Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Our Problematic Speech
WASHINGTON -- The Stolen Valor Act of 2005, a compound of political pandering and moral exhibitionism, was whooped through the Senate, aka the "world's greatest deliberative body," by unanimous consent; the House, joining the stampede, passed it by a voice vote. So Xavier Alvarez now hopes the Supreme Court will save him from punishment for lying. And his is not the only case arising from government supervising speech that is demonstrably, or arguably, inaccurate.
From The Comedy Store
The Justice Department convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout of selling weapons to South American terrorists. He broke all the rules. Under the WTO he's required to sell the weapons to the Justice Department, which gives them to a gun store on the border, which sells them to a cartel, which sells the weapons to the South American terrorists. That's how jobs are created.
The Iron Lady versus the Tin Woman
When Sec. of State Hillary Clinton is not berating Canadians in Ottawa for not pushing abortions in Africa, when she's not celebrating gay pride in Rome with Lady Gaga, when she's not counting Jews in Jerusalem, nagging Israelis about building homes for their people in their own capital, what does she do with herself? One thing she does is try to overturn one of the greatest victories for democracy and the rule of law since World War II. Mrs. Clinton has barged into still-festering dispute over the Falkland Islands. In 1982, the Argentine military junta invaded the Falklands and immediately set about placing the peaceful islanders under their own dictatorship.
Quo Vadis, Herman Cain?
With one percent of Americans paying most of the income taxes in America, while 47% pay nothing, it figures that Democrats would decide that the fair thing to do is to force the one-percenters to pay even more. That is what liberals refer to as social justice, which they believe is better than just plain old-fashioned justice because it allows them to stack the deck. That, in a nutshell, is not only a good reason to never vote for liberals, but an equally good reason not to play cards with them.
Arizona Bids Adios to Illegal Immigrant Basher
For the last several years, State Senator Russell Pearce has been the face of the anti-illegal immigrant movement in Arizona. But his district voted this week to recall him, ending a 10-year state legislative career that has been marked by ugly episodes. It's about time. Pearce was the chief author of Arizona SB 1070, the controversial law still being challenged in the courts that, among other things, allows law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect is there illegally. And Pearce has sponsored legislation that would attempt to deny citizenship to children born in Arizona to parents who are illegal immigrants, despite the 14th Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship.
Booing the Character Issue
I think I understand why the audience at Wednesday's CNBC debate booed Maria Bartiromo's question to Herman Cain about sexual harassment allegations. They don't believe there is any truth to them. They suspect, along with the candidate, that the women concerned are part of a liberal lynch mob out to smear another strong, conservative, black man. They know that accusations of sexual harassment are often nebulous and politically correct. If I guess correctly, they also believe -- with considerable justification -- that the press is less interested in the dry details of policy than in salacious tales of misbehavior. They resent being dragged into another smutty distraction.
K Street's Super Committee Splurge
The bipartisan debt panel to nowhere is exactly where K Street lobbyists want it to be: hopelessly deadlocked. A November 23 deadline for agreement on $1.2 trillion in budget savings is looming, but no real reductions in the size, scope or spending of government are on the table. Instead, we are witnessing another obscene special-interest splurge to preserve the status quo. All in the name of "reform," of course.
The Left's Many Double Standards
Today's liberals would have you believe they occupy the moral high ground on every political and cultural issue. But have you ever taken inventory of their double standards? The left's inconsistency in applying their principles based on the party affiliation of those they're judging, gives fuller meaning to the concept of moral relativism. The only thing that's consistent is their reliable inconsistency, whether in the area of economic, social or national defense issues.
The Heroes of 2011
CLOVIS, Calif. -- This little town not far from Fresno may be the perfect place to observe Veterans Day as our nation closes a decade of war. A quiet San Joaquin Valley community in the heart of our most populous state, Clovis has lost 10 of its sons -- eight of them from local Buchanan High School -- in Afghanistan and Iraq. Though the Defense Department apparently doesn't keep statistics on per capita losses for American communities, Clovis may be for this war what Bedford, Va., was for World War II. According to local records, 19 "Bedford Boys" -- all from the little Shenandoah Valley town -- died within hours of one another at Normandy's Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. That's why the National D-Day Memorial is in Bedford.
Winners, Losers, Misses
There were three winners in the CNBC debate: Herman Cain, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Gov. Rick Perry was the obvious loser because of his memory lapse. The guy with the toughest job on Wednesday night was Cain, who has been hammered by sexual-harassment charges. He needed a strong performance to put him back on message with his 9-9-9 tax plan and pro-business, free-enterprise views. I give him first prize, simply because he performed so well. He had the most to gain and the most to lose. He gained.
