Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Obama's Dangerous Approach to Missile Defense
When Congress returns after recess, the astronomical levels of spending included in President Obama's budget will face a vicious show down in this election year, which will make the debt ceiling debate look tame. And while our Campaigner in Chief is busy making jokes about eating dogs and claiming credit for the death of Osama bin Laden, President Obama is facing intense scrutiny for his proposed changes to the military which will leave American vulnerable to future terrorist attacks.
Obama's Savage Administration
President Barack Obama hates bullying. That's why he took time out in the middle of a Congressional election cycle -- in peak season, actually -- to cut a video for a little-known group called the It Gets Better Project. The It Gets Better Project was designed to protect children, particularly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender children and teens, from bullying. Its suggested pledge states, "Everyone deserves to be respected for who they are. I pledge to spread this message to my friends, family and neighbors. I'll speak up against hate and intolerance whenever I see it, at school and at work. I'll provide hope for lesbian, gay, bi, trans and other bullied teens by letting them know that 'It Gets Better.'"
'Sacaja-Whiner': Elizabeth Warren and the Oppression Olympics
Elizabeth Warren is the Harvard law professor running for Senate in Massachusetts as a Democratic populist-progressive champion. But don't call her "Elizabeth Warren." Call her "Pinocchio-hontas," "Chief Full-of-Lies," "Running Joke" or "Sacaja-whiner." Warren has claimed questionable Native American minority status for years to reap career "diversity" benefits. Now, Cherokee leaders, campaign rival GOP Sen. Scott Brown and an army of Twitter detractors have called her out for gaming the racial-preference system. Live by identity politics, die by identity politics.
America's Two-Faced Liberals
President Barack Obama and Wall Street occupiers, along with their allies in the mainstream media and on college campuses, have maintained an ongoing attack on high-income earners, people they call 1 percenters. Listening to their deceitful demagoguery, you would naturally think of them as 99 percenters, but you'd be dead-wrong. Last week, MSN Money posted a report titled "The richest counties in America." According to the report, residents of those 15 wealthiest counties "have median household incomes that are double the national average." Three of those counties have a median income of more than $100,000. The report goes on to say, "While many Americans struggle to find jobs, balance their budgets and get by with less, some folks are living high on the hog." Let's look at some of those counties.
Campaigning in Afghanistan
President Barack Obama made a trip to Afghanistan to put an exclamation point on the anniversary of the attack which resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. Air Force One costs about $180,000 per hour to operate. Just the travel from Joint Base Andrews just outside Washington, DC to Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan was about 26 hours round trip.
Forward to Socialism!
Someone in the Obama campaign should find a new line of work. They've adopted as a slogan the single word: Forward! You've heard those complaints from conservatives that Obama is a socialist? Well, Forward! is one sure way to validate those concerns. Forward! has been the slogan of Marxists for more than a century. Vorwärts is not a soccer rival to Harry Potter's Hogwarts school, that home of witchcraft and wizardry. Vorwärts was the German language name of the Socialist newspaper for generations of European leftists.
Occupy Activists' Bomb Plot Foiled
Yesterday in the midst of the OWS May Day protests taking place around the nation, the U.S. Justice Department revealed exactly how far some of those associated with such protests are willing to go. In Cleveland, Ohio, five men who describe themselves as anarchists were arrested for their attempt to blow up the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge that crosses the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, Steven M. Dettelbach, characterized the defendants as men who "took numerous and repeated acts that demonstrated a commitment to violent, terrorist acts." And despite efforts to distance themselves from these wannabe terrorists, Occupy Cleveland media coordinator Jacob Wagner admitted that "at least some of the five men" attended that group's events.
Our Anti-Obama Press?
The general-election campaign for president is not yet under way, but clearly, some in the media have entered the Utterly Ridiculous Zone. On CNN's "Reliable Sources," host Howard Kurtz hailed an "eye-opener: the candidate with the best coverage during the presidential primaries was Mitt Romney. And the worst? Barack Obama." That's not eye-opening. It's a declaration that you're blind and deaf, and your olfactory glands are shot to pieces. When something smells as bad as this, odds are it's rotten.
Keeping Nature Exactly as Is ... Forever
The human brain is torn between simple intuition and the more complex hard work of figuring out the unintended consequences of any policy. Who doesn't like thinking about trees and greenery and happy animals? Who doesn't want to see steps taken to protect those things, all else being equal? But all else is not equal. Civilization doesn't work when central planners treat each tree as if its value is infinite. Politicians specialize in convincing you that, with their help, you can have your cake and eat it, too. The idea of a new "green economy" that is both clean and rich with jobs became popular under Bill Clinton's administration, thanks in large part to a compliant media and Vice President Al Gore. But anyone who understands economics knows that President Obama's green jobs initiative is snake oil.
The False Modesty of 'Nerds'
Washington is full of nerds. I know. I speak nerd, not fluently mind you, at least not anymore. But I certainly know more than a few phrases memorized from a Berlitz nerd-to-English phrase book. I can talk Dungeons & Dragons (both D&D and AD&D). I know about the Golden Age of Comics (as in comic books -- if you thought that was a reference to Bob Newhart's heyday, subtract 20 nerd points right there). Anyway, if you spend any time in Washington you'll find nerds. What happens is most of them sublimate their fixations with comics, or baseball cards, or 1960s British comedies to policy minutiae and political arcana. But, like Christians in ancient Rome, you can still spot them if you know the signals.
