Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
From The Comedy Store
President Obama explained his cave-in on taxes Tuesday by saying Republicans were holding the middle-class hostage. The president had to act. Jimmy Carter called and warned him the longer there are hostages the less likely it is he'll be reelected.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Hillary's Unexpected Good Fortune
There are villains aplenty in the WikiLeaks scandal, but nobody looks better for it than Hillary Clinton. The purloined State Department cables show the secretary of state to be eager and willing to man up to both the nation's enemies and its faithless "allies" in the Middle East. She emerges in the confidential cable traffic as tough as any man, eager to deal with the Saudis as the unreliable ally they pretend not to be. In one signed memorandum, she calls Saudi Arabia the largest source of money for Islamist terror gangs.
Ragin' 'n' Stagin' at the White House
Liberals (or Progressives, if you prefer) have been raging at President Obama. For months they have complained that he did not show enough passion. Comic atheist Bill Maher even got racial. He wanted Mr. Obama to shove a Glock into his belt and use it to pistol whip BP execs over the oil spill. If a conservative comedian had engaged in such a blatant bit of racial stereotyping as that, he'd have been hauled up before the Sensitivity Trainers. (And besides, BP had been one of Mr. Obama's biggest corporate campaign donors.)
Protecting Our Protectors
WASHINGTON -- It's a tough time to be a member of the U.S. armed forces. Those serving in our all-volunteer military -- and their families -- are stretched and stressed by more than nine years of war. Unfortunately, our commander in chief -- supposedly the champion of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardsmen and Marines -- isn't doing anything to make serving in uniform any easier.
Sell Bonds, Buy Stocks
For once, top Obama economic advisor Larry Summers got it right. Warning opponents of the big tax-cut deal, Summers told reporters, "Failure to pass this bill in the next couple weeks would materially increase the risk that the economy would stall out and we would have a double-dip recession." Too bad Summers didn't advise the president to cut taxes across-the-board two years ago, rather than push for the misbegotten $800 billion government-spending package. That policy dismally failed to ignite a real economic recovery or to lower the unemployment rate.
The Diseases of Pornography
Derrick Burts, 24, started working as a porn-film actor in June. By October, he'd contracted the HIV virus. The AP story on Burts contained this jaw-dropping sentence: "He said he began to have doubts about the business after contracting chlamydia, gonorrhea and herpes in his first month of work, but was convinced to keep working." Burts claimed, "I wasn't stupid or oblivious, I knew what was out there. But it's not something you think about when they fill your head" with lucrative offers and promises that the work is safe. Lured into the porn world with the promise that he looked like money, Burts concluded his greed was unwise: "Making $10,000 or $15,000 for porn isn't worth your life."
Debunking the Millionaires and Billionaires Tax Cut Rhetoric
I am amazed when I hear not just liberal Democrats but also some Republicans being suckered into the belief that "the wealthiest 2 percent of taxpayers, these millionaires and billionaires" should see their tax rates rise. It is class warfare, yes. More importantly, it is not true!
There's Compromise, and There's Compromise
There's a lot of noise today about promoting political squishiness to a virtue and endorsing the notion that compromise for its own sake is noble. I uncompromisingly dissent. First, let's understand that compromise for pragmatic purposes or out of political necessity is wholly different from compromise for its own sake. It is the latter I reject, recognizing that the former is, by definition, sometimes the best of the bad options. Those types of decisions have to be made on a case-by-case basis with a thorough evaluation of the available options and the short- and long-term implications of settling for the imperfect solution.
Swindle of the Year
WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 -- and House Democrats don't have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years -- which just happen to be the two years of the run-up to the next presidential election. This is a defeat?
The Dream and the Nightmare
The Dream Act, which provides a path to citizenship for those children who were brought to the United States illegally by their parents, passed the House by 216-198 this week, but will likely die in the Senate for lack of bipartisan support. Democrats knew they have no chance of passing the Dream Act, but tried to force the issue to a vote so they could hammer home their message to Hispanics: Democrats are your friends; Republicans are not. When it became clear Thursday they didn't have the votes in the Senate to block a Republican filibuster, they tabled the measure.
