Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Beach Boys: They Get Around
COLUMBIA, Md. -- Three hours before showtime, Brian Wilson says: "There is no Rhonda." Sitting backstage, gathering strength for the evening's 48-song, 150-minute concert, Wilson was not asked about her, he just volunteered this fact. The other members of the Beach Boys seem mildly surprised to learn that the 1965 song "Help Me, Rhonda" was about no one in particular. Not that it matters; the sound is everything. Attention must be paid to baby boomer music-cued nostalgia, and no one pays it better than the Beach Boys. They are currently on a 50th-anniversary tour that has more than 60 concerts scheduled and others still being booked. Their new album, "That's Why God Made the Radio," debuted at No. 3 in Billboard's listing, and with this the Beach Boys topped the Beatles for most weeks on Billboard’s top-10 album chart. Their band began in 1961 in Hawthorne, in Los Angeles County, when the parents of Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson went away for a weekend, leaving the boys with meal money they used to rent instruments and record a song called "Surfin'." They rode a wave of fascination with California to the top of pop music.
So Much for Stopping the Leaks
So, how's that effort to keep administration officials from releasing classified information going? Try this from Tuesday's Washington Post: "The United States and Israel jointly developed a sophisticated computer virus nicknamed Flame that collected critical intelligence in preparation for cyber-sabotage attacks aimed at slowing Iran's ability to develop a nuclear weapon, *according to Western officials with knowledge of the effort*." Further on in the article we get even more: "This is about preparing the battlefield for another type of covert action," said *one former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official*, who added that Flame and Stuxnet were elements of a broader assault that continues today. "Cyber collection against the Iranian program is way further down the road than this." (italics mine) *Covert* action? This effort is now about as "covert" as the Super Bowl. And the only thing hard to figure out is who is more reprehensible, the cheerleading press whores at the Post, who, like their fellow liberal presstitutes, never miss an opportunity to burnish the Obama administration's "tough on terror" credentials, or the latest gaggle of unnamed "high-ranking" officials willing to sell this nation out in the process.
Romney Needs Big Share of White Working-Class Vote
What's up with the white working class vote? For years, the horny-handed blue-collar worker was the star of the New Deal Democratic coalition. It was for him, and his wife and family, that Democrats taxed the rich, invented Social Security and supported militant labor unions. Well, that was then, and this is now. White working class voters -- or white non-college voters, the exit poll group most closely approximating them -- are now a mainstay of the Republican coalition. Ronald Brownstein, a clear-sighted and diligent analyst of demographic voting data, provided some useful perspective in his most recent National Journal column. His bottom line is that in order to win this year, Mitt Romney must capture two-thirds of white non-college voters -- about the same percentage that voted for Ronald Reagan in his 1984 landslide re-election. The reason Romney must do so well is that white non-college voters are a smaller part of the electorate now than they were then. In 1984, they comprised 61 percent of all voters. In 2008, they comprised 39 percent.
Greece Alone and Broke - Again
The recent indecisive Greek elections could be summed up by two general themes: Greeks want to stay in, and expect help from, the eurozone. But they still do not want to take the necessary medicine to stop borrowing billions of euros from northern Europeans, who want a radical Greek reform of the tax code, deregulation of labor laws, fiscal discipline, massive cuts in bureaucracy, and greater transparency -- all unlikely given Greek history and contemporary culture. So what lies in the future for Greece as it is slowly eased out of the eurozone and its civilization goes into reverse? In theory, with the ability to devalue the drachma and be freed of enormous debts, the Greeks could return to business as it was practiced in the 1970s. In those sleepy days before the massive transfers of northern European money, I lived in a Greece that was a Balkan backwater without advanced surgery, autobahns, suspension bridges, sleek subways or a modern airport. In that era of genteel poverty, Greek divorce, abortion, drug use and crime were rare. Now, all are commonplace. Rural Greece outside Athens was more Middle Eastern than European.