No 'Glee' About Virginity
In Hollywood, the only truly serious sexual disease is virginity. It's a dire and embarrassing condition, desperately in need of elimination. Teenagers that still have "it" are woefully immature. They might as well consider themselves to be walking the school hallways in diapers. Along comes Fox Entertainment to enlighten us. Get ready. It's sick. Fox's "Glee" devoted an entire episode on Nov. 8 to setting up and celebrating the shedding of virginity by two teenage couples on the show. One was heterosexual, and one -- yippee! -- was homosexual. TV critics were raving in advance. Entertainment Weekly's Tim Stack all but demanded everyone watch: "It's without a doubt one of Glee's best installments ever and features two popular couples on the show having sex for the first time."
The 2011 Elections: Split Decision
WASHINGTON -- The 2011 off-year elections are a warning to Republicans. The 2010 party is over. 2012 will be a struggle. To be sure, Tuesday was not exactly the Democrats' night. They did enjoy one big victory, repeal of government-worker reform in Ohio. But elsewhere, they barely held their own. The bigger news was the absence of any major Republican trend. The great Republican resurgence of 2009-10 has slowed to a crawl.
'Right to Riot' Cemented in Campus Culture
"Of course we're going to riot," Paul Howard, a 24 year-old aerospace engineering student at Penn State University, told The New York Times. "What do they expect when they tell us at 10 o'clock that they fired our football coach?" The coach in question, as we all know, is Joe Paterno, the decades-long patriarch of Penn State football. Paterno was fired by the board of trustees for his part in a reprehensible non-response to the alleged rape of a 10-year-old boy in the locker room showers.
Obama Unbound
Richard Nixon went to Red China with political impunity. Had a Democrat tried that, he would have been branded a commie appeaser. To this day, liberals cannot conceive that during the two world wars, progressives like Woodrow Wilson, Earl Warren and Franklin Delano Roosevelt trampled on civil liberties in a way unimagined by Dick Cheney. Ronald Reagan signed the most liberal illegal immigration amnesty bill in history, and ran larger yearly deficits than had Jimmy Carter. "Read my lips" George H.W. Bush agreed to huge tax increases. And George W. Bush ran up the largest debt of any eight-year president, outspending Bill Clinton by more than fivefold. The latter, remember, bombed Belgrade without either congressional or United Nations approval -- and without antiwar protests. Without an opposition, almost anything goes.
The Real Scandal
The real scandal in the accusations against Herman Cain is the corruption of the law, the media and politics. Let's start with the law. Some people may think the fact that the National Restaurant Association reportedly paid $45,000 to settle a claim made by one of its employees against Mr. Cain is incriminating. Most of us are not going to part with 45 grand without some serious reason. But that is very different from the situation of an organization in the present legal climate.
GOP Field in Flux
My Dad would be beaming with pride over the behavior of Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain in Saturday's debate, where there were polite discussions over the issues that concern us all. Moreover, the candidates offered their genuine solutions to the nation's problems without the personal attacks that would have violated Dad's 11th Commandment. The winner in the Gingrich-Cain debate was this nation and its people. In the campaign itself, Herman Cain's recently soaring campaign is threatened by charges that he had sexually harassed several women when he was president of the National Restaurant Association. As of now the unproven charges have failed to damage his numbers but that still may happen as a result of the media's relentless coverage of the charges, which Cain vehemently denies have any merit. Unfortunately for Cain the story has legs, and the media will not let up the pressure.
William F. Buckley, Still at Yale
WASHINGTON -- Last weekend I was given a hint as to how an erroneous idea is born and how it takes on a life of its own. I was at Yale University as a guest of the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale. It's run by a group of extremely winning young Yale students who are all admirably conservative. Bill would approve. They all carried themselves like young ladies and young gentlemen. They were confident in their ideas and amused.
What It Was, Was Football
WASHINGTON -- A few millennia from now, when archaeologists from an ascendant Brazil or Turkey or wherever sift the shards of American civilization and find the ruins of the Big House in Ann Arbor, Mich., they will wonder why a 109,901-seat entertainment venue was attached to an institution of higher education. Today, the accelerating preposterousness of big-time college football is again provoking furrowed brows and pursed lips. But there probably were few of either among the 20 million who Saturday night watched Alabama's student-athletes play those of LSU.
Working for Fun Is No Laughs in Market Capitalism
Some of my friends in the conservative blogosphere have been ridiculing a New Yorker named Joe Therrien. I want to put in a good word for him. Therrien appears in the lead paragraph of a story in The Nation on Occupy Wall Street. He's an example, writer Richard Kim wants us to know, of the "creative types" ingeniously protesting capitalism. It's one of those no-violence-or-anti-Semitism-here-just-nifty-people articles you find not only in the avowedly leftish Nation but also in mainstream media.
Surprise! Iran Has Nukes
If ever there was a time when "see, I told you so" was warranted, it is now as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports this week that Iran is close to developing a nuclear weapon. That so many in the State Department over several administrations could deceive themselves into believing claims by the Iranians that their intentions are nothing but peaceful and their sole objective is to develop more sources of electricity for their country reminds me of the Munich Agreement of 1938. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with Adolf Hitler, thought they had an agreement concerning Czechoslovakia, shook hands on it, and then watched stupefied as Hitler boldly seized the country, en route to Poland, plunging Europe into greater turmoil.