Twenty Years for Standing Her Ground
"I got five baby mammas, and I put my hands on every last one of them except for one," Rico Gray confessed during a November 2010 deposition. "The way I was with women ... they had to walk on eggshells around me." He recalled punching women in the face, shoving them, choking them and tossing them out the door. Yet somehow, after one of those women fired a warning shot into the ceiling of her Jacksonville, Fla., home to scare him away during yet another violent outburst, prosecutors managed to convince a jury that Gray was the victim. As a result, Marissa Alexander, a 31-year-old mother of three, faces 20 years in prison for standing her ground against an abusive husband.
A Cynical Process: Part II
A small headline in the 2nd section of the Wall Street Journal last week told a bigger story than a lot of front page banner headlines. It said, "U.S. Firms Add Jobs, but Mostly Overseas." Just as there is no free lunch, there is no free class warfare. Some people may be inspired by President Obama's talk about making "the rich" pay their undefined "fair share" of taxes, or taking away corporations' "tax breaks." But talk is not always cheap. It can be very costly to those working people who are looking for jobs that the Obama administration's anti-business policies are driving overseas.
Chuck Colson, Sin, and the Power of Love
The news coverage of Chuck Colson's recent death betrayed our secular culture's continuing discomfort with God's power to transform hearts and lives. Colson, "born again" to a life of profound Christianity on the heels of his Watergate disgrace, founded Prison Fellowship Ministries, a life-changing ministry to prisoners and their families. He spent his life messaging the need for personal and cultural transformation in the face of sin, urging Christians to embrace and live by an authentic Christian worldview.
The Economic Paradox No One Wants to Talk About
There is an economic paradox that few people understand, much less wish to acknowledge, because to do so would reveal the level of societal deterioration that has caused it. In simple terms, there are two schools of economic thought: one posits that massive amounts of government spending, aka stimulus in all its odious forms, is the only way to save an economy. The other posits that until massive over-spending by government is brought under control, aka austerity, economies over-burdened by debts and deficits will continue to founder. Who's right? There is merit to both arguments -- but only because we've reached the aforementioned level of societal deterioration. Let me explain.
November Is a Plebiscite On the American Revolution
Election Day 2012 will not be a presidential election. It will be a plebiscite. Americans will not only be voting for a president (and a House and a third of the Senate). They will be participating in a plebiscite on the definition of America. If Americans re-elect the Democrat, Barack Obama, they will have announced that America should be like Western European countries -- governed by left-wing values. Americans will have decided that America's value system -- "Liberty," "In God We Trust," "E Pluribus Unum" -- should be replaced.
Obama Is Headed Anywhere but Forward
You have to hand it to President Obama and his cabal of re-election strategists; they are masters of illusion. Their newly released Web video and its accompanying campaign slogan, "Forward," are science fiction-level fantastical. We're all familiar with Obama's penchant for deflecting responsibility and blaming his policy failures on George W. Bush, but after more than three years in office for Obama, it has gone from childish mischief to juvenile delinquency. This is a question for Guinness: Has any other president run for re-election against the record of his retired predecessor?
A Cynical Process
Labor unions, like the United Nations, are all too often judged by what they are envisioned as being -- not by what they actually are or what they actually do. Many people, who do not look beyond the vision or the rhetoric to the reality, still think of labor unions as protectors of working people from their employers. And union bosses still employ that kind of rhetoric. However, someone once said, "When I speak I put on a mask, but when I act I must take it off." That mask has been coming off, more and more, especially during the Obama administration, and what is revealed underneath is very ugly, very cynical and very dangerous.
Give 'em 'L' Mitt!
In the 1993 movie "Dave" the faux president (played by Kevin Kline) calls in his best friend (played by Charles Grodin) and they stay up all night balancing the federal budget, not by raising taxes, but by cutting unnecessary and wasteful spending. If only it were that easy. Most presidents have talked about cutting spending, but few succeed because Congress holds the power of the purse and is reluctant to give it up.
The Perils of Greatness
The thing about Lyndon Johnson -- and you may be sure I kept a close adolescent eye on him while he was one of my two U.S. senators -- was that he knew what he was doing. There was more to it even than that. He knew how to get things done. The faint breezes from the '50s and '60s rustling the page of Robert Caro's super biography of Johnson -- the brand-new volume, titled "The Passage of Power," is fourth and penultimate in the series -- stirs memories of times when politicians sort of, a lot of the time, understood their job. They were not nearly as busy as their modern heirs. Their role in our affairs was smaller, less intrusive. That could be part of the reason that "legislative success" was not yet an oxymoron. The larger and more complex the thing you're trying to do in government, the fainter the chances of actually getting it done in a way that contributes to the general good and brings credit to the political artisans.
Was the Secret Service Pornified?
What do you suppose are the chances that the Secret Service agents who embarrassed themselves, possibly endangered the life of the president of the United States, and very likely damaged their marriages and the lives of their children by engaging prostitutes in Cartagena, were consumers of pornography? I'd guess 100 percent. Not that watching porn completely accounts for the behavior. But pornography undermines sexual restraint. It offers a distorted image of what "everybody" is doing, and it grants permission for indulging every conceivable urge. Porn is mainstream now, offered in nearly every hotel room and ubiquitous on the Internet. The stigma that once attached to porn is gone. You can take college courses in it. Is it surprising that its corrupting influence is felt everywhere?