The Man Who Would Be Dictator
How do I hate Barack Obama? I might spin Elizabeth Barrett Browning's immortal words and say, "Let me count the ways. I hate him to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach." But even that doesn't quite cover the contempt I have for this past and present community agitator. Fifty long years after Martin Luther King suggested we judge a person by his character, this slug is still waging race warfare. While we are all well-aware that he is basing his entire re-election campaign on separating Americans and playing to wealth envy, religious differences and even engendering gender divisions, it is his insistence on stoking up racial hatred that makes him the archenemy of everything decent that America represents.
Is the Worm Turning?
Those "cannibals" who recently turned up in Miami aren't the only people eating their own. Following President Obama's 54-minute snoozer of a speech in Ohio last week, even his "friends" are beginning to feed on him. In 2008, David Brooks of The New York Times played the sycophant when he admired the crease in Obama's pants and concluded that it was a sign he would be "a very good president." Last Thursday, Dana Milbank of The Washington Post wrote a scathing column, the headline of which suggests the media worm may have begun to turn: "Skip the falsehoods, Mr. President, and give us a plan." Boring was one of the kinder things said about Obama's speech, which rivaled Bill Clinton's address to the 1988 Democratic National Convention. Clinton's speech was so boring he received his loudest applause when he stopped talking.
God and Man and FDR
WASHINGTON -- Warren Kozak, the author of "LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay," wrote a memorable piece in "The Wall Street Journal" on June 6, 2012 that cries out for comment. On the 68th anniversary of the Allies' invasion of Europe over the bloody beaches of Normandy, he reminds us of an unthinkable act by President Franklin Roosevelt on that day. At least it is an unthinkable act today. The president did not call a press conference to notify Americans huddled before their radios of what our military was doing. They already knew from news reports, though they might have learned even more from their president. Nor did President Roosevelt boast of how he had marshaled our troops and given the order to action, as the present occupier of his office is prone to do. Instead, Roosevelt offered a prayer, a prayer of unthinkable dimensions nowadays. I suspect if I were of voting age in 1944, I would have been a Republican. Yet, as President Roosevelt spoke, he would have spoken for me. Transported back to the battle of Normandy, I would have taken heart in his words. Would a Barack Obama, similarly transported back across the decades, have taken heart? Or would he and millions of other miraculously transported Americans from the present have squirmed? Would they have filed lawsuits through the American Civil Liberties Union? Is this not another of those church and state conundrums that we conjure up today?
North Carolina Democrats Mobilize Against Israel
Party condemns the Jewish State; blames Israel for creating instability in the world.
Forget the Research; Our Minds Are Made Up
Do kids raised by same-sex couples turn out as well as those raised by parents of the opposite sex? In recent years, the accepted answer among social scientists has been that there is no difference: Families headed by a mother and father are no better at child-rearing than those headed by two mothers or two fathers. "Not a single study," the American Psychological Association categorically declared in a 2005 brief, "has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents." But was that conclusion -- which has been cited many times -- warranted? Loren Marks, a scholar at Louisiana State University, recently went back and reviewed the 59 studies on which the APA had relied. None of them, he writes in the July issue of the academic journal *Social Science Research*, "compares a large, random, representative sample of lesbian or gay parents and their children with a large, random, representative sample of married parents and their children." Most of the studies were built on small samples that were neither random nor representative. In the absence of high-quality data, the "strong, generalized assertions ... made by the APA brief were not empirically warranted."
America Equals France?
The G-20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico is, thankfully, over. During the proceedings we watched as President Barack Obama maneuvered himself into a position of being -- if not totally inconsequential -- certain a minor member of the chorus. From Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush American Presidents have held the title "the most powerful man in the world." Sometimes it was altered to "the most powerful man in the *western* world" but, you know what I mean. Barack Obama has not just allowed that label to lapse. He appears to have been happy to toss it aside. This isn't about American exceptionalism. It's about Obaman ordinariness.
