Right Opinion

The Mainstream Media's Temper Tantrum

With the resignation of green czar Van Jones despite their efforts to protect him, the mainstream media have finally been reduced to sputtering incoherence, as they've observed the un-deification of their anointed messiah and experienced firsthand their own diminishing relevance. The MSM are engaging in a colossal temper tantrum over their lost news monopoly -- a monopoly they forfeited through their bias, arrogance and self-imposed insulation. (Consider Rathergate and their shameless effort to "Swift boat" the Swift boaters, to name a few.) This is an especially hard pill for them to swallow considering that during the past year, they've been stewing in the intoxicating delusion that they were again supreme, as they appeared to be getting away with their conspiratorial enthroning of King Barack Obama. And they're not handling rejection well.

Teacher Tenure Must Go

Brandi Scheiner believes she is a political prisoner. Held against her will in what is euphemistically dubbed a "rubber room," Scheiner, 56, likens her two-year captivity to being imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. Alas, it's unlikely the Red Cross will hear her case. She's a New York City public school teacher who, like about 600 fellow NYC teachers, has been removed from the classroom for alleged incompetence or other charges that include being drunk in the classroom or molesting students.

Drug Control Becomes Speech Control

When the government accuses a doctor of running a "pill mill," prosecutors portray every aspect of his practice in a sinister light. Prescribing painkillers becomes drug trafficking, applying for insurance reimbursement becomes fraud, making bank deposits becomes money laundering and working with people at the office becomes conspiracy. When Siobhan Reynolds thinks a doctor has been unfairly targeted for such a prosecution, she tries to counter the official narrative by highlighting the patients he has helped and dramatizing the conflict between drug control and pain control. But now the government has turned its reinterpretive powers on Reynolds, portraying the pain treatment activist's advocacy as obstruction of justice and thereby threatening the freedom of anyone who dares to suggest there is more than one side to a criminal case.

Demasculation of America's Boys

Every time I write about how the modern culture seems dead-set on destroying the confidence of America's little boys, I am swamped with e-mail. It seems that everyone with a son or grandson has a story to tell about how manhood and chivalry are under attack. Last week I heard from a dad, Bill, who echoes the sentiments of many: "The boys are getting emasculated and wimpy/passive as they're now intimidated by girls due to fear of sex harassment charges and pro-female/anti male societal/educational tilts." Sadly, he's right. As a mom of two sons and a youth leader I have seen how boys cringe when television shows depict boys as crude and stupid while the girls are always smart and powerful. I've experienced their confusion when girls snub them for opening the door. One day I observed the pained looks on the faces of male highschool students when a teacher explained that a major assignment would be to watch a movie of their choice and write a paper on how women in the film are discriminated against.

Listening to a Liar

The most important thing about what anyone says are not the words themselves but the credibility of the person who says them. The words of convicted swindler Bernie Madoff were apparently quite convincing to many people who were regarded as knowledgeable and sophisticated. If you go by words, you can be led into anything. No doubt millions of people will be listening to the words of President Barack Obama Wednesday night when he makes a televised address to a joint session of Congress on his medical care plans. But, if they think that the words he says are what matters, they can be led into something much worse than being swindled out of their money.

Obama Cannot Escape Hard Choices in September

"Very active." That's what White House aides say Barack Obama is going to be this month. That's probably an understatement. Obama faces September deadlines on three issues, on each of which he could get himself in political trouble, not only with those on the right and center but also those on the political left. Only one of those issues is domestic: health care. Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress, scheduled rather hastily for Wednesday night, gives him a chance to turn around public opinion, which has been going against his policies, and to generate something like the enthusiasm his candidacy created last year.

A Bad Sign - Illegal Immigrants Are Leaving

Too Much Gained in Afghanistan To Exit Now

As he campaigned for the presidency, Sen. Barack Obama argued that Afghanistan should become "the central front in the battle against terrorism." Obama has delivered on that issue. U.S. troop levels have more than doubled since the beginning of a troop buildup first begun under President George W. Bush. The price for that promise is not cheap. For the moment, more troops mean more combat. As Institute for the Study of War President Kimberly Kagan noted at a Brookings Institute event last month, "As those new troops come in, as we have seen, violence will go up. They did so in Iraq. They will do so in Afghanistan because we are going into areas that the enemy effectively has controlled. So we mustn't conflate or confuse a rise in violence with success or failure."

