Right Opinion

Obama's Competing Waterloos

Sen. Jim DeMint predicted that Obamacare would be President Barack Obama's Waterloo. While that's certainly a strong possibility, Obama has other Waterloos in the wings competing for the prize, such as his monstrous deficits and his disastrous foreign policy. The Heritage Foundation reports that Obama's budget would produce $13 trillion in deficits over the next decade, even more than the outrageous $9 trillion previously projected. This is nation-shattering stuff, folks, and Obama and his minions remain unflappable, intent on staying the bankrupting course, sporting Alfred E. Neuman, "What, me worry?" expressions. The fact that we know they can't be that oblivious is what makes us wonder whether something more sinister lurks in their motives. But Obama's foreign policy is shaping up to be every bit as dangerous. Because he has lived in a relatively cloistered political world -- surrounded and shielded by mostly fellow leftist radicals -- he apparently doesn't realize just how repugnant his appeasement policies and mantralike derision of this nation are to most Americans.

Afterthoughts from the U.N. Address

It was the most Obamaesque address to date. "For those who question the character and cause of my nation," the president pronounced Wednesday, "I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months." America is 233 years old. Some think that there are ample accomplishments speaking to our character and cause that predate Obama's ascension to the presidency. Feh, Obama seems to be saying. Look instead to our new greatness, for we have elected a man like him! Having anointed himself America's vindicator and redeemer, Obama's real purpose seems to be to become the leader not of the free world but, simply, the world. "No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed," Obama said. "No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional divisions between nations of the South and the North make no sense in an interconnected world; nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War."

Nick at Nite Blight

During his 20-year reign at Disney, Michael Eisner's commitment to family values was viewed with suspicion by many. The worries apparently were well-founded. His animation studio, Tornante, has a new clay-animated cartoon on Nick at Nite called "Glenn Martin, DDS." Eisner and Nick at Nite executive Cyma Zarghami claim it's a show for the entire family. Even TV critics -- the crowd always wanting to applaud anything pushing the cultural envelope -- think it's outrageous to make that claim. "You know you're in for a bumpy ride when the first joke has to do with killing prostitutes," wrote Mike Hale of the New York Times. He wanted out of the dental chair when a tasteless joke about a "blood bath" of a circumcision by a "rabbi with Parkinson's" arrived. Yes, this is the same Nick at Nite whose original 1985 lineup included "The Donna Reed Show" and "Dennis the Menace" reruns.

When Defenses Go Down

Autumn in Washington is often cruel. The heat and the humidity have lifted, and Congress returns more or less refreshed from summer vacation, but the pressure cooker continues to cook politics. Conversations about health care legislation and the economy continue to get top billing on the Hill and elsewhere, but Barack Obama is playing football with foreign policy. It's the season of the gridiron, after all. The president threw a long pass over the heads of the lads from the Czech Republic and Poland, and Vladimir Putin, Moscow's very defensive back, intercepted easily. He naturally looks forward to more such floaters. "I do anticipate that this correct and brave decision will be followed by others." The president's announcement that the United States would not deploy long-range missile defenses in Eastern Europe after all was astonishing because George W. Bush had negotiated so patiently with the Czechs and Poles, who took considerable risks in cooperating with Washington. The astonishment and anger in the West was not necessarily duplicated in Eastern Europe, accustomed as the Europeans in the East are to a role as pawns. Saving face is not necessarily a skill practiced only in the Orient.

On Winning

KABUL -- Our Fox News' "War Stories" team is cleaning our gear and packing up to go home. The special operations teams that "hosted" us for a half-dozen carefully planned and executed raids against the Taliban have showered us with patches, "challenge coins" and mementos accumulated since we arrived last month. We even got to shower ourselves. While on operations, we've shot hours of videotape of their backs and legs and on their bases and taken hundreds of photos with their cameras because we're not allowed to show most of their faces. On our last night "in country," we sat down with them in their operations center to review the footage we had shot to ensure that whatever we put on the air in the days ahead will neither jeopardize allied lives nor divulge forthcoming operations. While we were scanning through the "tapes," one of our hosts informed us that The Washington Post had published a slightly redacted version of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's 66-page classified "assessment" on where we are headed in Afghanistan.

