Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, January 6, 2012
2011: Out With a Whimper, Not a Bang
It proved as hard to break up the bankrupt European Union as it was to create it. For all the hundreds of stories predicting the imminent end of the union, insolvent Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain still hung in. Apparently if these debtors keep promising to end their spendthrift ways, quit calling the historically sensitive Germans bad names, and welch only on serial billion-euro loans -- rather than default all at once on massive trillion-euro obligations -- the Germans will keep doling out enough money for the EU to whimper on a bit longer. Meanwhile, the world's failed states, such as Iran, North Korea and Pakistan, just keep on failing. Getting the bomb and acting crazy are about all these pariah nations can do. Otherwise, who would care that the adolescent-looking Kim Jong Un just took over North Korea? How else can we explain giving away billions each year to anti-American Pakistan? Without monotonous threats of acquiring nuclear weapons and closing the Strait of Hormuz, would anyone pay attention to the nutty theocracy in Iran?
Obama's Super-Czar Is on the Loose
Here is the operating motto of the Obama White House: "So let it be written, so let it be done!" Like Yul Brynner's Pharaoh Ramses character in Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments," the demander in chief stands with arms akimbo issuing daily edicts to his constitution-subverting minions with an imperious wave of his hand. His entourage of insatiable usurpers never rests. Can't delude legislators into adopting a $1.5 billion Kabuki summer-jobs makework boondoggle? Create an unfunded program through executive fiat. Can't muster up a filibuster-proof majority for radical nominees? Czar-ify 'em.
A Worthy Challenger
WASHINGTON -- After every other conservative alternative to Mitt Romney crashed and burned (libertarian Ron Paul is in a category of his own), from the rubble emerges Rick Santorum. But he isn't just the last man standing. He is the first challenger to be plausibly presidential: knowledgeable, articulate, experienced, of stable character and authentic ideology. He'd been ignored largely because he appeared unelectable -- out of office for five years, having lost his Senate seat in Pennsylvania by a staggering 17 points in 2006. However, with his virtual tie for first in Iowa, he sheds the loser label and seizes the momentum, meaning millions of dollars' worth of free media to make up for his lack of money. He's got the stage to make his case, plus the luck of a scheduling quirk: If he can make it through the next three harrowing primaries, the (relative) February lull would allow him to build a national campaign structure before Super Tuesday on March 6.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
The Great Conservative Sell-Out
Much of the conservative punditocracy has declared that Mitt Romney is the consensus conservative candidate. If he is, he's the least consensual consensus candidate in modern political history -- the man can't break 25 percent with a sledgehammer. While his supporters shout from the hills that Romney essentially tied for the win in Iowa, his glass remains three-quarters empty, with no-name Rick Santorum winning as much of the vote, Ron Paul winning nearly as much, and Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry combining for as much. The last time a Republican candidate captured the nomination for the presidency by winning Iowa with this low a vote total, his name was Bob Dole. A couple of years later, he was hawking Viagra. Nonetheless, the word is out: The fix is in. Unbelievably, not a single anti-Romney television ad was run in the state of Iowa. And while a few conservatives -- including yours truly -- have come out and opposed nominating the most left-wing Republican in the field, many more conservatives have endorsed Romney's candidacy.
Pinning the Tail on the Donkeys
There are so many bad things one can say about those on the Left, one hardly knows where to begin. But one of their most annoying traits is that they absolutely refuse to acknowledge that they've ever been wrong even when actual events, as opposed to the fiction so often spun by liberal professors and historians, confirms it time and again. For instance, when I was a youngster, Time magazine editor Whittaker Chambers testified that Alger Hiss, the fair-haired boy of FDR's and Truman's State Department, was not only a member of the Communist Party, but an agent of the Soviet Union. The way that the Left erupted, you might have thought that Chambers was a latter-day Pontius Pilate and that Hiss was Jesus. Even when the Soviet Union released the Venona Papers years later, proving that Hiss had indeed been one of their agents -- in other words, a traitor, one of Stalin's useful idiots -- the Left refused to acknowledge their collective naiveté.
China's JFK Moment
President Obama's decision in 2010 to cut NASA's budget and abandon the Constellation program, established by the Bush administration, which was charged with returning Americans to the moon by 2020 and creating an "extended human presence on the moon," has created a vacuum, which China will attempt to fill. China has announced an ambitious five-year plan that includes the launch of space laboratories, a manned spaceship to the moon and the creation of its own global satellite navigation system that will almost certainly be used for military purposes.
