Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Did Rick Perry Blow It on Social Security?
There is a brand of Republican who looks at President Obama's vulnerability on the economy and says "go for it." They argue that the overriding issue of the campaign should be jobs -- and that everything else should be a distant second. There is another kind of Republican who sees the 2012 election as a tipping point for the nation -- a do or die moment when we will either pull back from the precipice of debt and national decline or fall off the edge. This second brand of Republican is hoping that a candidate will emerge who can lay before the American people the nature of the challenge we face in a direct and forthright way. If a campaign is run and won on the need to reform our obese government, the new president will have a mandate to take the necessary steps, once in office.
Myth and Reality After 9/11
Why did radical Islamic terrorists kill almost 3,000 Americans a decade ago? Few still believe the old myth that prior U.S. foreign policy or support for Israel logically earned us Osama bin Laden's wrath. After all, the U.S. throughout the 1990s had saved Islamic peoples from Bosnia and Kosovo to Somalia and Kuwait. Russia and China, in contrast, had oppressed or killed tens of thousands of their own Muslims without much fear of provoking al Qaeda.
Reasons to Remember 9-11
The show business publication "Variety" reports "40-plus programs expected to commemorate 10th anniversary of (9-11) attacks." And those are just the specials. They don't include reports within news programs, or overseas TV memorials, which began last month. How we love our anniversaries. Whether it's "the Maine," "Pearl Harbor" or "9-11" we choose to remember, the question is "Why?" Why remember? To honor the dead? Yes, that is a good reason. How about to remember loved ones and survivors? That, too, is commendable.
Amanda Knox: The New Mumia!
Despite liberals' desperate need for Europeans to like them, the American media have enraged the entire nation of Italy with their bald-faced lies about a heinous murder in Perugia committed by a fresh-faced American girl, Amanda Knox. The facts aren't elusive: In December 2009, the Italian court released a 400-plus page report detailing the mountains of evidence that led the judges and jury to conclude that Knox, along with her Italian beau, Raffaele Sollecito, and a petty thief of her acquaintance, Rudy Guede, had murdered Knox's English roommate, Meredith Kercher, on the evening of Nov. 1, 2007.
A Ruling's Rehabilitation
WASHINGTON -- Liberal certitudes continue to dissolve, the most recent solvent being a robust new defense of a 1905 Supreme Court decision that liberals have long reviled -- and misrepresented. To understand why the court correctly decided Lochner v. New York and why this is relevant to current arguments, read David E. Bernstein's "Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights against Progressive Reform." Since the New Deal, courts have stopped defending liberty of contract and other unenumerated rights grounded in America's natural rights tradition. These are referred to by the Ninth Amendment, which explicitly protects unenumerated rights "retained by the people," and by the "privileges or immunities" and "liberty" cited in the 14th Amendment. Progressivism, Bernstein argues, is hostile to America's premise that individuals possess rights that pre-exist government and are not fully enumerated in the Constitution. This doctrine stands athwart liberalism's aspiration to erase constitutional limits on government's regulatory powers.
What Is to Become of Dominique Strauss-Kahn?
WASHINGTON -- Readers of this column will remember that when Dominique Strauss-Kahn was taken off an Air France flight in May, just as it was about to vamoose for Paris, I was suspicious. The story and circumstances of his adventure with the chambermaid, Nafissatou Diallo, in the Sofitel Hotel kept changing. In the meantime, he was accorded the indignity of the perp walk. He was sent to Rickers Island, a veritable hellhole. He got up on the morning of May 14 as one of the world's most distinguished public servants. He was head of the International Monetary Fund, IMF, and apparently about to become the Socialist Party's frontrunner for the president of France. He retired that evening a convicted felon in the eyes of almost anyone familiar with his story, and I suspect slept badly.
IOUs Can't Save Social Security
My mother's mother revered Franklin Roosevelt. She voted for him four times, and firmly defended him decades later, when I tried to convince her that FDR was not the haloed saint she imagined. "It's because of Roosevelt that I'm getting $800 in Social Security every month," she'd tell me. Actually, I'd reply, it was because of people like me -- workers paying into the system now, at tax rates considerably steeper than hers had ever been -- that retirees like her were receiving those monthly checks.
GOP Needs a Front-runner Stronger Than Candidate X
The race for the Republican presidential nomination finally seems to be gelling. On Wednesday night, candidates will debate at the Reagan Library in California -- the first of five scheduled debates over the next five weeks. They are competing for a nomination that increasingly seems worth having. In July and August, President Obama's job approval has been dropping like a stone. On July 4, the realclearpolitics.com average of recent polls showed it narrowly positive, 47 to 46 percent. On Tuesday, it was negative, 43 to 51 percent.
Goofballs to the Left of Me, Nut Jobs to the Right
I'm not a religious person, but I'm happy to acknowledge that those who have boundless faith are often the salt of the earth. So if they choose to interpret the six days of Creation as different from the 24-hour variety the rest of us are familiar with, I can live with it. I don't even have a problem with accepting that God managed evolution, fine-tuning what He had created in the first place.