Homegrown Hate Crimes Against our Troops
When jihad-bent American Muslims target American soldiers on American soil, why does America yawn? The Fort Hood massacre has faded from view. The Little Rock Army recruiting station ambush barely registered on the national radar screen. And the arrest this week of a Baltimore-area bomb plotter, intent on blowing up a military center and murdering our troops in the name of Allah, was met with a collective shrug. It's pointless to rally citizens around "never forget" when their heads are in the sand.
When Words Fail
Most theories for why the president came unglued like a papier-mache doll in a steam bath during his press conference this week center on the fact that he can't stand having his liberal bona fides questioned. When Iran unveils its nuclear program or slaughters dissidents in the streets of Tehran, Barack Obama keeps a steadier hand than G. Gordon Liddy's over a candle. Question his citizenship, his patriotism, even his jump shot, and he's all Vulcan poise. But if you doubt his commitment to The Cause, he turns into Charlie Sheen without his Ritalin.
The Daniels Dilemma
INDIANAPOLIS -- "If I could wave a magic wand and change just one thing, it would be to guarantee that every American child could grow up in a two-parent home until the age of 18. That would solve maybe three-quarters of our problems."
Thursday, December 9, 2010
While His Base Rages, Obama Faces Tax-cut Reality
Reality strikes. Barack Obama spurned the advice of columnists Paul Krugman and Katrina vanden Heuvel and agreed with Republicans to extend the current income tax rates -- the so-called Bush tax cuts -- for another two years. He got a few things in return, primarily extended unemployment benefits for another 13 months, and agreed as well to a 2 percent cut in the Social Security payroll tax.
GAO: 'Unclear' if Airport Body Scanners Will Detect Underwear Bombs
Repeatedly over the past year the Government Accountability Office has told Congress it is unclear if the whole-body-image scanners the Transportation Security Administration is now deploying at airports across the country will detect the sort of underwear bomb that terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab used last Christmas when he attempted to blow up Northwest Flight 253 as it approached Detroit from Amsterdam.
What Next for Liberals? Friendly Fascism
WASHINGTON -- The Great Denial continues. The liberals continue to labor under the assumption that nothing very bad happened in early November. They are still supreme. The columnists go on as though nothing is amiss. This week, E.J. Dionne consulted with three defeated members of Congress and passed on to President Barack Obama their advice on how to succeed during the next two years. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continues as if she is speaker for life, though it probably will be a generation until another Democrat holds the post. Mental illness can be amusing.
The WikiLeaks Vindication of George W. Bush
The WikiLeaks de facto declassification of privileged material makes it case closed: Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction -- and intended to restart his program once the heat was off. President George W. Bush, in the 2003 State of the Union address, uttered the infamous "16 words": "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
The Brass Ring in Obamacare Cases is Severability, Not the Individual Mandate
Litigation over the Obamacare individual mandate has captured the public's attention, as we've written previously for the Washington Examiner and the Wall Street Journal. But the ultimate goal in challenging the constitutionality of President Obama's health care law is not the mandate; it is severability.
Stop, Don't START!
In 1976, I stood beside my father in Kansas City after he lost the Republican presidential nomination to Gerald Ford. I asked him why he wanted to be president of the United States. His answer was a preview of the policies he would pursue when he finally won the presidency, recalling that for far too long he had watched American presidents inevitably cave in to the Soviets in every agreement reached with them. He said that he wanted to be the first president to say "NYET!" to their demands, loudly and clearly.
Politics Without Labels? What a Silly Concept
A group called "No Labels" is getting an awful lot of buzz these days, despite the fact it has raised only $1 million. (Though it sounds more impressive if you say it like Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies: One. Million. Dollars.) The professed idea behind No Labels is that its members don't believe in labels, by which they mean things such as Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative. Some black-hearted cynics see No Labels as a Trojan horse for a presidential bid by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent who finds the two-party system an unfortunate obstacle to his ambitions.