speaks of his own presidency as a rough patch in our nation's history. "I don't need to tell you what we've been through over the last three and a half years because you've lived it," Obama said in Roanake, Va., last week. "Too many folks lost jobs. Too many people saw their homes lose value. Too many folks saw their savings take a hit." The first lady last week described the bad times marking Obama's term in office as some sort of inevitable legacy he took on from his predecessor. "That's what he inherited," she said. The truth is: We are in the Obama recovery now. If history is a guide, these are the best of the Obama times. The next presidential term -- no matter who serves in the Oval Office -- is likely to see another recession.
Your Guide to Sleazy Democratic Party-Backed Banks
Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod and his hatchet people are still yammering about GOP presidential rival Mitt Romney's overseas investments. It's time for the Romney campaign to educate voters about all the shady financial institutions embraced by Democrats right here on American soil. The fat-cat narrative attacks on Republicans won't go away by making nice with the White House -- or by relying on Beltway journalists to drop their double standards and vet the president's own bad bank entanglements. Indeed, The New York Times admitted this week that their staff and other political journalists from every major media outlet submit their work to the White House for unprecedented review, editing and "veto power." Fortunately, the truth manipulators and message massagers haven't gotten to this column yet. So, let's talk sleazy Democratic Party-backed banks, shall we?
Our Business-Hating President
This week, President Obama spelled out just how much he hates American business in an off-prompter moment in Roanoke, Va. If "you've been successful," said Obama, "you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out here. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there." So, according to Obama, it wasn't your brains or your work ethic that made you successful. What was it? Obama continued: "There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." In other words, the government did it.
CBS: Still Lazy With Obama After All These Years
Back in 2007 and 2008, it was remarkable watching Barack Obama treated to one puffball interview after another, courtesy of Steve Kroft on "60 Minutes." Kroft compared him to Abe Lincoln and oozed about his "political poetry." But it's simply irresponsible, after three and a half years of President Obama wrecking the economy, that CBS -- now with anchor Charlie Rose -- is still in puffery mode. There's a certain level of contempt on the part of CBS. It could and should focus its attention on the plight of every family struggling with unemployment or a house that's underwater financially or facing its loss of religious liberties with a federal government drunk with power. CBS chose instead to waste most of the interview asking the Obamas about summer vacations, where they'd like to travel in the world and whether there's still mystery in their marriage.