Rep. Allen West Threatens to Resign From Congressional Black Caucus
The tea party, according to Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, would "love to see us as second-class citizens" ... and "some of them in Congress right now with this tea party movement would love to see you and me ... hanging on a tree." Of the tea party's influence on Congress, Carson called it an "effort that we're seeing of Jim Crow." Another CBC member, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., said, "The tea party can go straight to hell." This was too much for Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., the only Republican member of the CBC. Another black Republican, Tim Scott, R-S.C., pointedly declined to even join the CBC. Given the hard-left views of the CBC, one wonders why West joined in the first place. West, presumably, thought he might change the CBC's "blame whitey" approach to the problems and concerns of black Americans.
Banned Books Week Is Just Hype
School is starting up again, and later this month we will celebrate another national tradition: Banned Books Week, which since 1982 takes place every year during the last week of September. It's an exciting time. There are going to be special readings of "banned books" not merely in bookstores (where the banned books will, tellingly, be for sale) but online as well. This year, explains BannedBooksWeek.org, "readers will be able to proclaim the virtues of their favorite banned books by posting videos of themselves reading excerpts to a dedicated YouTube channel." It's all so very brave and subversive!
President Obama's Comity Central
They appeal to comity, defined as a friendly social atmosphere, social harmony. That was undoubtedly Barack Obama's greatest attribute as a candidate. He promised a new politics, a new cordiality. No more red state/blue divisions. He touted his Senate friendship with Oklahoma's Tom Coburn. It was genuine. On the campaign trail in 2008, Sen. Obama offered his sitting down with Tom Coburn as an example of how he could reach out to opponents and bring disparate groups together. President Obama last February spoke eloquently last winter when a madman shot Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and killed several others in Tuscon. Then, he pleaded again for a more civil dialogue. Instantly, "Choose Civility" sprouted on a million bumper stickers.
See Jake Run
Finally the candy-pants White House press corps has come to its senses. Or at least a few members of that pro-Obama, softball-tossing group of so-called journalists have. Chief among them, and from traditional media, is ABC's Jake Tapper. I was amazed in early August when Tapper challenged the boyish-looking and smug presidential press secretary Jay Carney (who, ironically, is married to one of Tapper's fellow correspondents at ABC). Tapper up and asked what if any plans the president had to create jobs in America. It was part of a rare, unique barrage of questions toward Carney, and he was unable to handle it.
There's No Such Thing as 'Crony Capitalism'
This week, Sarah Palin gave a terrific speech in Indianola, Iowa. In it, she tore into the Washington political class. Men and women in government get wealthy by "bail(ing) out their friends on Wall Street and their corporate cronies...reward(ing) campaign contributors...buy(ing) votes via earmarks...And there is a name for this: It's called corporate crony capitalism...It's the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest -- to the little guys." This "crony capitalism," Palin said, is "not the capitalism of free men and free markets." It is the "crony capitalism that destroyed Europe's economies."
The Watchdog That Didn't Bark
Writing in The Washington Post last March, former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey said requiring the Justice Department's inspector general to evaluate the benefits of national security letters, which intelligence agencies use to demand private records, would "duplicate oversight already conducted by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board." One crucial flaw in this argument: There is no Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. As 9/11 commission co-chairmen Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton noted last week, the board has been "dormant" since 2008 because neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama has managed to appoint its five members. This failure is vivid testimony to the continuing disregard for civil liberties and the rule of law under a president who promised to revive respect for both.
Two Different Worlds: Part II
A few weeks ago, I had what seemed to me a small medical problem, so I phoned my primary physician. However, after we discussed the problem, he directed me to a specialist. After the specialist examined me, he directed me to a different specialist elsewhere. When I was examined and tested in the second specialist's office, he immediately phoned a hospital, asking to have an operating room available in an hour.
How Obama Protects the Teamsters
At a Labor Day rally in Detroit on Monday before Obama spoke, Hoffa stoked anti-tea party hostility by urging his minions to "take these son of a b*tches out." (Botched grammar added that extra boost of street-gang authenticity to the labor lawyer's threat.) The same civility police on the left who decry any references to crosshairs as incitements to violence are now mute about Hoffa's brass-knuckle rhetoric. The Chicagoans in the White House refuse to comment. Those calling on Obama to condemn Hoffa's uncivil tone are deluding themselves. The 1.4 million-member Teamsters lifted Obama to power with a coveted endorsement and bottomless campaign coffers funded with coerced member dues. Over the past two decades, the union has donated nearly $25 million to Democrats (compared to $1.8 million for Republicans).
Are Scientists Becoming the New Priests?
"I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy," GOP presidential hopeful and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman recently tweeted. You've got to hand it to Huntsman; he sure knows how to endear himself to folks who won't vote in the Republican primary. Huntsman has said that he fears that the GOP will be perceived as the "anti-science party." That is, he gave a nod to Democrats' conceit that theirs is the party of science. Why? Because the Dems don't tolerate questions about evolution or global warming.
Those Who Adore Government and Those With Better Sense
An old joke would have it that there are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who preface broad statements with "There are two kinds of people in the world" -- and the kind who don't. The fact, nonetheless, is that for economic purposes there really are two kinds of people: the kind who think government has most, if not the all, the answers and, on the other hand, the kind who know better. You sense this, hardly for the first time, in the national palaver about jobs and economic recovery.
Individual Mandate? Romneycare Insured Only Another 5 Percent
When Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts in April 2006, he signed a health care reform bill that required all adults in that state to purchase health insurance by July 1 of the following year. Under Romneycare, people making up to 300 percent of the poverty level get a subsidy -- i.e., wealth redistributed from others -- to help them pay for their state-government-required insurance plan.