Racial Double Standards
Back in 2009, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said we were "a nation of cowards" on matters of race. Permit me to be brave and run a few assertions by you just to see whether we're on the same page. There should be two standards for civilized conduct: one for whites, which is higher, and another for blacks, which is lower. In other words, in the name of justice and fair play, blacks should not be held accountable to the same standards that whites are and should not be criticized for conduct that we'd deem disgusting and racist if said or done by whites. You say, "Williams, what in the world are you talking about?" Mitt Romney hasn't revealed all of his fall campaign strategy yet, but what if he launched a "White Americans for Romney" movement in an effort to get out the white vote? If the Romney campaign did that, there'd be a media-led outcry across the land, with charges ranging from racial insensitivity to outright racism. When President Barack Obama announced his 2012 launch of "African Americans for Obama", the silence was deafening. Should the same standards be applied to Obama as would be applied to Romney? The answer turns out to be no, because Obama is not held to the same standards as Romney.
Obama Campaign Tears America Apart
Remember when President Obama inspired Americans with such tired bromides as, "There are no red states or blue states, just the United States"? Remember when Obama declared that Americans had to pull together, because what united us was stronger than what divided us? Yeah, not so much. President Obama's re-election campaign has been an exercise in fragmentation. Where the 2008 campaign was built thematically around the notion that a polarized electorate was bad for the country and that election of a third-way, multi-racial president could symbolically overcome our divisions once and for all, the 2012 campaign is built on precisely the opposite notion: Americans united in opposition to Obama's agenda must be divided again. And so Obama has carved up the electorate into winnable chunks. And he's appeasing those chunks of the electorate, one by one.
Random Thoughts
Random thoughts on the passing scene: Many people may have voted for Barack Obama in 2008 because of his charisma. But anyone familiar with the disastrous track record of charismatic political leaders around the world in the 20th century should have run for the hills when they encountered a politician with charisma. What is scarier than any particular political policy or issue is the widespread tendency to treat political issues as personal contests in talking points -- competitive skill in fencing with words -- rather than as serious attempts to find out what the facts are and what the options are. People who are wondering what to get as a graduation present this year should consider "The Passage of Power" by Robert Caro, the recently published 4th volume in his monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson. Its revelations of the cynical, fraudulent and vicious politics in Washington should counter the pious graduation speeches that young people hear about the nobility of "public service."
Touting That Killer Barack Obama
Team Barack Obama knows they are in a heap of re-election trouble when pundits look at his shambles of an economic record. So what to do? Easy. The most shameless of our Obama-loving journalists are painting Obama as an action-movie superhero in the war on terror. Just open up Newsweek Magazine to an advertisement for a book by its own Daniel Klaidman called "Kill Or Capture." It begins by asking about Obama: "High-minded idealist or calculating killer?" They mean that in a positive way. Then comes this sales language: "How has President Obama waged the war on terror? With one hand tied behind his back -- and the other dealing death sentences to suspected terrorists around the world." Yes, this is the same Obama who refused to allow the term "war on terror" to be used.
The Benefit of Bloomberg's Big Beverage Ban
Everyone expected that New York City's Board of Health, all 11 members of which were appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, would rubber-stamp his proposed 16-ounce cap on servings of sugar-sweetened soft drinks. But at a meeting last week, several board members zeroed in on the most obvious problem with Bloomberg's plan to treat adults like children: It does not go far enough. Given Bloomberg's avowed goal of reducing New Yorkers' waistlines by reducing their calorie intake, his soda scheme is indeed absurdly inadequate, as he inadvertently emphasizes every time he minimizes the extent to which it will restrict consumer freedom. Once we accept the premise that our weight is the government's business, we open the door to meddling far more intrusive and oppressive than Bloomberg's pint-sized pop prescription, which is bound to fail as an anti-obesity measure but could still succeed as a paternalistic precedent. Although the Board of Health unanimously agreed to hold a hearing on the soft drink regulations next month, followed by a final vote in September, members' comments highlighted the timidity of the mayor's supposedly courageous plan. Joel Forman questioned the exception for milk-based beverages such as coffee drinks and chocolate shakes, which "have monstrous amounts of calories" -- more per ounce than soda, in fact, which is also true of the fruit juices that would be exempt from Bloomberg's serving ceiling.
