Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Those Cheapened Pulitzer 'Prizes'
Once upon a time, it meant something for a reporter to be called a "Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist." The prestige of this designation is quickly eroding. The 2012 Pulitzer Prizes looked less like an excellence-in-media competition and more like an exercise in leftist self-affirmation. No prize established this more strongly than the coveted National Reporting prize going to ... The Huffington Post. The Pulitzer judges who would rather swallow rat poison than give an award to a conservative outlet, such as The Washington Times, are bestowing kudos on a site that thrives on such celebrity dreck as "Miley Shows Off Legs in Lacy Shorts" and "Kim Kardashian Kanye West Earrings: Reality Star Sports 'KW' Initial Jewelry."
Bankward Banking
don't know if it's Dodd-Frank. Or if it's Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd themselves. Or if it's just the big bankers. But the reality is, our banking system is completely screwed up when it comes to getting a home loan. The problem used to be that the banks, in collusion with a federal government, made bad loans to bad people. That's what helped bring us the housing bubble and the inevitable bust that followed.
Five
Anyone who has every travelled overseas will tell you the hardest thing to do is to keep up with events back in the U.S. of A. It's hard to follow the Nationals, especially when they're on the west coast of the U.S. and I'm on the east coast of Africa. It's impossible to follow the Capitals (in fact we had generally agreed here that the 7th game of the Stanley Cup playoff match with the Boston Bruins was going to have been played last night), and it wasn't until just before dinner last night when I realized it was Five Primary Night for Mitt Romney.
Devious Taxation
The Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation does a yeoman's job of keeping track of how much we're paying in taxes and who's paying what. It turns out that American taxpayers worked this year from Jan. 1 to April 17, 107 days, to earn enough money to pay their federal, state and local tax bills. That statistic requires some clarification, and I ask my readers to help me examine it. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Congress will spend $3.8 trillion this year, about 24 percent of our $15 trillion gross domestic product. But federal tax revenue will be much less, only $2.5 trillion, or 16 percent of the GDP. That means there's a shortfall of $1.3 trillion. Some people, including economists, say there's a deficit. That's true, but only in an accounting sense, not in any meaningful economic sense. Let's look at it.
The 'New' Charles Colson
After Richard Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy and the California governor's race two years later (when he uttered the immortal line to the media, "You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore") the former vice president knew he must reinvent himself to run for president again in 1968. Thus was born "the new Nixon," an attempt to transform himself from "the old Nixon" the public didn't like, into a warmer, softer, more approachable person. As it turned out, the "new Nixon" was simply the "old Nixon" with a new coat of political paint.
Why America Is Still the Best Hope
Does it break some unwritten rule for a columnist to bring his readers' attention to his own book? If so, I ask your indulgence. But, after nearly a thousand columns and twelve years since my last book, I hope readers will forgive me for noting that today, April 24, 2012, HarperCollins is publishing the culmination of a lifetime of thinking and years of the most challenging writing of my life. The book is "Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph." It is an argument on behalf of the moral superiority -- and universal applicability -- of American values.
Blood Libels From Israel-Hating Students in Florida
Students who vocally call for the destruction of Israel have created a stir in Florida with their promotion of modern-day blood libels and lies demonizing the Jewish State. On March 30th, 200 mock eviction notices were placed on dorm-room doors by the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton. "We regret to inform you that your home is scheduled for demolition shortly," begins the notice, which can be seen here. "You have three (3) days to vacate the premise persuant (sic) to code no. 208.2A or you will be subject to arrest. If you do not leave, we reserve the right to destroy your home. Anyone left inside is not our responsibility."
The World's Great Prison Escapee
The power of redemption is the one concept a cynical, self-regarding epoch -- ours -- can't quite get its arms around, especially, perhaps, in the case of the late Chuck Colson. Can the guy have been right in the head? Wasn't he putting us on with all this Sweet Jesus business he performed in prisons all over the world? If Colson was dissembling about his hard-won faith in Christ, the result of imprisonment for his part in Watergate -- a possibility I don't accept for a millisecond -- his was an odd way of staging a comeback: witnessing Christ's love to the ickiest congregation imaginable, prison inmates.
Cuddly Symbols Not Cooperating in Climate Panic
In a better world, debates about science -- and nearly everything else -- would be conducted without resort to demagoguery, sentimentality, cynical manipulation, or hysteria. In the world we inhabit, those tactics are dismayingly routine. Still, the great weakness of overwrought predictions of doom is that they can be checked. The past year has not been kind to the most potent symbols of climate change hysteria. Consider the polar bears. Among the most moving images of the warmists' warnings was the solitary polar bear, supposedly marooned on an ice floe. The image became iconic after it was published in Science Magazine. Among the most memorable moments in Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," was an animated clip depicting struggling polar bears.
In the Age of Obama: The Eagle Has Fallen
Columnist Charles Krauthammer calls the ceremonial interment of the Shuttle Discovery an act of "willed American decline." He's certainly right about that. It is an historic retreat for America. It was under John F. Kennedy, a liberal Democrat, that America was summoned to greatness. Frustrated by a series of Soviet "firsts" in space -- first earth satellite (Sputnik), first man in space (Yuri Gagarin) -- the young President Kennedy knew that his talk of "betting America moving again" would ring hollow if the Soviets bested us in space.
