Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Introducing Tom Dewey to Barack Obama
By this time, we're all aware that union thugs, including nurses and school teachers, not only went AWOL from their jobs, but caused over seven million dollars in damage to Wisconsin's state capitol when they stormed Madison and tried to bully Governor Walker and the state legislators into capitulating to their outlandish demands. What you may not have heard about is that hundreds of goons from the Longshoreman's Union descended on the Port of Longview (Washington), broke down gates, smashed windows, overpowered security guards, damaged railroad cars, cut brake lines and dumped carloads of grain, in a jurisdictional dispute with a different union.
Obama Becomes the Fall Guy
Suddenly, liberal op-ed writers are trashing -- even lampooning -- Barack Obama as a one-term president ("one and done"). Centrist Democrats up for re-election in 2012 openly worry about inviting a kindred president into their districts, lest the supposed new pariah lose them votes. Left-wing think tanks, environmentalists and academics vent their anger against Obama for supposedly being too soft on Republicans, and too ready to compromise with right-wingers. But what really caused the left-wing falling-out, less than three years after the hope-and-change crush on Barack Obama?
Obama Tainted by Loan Guarantees to Solar Firms
One factor favoring President Obama's re-election, according to a recent article by political scientist Alan Lichtman, is the absence of scandal in his administration. Lichtman may have spoken too soon. The reason can be capsulized in a single word: Solyndra. That's the name of a company that manufactured solar panels in Fremont, Calif. (which voted 71 percent for Obama in 2008).
So a Comatose Guy Walks Into a Bar ...
Liberals are on their high horses about a single audience member at CNN's Republican debate whom they believe wanted a hypothetical man without health insurance in a hypothetical coma to die -- hypothetically. (Democrats want people in comas to die only when they are not hypothetical but real, like Terri Schiavo.) I concur with the audience member who shouted "Yes!" This has nothing to do with any actual people in comas -- the people Democrats want to kill -- it's just a big "screw you" to the moderator.
Mission Accomplished
WASHINGTON -- We are preparing to vamoose Camp Victory just outside of Baghdad. There were once 505 bases for American troops sprinkled around Iraq at the height of our involvement, from whence an American army went out to pacify the bloodthirsty hordes. Now we are down to some 40 bases, and shortly, there will be none at all. Perhaps one or two headquarters will remain for a skeleton force of Americans training Iraqi police or military.
Pundits Push Myth of Tea Party-Republican Rivalry
Let's get this straight once and for all: The vast -- and I mean vast -- majority of those who identify themselves as Republican voters, or as independents who likely will vote in Republican primaries in 2012, has no problems with the tenets and beliefs of the tea party movement. It's a laugh-out-loud moment when national political pundits continue to have weighty discussions about a "battle between the GOP establishment and the tea party." Make no mistake: Such discussion is designed to create that very division. Because it doesn't exist right now.
San Francisco -- the Naked City
There is a line between being tolerant and having no standards whatsoever, and that's a line that San Francisco passed a long time ago. Public nudity has become the costume de rigueur in certain corners of the Special City. Twice in the past year, I've seen groups of nude adults walking or biking around the Embarcadero -- to the delight of some tourists and the disgust of others. "Clothing-optional" could be the city's new motto, along with "age-inappropriate."
All in the (Federal) Family
WASHINGTON -- In societies governed by persuasion, politics is mostly talk, so liberals' impoverishment of their vocabulary matters. Having damaged liberalism's reputation, they call themselves progressives. Having made the federal government's pretensions absurd, they have resurrected the supposed synonym "federal family." Having made federal spending suspect, they advocate "investments" -- for "job creation," a euphemism for stimulus, another word they have made toxic. Barack Obama, a pitilessly rhetorical president, continues to grab the nation by its lapels, demanding its attention, and is paying the price: The nation is no longer listening. This matters because ominous portents are multiplying.
Will Gore Get Sunstroke?
It's been a rough season for Nobel Peace Prize winners. Jimmy Carter is campaigning for the UN to seat Palestine as a full voting member. The former president and 2002 Peace Prize winner has yet to explain why seating another Terroristan in the UN is a good idea. Then, there's President Obama. He copped the prize of prizes in 2009. He got his prize for his first 42 days of on-the-job training in healing the planet and causing the seas to cease to rise. Nice work, Mr. President.
Authors of Social Security Believed It Was Unconstitutional
Mitt Romney may believe Social Security is constitutional, but he would have a hard time convincing some of the people who pushed the Social Security Act into law. As I wrote in my book, "Control Freaks," some of the main players involved in creating Social Security believed it was unconstitutional -- and for good reason. Yet, for them, not unlike many in today's Washington, the ultimate questions were not: Is this good for the long-term future of the country, and does Congress have authority to do it? They were: Will this serve our immediate political interests, and can we get away with it?
Debate Jars Perry Out of Sweet Spot
Mitt Romney and Rick Perry are both exactly where they want to be. Until Monday night's CNN/Tea Party debate, it looked like the Texas governor was in the sweet spot (or at least that's how it seemed to me). In a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released just before Monday's debate, not only was Perry leading Romney by a healthy margin (30 percent to 18 percent), he was also considered more electable (42 percent to 26 percent). When three-quarters of GOP voters consider electability their top concern, that's a big deal. But again, that was before the debate in Tampa.