Pull the Parachute
A year ago this week, just two days before being shot by a deranged assailant in her district, Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords introduced legislation to cut congressional salaries by 5 percent, from $174,000 to $165,300. Needless to say, the bill didn't become law -- the last time the House and Senate actually trimmed their members' pay was during the Great Depression. Yet there are few things Congress could do that would be more certain to win public esteem. In a national poll commissioned last month by The Hill, a Washington newspaper, 67 percent of voters said lawmakers should be paid less. With Congress's approval rating barely above single digits, and with so many Americans feeling the sting of a weak economy, you might think support for a modest one-time pay cut would be a no brainer -- especially since congressional pay has been hiked 10 times since 1998.
Iowa Votes
Iowa caucus results show it's still early in the game and nothing's certain. So what happened on the way to the Republican presidential nomination? Well, even with a slim official win, Mitt Romney did no better in practical terms this year than he did four years ago in 2008 because of the level of competition. This proves that the road to the 2012 nomination will be anything but smooth, and that he has a tough road ahead if he is to win the Republican presidential nomination.
Iowa Shows Republicans Determined to Beat Obama
It's been a mixed week for Mitt Romney's campaign. On one hand, Romney won Iowa, but on the other, he was endorsed by John McCain. Until the first actual votes were cast Tuesday night, it appeared as if some elements of the Republican Party were becoming the mirror image of a liberal mob. The wild swings -- at least in the polls -- from one populist right-winger to another suggested that some Republicans were determined to change the meaning of "conservative" from "normal person who wants to protect what's best in mainstream America" to "perpetually indignant, restless carper against everything, obsessed with symbolic issues, determined to punish the country for its impurities."
Romney's Watchwords in Iowa: Divide and Conquer
Elections are contests held during a moment in time between candidates who have records stretching back, often far back, into the past. So there is always a tension between the man (or woman) who is running and the moment. That tension is greater than usual when the contest is for the nomination of a political party dominated by a large number of newcomers to politics motivated by strong opposition to current policies. That was the case 40 years ago, when members of the peace movement, opposed to the Vietnam War, became the largest and most highly motivated part of the Democratic Party.
Suddenly, a Fun Candidate
WASHINGTON -- The complaint that Iowa is not a typical American state is true but trivial because there is no such state. Can you name one whose political culture, closely considered, is more like than unlike any other state's? Anyway, someplace has to go first, and it should be somewhere the natives are receptive and media are not decisive, so marginal candidates have a sporting chance to become central. Rick Santorum has become central because Iowa Republicans ignored an axiom that is as familiar as it is false: Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. Republicans, supposedly hierarchical, actually are -- let us say the worst -- human. They crave fun. Supporting Romney still seems to many like a duty, the responsible thing to do. Suddenly, supporting Santorum seems like a lark, partly because a week or so ago he could quit complaining about media neglect and start having fun, which is infectious.
The Importance of Ron Paul
If libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Paul, as expected, did well in Iowa. His strong third-place finish is substantially better than he did in 2008, and his national poll numbers are twice what they were back then. Paul's appeal is easy to understand. His antiwar message of limited government, low taxes and federalism have strong appeal, especially to young people who oppose the war on drugs, take a pro-choice position on abortion and support gay marriage. Paul scares people who purport to embrace freedom but fear the responsibility that goes with it. Privatize Social Security? Serious change in Medicare? Call off the war on drugs? End government welfare? He actually believes in the Constitution, an amazing document that many Americans ignore, have not read or are apparently waiting for the movie version.
Cat Nip From the Egotists
WASHINGTON -- An underlying theme of our times that has gone unperceived by the high and mighty in media, government and other locales where the politically alive come to roost is the thumping failure of an increasing number of counter-productive, old progressive reforms. Once they were beheld as prodigies from the minds of superior citizens -- such stars of yesteryear as Robert M. La Follette and Woodrow Wilson. Now they are revealed as hollow shams or, at best, curiosities. Surely soon they will be seen for what they are: catnip from the egotists. In a political year, progressive reforms from a bygone era are all around us, assumed by the high and mighty as the way things should be. Is there too much money in politics? But of course! Are the pols being bought off by the vested interests? For a certitude, the giant corporations, the fat cats, the vested interests are flooding the halls of Congress and lesser political venues with cash (never in this list is included the unions, particularly the public-sector unions).
