Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Get Rid of Government -- But First Make Me President!
I consider all Republican debates time-fillers until New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie jumps in, but Monday night's debate did crystallize for me why I dislike libertarians. (Except one, who is a friend of mine and not crazy.) They lure you in with talk of small government and then immediately start babbling about drug legalization or gay marriage. "Get the government out of it" is a good and constitutionally correct answer to many questions, but it's not a one-size-fits-all answer to all questions. It was a good answer, for example, when libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, was asked about government assistance to private enterprise and government involvement in the housing market.
The Pulchritudinous Michele Bachmann
WASHINGTON -- So there are two. Two pulchritudinous ones, that is. Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin are very beautiful, and the feminists tell us, "So what?" Well, they never say "So what?" when an attractive male, usually a Democrat, comes onstage. They call him charismatic. Bachmann and Palin are sufficiently charismatic for me, and both have raised families, Bachmann five children of her own and 23 foster children before entering public life. That is the proper sequence of events -- raise a family, enter public life. Now Bachmann has entered public life in a big way. She declared her candidacy for president Monday night at the Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire. Her answers were crisp and persuasive. She is strong on the social issues and the economic issues, also intelligence and security issues. Rather brilliantly, she suggested her expertise by drawing on her experience on congressional committees, namely intelligence and financial oversight committees. She is a tea partyer and a social conservative. In the campaign, both areas need addressing.
Leading the Way for Liberty
In the late 1980s, the fight against global communism entered a crucial phrase. President Ronald Reagan publicly pressed Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa gave Polish workers the courage to rise up against their communist masters. The Velvet Revolution sprang up in Czechoslovakia. That last event may be less famous, but it's no less important.
Feinstein vs. Coburn-Feinstein
On Tuesday, the Senate voted 40-59 against an amendment by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., to end the annual $6 billion (45-cents-per-gallon) tax subsidy for ethanol, as well as the 54-cents-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., was a co-author of the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit Repeal Act. As she explained, the subsidy bestows $15 million per day on large oil companies for "no good reason" and drives up food prices.
The 11th Commandment Is Alive and Well
They stood up there on the stage, shoulder to shoulder, and voiced their opinions freely, often disagreeing with each other over the various details, but they did it like the gentlemen and lady that they are; attacking positions on the issues without attacking each other. My dad, Ronald Reagan, would have been proud to see them strictly observe his 11th Commandment -- that Republicans shall not ever speak ill of their fellow Republicans. They did not go after each other but kept their eyes on the target, Barak Obama, the architect of this double-dip recession he has inflicted on the nation. He can try to blame George W. Bush, but this illegitimate baby is his and it's time he admits his fatherhood.
Don't Be Bullied by Moderators
The Republicans candidates for president did a respectable job presenting themselves at the New Hampshire debate on Monday. But there was one person on stage most viewers must have wished they could vote out -- the moderator. John King was bumptious, bullying, and, with his "this or that" game-show gimmick, stupefyingly trivial. Isn't it members of the press who usually complain that candidates dodge the really important issues? Yet here was a CNN honcho wasting valuable airtime with questions like "BlackBerry or iPhone?" while the candidates itched to return to the deficit, taxes, health care, and foreign policy.
Let the Candidates Debate
The recent CNN debate among the current candidates for the Republican nomination for president illustrated once more that political debates have become more about the moderators and reporters, and also about endless social media and technical gimmicks, than about the candidates themselves. Before I criticize, let me offer a defense of the moderator of the CNN debate, John King. He suffered some pretty bad press reviews for his repeated tries at interrupting the candidates in order to keep them within the 30 seconds in which they each were allowed to speak. King was a victim of the way the debate was set up. He was merely trying to keep a really bad format on track.
'Now What, President McCain?' (A 'What If' Editorial)
On Jan. 21, 2009, President John McCain took office. We strongly editorialized against McCain's election. After all, it was he who said, "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should." So not only did we warn you -- he warned you. We urged American voters to set aside their racist fears of electing to the presidency the son of a Kenyan sheepherder and a white woman from Kansas. We contrasted McCain's tired, discredited vision for the American economy with that of the young, dashing senator from Illinois by way of Hawaii, Barack Obama. We predicted that under McCain's stewardship our severely ailing economy would get worse. In fact, we underestimated how bad things would get -- and how quickly.
As Good as It Gets
DALLAS -- For a conservative Texan seeking national office, it could hardly get better than this: In a recent 48-hour span, Ted Cruz, a candidate for next year's Republican Senate nomination for the seat being vacated by Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison, was endorsed by the Club for Growth PAC, FreedomWorks PAC, talk radio host Mark Levin and Erick Erickson of RedState.com. And Cruz's most conservative potential rival for the nomination decided to seek a House seat instead. For conservatives seeking reinforcements for Washington's too-limited number of limited-government constitutionalists, it can hardly get better than this: Before earning a Harvard law degree magna cum laude (and helping found the Harvard Latino Law Review) and clerking for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Cruz's senior thesis at Princeton -- his thesis adviser was professor Robert George, one of contemporary conservatism's intellectual pinups -- was on the Constitution's Ninth and 10th Amendments. Then as now, Cruz argued that these amendments, properly construed, would buttress the principle that powers not enumerated are not possessed by the federal government.
Another One Jumps Ship
It comes as no surprise to learn that Barack Obama's top economic adviser is resigning. That's good news, because whatever it says about the current state of the American economy, it indicates that results still matter in what has been and should remain a results-oriented society. If a policy isn't working, it needs to go. So does the policymaker. And last week he went. The bad news is that Austan Goolsbee won't be taking his economic policies with him. The shorthand for those failing policies is demand-side economics.
