Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, June 10, 2011
'Demonic' Is Angelic
Ann Coulter's chilling two-chapter recapitulation of the French Revolution is worth well more than the price of her new book, "Demonic," but that's just a bonus. Also priceless are Coulter's plethora of one-liner skewerings of the liberal mob, but I digress. What make this her best book are her incisive demonstration that the revolution was the mother of the many totalitarian "revolutions" it spawned in the name of the people, her dissection of the mob mentality that drove it, and her case against today's American liberals as exemplars of this mob mentality.
Killing the Housing Market
And you thought things couldn't get worse on the housing front. The U.S. housing market is in the worst shape since the Great Depression, and now the Obama administration's solution is to impose new rules that would banish 60 percent of current homebuyers from the market. The proposed Mortgage Qualification Rules are the result of legislation passed in the wake of the financial meltdown to ensure that mortgage-backed securities are based on high-quality loans. But the effect will be to disqualify millions of potential homebuyers.
Missing in Action
PATRIOTS POINT, S.C. -- Sixty-seven years ago this week, more than 155,000 U.S., British and Canadian troops assaulted German defenses in Normandy, France, during Operation Overlord. The USS Laffey, the most decorated World War II destroyer in existence -- normally an exhibit at this magnificent museum but now undergoing repairs -- was there on D-Day. During the first 24 hours of the invasion, nearly 2,000 U.S. soldiers, sailors and airmen were declared "MIA" -- missing in action. Many of the paratroopers, Army Rangers, "straight-leg infantrymen" and small-boat crewmen who were listed as "unaccounted for" in the first 48 hours of the invasion were eventually identified posthumously by graves registration personnel. Those captured by the Germans were re-listed as POWs -- prisoners of war. Some were never found and remain among the 74,000 World War II "open case files" at the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command. Today, in the 10th year of the global war on terror, it's the political elite in Washington and the so-called mainstream media who are MIA.
Viacom's Endless Violations
It's so ironic that in the very midst of the Anthony Weiner Twitter scandal, television's most shameless channel, MTV, is working overtime to make any notion of sexual restraint obsolete. This year's MTV Movie Awards aerobically established a new low. Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis are starring in the upcoming summer comedy "Friends with Benefits," yet another movie exploring the "dream life" of casual and very cold sex. As they introduced the award for Best Male Performance, Timberlake and Kunis grabbed each other's private parts on national TV.
Simply Madness
"Live simply so that others may simply live," Gandhi famously proclaimed. Some vegetarians see their diet as the truest expression of Gandhi's advice. But these days, the slogan has been embraced most passionately by those who wish to say goodbye to economic growth. That's not an exaggeration. The so-called "steady-state economy" movement holds that "We will have to get beyond growth as a society in order to realize a sustainable future."
David Mamet Turns Right
Conservatives have a new celebrity spokesman-writer-thinker-philosopher. David Mamet, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, movie director and sometime essayist, has come out of the closet. No longer, he declares, is he a "brain-dead liberal." Now he's a wide-awake conservative. Some time after arriving in Hollywood, of all places, and at age 60, he engaged in a conversation with his Republican rabbi (where did he find one?), who gave him the books of conservative writers, such as Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Milton Friedman and Paul Johnson.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Anthony Weiner, Hypocrite
As many as 300,000 children are taken from their homes every year from neglect and abuse. In light of that, it is a blight on America even to think or to know that a member of the Congress of the United States has been sending e-mail tweets to young women he doesn't even know -- taking advantage of them for his own apparent sexual pleasure. Anthony Weiner, you are a pervert and you should step down NOW!! Your blatant hypocrisy is never more evident than when your record as a self-proclaimed defender of youth is examined.
Covering One Weiner While the Whole Hotdog Stand Is on Fire
It is one thing to be an alarmist about potential problems, to which I readily plead guilty. But it is another thing to feel genuine fear for our future as a nation while the news and talk shows devote what seems to be nearly all their airtime to one wiener. Make that one Weiner, as in New Congressman Anthony Weiner. I've written about them before, and sure enough, the past week brought some pivotal developments not only for the present, but for the 2012 elections, as well. Since I wrote in my column last week about the coming economic slowdown, things have only gotten worse. Now the stock market is stalling out, the Federal Reserve is sending out gloomy predictions concerning future economic growth, and Congress has yet to address the issue of the debt ceiling.
Breitbart 1, Weiner 0
Dead man texting. This describes the eventual fate of Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y. Weiner's I-won't-resign press conference aside, he'll soon quit -- shoved out by his party, whose members do not want to see the word "Weiner" in their 2012 opponents' attack ads. The real story here is the initial refusal of the so-called traditional media to take Weinergate seriously. Certainly the story contains juicy, hot-button interest points -- power, politics, a big-name principal married to a top aide of a powerful Cabinet member, the allegation of an online criminal hacking of the Twitter account of a congressman. Potent page one, above-the-fold stuff, right?
Where Are You, Norman Lear?
This week has been a shocking one for Hollywood. Shortly after releasing my syndicated column last week, I handed The Hollywood Reporter a bevy of tapes showing tremendous liberal bias in the entertainment industry -- and a tape of one top Hollywood creator, Vin Di Bona ("America's Funniest Home Videos" and "MacGyver"), celebrating anti-conservative discrimination in Hollywood. Matt Drudge linked the piece, sending my book, "Primetime Propaganda," to the top of the Amazon.com best-seller charts. I began receiving emails from underground conservatives in Hollywood thanking me for revealing what everyone in town knows but few could confirm: that liberal Hollywood kills careers of those with whom it disagrees. I even got a few calls from liberals congratulating me on my attempts to open up the industry to different political viewpoints.
