Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
A Political Reality Show
(Editor's Note: Mark Alexander is traveling with his family on spring break this week. Enjoy this week's guest column from Burt Prelutsky.) I am constantly writing myself notes, jotting down the things I hear oozing out of the mouths of politicians. But occasionally when it comes time to use the quotes in an article, I find myself wondering if our elected officials actually spoke those words or if I had been hallucinating.
Mad Dog of the Middle East
Ronald Reagan called him the "Mad Dog of the Middle East" and treated him as such, launching a bombing raid against his compound that purportedly killed a member of his family and scared Moammar Gadhafi silly, reining him in for 20 long years. As my father said then, Gadhafi has a goal of a Muslim fundamentalist revolution which is targeted on many of his own Arab compatriots. Dad said that it could be that the only reason Gadhafi sees the United States as an enemy is simply because we exist and stand in his way. Now he's at it again, even killing his own people in a brutal effort to save his brutal dictatorship, yet our president seems unable to cope with the international crisis Gadhafi has created.
Norman Who?
Norman Braman is not your typical billionaire car dealer. Nor is he your typical establishment Republican, who too often puts party above principle. Norman Braman is the type of person who strikes fear into the hearts of every professional politician who thinks he can say one thing to get elected and then do the opposite once in office. In case you haven't been paying attention, Braman led a successful drive to recall Republican mayor Carlos Alvarez of Miami-Dade, Fla., and Commissioner Natacha Seijas. Their offenses? In a telephone conversation, Braman tells me there were many, including, he says, "sloppy bookkeeping, fraud, and the mayor's decision to use tax dollars to build a sports stadium for the local baseball team" when fiscal challenges for the city and high unemployment were harming the local economy.
Liberals: They Blinded Us With Science
In response to my column last week about hormesis -- the theory that some radiation can be beneficial to humans -- liberals reacted with their usual open-minded examination of the facts. According to Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters, MSNBC's Ed Schultz devoted an entire segment to denouncing me. He called me toxic, accused me of spreading misinformation and said I didn't care about science. One thing Schultz did not do, however, was cite a single physicist or scientific study.
Obama and War
WASHINGTON -- Well, it is official. The president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, has asked the Norwegian Nobel Committee to take back President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize owing to Obama's missile strikes in Libya. The head of Russia's Liberal Democratic Party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, also has weighed in, and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is really in a snit. This is the best news Col. Moammar Gadhafi has had in weeks. President Obama, who ordered airstrikes against Libya and then took his wife and the girls on a sightseeing and official junket to South America, probably took little note of the Bolivian's and Russians' actions, but it does show how difficult it is to get "world opinion" behind the use of force, even against a fla fla dictator such as Gadhafi. There is more unease in the "world community." Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League, at first was for enforcing a "no-fly zone" over Libya. Now he is not so sure. The next thing you know, he will be on Gadhafi's side. World opinion can be volatile.
Why Sacramento Can't Get Cellphones Out of Prison
California prisons confiscated more than 10,000 cellphones last year. This year, officials at Corcoran State Prison found a cellphone with a camera in possession of convicted serial killer Charles Manson. It was the second phone found on Manson in two years. In 1996, four men gang-raped a 15-year-old girl. They were convicted. But in 2008, the ringleader called the victim from his prison cell. "To our horror," Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley said at a press conference March 22, "there was nothing we could do about that."
The Damning Contradictions of Obama's Attack on Libya
Let's imagine that all goes well in Libya. The rebels, protected by air strikes, recapture lost territory and sweep into Tripoli. Moammar Gadhafi and his sons one way or the other disappear. Leaders propose a democratic and secular constitution that voters overwhelmingly approve. The first act of the duly elected government is to issue a proclamation of thanks and friendship to the United States, Britain, France and others who prevented Gadhafi's mass slaughter. Well, we can all dream, can't we?
Anti-Iraq War Bush-Haters Squirm to Justify Libya
"The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation," then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said in December 2007. What a difference a change of job title makes. "Let's just call a spade a spade. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya," said Defense Secretary Robert Gates three weeks before President Obama ordered a no-fly zone over -- and other military action against -- Libya.
Obama Wags the Dog
What is this really about? As the price of oil skyrockets, as our debt levels rise to new highs and our housing market drops to new lows, President Obama decides that it is a fantastic time to start dropping bombs on Libya. Nobody, including Obama, seems to know what our objective is in Libya. First, it was deposing terroristic thug Muammar Qaddafi; then it was standing up for the United Nations; then it was protecting civilians; now it is some combination of all of them. This is the same man who once explained with regard to Middle East policy, "I can tell you this -- when I am president of the United States, the American people and the world will always know where I stand." Now, finding where Obama stands is tougher than finding a cane-less Waldo in a crowd of Christmas elves.
Energy Fantasyland
Gas is well over $4 a gallon in most places in California -- and soaring elsewhere as well. But are such high energy prices good or bad? That should be a stupid question. Yet it is not when the Obama administration has stopped new domestic offshore oil exploration in many American waters, curbed oil leases in the West, and keeps oil-rich areas of Alaska exempt from drilling. Last week, President Obama went to Brazil and declared of that country's new offshore finds: "With the new oil finds off Brazil, President (Dilma) Rousseff has said that Brazil wants to be a major supplier of new stable sources of energy, and I've told her that the United States wants to be a major customer, which would be a win-win for both our countries."
