Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
The Truth Will Out
No matter what the record shows, there will always be the nay-sayers who have no trouble ignoring facts as obvious as the noses on their faces. Sunday was the 10th anniversary of the horror we call simply by the numerals that mark its point in time. Anyone who watched the minute-by-minute film record of the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center buildings broadcast by cable networks such as Fox, MSNBC and CNN -- and had any doubts about what happened and who made it happen -- has a serious gap in their ability to process information clearly presented.
Back to the Future: Part II
Those who are truly optimistic hope that Democrats and Republicans will both put aside their partisanship and do what is best for the country. Almost nobody seems to be hoping that the government will leave the economy alone to recover on its own. Indeed, almost nobody seems at all interested in looking at the hard facts about what happens when the government leaves the economy alone, compared to what happens when politicians intervene.
Memo to GOP: Social Security Demagoguery Is the Province of Liberals
It is very disheartening to see Republican presidential primary candidates racing to out-demagogue one another in denouncing Texas Gov. Rick Perry's accurate description of Social Security as a Ponzi scheme. It used to be that Republicans at least waited until the general election campaign to pander to liberals. I admire Perry both for telling it like it is and for having the guts to stand by his statement when under fire. That shows character.
Raison Debt
You might suppose that a political book, appearing less than six months after Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels indicated that he would not run for president, must have been written as a campaign prop. But that's not Daniels' style. "Keeping the Republic" is a deadly serious, though frequently witty, effort to lay before the American people the perilous state of the nation. Be prepared -- the first few pages of Chapter 2 can turn your blood to ice. America's decline, Daniels writes, may not be a gradual slide, but instead a sudden plunge into chaos. Sketching what a financial collapse could look like if we fail to control our debt, he writes, "Monday, 6 a.m.-- a Chinese official issues a statement saying that China will no longer be buying Treasury securities because 'we see no evidence that the U.S. will take the steps necessary to grow its economy or limit its spending so it can afford to repay' . . . Monday 9:30 a.m. -- the dollar drops 10 percent . . . New York stock market opens in free fall . . . Monday afternoon -- . . . other nations' central banks begin to sell off U.S. Treasuries. . ."
Back to the Future?
Those who are impressed by words seem to think that President Barack Obama made a great speech to Congress last week. But, when you look beyond the rhetoric, what did he say that was fundamentally different from what he has been saying and doing all along? Are we to continue doing the same kinds of things that have failed again and again, just because Obama delivers clever words with style and energy?
Gov. Jerry Brown and 3 Telling Bills
California Gov. Jerry Brown scored a victory for common sense last week when he vetoed a bill that would have imposed criminal penalties on minors -- or their parents -- who ski or snowboard without a helmet. "While I appreciate the value of wearing a ski helmet, I am concerned about the continuing and seemingly inexorable transfer of authority from parents to the state," Brown explained. "Not every human problem deserves a law." That veto endeared Brown to conservatives who have grown wary of the Democratic Legislature's nanny-state ways. It also highlighted how unpredictable Brown can be.
Gov. Perry and the Ponzi Scheme
So much for the spirit of we're-all-in-it-together, which prevailed, more or less, at the 9/11 commemorations. The next day, President Barack Obama showed up in the White House Rose Garden to propose financing his presidential comeback by picking the pockets of his opponents. The president said some $400 billion to finance the tax cuts he wants should come from limiting itemized deductions enjoyed by the filthy rich, as he seems to define them: families earning more than $250,000 a year, not to mention those perennial favorites in the Obama lexicon, oil companies, hedge funds and owners of corporate jets.
President Obama's Folly
Nearly every time President Obama delivers a speech about the economy or jobs, something bad happens. His speech to Congress last Thursday night is the latest example. The next day, the Dow Jones Industrial Averages plunged 303 points, a decline replicated in other indexes in the U.S. and overseas. This president is such a prisoner of his leftist ideology he seems incapable of pulling a Clinton and triangulating to get something done that motivates the private sector to hire workers and spur economic growth.
Lessons from 9/11? What Lessons?
In attempting to understand 9/11, the first question asked by the world's elites -- as exemplified by leading media and academics -- was, "What did America do to provoke such hatred?" Ten years later, the same people are still asking the same question. And it is as morally repulsive now as it was then. It was always on par with "What did the Jews do to antagonize the Germans?" or "What did blacks do to enrage lynch mobs?" As long as people keep asking what America did to incite such hate, nothing will have been learned from 9/11.
Hillary: Counting Jews in Jerusalem
The normally sensible Forbes Magazine recently named Hillary Clinton the Second Most Powerful Woman in the World. That's absurd. She's clearly not even the second most powerful woman in the Obama administration. For influence on this president, she clearly walks behind Michele Obama, Valerie Jarrett, and Kathleen Sebelius. Mrs. Clinton has even been derided in liberal blogs as Barack Obama's "Saudi wife." Feminist editor Tina Brown went so far as to say she's been put in a "foreign policy burka." We don't have to follow the Washington Post's annual In/Out listings. Fashions come and go in the "Style Section," even burkas.