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Occupy's Celebrity 1 Percent Backers
The Occupy Wall Street movement has hit several huge roadblocks. First it was the cold temperatures that sent many home. Next was the long-overdue decision to evacuate them out of public parks by liberal Democrat mayors. But another huge roadblock that's emerging: their enormous hypocrisy on wealth. The occupiers have pushed the ludicrous slogan that "We are the 99 percent," somehow stands for the same public that installed 63 new conservative Republicans in the House in 2011. To demonstrate their 99 percentism in October, these protesters staged a "Millionaires March" in New York City, parading to the homes of wealthy citizens such as Rupert Murdoch and David Koch. But OWS organizers have conveniently ignored the massive wealth of celebrities within their own ranks.
Iowa-Bashing Snobs and Sore Losers
The Iowa caucuses may not have much predictive value, but they did a wonderful job of unmasking both elitist whingers on the left and incompetent whiners on the right. As they do every presidential election cycle, progressives of pallor wore their indelible disdain for Middle America on their sleeves. Pale-faced University of Iowa journalism professor Stephen Bloom launched a 6,000-word jeremiad, littered with factual errors, against his home state's residents. The abridged version: Raaaaaaaacists! Hicks! Christians! Argggh!
Santorum's Experiment in Truth-Telling
Even though he is a columnist for The Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer often makes shrewd observations about American politics. On Fox News the night before the Iowa caucuses, however, Krauthammer indulged in a false appeal to common knowledge -- before casually dismissing Rick Santorum as a nonviable presidential candidate. Bill O'Reilly asked: Who is going to win Iowa? "I'll tell you that it's win, place and show, everybody knows: Romney, Santorum and Ron Paul," Krauthammer responded. "And I'm not sure it will matter either way, because Santorum has a one-in-50 chance of winning the nomination. Paul has zero chance."
A Role Model for Boehner
The battle smoke lifts, the noise of past political combat dies away and we envision at last the right role model for John Boehner as he assumes the speakership. Who else, I ask, but Nancy Pelosi? The Rose of San Francisco will not go down in the speakership annals standing beside the honored likes of Henry Clay, Jack Garner and Sam Rayburn. Instead, she'll possibly go down as the speaker with both the hardest head and nose -- unyielding in pursuit of her objectives, giving an inch to critics only when forced to and then waiting patiently to snatch it back.
Obama's Genocidal Mediator
The Obama administration, fresh from abandoning Iraq at a critical time in its post-war development, is apparently preparing to do the same thing in Afghanistan. According to a report published late last month in The Hindu, radical Islamist cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi is serving as a "key mediator in secret talks between the U.S. and the Taliban." Unnamed government sources assert that Qaradawi helped in putting together a "road map" whose purpose is to provide America a "face-saving political settlement ahead of its planned withdrawal from Afghanistan which is due to begin in 2014." Once again, for an Obama administration concerned with the 2012 election, a "political settlement" becomes a viable substitute for victory.
Ideas Have Sex, and We're Better for It
An idea walks into a bar. She meets another idea. They get together, and nine months later (or maybe it's nine minutes or seconds? It's not clear how it works with ideas), a new idea is born. A baby idea with the best traits of both parents. When this happens a lot, everyone gets smarter and the world gets better. Did you know that ideas have sex? It's a weird concept, but the more I think about it, the more right it seems. I learned it from British journalist Matt Ridley. Ridley, author of "The Rational Optimist," says the reason life gets better is that ideas have sex.
The Loneliness of the Non-mainstream Swimmer
"I don't think Ron Paul represents the mainstream," says Mitt Romney. Newt Gingrich, another of the Texas congressman's opponents in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination, uses stronger terms, declaring, "Ron Paul's views are totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American." As the results in Iowa suggest, the "mainstream" to which Romney and Gingrich refer is not defined by voters; it is the range of opinion deemed acceptable by leaders of the two major political parties. The mainstream has brought us a national debt the size of the national economy, a bloated yet overextended military that has strayed far from its mission of defending the country, and a lawless executive branch that usurps legislative powers and violates civil liberties.