105 articles
In September, President Clinton discovered a rare patch of common ground with the Speaker of the House. All public schools, the president proclaimed, ought to be linked to the Internet by the year 2000. Newt Gingrich has been extolling the educational virtues of the Net for months. Want to learn…
I do a lot of television, but there's a world of difference between a public-affairs program and a network sitcom. The tipoff for me came shortly after I showed up on October 17 at the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank ;to rehearse for an appearance on Murphy Brown. A fellow asked me if I'd brought my…
Republicans in Florida are saying that the big news, come Nov. 18, could be Lamar Alexander. That day, 3,700 delegates show up in Orlando for Presidency III, the strange name the state party is giving to its straw poll, and private polling shows a tight race between the struggling Alexander,…
"If there is peace, peacekeepers are unnecessary. And if there is war, peacekeepers are unavailing."
Bill Clinton's repudiation of his own 1993 tax increase, and then his semi- repudiation of his repudiation, again reveal his increasingly bizarre weakness for the unnecessary lie. Faced with a roomful of rich people in Texas last week, the president decided, as is his wont, to demonstrate his…
Apparently, Baltimore merchants are angry because the pop just didn't sell like he was supposed to when he camto Charm City for a mass the other week. " If it was 350,000, none of them came to the harbor," restaurateur Yogi Kumar told the Washington Post. "We lost a lot of money and a lot of food."…
Just how bad are things for the Democrats? In an Oct. 19 appearance on Larry King Live, Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, discussed Bosnia and American race relations. The show starring this less than dynamic duo would have…
THE FACT THAT THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE has been awarded to an individual who heads an organization that long seemed to serve the interests of the Soviet Union shouldn't surprise. This isn't the first time the prize has been conferred on folks who didn't mind carrying water for Moscow. What's curious,…
ICE COLD SLUSH, read a large sign on a food stand directly outside Blackpool's Wintergardens auditorium, where Britain's Corlservative party met for its seventeenth annual conference since coming to power. Nothing better described the speeches inside the hall.
George Orwell once said (we paraphrase) that some ideas are so stupid, only an intellectual could believe them. Here are three works that put intellectuals in their place:
George Gilder calls the networked computer "a powerful force for democracy, individuality, community, and high culture." Newt Gingrich boasts that THOMAS, the Library of Congress's online system, will shift political clout "toward the citizens and out of the Beltway" because, after all, " knowledge…
Four days after O.J. Simpson's acquittal, Jack F. Kemp went on Meet the Press a'nd talked about the delirious joy with which" certain blacks greeted the verdict. "! am convxnced, said Kemp, "that a lot of the black experience, arid a lot of black people, cheered for the reason that . . . this…
This week, several hundred of the sort of people Harry Truman would likely have cursed as "bloodsuckers" on one of his intemperate days will pay upwards of $ 1,000 per ticket to attend a black-tie fundraiser for the Truman Library at the National Building Museum in Washington. The dinner is iust…
The battle for congressional term limits was lost this year, on two fronts. In the House of Representatives, four versions of a constitutional amendment to limit congressional tenure went down to defeat. Soon after, the Supreme Court, in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, struck down the attempt…
Twenty-five years ago, the Stephen Sondheim musical Company opened on Broadway, and made a sensation. Company has now returned to Broadway for the first time in a revival at the Roundabout Theater. But something interesting happened in the years between the two productions: Broadway died. And one…
In a seedy attempt to sully the Clinton's pro-family credentials, the Manchester Guardian announced in a recent headline: "Clintons Are Playing The Family Card." The article suggested that the First Couple's use of Dan Quayle-like terminology during the Beijing maelstrom was an eelish ploy to ward…
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY may not be as libertarian as it seemed a few months ago. Just after the November election, sweeping anti-government rhetoric was the order of the day, and controversial libertarian ideas went unchallenged. Among these was the idea that if government would just get out of the…