The Internet 'Brutopia'

WASHINGTON -- The transformation of Germany in the 1920s and '30s from the nation of Goethe to the nation of Goebbels is a specter that haunts, or should haunt, every nation. The triumph of Nazi propaganda in this period is the subject of a remarkable exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (where I serve on the governing board). Germany in the 1920s was a land of broad literacy and diverse politics, boasting 146 daily newspapers in Berlin alone. Yet in the course of a few years, a fringe party was able to define a national community by scapegoating internal enemies, elevate a single, Messianic leader, and keep the public docile with hatred while the state committed unprecedented crimes. The adaptive use of new technology was central to this achievement. The Nazis pioneered voice amplification at rallies, the distribution of recorded speeches, and the sophisticated targeting of poster art toward groups and regions.

Immigrant Values

For the first time in decades, the number of foreign-born individuals living in the United States declined last year, according to new numbers released by the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. The drop was small, from 12.6 percent of the U.S. population to 12.5 percent of the population, but it is significant nonetheless. It suggests that not only are fewer people coming here but also some who are already here have decided to leave. But the reason for the decline may be nothing to cheer about. It may have less to do with tougher border enforcement effectively keeping out illegal immigrants than it does with a shrinking economy making the country a less enticing destination. Immigrants always have been the canaries in the mine shaft -- an early warning system about the health of the U.S. economy. By mid-decade, informal networks of immigrants in the U.S. had already begun to send word-of-mouth messages back home that job opportunities in the U.S. were drying up. As a result, immigration from Mexico -- the country responsible for about a third of all immigration to the U.S. -- began a steep decline and is now down overall by about 40 percent. And according to estimates from Mexico's National Survey of Employment and Occupation, Mexicans have been returning home at a rate of more than 400,000 a year since 2006, at the very time that fewer Mexicans have been choosing to leave Mexico for the U.S.

Conservatism's Next Coming

WASHINGTON -- Was I wrong about him? I have voiced a low opinion of the Hon. Newt Gingrich since the mid-1990s. It was then that I concluded Newt was the Republican equivalent of Boy Clinton. That is to say, Newt was a 1960s narcissist of the student government variety. A rather good book on these two lovable lugs, "The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry That Defined a Generation," by historian Steven M. Gillon, confirmed my assessment, right down to their early campaigns as campus Machiavels when the rest of us were drinking beer and avoiding the library. Yet possibly I was wrong about Newt, or possibly he has grown. The other day in The Good Times -- also known as The Washington Times -- Newt published a very important piece revealing that Newt has given sustained intelligent thought to the Prophet Obama's present Carousel of Incompetence. Newt is not the only observer to recognize that we face four years of high seas, after which a Reagan or a Roosevelt (any Roosevelt) will be exigent. Even the left is catching on. Recently in the U.K., Steven Hill, writing in the left-wing Guardian, lamented: "Beyond Obama's oratorical skills, which excited not only American voters but people all over the world, he is mostly untested as a politician. His previous experience was only a few years in the US Senate and a few years more as a state senator. A sinking feeling is arising (can a sinking feeling arise?) among many that President Obama may not be up to the task." Hill's gloomy appraisal reminds me of me ... and of Newt.

The Letter Joe Wilson Should Write

Dear Madame Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, I apologized to President Obama for my "you lie" outburst during his recent speech. The President immediately accepted my apology. Yet you and nearly all members of your party in the House of Representatives demanded that I make yet another apology from the floor of the House. I refused and then received an admonishment by resolution -- passed almost completely down party lines. Now it's your turn, Madame Speaker. I invite you and others in your party to apologize publicly to former President George W. Bush for vicious, personal and frequently race-based attacks. "Bush is an incompetent leader," you said of the then-sitting president. "In fact, he's not a leader. He's a person who has no judgment, no experience and no knowledge of the subjects that he has to decide upon." If a Republican --especially a Southerner -- attacked Obama that way, former President Jimmy Carter would call him or her a racist. Apologize, Madame Speaker.