The Jobless Recovery

The jobless-recovery theme re-emerged on Friday with the arrival of a disappointing employment report. The daunting number was the unemployment rate, which jumped from 9.4 percent in July to 9.7 percent in August. This is a big-versus-small-business issue. Sort of the haves versus the have-nots. The large companies are gradually recovering as a result of major cost-cutting, inventory reduction, and a lean-and-mean return to profitability and high productivity. So the payroll survey registered a 216,000 job loss, the smallest drop in over a year.

Trials and the Celebrity-in-Chief

They're all over him -- swarms, flocks, flights of critics taking apart President Obama: his style, his motives, his modus operandi, assuming he has one. Charles Krauthammer, in a dead-on column, called him "Obama the Mortal." Peggy Noonan, in the Wall Street Journal, sought to close the deal: "Obama has grown boring . He always has the same stance. There is no humor or humility in it . He is cold ." Cries of alarm escaped the mouth of Time Magazine's Joe Klein: "He has to lead, clearly and decisively, starting now." How's he going to restore his sagging popularity and procure enactment of health care reform? Well, we'll see. There's a lot more out there to look at, even so. What we see, when we really look hard, are the consequences of celebrity politics. In naming Obama their chief magistrate, American voters handed over their credit cards for a pig in a poke -- as, by the way, they had been warned along the way to avoid doing. They no more knew how Obama would perform, than they knew why real estate prices were collapsing.

No Requiem for a Twitching Corpse

All but hidden in the fulsome eulogies for Ted Kennedy lurk a few serious ideas worthy of more than romancing history or waxing sentimental over a death in a famous family. These ideas are about the very nature of liberalism and conservatism, the connections between personal virtue and public morality, and how emotion shapes ideology. The passing of "the last liberal lion" comes amidst a national debate over health care "reform" that grows fiercer by the day. President Obama, who has tried to stand above the messy details of whatever emerges from Congress -- tacking first left, then right, then left again -- is about to tack this time into the fray. But there's scant room left above the fray. Two books, one a reissue of a minor classic, illustrate how and why. The president, like the rest of us, could usefully make room on his bedside table for both of them.

Moving in Mysterious Ways

I was stunned to read on Life Site News that a new movie is being planned about Our Lady of Guadalupe, so-named for an appearance of the Virgin Mary near Mexico City in 1531 that's credited with converting 9 million indigenous Mexicans to Christianity. The film, still untitled, will be produced by Mpower Pictures, the company that was launched with the pro-life movie "Bella" in 2006 and founded by "The Passion of the Christ" producer Steve McEveety. That a movie would be made about Our Lady of Guadalupe is amazing, but that wasn't half the surprise. The movie is being written by Joe Eszterhas. Yes, the same Joe Eszterhas responsible for screenwriting filthy movies like "Basic Instinct" and most infamously, "Showgirls," a movie so pornographic even the late Jack Valenti condemned it.

No Compromise, No Retreat, No Surrender

The key to stopping Obama's far-left agenda is to understand where his heart is. If politicians let their guard down and compromise, the Obama steamroller will regain its momentum and forge ahead to gobble up our individual liberties. Obama's heart is and always has been on the farthest reaches of the left wing of politics. His driving ambition is to force fundamental change on America. That should go without saying, but it must be repeated -- and repeated -- lest people's forgiving spirits and short memories generate just enough complacency to allow Obama to get back on track. It is remarkable that Obama has lost public favor so quickly. But the other side of that coin is that he is receiving a wake-up call early enough in his first term to allow him to recover well in time for the crucial 2010 elections.

