Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Cain Under Fire -- No-Fly Zone Over Clinton, JFK Sexcapades
"He's got it coming to him," said Ben Bradlee, former editor of The Washington Post. "You can't do that in this town anymore. Probably could do it 50 years ago, but you can't do it now." The "he" was Herman Cain. The "that" means sexual harassment. And the "got it coming" means the media firestorm around the Republican front-runner as he deals with the sexual misconduct accusations that threaten to derail Cain's surprisingly strong candidacy.
David Axelrod's Pattern of Sexual Misbehavior
Herman Cain has spent his life living and working all over the country -- Indiana, Georgia, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Washington, D.C. -- but never in Chicago. So it's curious that all the sexual harassment allegations against Cain emanate from Chicago: home of the Daley machine and Obama consigliere David Axelrod. Suspicions had already fallen on Sheila O'Grady, who is close with David Axelrod and went straight from being former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley's chief of staff to president of the Illinois Restaurant Association (IRA), as being the person who dug up Herman Cain's personnel records from the National Restaurant Association (NRA).
The World's Gone Mad
Some of us imagined that Barack Obama couldn't possibly have a lousier, more corrupt, circle of friends and advisors in Washington than he had back in Chicago. But is it possible that we simply underestimated the man's uncanny ability to attract vermin?
A Nuclear Iran Would Be the Gravest Threat
Ron Paul, the Texas congressman and isolationist would-be president, is against using tough economic sanctions or military force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. How then, he was asked on "Fox News Sunday," would he persuade Teheran to abandon its quest for the bomb? "Well," Paul suggested, "maybe offering friendship to them." Hmm, there's an idea. How might it work in practice?
Blame It on Brokaw
You know who I blame for the terrible tone in American politics? Tom Brokaw. No, not the man himself, but what he represents. Since Dan Rather famously beclowned himself, Brokaw stands as the last of the respected "voice of God" news anchors (CBS News executive Don Hewitt's phrase). These were the oracles who simply declared what was news and what wasn't. Walter Cronkite, the prize of the breed, used to end his newscasts, "And that's the way it is" -- as if he were speaking not just with journalistic but also epistemological and ontological authority.
Absolutely Profligate: Mitt Romney's Spending 'Cuts' Would Expand the Federal Budget
Presenting his fiscal plan in USA Today last week, Mitt Romney said he wants to "eliminate every government program that is not absolutely essential." That sounds good until you realize that Romney's goal of cutting $500 billion from projected federal outlays in 2016 would, at best, leave the budget about 8 percent higher than it is now and only 11 percent lower than it would be without any attempt to restrain spending. The implication: Mitt Romney thinks 89 percent of what the federal government does is "absolutely essential." And that's what he says when he is trying to appeal to the fiscally conservative Republicans whose votes he will need to win his party's presidential nomination. Who knows what he really thinks, assuming he has any firm convictions at all on this crucial question.
Thanking an Old Friend
With a swoosh, the Gulfstream 550 is effortlessly launched into the heavens for the hour-long slingshot from Dallas to Stillwater, the sleek jet headed for Oklahoma State University and the football field bearing the name of our host -- Boone Pickens Stadium. The game against Kansas State University is spectacular, a record 58,750 fans roaring their (now) No. 2-rated Cowboys to an explosive 52-45 victory. It's hard to believe this stadium was the scene of the crime five years ago.
The FDA Kills
It would be nice if politicians and regulators left us alone. But they don't. They always want to do more. Recently, there have been shortages of some medicines. Cancer patients can't get drugs they need. Why not? One reason is that a big drugmaker shut down for a year in part to meet Food and Drug Administration rules. The FDA makes it so expensive and difficult to sell drugs that there isn't an eager pack of companies rushing to the fill the gap. The free market would provide that, but government intervention, such as low Medicare reimbursement, strangles it. So people suffer.
Ignorance Exploited
Many Wall Street occupiers are echoing the Communist Party USA's call to "Save the nation! Tax corporations! Tax the rich!" There are other Americans, on both the left and the right -- for example, President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner -- who call for reductions in corporate taxes. But the University of California, Berkeley's pretend economist Robert Reich disagrees, saying, "The economy needs two whopping corporate tax cuts right now as much as someone with a serious heart condition needs Botox." Let's look at corporate taxes and ask, "Who pays them?"
The Great Stonewall of Obama
The White House laments that America hasn't built enough massive government infrastructure projects. Nonsense. At the rate it's growing, the Great Stonewall of Obama may soon be the second largest manmade object visible from outer space. While many construction workers across the country remain idle, Team Obama's attorneys have been laboring overtime to erect impenetrable information blockades around three festering scandals: Solyndra, LightSquared, and Fast and Furious. This much is clear: The "most transparent administration ever" is hyper-allergic to sunlight and subpoenas.
What Is Obama Thinking?