Mandatory Insurance: Yes, It’s a Tax

Liberal Lies About National Health Care, Part 5

(15) Democrats lost Congress in 1994 because President Clinton failed to pass national health care. I'm not sure if this is another example of the left's wishful-thinking method of analysis or if they're seriously trying to trick the Blue Dog Democrats into believing it. But I gather liberals consider the 1994 argument an important point because it was on the front page of The New York Times a few weeks ago in place of a story about Van Jones or ACORN. According to a news story by Jackie Calmes: "In 1994, Democrats' dysfunction over fulfilling a new president's campaign promise contributed to the party's loss of its 40-year dominance of Congress." That's not the way I remember it. The way I remember it, Republicans swept Congress in 1994 not because Clinton failed to nationalize health care, but because he tried to nationalize health care. HillaryCare failed because most Americans didn't want it. (For more on this, see "ObamaCare.")

GOP Return to Power Could Be Swift

The D.C. pundits think they have it nailed. Sure President Obama and the Democrats have slipped from their mighty post-election high approval ratings. But the Republicans have no message and no candidates, and are a party that has allowed itself to become marginalized because of an over-reliance on the support of Southern whites. Wrong. For starters, no Republican has a prayer of capturing the White House without running the table of some large Southern states. Florida, Virginia and North Carolina all went for George W. Bush in 2004 and then for Barack Obama four years later. Recapture these states, and a Republican nominee is halfway to winning in 2012. So dismissing the importance of Southern support for the GOP is misguided analysis. The region is their base, and no party wins without first holding its base.

Obama's Time Warp: The U.S. Is Still the Bad Guy

In the early 1980s, while planning a vacation in Latin America, I went to bookstores to look for histories of the region. All I could find were Marxist tracts arguing that "the people" were exploited by greedy corporations and military dictators, all propped up by the United States. Available literature on Latin America today includes much more sensible accounts. But some people, including Barack Obama, whose college thesis written in those years has never been made public, seem stuck in a time warp in which the United States is the bad guy. That, at least, seems to explain Obama's latest foreign policy moves, starting with Honduras, where the president was ousted by the country's supreme court for violating a constitutional provision that forbids any moves to seek a second term. (Other Latin countries, notably Mexico, have similar constitutional prohibitions.)

Glenn Beck Explained

"They would not listen, they're not listening still, "Perhaps they never will." -- Don McLean, "Vincent" Radio and TV commentator Glenn Beck was mentioned three times in separate opinion columns on the same day and in an article the next day in The New York Times, possibly a record for someone who does not hold elective office. Oh, and then there's this week's Time magazine cover. He's everywhere. Beck is also the Left's latest explanation for what is wrong with America. Many on the Left believe that if conservatives would just get out of the way, shut up and allow liberals to re-create America in their image, we would all be better off. But those loud-mouthed cable TV and radio talk show hosts keep uneducated, God-worshipping, flag-waving, NASCAR-loving, country music-fueled trailer trash riled up and prevent their brave new world from being born.

A Fishy Tale

California is in an uproar over water. Nearly a quarter-million acres worth of contracted federal irrigation deliveries have been cut from the big farms of the west side of the San Joaquin Valley in central California. The water in large part is being diverted to the salty San Francisco Bay and the delta to improve marine ecology. The result of the cutbacks is that many crops in the San Joaquin Valley have gone unplanted. Farm income is down. Thousands of farm laborers are unemployed. Growers and workers are now livid at environmentalists, federal bureaucrats and judges for worrying more about fish than about people and food growing. Environmentalists counter that the real cause of the cutoff is an ongoing drought. They argue there are too many claims on too little fresh water with no margin of safety in dry years like this one. The problem is not just saving tiny delta smelt or salmon, but a larger one of living within our means and not polluting our fragile ecosystem. Emotion colors the arguments of both sides. The west side is not yet a "dust bowl," as claimed on Fox News, and San Francisco Bay and the delta will not turn stagnant, as some environmentalists fret. The majority of west-side land is still farmed, and the bay is far cleaner than it was decades ago.

Does Cost of Uncompensated Care Justify Forcing People to Buy Insurance?