All good men despise him, but the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, peerless master of demagoguery's magic arts, has already defeated them. And they do not know it. A week ago Sunda ABC's Sam Donaldson asked the cleric about President Clinton's reluctance to endorse the Nation of Islam-sponsored…
SAN FRANCISCO'S "PRE-ELECTION symposium" on Oct. 9 -- not a debate, please, that's too tacky -- was everything you might have expected: politically correct, unapologetically liberal, and occasionally bizarre. The incumbent sheriff told the crowd that one reason he should be re-elected was the great…
EARLIER THIS MONTHA LITTLE-KNOWN Washington advocacy group called the Sentencing Project released a report with an unassuming title: "Young Black Americans and the Criminal Justice System." The 30-page study began with a simple but disturbing claim: "Almost one in three (32.2 percent) young black…
Amidst metal chairs and rec-center acoustics in a frat house basement along a roughneck patch of northeast D.C., an alliance of Washington-area groups called the Youth Organizers Committee is about to announce its solidarity with Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March -- his invitation for black men…
The presidency is as important to Americans symbolically as in its practical power. This is why matters of character and personality have loomed large in the public's assessment of candidates for the office. While we often haven't found the desired mix, we've consistently sought presidents to be…
Janos Starker, the great Hungarian cellist, struck a memorable blow for a precious freedom now under assault -- smoking. Last year, he traveled to Columbia, S.C., to conduct a master class at the university there and play the Elgar Concerto with the South Carolina Philharmonic. Because the concert…
As the Ryder Cup unfolded on television a few weeks ago, my thoughts turned naturally to the differences between patriotism and nationalism. Whose didn't?
That was some debate they had up there in Concord, N.H., last week on television station WMUR. Actually, it wasn't a debate. It was a forum. Actually, it wasn't a forum; it was a chance for WMUR political reporter Carl Cameron to watch as the candidates kowtowed before him. And it resembled nothing…
THE DEMOCRATS' LAST HOPE may be a middle-aged mother from the Rust Belt. She is Debbie Stabenow, a 45-year-old career state legislator who traveled last week from her Michigan home to the Democratic National Headquarters in Washington, D.C., to consider a run for Congress. "I've never been afraid…
Any organization that horrifies the kind of people who embrace seat belt laws and Big Mac nutritional labels has a corkscrew appeal for those who delight in tweaking liberal sensibilities. But aside from the pleasure of an alliance with a group considered positively Satanic by their common…
SENATE REPUBLICANS, never particularly unified, can't make up their minds about the size, shape, and timing of tax cuts this year. They considered a scheme to make some of the curs temporary, quickly abandoned the idea, then on October 12 decided to look at the scheme again. No Republican is in…
Today, our culture is far less likely to raise up heroes than it is to exalt victims -- individuals who are overcome by the sting of oppression, injustice, adversity, neglect, or misfortune. Today, it seems that those who have succumbed to their circumstances are more likely to be singled out than…
Those who enjoyed the March and Louis Farrakhan's role in it so very much can always keep that special feeling alive through the pleasures of video rentals. Some recommendations:
This is a message for a group of people more often spoken of than spoken to. As the dust settles from the march on Washington asserting the dignity of African American males generally, this is meant in particular for you -- for unemployed black men.
PRESIDENT CLINTON OUGHT TO BE deliriously happy about the Republican response to his plan for deploying as many as 25,000 soldiers in Bosnia as peacekeepers.
Since we are supposed to say that the ostensible goals of the Million Man March are laudable, here are some books the marchers might want to read if they genuinely wish to assert and accept their responsibilities as men and fathers:
Everybody knows Colin Powell is a popular guy. But how strong is he as a presidential candidate when matched one-on-one against the Republican party's top sluggers, Bob Dole and Phil Gramm? Ed Goeas of the Tarrance Group found out for us. In a national survey in early October, Goeas asked…
"You know you're absolutely gonna be gay when . . . your third-grade teacher asks you for decorating tips."
The humanities and social sciences are sinking into linguistic obscurity. This complaint is largely the province of conservatives, who relentlessly parade excerpts from current scholarly books and journals and ask, "Is this English?"