What is Barack Hussein Obama thinking? That's the question that has to be on everyone's lips at this point. We've spent trillions of dollars of taxpayer money we don't have -- to no avail. We've created massive new entitlement programs without funding them. We've emboldened class warfare artists to take to the streets, littering America's public spaces with human debris -- all with presidential backing. We've kowtowed to dictators around the world and created new Islamic terror states in the Middle East. It's as though this man doesn't have the best interests of the United States at heart.
This Ain't Your Mamma's Girl Scouts
The Girl Scouts(GSUSA) gather this week in Houston (November 8-13) to celebrate its 100th Anniversary, with a convention theme of "Renewing the Promise: Girl Scouts in a New Century." The Girl Scouts' promise to its 3.2 million members includes, among other things, the commitment to help girls "develop values to guide their actions and provide the foundation for sound decision-making." A quick look at the speaker lineup for its upcoming convention makes clear that the Girl Scouts are promoting not the traditional values of the original Girl Scouts, but the radical, raunchy values and relativistic decision-making of the trendy left-wing Girl Scouts.
GOP Primary Deadlock?
Here's a thought: The GOP presidential primaries may well prove to be inconclusive, with the nominee actually being chosen at the convention in Tampa, Fla., in the fourth week of August next year. True, it has been generations since a presidential nominating convention actually made that decision, although, admittedly, this idea pops up every four years. The last GOP contested convention that went beyond the first ballot was in 1948, when Thomas Dewey was chosen on the third ballot -- and went on to lose to Harry Truman. For the Democrats it was in 1952, when Adlai Stevenson was also chosen on the third ballot -- and also went on to lose, to Dwight Eisenhower. The longest was the Democratic convention of 1924 that went on for over two weeks and took 103 ballots to nominate John Davis, who lost to Calvin Coolidge.
Country Music's Raye of Hope
About a decade before he began a Nashville recording career that has included five platinum albums, Collin Raye was singing at a nightclub in Beaverton, Ore., when he experienced something he would later recognize as an act of Providence. There was a couple that came every weekend to see him perform. "As I was working the crowd, I would sit down with them," Raye told me in an interview for CNSNews.com. "I realized they would have a glass of wine and a beer. But they never really partied. They just came because they liked my singing and they liked our band."
Politics of Personal Destruction II
In 2007 when she was running for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton told a fundraising event in Carson City, Nev., "I sure don't want Democrats, or the supporters of Democrats, to be engaging in the politics of personal destruction. I think we should stay focused on what we're going to do for America." Clinton's husband, the former president, used the phrase at the time of his impeachment proceedings for lying under oath about a sexual dalliance in the White House.
Why We Don't Have Better Presidential Candidates
The sagacious editorial page of the Wall Street Journal raised this question the other day of a too-little-noticed point concerning the long-running Herman Cain affair. The Journal addressed the much-discussed question of "why we don't have 'better candidates.'" Take a guess. "Because no normal person would risk it." On the nose! No "normal" person, for the privilege of leading the United States of America, would subject himself, I hereby suggest, to:
Optimistic or Pessimistic About America?
Commentary Magazine asked 41 Americans to respond to this question: "Are you optimistic or pessimistic about America's future?" The responses, including my own, appear in the current issue of Commentary. As we were limited to 500 words, I offer my response here, in edited and longer form. I am both optimistic and pessimistic regarding America's future. Here are my reasons for pessimism: First, the unique American values system -- what I call the American Trinity -- is under assault. These three values are declared on every American coin: Liberty, "E Pluribus Unum" and "In God We Trust."
Numbers Games
One of the things that has struck me, when I have gone on luxury cruise ships, is that most of the passengers look like they are older than the captain -- and luxury cruise ships don't have juveniles as captains. The reason for the elderly clientele is fairly simple: Most people don't reach the point when they can afford to travel on luxury cruise ships until they have worked their way up the income ladder over a long period of years.
Leftist Exploitation of Race Issue
It's almost 2012, and we have a black president, yet the white ghost of racial tensions still haunts our national politics. Will it ever end? Far too many liberals continue to paint conservatives as racists based on their ideological leanings and party affiliation. Some believe it; others know better but milk it for their political gain. Still others selfishly and recklessly cling to this view to make themselves feel morally superior, wholly indifferent to their own immorality in impugning a category of people in the same way racists categorically impugn entire races of people and wholly indifferent to the facts.
Medallion Madness
Here's one for the Guinness World Records people: Two New York City taxi medallions were sold last month for $1 million apiece. That's the highest price ever paid for the right to operate a car as a taxicab in The City That Never Sleeps. It's also an expensive lesson in the harm caused to consumers and would-be entrepreneurs by overregulation and the strangling of competition. By law, every cab in New York has to have an official medallion -- the numbered metal plate nailed to the hood -- but the number of medallions is fixed at 13,237. When the city first issued taxi medallions in the 1930s, they cost $10 each. But before long the demand for taxi ownership had outstripped the limited supply of medallions. Since City Hall wasn't issuing new ones, the only way to get a medallion was to buy one from an existing owner. Over time the value of those metal tags went through the stratosphere.