Free Market, Not Government Policy, Drives Energy Boom
There's an awful lot that's stale in the debate on government energy policy. Some stale arguments are nevertheless valid: It's dangerous to depend heavily on Middle Eastern oil. Others have increasingly been seen as dubious: that global warming caused by human activity will result in catastrophe. There's stale talk about federal and state laws that promised great change but have produced very little. Electric cars, even with subsidies, are no larger a part of the auto fleet than they were 100 years ago.
Sex Scandal Sans Sex
What's to be done with the strange story, tabloid saga, curious case and general embarrassment that is The Honorable -- how ludicrous that title now sounds -- Anthony Weiner, congressman from New York's Ninth District and national object of derision? Here's my suggestion: Exactly nothing. Rise above this whole one-day story that now threatens to go on for a week and seems as if it's gone on forever. Somebody find the hook and get this guy off the stage. Here is just one more pitiable male who's made a beyond-absolute fool of himself. Except for his political position, he could be just another creep lost in well-deserved obscurity. Instead, it is his merciless fate to be the subject of glaring headlines and bad jokes.
Confessions of a TV Propagandist
Because I've just finished reading my friend, Ben Shapiro's excellent new expose, "Primetime Propaganda," I'm reminded how fortunate I am that during most of the time I was writing for television, I was a Democrat. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have had a TV career at all. As Shapiro points out, TV has grown increasingly liberal over the past 50 years. Although he is only 27 years old, he has been diligent in his historical research. Moreover, because he is young, Jewish and wore his Harvard Law baseball cap when he interviewed the writers, producers and network executives, who have created the product and scheduled the programming over the years, they all assumed he was, like them, a devout leftist.
Congress' Bipartisan Vice Is Cowardice
Washington is suddenly embroiled in one of its most time-honored traditions, a debate about the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution, specifically how it should be applied to our efforts in Libya. But don't worry! This is not a column about the War Powers Act, the term paper topic of choice for earnest AP social studies students for roughly the past four decades. Instead, it is about the bipartisan problem of institutional cowardice in the American political system. The War Powers Act -- which sets an arbitrary deadline for presidents to seek congressional approval for military engagements -- is just one facet of a much more serious malady: acute buck-passing.
Obama: Hope, Change, and the Occasional Sex Dream
In Part One of my new book -- released this week! -- "Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America," I demonstrate that liberals have all the earmarks of mob psychology. Their myths, slogans, demands for immediate action, messianic goals, demonization of opponents, creation of political idols and occasional resorts to violence -- all this is classic herd behavior. Because mobs are irrational, immature, subject to wild passions and infatuations, they cannot be reasoned with. And they are always dangerous.
Europe Is Warning Us
ROME -- If Americans think fuel and food prices are high, they should try Europe, where both can nearly double those in the United States -- while salaries here are often lower. Italians, like most now-broke Southern European countries, are desperate to privatize bloated public-owned utilities. Politicians are trying to curb pensions, and to encourage the private sector to hire workers and buy equipment, as a way of attracting wary foreigner parents to lend such perpetual adolescents more bailout money.
Bill Clinton Syndrome
WASHINGTON -- They call it BCS, Bill Clinton syndrome, and it has broken out anew in New York and here in Washington, where it was first discovered. As elaborated upon in scholarly detail in the now famous "Starr Report: The Official Report of the Independent Counsel's Investigation of the President," BCS strikes powerful figures, usually male, who experience lewd compulsions of an overpowering nature, generally in the presence of technology -- often the telephone, occasionally a smartphone or even a computer -- and usually when they are alone or behind closed doors with a woman of inferior rank. The first victim of the syndrome was, of course, President Bill Clinton, but it has struck a growing number of powerful individuals, most recently Rep. Chris Lee, International Monetary Fund chieftain Dominique Strauss-Kahn and now Rep. Anthony Weiner (pronounced VY'-nehr -- at least by him).
A Time for Sadness
"A member ... officer or employee of the House shall conduct himself at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House." -- Code of Official Conduct, Rule XXIII, Clause 1 One might expect a conservative like me to pile on Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY), joining many of my fellow conservatives on the heap. I've heard the jokes and read the double entendre headlines in the New York Post and other publications. After the high and mighty promise of Rep. Nancy Pelosi to "drain the swamp" of Republican corruption following recent GOP sex scandals, some conservatives might see this as payback. They shouldn't, both they and our institutions of government could benefit from a little soul searching.
Let Weiner Be Weiner
There are reasons why Anthony Weiner should not resign. New York's Ninth Congressional District voters have sent him to Washington since 1998. You don't overturn the will of the electorate because of bad publicity. OK, really, really bad publicity. Weiner Week One started with the New York Democrat charging that he was smeared, his Twitter account was hacked and he never sent a tweet of his lower half in underpants to a college student. In Week Two, Weiner had no choice but to come clean and admit he sent the pic.
Appease and Entitle
WASHINGTON -- Because government is inherently dangerous and often mischievous, the Constitution's framers provided, and congressional rules have multiplied, mechanisms for blocking government action. These mechanisms can, however, also be used to force action. One is being so used in a dispute that has two remarkable facets. President Obama is sacrificing economic growth and job creation in order to placate organized labor. And as the crisis of the welfare state deepens, he is trying to enlarge the entitlement system and exacerbate the entitlement mentality.