Right Opinion

Chasing Olympic Gold

WASHINGTON -- At the conclusion of the 1939 movie "Gone With the Wind," Vivien Leigh, playing Scarlett O'Hara, defers decision on what to do about the major crisis in her life with this sentence: "After all, tomorrow is another day." Unfortunately, the Obama White House seems to have adopted Scarlett's decision-making process for the war in Afghanistan. Note to the O-Team: Kabul isn't Tara -- and Americans are dying while the commander in chief dithers. On Wednesday, Sept. 30, a full month after Gen. Stanley McChrystal submitted his "assessment" of the situation in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama convened a three-hour meeting of his "national security team" in the White House Situation Room to "discuss next moves." According to information subsequently provided by the White House press office, Gen. McChrystal "participated in the meeting" via an encrypted video link, and no decisions were made.

Will Israel Attack Iran's Nukes?

WASHINGTON -- On June 7, 1981, Israeli F-15s and F-16s took off for the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq, after the pilots were emotionally briefed that "The alternative is our destruction." In fact, Prime Minister Menachem Begin had no idea if the raid would stop the Iraqi nuclear program or merely slow it. But slowing it was reason enough. Since the George W. Bush administration, the American military has assessed that an attack against Iran's nuclear facilities would only delay the development of its program. "The reality is," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said recently, "there is no military option that does anything more than buy time. The estimates are one to three years or so."

An Olympics We Can Believe In

Close your eyes, and pretend it's still the George W. Bush administration. In Afghanistan, more American service members died in August than in any month since the war began. His top military commander says that without more troops, we run the risk of losing the war. Iran admits operating a second previously undisclosed nuclear facility. Unemployment stands at 9.7 percent, with consumer confidence lower last month after a brief uptick. An important domestic initiative -- one he campaigned on -- faces a likely make-or-break month in Congress. What does the President do? He flies to Copenhagen to personally lobby the International Olympic Committee to bring the Olympics to Crawford, Texas.

Freedom From Foreign Oil

WASHINGTON -- Boone Pickens likes to call it a "game changer," and the game he has in mind is a big one: the game for our global energy security. Boone is the billionaire Texas oilman who years ago warned that the price of oil will continue to go up, price plateau by price plateau -- each plateau being higher and more expensive for the American consumer. Sure, the price of oil will dip from its highs, but then it will go up again to a higher plateau. As the years pass, the price of oil has been climbing and will continue to climb. That is because the supply of oil is finite, and the demand is always growing. Worse, the United States, which uses 25 percent of the world's oil with only 4 percent of the world's population, has only 3 percent of the world's reserves, and that is being exhausted. We now depend on foreign oil for almost 70 percent of our oil needs. Our suppliers are countries such as Iraq, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Russia, which is to say, countries that are unfriendly or unstable or both.

On Climate, Bad News Will Resume

Plateau in Temperatures Adds Difficulty to Task Of Reaching a Solution -- New York Times, Sept. 23 WASHINGTON -- In this headline on a New York Times story about difficulties confronting people alarmed about global warming, note the word "plateau." It dismisses the unpleasant -- to some people -- fact that global warming is maddeningly (to the same people) slow to vindicate their apocalyptic warnings about it.

The Story Behind a Story

"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?" -- Alice in Wonderland What we are led to believe by an often lazy and Obama-supporting big media, enabled by a deliberately ignorant public that lacks, rather than longs, for the truth, is not as it first seems. Take just one example. Remember the four Chinese Uighur released from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay? They were flown to Bermuda where they now reside under conditions that are better than any they might have imagined. The storyline cast the men as innocent victims of a military terrorist sweep in Afghanistan.

Three Dangerous Stooges

Last week, three dictators -- from Iran, Libya and Venezuela -- delivered lunatic hate speeches at the General Assembly of the United Nations. Why do these anti-Semitic dictators feel so free to damn America from downtown New York? Why do their abettors spurn our requests for help? And why do creepy regimes plot to get nukes, and fund terrorists? Easy. They do not fear, much less listen, to an indebted and energy-hungry America that either needs their cash or oil -- or both. Libya's Moammar Gadhafi raved for 90 minutes. He railed about everything from the Kennedy assassination to his own jet lag. He trashed the United States and the Jews. Even Gadhafi's translator collapsed from exhaustion trying to keep up with the stream-of-consciousness insanity.