What Obama Could Say To Get Our Respect

As Democratic congressmen limp back to D.C. after bruising town hall meetings, and polls show Obama and the Democrats in Congress sinking fast in public opinion polls, the political team in the West Wing has surveyed the landscape and decided that what we need is another big Obama speech. "Under Fire" headlined The Politico, "Obama Shifts Strategy." Shifts? Obama has held four full-dress, primetime news conferences, granted God knows how many interviews, and delivered dozens and dozens of speeches on health care. A cartoonist featured an exasperated voter looking at the president on TV and asking, "Is he on again?" Still, another speech could be helpful -- if President Obama says something different.

Mistrusting the Media

When it comes to politicians' foibles and faux pas, the mainstream media's double standard is nothing new, but the Washington Post's recent coverage of the Virginia governor's race takes the cake. Republican gubernatorial candidate and current State Attorney General Bob McDonnell has been trouncing his Democratic opponent, State Sen. Creigh Deeds, in the polls for much of the campaign. So the Post has now dredged up a 20-year-old academic paper McDonnell wrote for a conservative Christian college in which he condemns homosexual behavior, criticizes feminism for being anti-family, and questions the effect on the family of the mass movement of women into the workforce.

The Labor Theory of Value

The old man had long ago given up fixing shoes and tried other occupations, but always at the same location, and usually with the same customers. But he never found any other work that gave him as much satisfaction as putting new soles on a pair of old uppers. Or a pair of Cat's Paw heels on shoes that still had a lot of good wear left in them. You could be sure he'd do the job neatly, surely, carefully -- to last. He loved the feel and aroma of new leather, the grain in the old. He was seldom as happy as when he could hold a pair of weathered shoes in his hands, turn them over and over, feel the tread, admire the workmanship ... and judge whether they were worth saving. Labor omnia vincit.

Why Parents Don't Trust the Educator-in-Chief and His Comrades

They think we're crazy. "They" are the sneering defenders of Barack Obama who can't fathom the backlash against the president's nationwide speech to schoolchildren next Tuesday. "We" are parents with eyes wide open to the potential for politicized abuse in America's classrooms. Ask moms and dads in Farmington, Utah, who discovered this week that their children sat through a Hollywood propaganda video promoting the cult of Obama. In the clip, a parade of entertainers vow to flush their toilets less, buy hybrid vehicles, end poverty and world hunger, and commit to "service" for "change." Actress Demi Moore leads the glitterati in a collective promise "to be a servant to our president." Musician Anthony Kiedis pledges "to be of service to Barack Obama."

Obama, the Mortal

WASHINGTON -- What happened to President Obama? His wax wings having melted, he is the man who fell to earth. What happened to bring his popularity down further than that of any new president in polling history save Gerald Ford (post-Nixon pardon)? The conventional wisdom is that Obama made a tactical mistake by farming out his agenda to Congress and allowing himself to be pulled left by the doctrinaire liberals of the Democratic congressional leadership. But the idea of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi pulling Obama left is quite ridiculous. Where do you think he came from, this friend of Chavista ex-terrorist William Ayers, of PLO apologist Rashid Khalidi, of racialist inciter Jeremiah Wright?

More Cowbell ... er, Obama

ABC News reports that Barack Obama has returned to Washington, only to step off the plane and "into his next domestic crisis." He "planned to leave the details of health care reform to Congress, but today the White House says he'll play a much stronger role." The Associated Press says Obama is "backing away" from his "'it's-all-on-the-table' approach" and is "prepared to get louder and more involved in the details of a health care overhaul." "This weekend," NBC Nightly News explained in its lead story, "the president signaled an aggressive stance to put his personal stamp on the sweeping legislation."

A Loss of Will on Afghanistan

WASHINGTON -- We are seeing the stirrings of a cross-ideological revolt against American military involvement in Afghanistan. On the right, some who accepted the Cold War as a great moral cause view the war on terror as a bother -- even as a dangerous excuse for global social engineering. Such tinkering, the argument goes, is particularly doomed in Afghanistan, brimming with warlords both primitive and invincible. And because Afghanistan is now Barack Obama's war, no partisan motive remains to support it.