Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Amanda Knox a Cautionary Tale
From now on, parents who plan to send their children abroad to study in a foreign nation should sit them down in front of the TV set and watch replays of the Amanda Knox saga. It has all the elements of a true-to-life lesson in the dangers of turning young men and women barely out of their teens into innocents abroad. Youngsters -- and many parents -- are clueless when it comes to the customs and laws in other countries that lack many of the safeguards which we Americans take for granted. They should study the Amanda Knox case. It is a clear warning that -- unlike here in the United State -- in many foreign countries the accused is automatically guilty until proven innocent.
Macaca Media: Squeezing Blood From Stone
The Washington Post's stoning of Texas GOP Gov. Rick Perry is journalistic malpractice. Instead of calling the newspaper to task, other national media outlets have joined in. And now, the Post is doubling down on slander. The Post dispatched reporters to the remote hunting grounds of a Perry-linked ranch -- "associated" with Perry through "his father, partners or his signature on a lease" -- because it once had a rock on it somewhere that had the word "Niggerhead" painted on it. The term is an embarrassing vestige of past racism not just in Texas but on geographical landmarks across the country.
Social Security Disaster
Politicians who are principled enough to point out the fraud of Social Security, referring to it as a lie and Ponzi scheme, are under siege. Acknowledgment of Social Security's problems is not the same as calling for the abandonment of its recipients. Instead, it's a call to take actions now, while there's time to avert a disaster. Let's look at it.
The Tea Party vs. The Establishment
The stars are aligned for Mitt Romney. In every Republican debate, he has been left relatively untouched by the moderators and by every candidate save Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. He continues to ride high in the national polling, holding steady at near one quarter of the likely Republican primary voters. The Republican Party bigwigs, including key funders on Wall Street, are throwing their support to him. There's only one problem: He'll lose the general election.
The 'Hunger' Hoax
Twenty years ago, hysteria swept through the media over "hunger in America." Dan Rather opened a CBS Evening News broadcast in 1991 declaring, "one in eight American children is going hungry tonight." Newsweek, the Associated Press and the Boston Globe repeated this statistic, and many others joined the media chorus, with or without that unsubstantiated statistic.
Government Makes Us Poor
Here's my fantasy: Libertarians are elected to the presidency and to majorities in Congress. What would happen next? Well, if libertarians were "in charge," you'd have more freedom and prosperity. Freedom frightens some people. They say if no one is in charge there would be chaos. That is intuitive, but think about a skating rink. Before rinks were invented, if you proposed an amusement in which people strap blades to their feet and skate around on ice at whatever speeds they wish, you'd have been called crazy. There's got to be speed limits, stoplights, turn signals. But we know that people navigate rinks safely on their own. They create their own order, with only minimal rules.
Runaway Missiles
After FBI agents took custody of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian charged with trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight on Dec. 25, 2009, they told him he had the right to remain silent. For Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who allegedly helped plan Abdulmutallab's mission, that right was more like an obligation, enforced by Hellfire missiles fired at his car from remotely controlled CIA aircraft in northern Yemen last week. President Obama's policy regarding people linked to terrorism is clear: They are to be treated like criminal defendants with constitutional rights, except when they are treated like enemy soldiers in the heat of battle, subject to summary execution from a distance. Although this flexibility has obvious advantages in waging the never-ending war on terrorism, it threatens to transform the elected executive of a republic into a dictator with the power of life and death over his subjects.
Ambushing Terror: Surprise, the Predator and the ACLU
The appalling loss of life and physical destruction of al-Qaida's 9-11 suicide air strikes stunned the United States. The shock of surprise -- the unexpected attack "out of nowhere" on the presumed safe havens of American cities -- psychologically magnified the shock. Al-Qaida's commanders sent the message that in their war on America and its allies, they possessed a key advantage: surprise. Al-Qaida's smart weapons -- violent zealots willing to die in order to kill thousands -- would penetrate our cities and towns and, at the moment of their choosing, a moment of surprise, turn them into killing fields. America would not be able to stop these unpredictable "asymmetric" attacks. Al-Qaida's commanders, however, would be able to disappear in the global haystack. Difficult terrain (e.g., the Himalayas), anarchic hells (e.g., Somalia) or friendly governments riddled with corrupt officials would provide safe havens.
Good GOP Flip-Flops
William F. Buckley, Jr., founding father of the modern conservative movement, famously asserted his doctrine of voting for the most conservative candidate who is electable. Let me presume to add an analytic codicil: The GOP and the conservative movement have tended to support the most conservative policies only when they are understood to be conservative and are plausibly supportable by the conservative half of the electorate.
Petty, Radical Obama Blasts GOP for Smallness and Extremism
It's clear that Obama's re-election strategy is to demonize conservatives and his Republican opponents as extremists, "small," intolerant and morally deficient. That's a safer course, I suppose, than running on his miserable record. Playing to his gay and lesbian audience, Obama took out his broad brush and smeared all the GOP presidential candidates in a speech at the Human Rights Campaign's annual dinner, saying the Republican contenders are "small" for "being silent when an American soldier is booed."