Myth of the Underpaid Public Employee

Democrats Win Lobbyists but Lose Basic Reforms

As Sen. Max Baucus tries to squeeze a health care bill out of the Senate Finance Committee, and as Sens. Barbara Boxer and John Kerry race to meet their latest deadline to introduce a bill to reduce carbon dioxide, some Democrats wonder whether their congressional leaders and the president who has deferred to them have sought only limited changes rather than more fundamental reform on both health insurance and carbon emissions.

Senators Have Wires Crossed on Security

On Tuesday, Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old Afghan immigrant who was a teenager in Queens during the Sept. 11 attacks, pleaded not guilty to federal terrorism conspiracy charges in New York. This is a scary story. Police stopped and searched Zazi's rented car on the George Washington Bridge on Sept. 10, as the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks loomed and President Obama was about to join world leaders at a U.N. confab. According to the U.S. attorney's office, Zazi flew to Pakistan in August 2008 to receive bomb-making instructions, returned to use the Internet and nine pages of handwritten bomb-making notes he had e-mailed himself from Pakistan to purchase and mix triacetone triperoxide (TATP) -- the explosive used in the 2005 London transit bombings that killed 52 commuters.

Liberal Lies About National Health Care, Part 6

(17) America's low ranking on international comparisons of infant mortality proves other countries' socialist health care systems are better than ours. America has had a comparatively high infant mortality rate since we've been measuring these things, going back to at least the '20s. This was the case long before European countries adopted their cradle-to-grave welfare schemes and all while the U.S. was the wealthiest country on Earth. One factor contributing to the U.S.'s infant mortality rate is that blacks have intractably high infant mortality rates -- irrespective of age, education, socioeconomic status and so on. No one knows why.

Success No Matter What

This Friday, September's job-loss total will be announced. Whatever the numbers, administration officials surely will tell us that life is better -- because of them. "We brought the global economy back from the brink," President Obama said at the close of the G-20 meeting last week. "(B)ecause of the bold and coordinated action that we took, millions of jobs have been saved or created; the decline in output has been stopped; financial markets have come back to life." This has been the president's theme: His so-called stimulus package, bailouts for politically connected banks and industries, ludicrously wasteful programs like Cash for Clunkers, etc. have saved America from the greatest disaster since the Great Depression.

A Pragmatic Look at Obama's Pragmatism

"When John McCain said we could just 'muddle through' in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and made clear that we must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights," Barack Obama thundered as he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in Denver last year. "John McCain likes to say that he'll follow bin Laden to the gates of Hell. But he won't even go to the cave where he lives." It was a shabby bit of rhetoric, even for a campaign. Insinuating that McCain, of all people, didn't have the intestinal fortitude to take the fight to bin Laden was not only absurd on its face, it smacked of overcompensation coming from the former community organizer whose greatest foreign policy passion prior to his presidential bid had been nuclear disarmament.

Is Obama Breaking the Law?

In March 1850, Karl Marx spoke to the Central Committee of the Communist League. In order to bring about true change, Marx stated, the world needed not a massive, singular upheaval, but a "permanent revolution." The revolution would not be accomplished in a moment; it could be accomplished only through renewed and constant dedication to a political program, by a constant attempt "not to improve the existing society but to found a new one." President Obama is not a communist, although he certainly has a soft spot for communists ranging from Van Jones to Frank Marshall Davis. Obama is, however, a devotee of the Marxist philosophy of politics: permanent change. Or, in his case, permanent campaigning on change.

Cut and Walk From Afghanistan?