At a July press conference, President Obama claimed "the average American family is paying thousands of dollars in hidden costs" because uncompensated health care for the uninsured drives up the price of medical coverage. In an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, by contrast, he said uncompensated care costs the average family $900. According to a 2008 report from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, both of those estimates are way off. The foundation's analysis indicates that the true annual cost per family is more like $200, with uncompensated care accounting for "less than 1 percent of private health insurance costs." These numbers are important because the president's main justification for requiring every American to buy health insurance, a central element of his reform plan, is that uninsured people unfairly impose costs on their fellow citizens. That rationale not only has a weak empirical basis, it conceals the real motivation for the individual insurance mandate, while dodging moral and constitutional questions about it.

A Willowy Weakness

WASHINGTON -- While in Pittsburgh, a sense of seemliness should prevent President Barack Obama from again exhorting the G-20, as he did April 2 in London, to be strong in resisting domestic pressures for protectionism. This month, invertebrate as he invariably is when organized labor barks, he imposed 35 percent tariffs on imports of tires that China makes for the low-price end of the market. This antic nonsense matters not only because of trade disruptions it may cause, but also because it is evidence of his willowy weakness under pressure from his political patrons. In 2000, as a price of China's admission to the World Trade Organization, Congress enacted a provision for "relief from market disruption" to American industries from surges of Chinese imports. Actually, American consumers cause "disruption" in American markets when their preferences change in response to progress -- better products and bargains. Never mind. Congress said disruption exists whenever imports of a product "like or directly competitive with" a U.S. product increase "rapidly" and threaten "significant" injury to a U.S. industry. Evidence of disruption includes the volume of imports of a particular product, the effect of imports on the prices of competing U.S. goods, and the effect on the U.S. industry.

Omnipresent Obama

Following his usual mantra that "to watch me is to love me," Barack Obama appeared on five Sunday interview shows and since that wasn't enough, then the David Letterman show on Monday night. He remains convinced that the more he plays dust speck in the national eye, the further he'll get in passing his leftist agenda. He's also confident our media won't hold him accountable. They just hold him. "I can't tell you how satisfying it is to watch you work!" a beaming Letterman gushed to Obama. Even during that show, Letterman was still whacking away at George W. Bush as an idiot, unctuously currying favor with the new president. Letterman doesn't pretend to be an objective journalist, of course. But can you recall him ever voicing his satisfaction with conservatives? Perhaps the most amazing thing Obama did -- over and over -- on Sunday was to scold the media for making the national dialogue coarser by allowing his critics to have a voice on the networks. "Let's face it, the easiest way to get on television right now is to be really rude," he said.

Lying Propaganda

Michael Moore's new film, "Capitalism: A Love Story" will be released next month. I've neither seen nor read reviews of the film, except for a short piece in the London Telegraph (9/6/09) titled "Michael Moore film calls capitalism evil." Aware of Michael Moore's previous films, I know that it will be at best a misleading story about capitalism. So let's do some defensive mental preparation, not about the film but what is and what is not capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private ownership and control over the means of production. The distribution of goods and services and their prices are mainly determined by competition in a free market. Under such a system the primary job of government is to protect private property, enforce contracts and ensure rule of law.

Still Handling Homeland Security With a 9/10 Attitude

Terror suspect Najibullah Zazi has done us all a favor. But is it enough to rouse a nation in permanent snooze-button mode? The arrest of Zazi, a Colorado-based Afghan airport shuttle driver who counterterrorism officials believe may have been plotting bomb attacks on New York City mass transit trains, raised alerts on rail lines across the country. A joint FBI-Department of Homeland Security assessment issued Monday warned law enforcement agencies about the use of improvised explosive devices against passenger trains overseas. Zazi was allegedly trained in manufacturing liquid explosives with hydrogen peroxide -- the same material used in the London subway attacks in 2005. FBI/DHS analysts have recommended random sweeps and patrols at rail stations and terminals as deterrents. The bust reminded America that while the annual September 11 memorials are over, the jihadi threat looms. Yet, homeland security remains crippled by a 9/10 mentality. Remember: The New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the New York Police Department a few years ago to try to stop random bag searches. The civil liberties absolutists are against random searches because they constitute "unreasonable" invasions of privacy. They're against targeted searches because they amount to racial, religious or ethnic "profiling." And they're against across-the-board searches because they lack "individualized suspicion."