When Science Isn't
Now the most embarrassing piece of evidence yet has made its appearance at that super-sophisticated physics lab over in Switzerland where they put atomic particles through their very fast paces. This time CERN's researchers have found that nearly half of the global warming observed of late isn't traceable to man's activities after all but to sunspots, specifically the fluctuations in solar cosmic rays that promote cloud formation. (I don't understand it, either, but I'll take the textbooks' word for it.)
Messiah Complex: The Sequel?
Listening to some establishment Republicans grousing about the field of GOP presidential candidates should serve as a warning. Republicans, if they are not careful, are in danger of catching the same virus that infected Democrats in 2008. That would be a messiah complex, the belief that one man (or woman) can deliver us from our collective economic, social and foreign policy "sins" and bring redemption to a nation from the consequences of too many wrong-headed choices.
San Francisco Supes Take Unnecessary Flier on Bird Safety
Does San Francisco have a serious problem with birds flying into tall buildings? Was there a good reason the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a "bird-safe" building ordinance last month? I asked Supervisors David Chiu and John Avalos on Saturday why they supported the measure, at a mayoral candidates debate hosted by the West of Twin Peaks Central Council. Their answers were instructive. Chiu seemed put out that he had been asked such a trivial question. The board has spent about "40 seconds" on the measure, he assured me, less time than during Saturday's debate. Avalos answered that he knows the city has a problem; he has seen lots of dead birds on top of City Hall. (Insert your own joke here.)
HPV Vaccines: Should Children Have the Final Say?
Democratic Governor Jerry Brown has a ticking time bomb on his desk: he must sign a recently passed bill (AB 499) by October 9th in order for it to become law. His signature, however, would set an explosive precedent: the bill allows children (even 12 year olds) to give valid consent -- without their parent's knowledge or permission -- to receive vaccines that aim to prevent sexually transmitted diseases.
Let the [Drone] Thing be Pressed
The killing of Anwar al-Awlaki last week has sparked spirited discussions in the prestige press and on the Web. Awlaki was an American-born Muslim cleric who once headed a mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. But he traveled to Yemen, where he became a leader of Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula. He urged fellow jihadists to take up arms and to engage in terror attacks on the United States, the country of his birth and citizenship. For most of the nation's history, such acts would be recognized, quite simply, as acts of treason. And in calling not just for war against America, but for terror acts outside all the recognized laws of warfare, Awlaki would have been branded Hostis humani generis -- an enemy of all mankind. Such was the status of pirates and slave traders in the nineteenth century.
Thirteen Obstacles to Becoming a Better Person
This week, for the fourth consecutive year, I am conducting Jewish High Holiday services. Though not a rabbi, I spent 12 years studying in yeshivas and 35 years teaching and writing on Judaism. The following is a summary of the Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) sermon that I gave this past Wednesday night. The purpose of the High Holidays (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) is moral introspection: What kind of person am I, and what kind of person can I become? So, every year, Jews meditate on the issue of becoming a better person.
There Go the Media -- Again
"I, Rick Perry, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and I further will avoid physical proximity to racially charged names susceptible of scandalizing the media on pain of public disembowelment." Would that speech do the job, should Gov. Perry against lengthening odds, become President Perry? Not a chance. The trivialization of American politics proceeds apace, with the enthusiastic collaboration of the media -- my own profession, one way or another, for nearly half a century.
Obama: Liberal Demagogue
President Obama is excessively fond of defining "who we are as a nation," which is interesting coming from someone whose campaign was based on bringing sweeping and profound changes to the country. He has resorted to this formulation when urging government-controlled, universal health care. He has used it to explain his (reasonable) decision not to release photos of the dead bin Laden. He used it when supposedly rebutting the argument that we should "tear apart families" by deporting 12 million illegal aliens (a straw man since no leading American has proposed such a thing). He has invoked "who we are as a nation" to justify vast new stimulus spending and higher taxes on the rich. It's pretty well guaranteed that when this president invokes WWAAAN he has once again mounted his high horse, chin tilted up.
'Stop Whining'?
If there was ever any doubt that the Democrats take the black vote for granted, that doubt should have been put to rest when Barack Obama told the Congressional Black Caucus, "Stop whining!" Have you ever before heard either a Democratic or a Republican leader tell his party's strongest supporters, "Stop whining"? Blacks have a lot to complain about, not just about this Democratic administration but about many other Democratic administrations, national and local, over the years.
Is Herman Cain a Contender?
Is Herman Cain a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination? It's a question no one in the pundit world was asking until the past week. Cain has never held public office. When he ran for the Senate in Georgia in 2004, he lost the primary by a 52 percent to 26 percent margin. He has zero experience in foreign or defense policy, where presidents have the most leeway to set policy. When questioned about the Middle East earlier this year, he clearly had no idea what the "right of return" is.