Regulating Political Speech
It's presidential season, so again pundits are indignant that *money* is spent on politics. Spent by corporations! And rich people! Because the Supreme Court allowed that, "2012 will be a miserable year," says The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne. 2012 may be miserable -- but if it is, it won't be because corporations spend on politics. And anyway, they have a right to spend. In politics, money is speech. The very *first* amendment that the Founders chose to add to the Constitution couldn't be more clear: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech ... ." Yet most people support laws against political speech -- when they don't like the speakers.
How Obama Bureaucrats Fueled Western Wildfires
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- The smell of singed air here is inescapable. Less than 50 miles west of my neighborhood, the latest wildfire has spread across 1,100 acres. It's the fifth active blaze to erupt in our state over the past month. But ashes aren't the only things smoldering. The Obama administration's neglect of the federal government's aerial tanker fleet raises acrid questions about its core public safety priorities. Bipartisan complaints goaded the White House into signing a Band-Aid fix last week. But it smacks more of election-year gesture politics: Too little, too late, too fake. Ten years ago, the feds had a fleet of 44 firefighting planes. Today, the number is down to nine for the entire country. Last summer, Obama's National Forest Service canceled a key federal contract with Sacramento-based Aero Union just as last season's wildfires were raging. Aero Union had supplied eight vital air tankers to Washington's dwindling aerial firefighting fleet. Two weeks later, the company closed down, and 60 employees lost their jobs. Aero Union had been a leader in the business for a half-century.
Romney's Spending Plan to Left of Senate GOP
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has staked out a position on federal spending to the left of every Republican in the U.S. Senate. On Dec. 14, the Senate voted on S.J. Res. 10, the proposed constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget sponsored by Sens. Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee of Utah. All 47 Senate Republicans voted for this constitutional amendment. All 53 Democrats voted against it. Romney took no stand. Romney did sign a "Cut, Cap and Balance" pledge, vowing to support a balanced budget amendment that would include an unspecified "spending limitation." However, he did not specifically support the Hatch-Lee Amendment that would require balancing the budget while capping federal spending at 18 percent of gross domestic product. Senate Republicans backed the 18-percent spending cap for a reason: 18 percent approximates the average percentage of GDP the federal government has been able to collect in taxes over many decades.
Barack in Wonderland
When Congress, split seven ways from Sunday on the question, squelched legislation granting resident status for those formerly called "illegal aliens," President Obama said, in effect, so what? -- we'll do it anyway. And so he did it anyway, announcing last Friday the birth of a new immigration policy affecting an estimated 800,000 illegals. These illegals -- according to the president, who invokes the right to "prosecutorial discretion" -- get exempted from deportation for two years. The new policy renders them legally untouchable, in spite of their illegal status. The situation moves beyond factuality. Up becomes down, hot becomes cold -- by presidential directive, it is as if the country for whom the policy has been constructed was another nation entirely: less like the United States, more like the Wonderland in which Alice discovered the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and other self-definition experts.
No One Left to Pander to
In 1999, Christopher Hitchens penned an acid reflection on the presidency of Bill Clinton, titled "No One Left To Lie To." The verdict on the presidency of Barack Obama, at least during this campaign season, might be No One Left to Pander To. In three and a half years, we've gone from the "audacity of hope" to the "shameless palm grease." Shaken by the polls and unable to tout his accomplishments in office, the president has instead targeted giveaways to particular constituencies of the Democratic Party. We've gone from soaring to squalid. Women got free contraceptives and the invitation to believe that the Republicans had launched another war of choice -- against women. College students got more subsidies for their loans. Gays got support for same-sex marriage. And Hispanics got the dubiously legal decision to forego deportations for certain illegal immigrants. Blacks and Jews haven't been bribed yet, but perhaps that's what comes of voting too reliably Democratic. (Supporters of Israel have long since been disappointed in this White House.)