Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, January 7, 2011
Islam's Hijackers and Hijackees
For years we've been hearing about how the peaceful religion of Islam has been hijacked by extremists. What if it's the other way around? Worse, what if the peaceful hijackers are losing their bid to take over the religion? That certainly seems to be the case in Pakistan.
Washington Goes Supply-Side
"Stop the bad stuff" is what John Boehner told a bunch of us at breakfast a few weeks before the election. That's how he defined the GOP mission. Now he's speaker. And now there's an opportunity for both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to move in the direction of a supply-side economic growth model to reduce chronic unemployment and really get the economy moving again.
Boomers Back to the Future
The baby boomers who wouldn't trust anyone over 30 now must rely on young clerks to get their Social Security and Medicare checks in the mail. This is the year the first of millions of boomers turn 65, and their younger brothers and sisters will follow them into the next two decades at the rate of 10,000 a day. The boomers, like everyone before them, never believed that old age would afflict them "when they're 64," as the Beatles put it. Maybe for some of them, it hasn't. The hale and hardy claim they're "the new 50," with new knees, new hips, new ankles, new arteries and even the occasional new heart.
Constitutionalism
WASHINGTON -- For decades, Democrats and Republicans fought over who owns the American flag. Now they're fighting over who owns the Constitution. The flag debates began during the Vietnam era when leftist radicals made the fatal error of burning it. For decades since, non-suicidal liberals have tried to undo the damage. Demeaningly, and somewhat unfairly, they are forever having to prove their fealty to the flag.
When the Times Turn Awful
You may not recognize the name Robert Macauley. Or even that of his brainchild, AmeriCares. But there was a time -- April of 1975, the Last Days of Saigon -- when he was very much in the news. And the news was bad, very bad. The pictures in the paper and on television were of defeat, collapse, exile and all the attendant chaos that goes with the loss of any hope of freedom. It was a whole panorama of suffering. Only the communists and their friends, in Vietnam and elsewhere, were celebrating. Freedom's loss was communism's gain. Tyranny looked like the Wave of the Future once again -- a dark, crushing wave that would trap still more millions under its inexorable advance.
The Other New Chicago Crony Chief of Staff
Fun fact: Bill Daley isn't the only new chief of staff in the White House with longtime ties to the Chicago Way. Yep, it's No Windy City Corporate Lawyer Left Behind Week in the nation's capital. On the other side of the White House, deep-pocketed campaign finance mega-bundler Tina Tchen was named first lady Michelle Obama's new right-hand woman. Or rather, left-hand woman. The self-described "progressive" attorney from Chicago is taking over as chief of staff in the East Wing following the expected departure of Susan Sher. Tchen personally raised more than $200,000 for the Obama presidential campaign while a lawyer at white-shoe Skadden Arps. (No word on whether Mrs. Obama gave her the same anti-corporate lawyer, fat cat-bashing lecture she delivered on the campaign trail.)
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Let the Investigations Begin
Given the Democrats' track record of investigating Republican administrations, they will lack credibility when they protest Republicans investigating actions by the Obama administration. Oversight is a primary function of any Congress. The new Republican House majority is expected to conduct several investigations. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has promised to lead six of them, including one that according to Issa's spokesman, Kurt Bardella, will focus on the "institutional culture of waste, fraud and abuse," within the federal bureaucracy. To be credible, these investigations must expose Republicans as well as Democrats because misspending the public's money is one of the few bipartisan activities remaining in Washington.
Investigate This!
The Republicans are back in charge in the House of Representatives this week, and not a moment too soon! Forget "stimulus" bills and "shovel-ready" bailouts (for public school teachers, who need shovels for what they're teaching), the current financial crisis, which is the second Great Depression, was created slowly and methodically by Democrat hacks running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the past 18 years. As even Obama's treasury secretary admitted in congressional hearings, "Fannie and Freddie were a core part of what went wrong in our system." And if it's something Tim Geithner noticed, it's probably something that's fairly obvious.
Reliving -- and Denying -- an Ugly Past
On Jan. 16, 1861, delegates to a Georgia state convention gathered to consider whether to secede from the United States. Three days later, voting 208-89, the convention adopted an "Ordinance of Secession," which "repealed, rescinded, and abrogated" Georgia's ratification of the federal Constitution in 1788. The ordinance was publicly signed and Georgia joined the Confederate States of America, "to the accompaniment," in the words of the New Georgia Encyclopedia, "of wild celebration, bonfires, and illuminations."
Saturday Night Alive?
We all breathed a sigh of relief when the ball fell in New York's Times Square and the holiday season this year ended without another terror attack, or attempted attack on our homeland. You'll recall that on Christmas day, 2009, the notorious "underwear" bomber tried to blow up his jet over Detroit. Young Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian citizen, wanted to take down his Northwest Airlines Flight 253 right over Detroit's airport. Had he succeeded in detonating his BVDs, his victims would not only have been the 288 passengers and crew he was flying with, but doubtless hundreds or thousands on the ground.