The gist of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's analysis that presumably will be presented to President Barack Obama is: If 1) you and Congress fully resource the effort (troops, materiel and civilian aid) and 2) if we get much better at coordinating all our assets -- Defense and State departments, the U.S. Agency for International Development, intelligence, contractors, NATO and others -- then 3) there is a better than even chance of success in Afghanistan, which will take 4) between five and seven more years. Note that the president is not likely to be told that the Pentagon can "predict" success -- only that it would be more likely than not to succeed. Thus, the president will have to place a heavy bet at odds barely better than a gambler would get on even or odd at the roulette table. But unlike the gambler, who can leave the table, the president is forced to bet -- either go or no go. There is a potentially huge danger to leaving (as well as to escalating) -- for both national security and political reasons.

Should Government Have E-Record of Every Woman Who's Had an Abortion?

Should doctors and hospitals be required by the federal government to maintain a national network of electronic health records for every individual in America that indicates, for example, whether that individual has had an abortion, a sexually transmitted disease, a mental illness or a drug problem? Such a system has already been mandated by the stimulus law enacted in February, and politicians in Washington, D.C., would now prefer not to answer straightforward questions about it. Americans should not let them get away with it. The stimulus law provided for "the development of a nationwide health information technology infrastructure" that would include an electronic health record for "each person in the United States by 2014."

Pittsburgh Protest Promoters

Radical-left protesters outside the G-20 summit meeting in Pittsburgh last week underlined once again that our friends in the news media see no real enemy or extremist to their left. But conservative protests against Team Obama are an ugly sign of incivility, and according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, even impending violence. HBO talk show host Bill Maher exemplified the liberal-media attitude on his Twitter page on Sept. 24: "Even with a face full of tear gas, these G-20 protesters (are) better looking than the teabaggers." But there's a big difference between the sea of tens of thousands of conservative protesters in Washington on Sept. 12 and the 3,000 anti-capitalist radicals in Pittsburgh. The tone from the podium in Washington was happy and patriotic, which meant nothing to The Washington Post, which covered it as an outpouring of a "spectrum of conservative anger."

All the President's Olympic Cronies

When government officials play the Olympic lottery, taxpayers lose. That has been the disastrous experience of host cities around the world. (Forbes magazine even dubbed the post-Olympic financial burden the "Host City Curse.") So, why are President Obama and his White House entourage headed to Copenhagen, Denmark, this week to push a fiscally doomed Chicago 2016 bid? Political payback. Bringing the games to the Windy City is Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's "vision." The entrenched Democratic powerbroker -- in office since 1989 -- would like to cap off his graft-haunted tenure with a glorious $4 billion bread-and-circuses production. The influential Daley machine backed Barack Obama for the presidential primary. Obama lavished praise on Daley's stewardship of the city. Longtime Daley cronies helped pave Obama's path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Now, they're returning the favor for their hometown boss.

Criminal Records

Does "Conan the Barbarian" have serious artistic value? That's one of the intriguing questions raised by a case the U.S. Supreme Court will hear next Tuesday. Because "Conan" includes footage of horses tripped by wires, it is arguably covered by a federal ban on depictions of animal cruelty. If so, Amazon is committing a felony by selling it, unless it could convince a jury that the 1982 epic -- in which a bare-chested, codpiece-wearing future governor of California declares that the best thing in life is "to crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women" -- has "serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical or artistic value."

Sudan's Simmering North-South War

Sudan's genocidal Darfur war still attracts international attention, and though large battles pitting national government troops against Darfur rebels are less frequent there, violent anarchy still afflicts that sad region. A much larger and more dangerous war haunts Sudan, however: a re-ignition of the "North versus South" civil war. This reviving horror has ominous implications not only for East Africa but all nations straddling sub-Saharan Africa's "Arab-Black" ethnic and "Muslim-Christian" divides. The last North-South war (the Second Sudan Civil War) lasted for two decades, left approximately 2 million dead, created millions of refugees and -- despite ritual denials by the northern, Islamist, "national government" in Khartoum -- involved slaving operations by northern-backed "Arab" militias. The evidence for this evil was damnably clear. South Sudanese black tribespeople would be kidnapped and then sold as laborers in the north.