Romney in Front as Feisty Bachmann Gains on Pawlenty
Barack Obama did not watch the Republican presidential candidates' debate in Manchester, N.H., on Monday night, we are told. He was busy addressing a campaign fundraising event in Miami. If Obama had Tivoed the debate, he would have seen a full crowd in the glitzy cavernous hall in St. Anselm's College. Something of a contrast to the empty seats at the top level of the gleaming Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami, even though tickets ran as low as $44. The standard rule in politics is to hire a hall that's not big enough for the crowd you expect. This was no problem for the Obama campaign in 2008, when it filled venues as large as Invesco Field in Denver and Grant Park in Chicago.
Our Reactionary President
Barack Obama is the most reactionary president in the recent history of the United States. Obama seems intent on turning back the clock to the good old days of the 1960s and 1970s, when rigid political orthodoxy, not an open mind, once guided government. Take the economy. The 1980s implosion of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union proved that state control of the means of production guaranteed poverty and worse. The current insolvent and fragmenting European Union, and the stagnant economics of the exploding Middle East, remind us that state socialism does not work.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Our Moral Dilemma
Most of our nation's problems are a direct result of our being immune, hostile or indifferent to several moral questions. Let's start out with the simple and move to the more complex. Or, stated another way, let's begin with questions that generate the least hostility, moving to those that generate the greatest. If a person benefits from a hamburger, a suit of clothing, an apartment or an education, who should be forced to pay for it? I believe the question has only one moral answer, namely the person who benefits from a good or service should be forced to pay for it, that's if we wish to distinguish ourselves from thieves who only care about enjoying something and who pays is irrelevant.
The Money Hole
America is falling deeper into debt. We're long past the point where drastic action is needed. We're near Greek levels of debt. What's going to happen? Maybe riots -- like we've seen in Greece? We need to make cuts now. Some governors have shown the way. You know about Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Rick Scott, John Kasich, etc. But you probably don't know about Luis Fortuno.
Taken in by 'Gay Girl'
I'd barely followed "A Gay Girl In Damascus" until last week, when Daily Beast columnist Peter Beinart posted something to Twitter: "This is really important -- this woman is a hero," with a link to a story about Amina Abdallah Arraf, a Syrian-American woman and the author of the blog "A Gay Girl In Damascus." According to the story, Amina had been seized by Syrian security forces for her dissident writing. Quickly, Amina's arrest became a new Internet cause. Even the U.S. State Department joined the effort.
Liberalism Lite with Ann Curry
When the folks at CBS shooed Katie Couric out the door, one could almost hear the harrumph with which Scott Pelley was reinstalling the Old Regime of Ed Murrow. Unlike Couric, Pelley wasn't debuting with celebrity interviews and updates on Tom Cruise's baby. CBS is going back to biased Dan Rather basics, treating Couric's tenure as little more than a palate cleanser. With Couric off the news grid in pursuit of cloning Oprah Winfrey's success in feel-your-pain afternoon chat, who will be the public face of soft and marshmallowy News Lite? Coincidentally, NBC's Meredith Vieira retired from "Today," and NBC was contractually obligated to promote longtime morning news reader Ann Curry.
It's Debate Time in America
We didn't used to have long seasons of debate by earnest people wanting to show us why they should be president. But then we didn't have Twitter, estimated debt in the trillions of dollars or -- to the degree we have it now -- angst over the survival of our liberties. This means we should get used to a lot of debates. And further, that these puppet shows with cute questions ("Leno or Letterman?") and choreographed camaraderie bear some direct relationship to liberty's prospects in the new century.
Capitol Hill's Other Dirty Laundry
The same congressional panel that launched a preliminary inquiry into Weiner-gate this week has been diddling around with several other Democratic ethics scandals for years. These aren't foxes guarding the henhouse. They're sloths guarding the foxhole. The House Ethics Committee is now reportedly probing into Twitter-holic Democratic New York Rep. Anthony Weiner's possible abuse of government resources while sending pervy messages and photos to young women across the country. The latest batch of Weiner's leaked social-media self-portraits -- more cheesecake than beefcake -- showed him in various states of undress at the congressional gym. From what other public buildings has Ick-arus tweeted his junk? And how much time on the public's dime did his government staff spend coaching Weiner girls to assist with damage control?
Obama's Misdirection Strategy
President Obama loves the smell of humus in the morning. Smells like ... victory. At least, that seems to be the message resonating from this suddenly imperialistic White House. According to the UK Guardian, "American and Afghan officials are locked in increasingly acrimonious secret talks about a long-term security agreement, which is likely to see U.S. troops, spies and air power based in the troubled country for decades." Meanwhile in Libya, President Obama continues to escalate the conflict, despite the fact that he will be in violation of the War Powers Resolution in five days. And in Israel, Obama is attempting to force our ally to come to the negotiation table with a Hamas-backed regime, and to pre-emptively give up all claims to anything beyond the pre-1967 lines, save a few choice areas.
The Price of Prohibition
Forty years ago this Friday, President Richard Nixon announced that "public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse." Declaring that "the problem has assumed the dimensions of a national emergency," he asked Congress for money to "wage a new, all-out offensive," a crusade he would later call a "global war on the drug menace." The war on drugs ended in May 2009, when President Obama's newly appointed drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, said he planned to stop calling it that. Or so Kerlikowske claims. "We certainly ended the drug war now almost two years ago," he told Seattle's PBS station last March, "in the first interview that I did." If you watch the exchange on YouTube, you can see he said this with a straight face.