Romney Should Choose Bold Colors, Not Pale Pastels
Mitt Romney's presidential run could turn out to be a test case to resolve the long-running debate inside the Republican Party as to whether the GOP presidential nominee should run as a conservative or more of a centrist. How often have we heard both Democratic and Republican political "experts" reciting the conventional wisdom that during primary contests, candidates of both parties must play to their respective base voters and then shift toward the center during the general election campaign? Does anyone even challenge this edict?
Who Is 'Racist'?
Whatever the ultimate outcome of the case against George Zimmerman for his shooting of Trayvon Martin, what has happened already is enough to turn the stomach of anyone who believes in either truth or justice.
Liberal Nostalgiacs Don't Understand Jobs of the Future
I don't know how many times I've seen liberal commentators look back with nostalgia to the days when a young man fresh out of high school or military service could get a well-paying job on an assembly line at a unionized auto factory that could carry him through to a comfortable retirement. As it happens, I grew up in Detroit and for a time lived next door to factory workers. And I know something that has eluded the liberal nostalgiacs. Which is that people hated those jobs.
2012: A Referendum on Our National Character
As I have said many times before, there are three types of Americans: the workers, the slackers and the fence-sitters. Inevitably the workers will always work, and the slackers will always be slackers. It is the fence-sitters who determine the overall tone of the nation. If more of them decide it is in their best interests to work, the nation is healthy. If they decide it's in their best interests to become slackers? Welcome to the essence of the 2012 election. Who's kidding whom? Absent shame, which has receded in direct proportion to the increase in moral relativism, promoting such concepts as dignity, integrity and self-reliance has become a gargantuan task. Some Americans are old enough to remember when going on the dole was something one did only when every other option became untenable. And even then, a certain degree of lingering shame accompanied that choice, along with an equal amount of determination to change course and return to being productive as quickly as possible.
Hillary: Playing Roulette With the Russians
Secretary Hillary Clinton was at the Naval Academy recently. She went there to deliver a prestigious Forrestal Lecture. And she was well received by the 4,000 Midshipmen and hundreds of students attending the Naval Academy Foreign Affairs Conference. One Midshipman asked Sec. Clinton about the killing of Osama bin Laden. Hillary responded with poised professionalism. She crisply outlined all the steps that were taken and the vast, complex operations that had to come together in time and space to bring success. She tells the story well. And, interestingly, she gives no hint of envy that it was Barack Obama who got to make that critical call, not Hillary herself.
A Century of Service
You find them in all walks of life. They might be playing outfield for the Philadelphia Phillies (Shane Victorino). Or hosting the show "Dirty Jobs" for the Discovery Channel (Mike Rowe). Or founding Wal-Mart (Sam Walton). Or even becoming president of the United States (Gerald Ford). The men listed above all have at least one thing in common. All achieved the highest honor possible for a member of the Boy Scouts of America: the rank of Eagle Scout. It's been 100 years since the first one was awarded. Since then, more than two million young men have reached this milestone, including my son-in-law.
Wrangling Over Rangel
A while back, I compared Sarah Palin's voice to bagpipes and nails on a blackboard. Predictably, a number of people leapt to her defense, while one guy of Scottish heritage leapt to the defense of bagpipes. I understand that, thanks to the media's unrelenting attacks on Mrs. Palin, a lot of Republicans resent any criticism of their favorite Alaskan, no matter how benign. But, frankly, I can't believe I am the only one out here who cringes every time she opens her mouth. Frankly, for conservatives, I think Palin's annoyingly nasal voice is our own version of the emperor's new duds.
Clean Out the Garage
According to two pieces I read over the weekend, the world is coming to an end but I am going to be out-of-town for it. I am at JFK awaiting a flight to Accra, Ghana to whence I will be traveling on behalf of the ONE Campaign. Ghana is introducing two new vaccines to its medical system and I'll be there to watch (and write about) the roll-out. However. While I'm gone I would appreciated it if you would take some steps to straighten up the national garage. It's a mess and it would be a good thing if we started tossing out the junk and putting the good stuff in its proper place.
Obama Is a Unifier? Hardly
"I saw many signs in this campaign," said Richard Nixon the day after he was elected president in 1968. "But the one that touched me the most was one that I saw in Deshler, Ohio, at the end of a long day of whistle-stopping.... A teenager held up a sign, 'Bring Us Together.' And that will be the great objective of this administration at the outset: to bring the American people together." Nixon had started using the phrase "Bring Us Together" a couple weeks earlier, after one of his aides spotted the youngster with the sign. Some of the campaign staff were so enamored of the slogan, William Safire later recalled, that they wanted to make it the Inauguration Day theme. The desire to see an incoming president as a unifier, a healer of the national breach, is an old American tradition, especially in times of acrimony and political conflict.
Cruel and Unusual - a Test Case
WASHINGTON -- In the summer of 1787, just 94 years after the Salem witch trials, as paragons of the Enlightenment such as James Madison, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin deliberated in the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, a mob pelted and otherwise tormented to death a woman accused of being a witch. Prosecution of alleged witches, writes historian Edmund Morgan, had ceased in the colonies long before the English statute criminalizing witchcraft was repealed in 1736. Some popular sentiment, however, lagged. Today, 221 years after the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution, the Supreme Court is again pondering the Eighth Amendment's proscription of "cruel and unusual punishments." The case illustrates the complexity of construing some constitutional language in changing contexts of social science and brain science.