Too Bad Obama Is Only Half-White
The worst thing about Obama's being a black man is that when you take him to task for his leftist agenda, it's so easy for those who endorse his policies to accuse you of being a bigot. It's fascinating how that works. If you happen to disagree with Henry Waxman or Charles Schumer, you're not automatically called an anti-Semite. If you take exception to Nancy Pelosi, you're not immediately dismissed as a misogynist. In most quarters, you can even dismiss the lunacies of Barney Frank without necessarily being labeled a gay-basher.
Top 10 Political Lies of 2010
The biggest political "lie" of 2010? The winner is: the Republican assertion that ObamaCare is a "government takeover of health care." A website called PolitiFact based this on the votes of 4,000 of its readers. ABC's "Nightline" featured PolitiFact's editor, and "Nightline" reporter Jake Tapper heartily agreed this was the "biggest lie of the year." Tapper, normally pretty sane, concluded the piece by saying, "Way to deceive the public"!
Wily Old Dems Take on Whippersnapper Republicans
Curious fact, unearthed by Gerald Seib of The Wall Street Journal. The average age of Republican House members in the new Congress convening this week is 54.9, younger than the Republicans' average age in the previous Congress, 56.5. But the average age of House Democrats has risen, from 58 to 60.2. That can be explained partly by the high turnover in the 2010 election. Many younger Democrats, first elected in 2006 or 2008, fell by the wayside. The old bulls from 65 percent-plus Democratic districts survived. Meanwhile, many young Republican challengers won.
Governator Flubbed His Exit, Won't Be Back
In his last remaining hours as California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger issued three sentence commutations. The most notable went to the son of former Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, Esteban Nunez, who is serving time for voluntary manslaughter. Esteban Nunez's legal problems began in San Diego on Oct. 4, 2008. After Nunez, then 19, and some friends were not admitted to a fraternity party, they went looking for a fight. They found a group of students who also had been drinking. After a short but fatal clash, Luis Dos Santos, 22, lay dying.
The New Sophists
In classical Athens, public life became dominated by clever and smart-sounding sophists. These mellifluous "really wise guys" made money and gained influence by their rhetorical boasts to "prove" the most amazing "thinkery" that belied common sense. We are living in a new age of sophism -- but without a modern equivalent of Socrates to remind the public just how silly our highly credentialed and privileged new rhetoricians can often sound.
Out of Control, by Choice
WASHINGTON -- Wonder why you have already broken all your New Year's resolutions? Do not blame yourself -- heaven forbid. Enlist modern sophistication and blame your brain's frontal cortex, affluence, the Internet (the "collapse of delay between impulse and action") and "the democratization of temptation." Those phrases are from Daniel Akst, a novelist and essayist whose book "We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess" notes that the problems of freedom and affluence -- of "managing desire in a landscape rich with temptation" -- are desirable problems. But they are problems and have fascinating philosophic entanglements.
Turnabout Is Fair Play
It takes what a lot of my Jewish friends call chutzpah for House Democrats who ran the House of Representatives since 2003 as if it was their solely owned domain for so long, now to demand a policy of the very bipartisanship they scorned. With Republicans now at last in control of the House, Democrats who ruled the lower body with an iron hand, and stone deaf to the voice of the GOP minority, now cry out for a policy that will give them the important role in the business of the so-called lower body on Capitol Hill -- the rights they denied to the GOP.
Reinforcements Are Here
WASHINGTON -- New Year's Day in Washington dawned gray and wet -- and cold. It was a perfect day for sightseeing, so my wife and I decided to sightsee. We went to Mount Vernon, George Washington's home -- named, incidentally, after a British admiral, Adm. Edward Vernon, by George's elder half brother. Upon inheriting the mansion, George never saw any reason to change the name, despite the British army's many acts of rudeness to him. George was a big enough guy not to bear a grudge.
Mascot Politics
Dr. Victor Davis Hanson's quietly chilling article, "Two Californias," in National Review Online, ought to be read by every American who is concerned about where this country is headed. California is leading the way, but what is happening in California is happening elsewhere -- and is a slow poison that is being largely ignored. Professor Hanson grew up on a farm in California's predominantly agricultural Central Valley. Now, as he tours that area, many years later, he finds a world as foreign to the world he knew as it is from the rest of California today -- and very different from the rest of America, either past or present.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
War in the Mideast -- on Christians
Our national media elite reviewed 2010 with great sorrow for how America has besmirched itself in the eyes of the world with its "seething hatred" of Muslims. CBS anchor Katie Couric announced on her Internet show that there wasn't enough evaluation of "this bigotry toward 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide" which was "so misdirected, and so wrong -- and so disappointing." Couric even embarrassed herself by suggesting, "Maybe we need a Muslim version of 'The Cosby Show.'" A ridiculous idea -- unless it were to run every night instead of Couric's lame half-hour "news" report.