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
'Let Me Just Be Very Unambiguous About This'
Amid all the confusion of our new little war in Libya, one thing is clear: Notwithstanding the bravery and professionalism of our troops, in naming it Operation Odyssey Dawn, the Pentagon has invoked a haunting specter. The war's namesake -- Homer's epic poem "The Odyssey" -- is the tale of the hero, Odysseus, taking 10 years to get home from the Trojan War -- which itself took 10 years to fight. In fairness to the Pentagon, when the Germans started their ill-fated campaign in Tripoli in February 1941 (that was to be lost due to a too-long and thin logistics line), they, too, had difficulty, calling it Operation Sonnenblume (Sunflower). As the German historian Wolf Heckmann drolly noted of the Wehrmacht high command: "Unconsciously, someone had hit upon the perfect symbol: a huge and showy flower at the end of a long and rather fragile stem."
Evasion of the Body Snatchers
Eleven years after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, on the eve of America's great Centennial celebration, counterfeiters formed a plot to steal his body from its honored grave in Springfield, Illinois. They had plans to hold the body for ransom. The U.S. Secret Service was able, happily, to disrupt this ghoulish plot. Today, we have a new ghoulish plot. Liberal writers are trying to steal the body of Ronald Reagan. They don't want to hold it for ransom. Instead, they are vigorously telling us he wasn't what we think he was.
Obama's War of Choice: The Dangerously Open-Ended Rationale for Attacking Libya
In December 2007, The Boston Globe asked 12 presidential candidates about military action aimed at stopping Iran from building nuclear weapons. "In what circumstances, if any," the Globe asked, "would the president have constitutional authority to bomb Iran without seeking a use-of-force authorization from Congress?" Here is how Barack Obama responded: "The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation." According to Obama's own standard, then, he violated the Constitution when he ordered a military attack against Libya.
Corporate Welfare
In America today, the biggest recipients of handouts are not poor people. They're corporations. General Electric CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt is super-close to President Obama. The president named Immelt chairman of his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Before that, Immelt was on Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. He's a regular companion when Obama travels abroad to hawk American exports. (Why does business need government to do that?) "Jeff Immelt is perhaps the CEO who is most cozy with President Obama," says journalist Tim Carney. "General Electric is structuring their business around where government is going ... high-speed rail, solar, wind. GE is lining up to get what government is handing out."
Regime Change: Libya
Stopping mass murder in Libya requires regime change. The first step toward achieving modern stability in Libya -- not the brittle and brutal false stability of tyranny -- is regime change. The international coalition (yes, that Iraq word again, coalition) now aiding Libya's rebels is pursuing regime change because actually winning Libya's War of Liberation means getting rid of Moammar Gadhafi. Despite the White House writhing, the U.N. squirming, the screaming hypocritical silence of the usual media suspects -- toppling Gadhafi is regime change.
The Amendment That Isn't
Dear Unreconstructed, It was wholly a pleasure to get your brief note, accompanied by voluminous documentation, solemnly informing me that there is no Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. No legal Fourteenth Amendment, anyway. You could've fooled me. I quoted from it not long ago on the subject of birthright citizenship, the idea that anyone born on American soil is an American citizen. Race, creed, color or previous condition of servitude ... none of that matters. If you're born an American, you are an American. No questions asked. It's one of many ideas that makes America exceptional.
Q1 Slowdown: Caveat Emptor
Caveat emptor: The first-quarter economy is slowing, and inflation is rising. A month ago, economists were optimistic about the potential for 4 percent growth. Now they are marking down their estimates toward 2.5 percent. Behind this, consumer expectations are falling, while inflation fears are going up. A recent CNBC All American Economic Survey revealed that 37 percent of respondents expect the economy to get worse in the next year. That's up about 15 percentage points from the December poll. The key reasons? Worries over rising food and fuel costs. Respondents anticipate prices to climb 6.6 percent over the next year. That's double the 3 percent inflation registered in the December survey.
Flunking the Citizenship Test
Anyone who's ever seen Jay Leno do one of his "Jaywalking" segments on NBC, locating average Americans and asking them factual questions on street corners, knows there are far too many Americans who know next to nothing about just about everything. They can't name our first president or don't even know what the phrase "Founding Fathers" means. Ask them to name our current vice president and watch the brain waves flat line. Newsweek magazine recently announced its disgust after it offered the government's official citizenship test (the one we require immigrants to pass before being naturalized) to 1,000 Americans. Thirty-eight percent of the sample failed. Newsweek worried in its headline: "The country's future is imperiled by our ignorance."
Charlie Sheen and the Fukushima 50
The contrast couldn't be sharper. Over the past few weeks, Charlie Sheen's spiraling self-destruction first grabbed headlines and then vaulted him to new level of celebrity. The now-fired star of TV's Two and Half Men spewed racist comments and drug-fueled nonsense and shamelessly bragged about his two lovers -- "goddesses," he calls them. They fill the supporting roles in his personal "polygamy story." Even the presence of his two young sons can't restrain Sheen's narcissistic displays.
Is Obama's Use of Military in Libya Constitutional?
Leave aside for a moment whether it was wise for President Obama to order our military to intervene in Libya's civil war, siding with rebels we know little about against a dictator who has sponsored terrorism against us. A more fundamental question comes first: Did Obama have constitutional authority to do it? President Washington's actions counsel otherwise. In responding to Indian raiders, Washington repeatedly declined to order offensive -- as opposed to defensive -- military action because Congress had not approved it, as he believed the Constitution required.