Brian Williams, Shameless Partisan
"NBC Nightly News" is the highest-rated daily news show in the morning or evening. In mid-August, the show had been ranked No. 1 for 100 straight weeks, pulling an average of 7.7 million viewers. This makes Brian Williams the king of the TV-news hill. To be sure, it's obviously a smaller hill than the Walter Cronkite era, but in political terms, Williams, like Cronkite, is E.F. Hutton. His newscast can set the tone across the rest of the "news" media. But all that royalty evaporates in the presence of President Barack Obama. The contrast between Williams roaring like a lion against Obama's Republican challengers at the Reagan Library on Sept. 7, and then bowing gently like a lamb at the White House two days later was jaw dropping.
Can You Become Rich in America?
America stands on the brink of economic annihilation. The situation has become that serious. Our president wants to spend an additional $447 billion on random nonsense guaranteed to create zero new jobs; he wants to tax American citizens to pay for it. There are only 1.75 full-time private sector workers for each Social Security recipient, which means that Social Security is essentially insolvent. The unemployment rate remains 9.1 percent. The stock market is bouncing like a ping-pong ball because nobody knows what to expect -- and some experts estimate that it will drop another 20 percent in the long run before hitting rock bottom.
Obama's Big Green Boondoggles
With the scandalous bankruptcy of Solyndra (a shady California solar power company that received $535 million in stimulus funds and is now under investigation by the FBI) hanging overhead, President Obama wisely whitewashed any mention of "green jobs" out of his latest address to Congress. But buried in the details of his latest government jobs bill released this week -- Spawn of the Spendulus, Porky's II, Night of the Keynesian Dead -- are yet more big green boondoggles that will reward cronies, waste taxpayer dollars and make no dent in the jobless rate.
Is It Still Good to be the King?
Since the end of World War II, in both the United States and Western Europe, the best way to win a national election has been to be the incumbent political party. But that 3-generation-old predisposition of publics in Western democracies may be coming to an end. We may well be entering a political epoch in which the best way to win a national election in the West is not to be the party in power. For the last 65 years, the world economic order has been vastly favorable to the middle-class citizens and voters in the West with their incomes going steadily up or at least flattening at a predictable and comfortable material level. Moreover, the middle-class fears of economic hardship were virtually eliminated by the existence of the welfare safety net.
Mindstream
The mind wanders. You never know where it'll take you -- high peaks or deep depressions, home sweet home or a juke joint. There's no telling what will set the neurons firing, one flashback following another. Till you're driving down some kudzu-lined two-lane just this side of Kilgore, Tex., with a familiar figure from your past who is much more present than the present. It's said we're lost in thought at such moments, but maybe we're just being found. What took me back this time was the resignation of a university president here in Arkansas. It was precipitated by his having accepted a "gift" to the school that had just one little ol' condition attached -- that the donor's contract with the university be extended.
Do You Know What the Constitution Really Says?
When it comes to the U.S. Constitution, there's good news and bad news. (And then some really good news!) Good news first: As the political debates have sharpened over the past few years -- since the rise of the Tea Party movement -- more and more Americans are interested in the Constitution. While academics and some limited political circles have always discussed the Constitution and its meaning, it's striking to see so many ordinary Americans having these conversations -- and embracing the ideals of our Founding Fathers and the Constitution itself.
Egyptian Islamist Militants Following Khomeini's Script
The generals running Egypt's military services need to decide what kind of future they want for their country, and they must decide quickly. Initial reports of the mob attack on Israel's Cairo embassy suffer from the usual faults of reporting in chaotic conditions: incomplete information mixed with rumor and allegation. We do know Egyptian soldiers eventually rescued Israeli personnel trapped in the building. Israeli media claim that the Egyptian military ignored the Israeli pleas for assistance and only reacted after American diplomatic intervention. We will know more in the coming weeks.
You Say 'Ponzi Scheme,' I Say 'Fraud'
At the Republican presidential debate in Tampa, Fla., on Monday night, Mitt Romney said Rick Perry has needlessly "scared seniors" by calling Social Security "a Ponzi scheme." Romney, more sensitive to the anxieties of retirees, prefers to say "the American people have been effectively defrauded out of their Social Security" (as he puts it in his 2010 book "No Apology") because Congress has spent the program's surplus revenue instead of saving it to pay for future benefits -- the sort of crime for which bankers "would go to jail." See the difference? Neither do I. Both the former Massachusetts governor and the current Texas governor understand that Social Security is a transfer program disguised as a retirement plan and that its frequently mentioned "trust fund" does not actually exist. Their spat over how exactly to characterize that situation is illuminating not because it reveals substantive differences between the candidates but because it shows how often these simple truths are overlooked.
Ponzi! Ponzi! Ponzi!
Many people think that when the government takes payroll tax from their paychecks, it goes to something like a savings account. Seniors who collect Social Security think they're just getting back money that they put into their "account." Or they think it's like an insurance policy -- you win if you live long enough to get more than you paid in. Neither is true. Nothing is invested. The money taken from you was spent by government that year. Right away. There's no trust fund. The plan is unsustainable. Medicare is worse.