9/11, Ten Years Later
So are we safer now, a decade after the terrorist strike that killed more than 3,000 Americans on 9/11? Yes, thanks to everyone who works -- day in and day out -- to keep us safe and secure.But there's considerable room for improvement. Law-enforcement officials have become much better at sharing information and linking databases. They've thwarted at least 40 post-9/11 attacks, thanks largely to security changes made in the wake of that devastating day. That's the good news.
Obama Buys the Drinks That Other Guys Pay for
What is there to say about Barack Obama's speech to Congress Thursday night and the so-called American Jobs Act he said Congress must pass? Several thoughts occur, all starting with P.
After 10 years, It's Still a Fight for Freedom
America's war on terror was launched when the heroes of United Flight 93 rushed the hijackers over Shanksville, Pa., aborting what would have been Al Qaeda's fourth 9/11 attack. In the decade that began that terrible day, the goal of disrupting and crushing the Islamist terror network has been pursued with remarkable versatility: The United States has fought this conflict with military, diplomatic, and financial weapons; it has relied on aggressive intelligence-gathering and sensitive counterinsurgency; it has reshaped airline security and rewritten civil-liberties law. Jihadists have been killed with Predator drones abroad, detained as enemy combatants at Guantanamo, and thwarted in undercover stings at home. Yet in the long run it may turn out that more significant than any of these was the war of ideas that followed 9/11.
Musings About Muslims and Obama's Body Parts
It's hard not to appreciate the irony of the man who promised that with his election, the rise of the oceans would begin to slow and the planet would begin to heal having to cut his vacation short because of Hurricane Irene. Apparently Mother Nature doesn't like this guy any more than I do. It occurred to me that between them, George Bush and Barack Obama have spent most of the past decade telling us what a great religion Islam is. They've gone at it like a pair of competing televangelists. All it took was for Muslims to top off 20 years of taking Americans hostage, bombing our embassies, leveling our Marine barracks, blowing up our ships, and killing thousands of us in New York, Iraq and Afghanistan, to make Islam the religion du jour. What makes this especially odd is that in the prior 200 years of our history, no president felt even slightly inclined to pay these folks a single tribute, no matter how insincere.
Salve for Our Wounds
The most interesting question is not how America in 2011 is unlike America in 2001, but how it is unlike it was in 1951. The intensity of today's focus on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 testifies to more than the multiplication of media ravenous for content, and to more than today's unhistorical and self-dramatizing tendency to think that eruptions of evil are violations of a natural entitlement to happiness. It also represents the search for refuge from a decade defined by unsatisfactory responses to 9/11.
Andrew Sullivan's Atlantic Error
In liberals' frenzy to elect Barack Obama in 2008, no one was quite as far out to sea as Andrew Sullivan, a respected columnist for the Atlantic website. He served up his "Daily Dish" by the plateful. Here's perhaps the hottest example of his rhetoric -- quoted endlessly around the blogosphere--back then: "A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man -- Barack Hussein Obama -- is the new face of America. In one simple image, America's soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama's face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can."
10 Years After 9/11
Anniversaries -- even those of such tragic events as 12/7/41 and 9/11/01 -- are occasions which cause us to reflect and take stock. What the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers should teach us is to be forever on the alert. Not since the days of the Redcoats have our nation's enemies behaved like gentlemen, and it is high time that we learned that enemies often strike without warning. We should expect them to gouge our eyes and knee our groin, and if we're not prepared to do likewise, we shall remain at the mercy of the unmerciful. On a Sunday in 1941, America discovered that Japan was our mortal enemy, and we spent the better part of the next four years teaching them a well-deserved lesson. On the other hand, in the wake of 9/11, our leaders told us time and again that Islam was a peaceful religion. Moreover, the media tried to convince us that the Palestinians were the good guys in the conflict with Israel, that a mosque at Ground Zero would serve as a monument to good fellowship, and that it was a swell idea to elect as our president a left-wing bigot named Barack Hussein Obama.
The GOP Field Expands -- and Narrows
It was only fitting that the Republican presidential hopefuls -- or at least eight of them out of a growing crowd -- would be invited to gather at the Reagan Library in the once Golden State, whose parlous economic condition now mirrors that of the country. It was an occasion for the candidates to have their picture taken with Nancy Reagan, who's still holding her own as a link with the GOP's glory days. Once again the country seems waiting, in the Gipper's words, for a new beginning, for morning to come to America.
From The Comedy Store
Caroline Kennedy did interviews about her book of Jackie Kennedy's taped conversations describing life with JFK. The book quotes everything her mother said about her father's White House infidelities. Bill Clinton just bought Chelsea two yachts and a car.
Tiny, Targeted and Temporary
Who would have really expected a 300-point stock market plunge on the day after President Obama's so-called jobs speech? Yes, worries over new fears of a Greek default ripped through the markets on Friday. As did fears of an al-Qaida bombing plot on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. But you can't help but think that at least some of the stock plunge is a signal of no economic confidence in Obama's plan. And for that matter, who really expected an unbelievably large $450 billion plan? That's way more than 50 percent of the original $800 stimulus package in 2009 -- which did not work.