Demi Moore has large breasts, and she loves to show them. Why shouldn't she? They're not really hers anyway, since they are less the handiwork of God than Dow Corning, Inc., makers of the silicone-gel packet. Besides which, Moore plainly says that her willingness to bare all -- or, at least, every…
IN A CRAMPED WORKSHOP just a few miles off the coast of China, Wu Zen- tung takes an old bomb fragment and within minutes has hammered it into a sleek kitchen knife. The bomb dates from 1958, when Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces managed to hold onto Quemoy, the little Taiwanese outpost that…
Due to an error by the printer, two lines were dropped from last week's memoir, "My Friend, Allan Bloom," by Werner J. Dannhauser. The paragraph at the end of page 45 should have read as follows:
This summer, the House of Representatives moved to cut or eliminate some 130 education programs. Some, however, were so sacrosanct that even the energized Republican budget-slashers let them be. The Even Start Family Literacy Program, beloved by politicians in both parties, survived the brutal…
President Clinton has announced this year's winners of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and (as is true of all administrations) the list is a distillation of the social and cultural attitudes of the White House. This year's honorees include Earth Day creator Gaylord Nelson, liberal historian John…
It's hard to think of a place that needs school reform more than Washington, D.C. -- or a place that seems less likely to get it. Washington's school system, you'll remember, is the one that doesn't seem to know how many students it actually has, the system in which a quarter of school security…
American policy toward Fidel Castro's Cuba could well change dramatically during the next administration, no matter who wins in November 1996. Don't be misled by the lopsided vote in the House last month to tighten the economic embargo against Cuba. This week or next, tile Senate version of that…
He got away with it. O. J. is free to drink his celebratory champagne, despite the mountain of circumstantial evidence that, one night in June 1994, he did corner and knife to death his ex-wife and a young man who chanced upon the scene.
It's horrifying, really, you just have to put it out of your mind, justice has been served, and now the .healing can begin. That was what should follow the O. J. Simpson verdict, according to the practitioners of African- American talk radio in the District of Columbia.
The House Ethics Committee is reportedly seeking a special prosecutor to pursue the case against Speaker Newt Gingrich for committing ethical violations while writing his best-selling book, To Renew America. The thesis is that he improperly used non-partisan funds from the Progress and Freedom…
THE DIE HAS BEEN CAST," Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole said in July after Republicans failed to halt a filibuster against regulatory reform, once a wildly popular item on Congress's agenda. The issue was dead, the victim of extraordinarily intense lobbying by the White House and ideological…
Back in 1955, New Republic drama critic Eric Bentley was actually able to write these words: "I was praised recently for having intimated that thre was too much homosexuality "in current plays, but what I meant to imply was that there was not enough. Having gone so far, our playwrights will have to…
Race trumped gender" -- for me this comment, by a professor of government quoted in the Washington Post, is the most telling observation on the Simpson verdict.
Since the end of the Cold War . . . Is any opening sentence dreaded more by readers of newspapers, magazines, and journals of opinion? After the fall of the Berlin Wall. . . . Synapses freeze, eyes glaze, brain cells die one by one. Where do we find ourselves six years after the breakup of the…
Here's a short primer for a certain acquitted celebrity on what to expect when judgment is finally passed upon him:
In Washington, D. C., last August, a robber held up a McDonald's near Capitol Hill and killed three employees. A fourth was saved only because the robber's gun was empty when he aimed at her and twice pulled the trigger. The assailant fled in the car of one of the victims. Hours later, police…
Where is the outrage? It's there, all right. Most Americans were disgust ed and appalled and angered by the O. J. verdict. But moral outrage at the sigh t of a murderer walking fee is apparently not a respectable sentiment in polite society. At least not on the opinion pages of America's leading…
Remember that question pollster Frank Luntz asked a few months ago about President Clinton -- the one that asked, "Would you want your son or daughter to grow up and be like him?" Seventy-two percent said no. Well, we asked Luntz to broaden the question: If you had your choice, would you rather…
For or whites, the racial gulf in America has never felt so wide these past 20 years or more -- how can most American blacks believe (or say they believe) that O. J. Simpson is innocent of a crime science tells us there is a one-in-a-billion chance he did not commit? What is to be done?
People who don't follow the Cleveland Indians baseball team too closely were introduced to Jose Mesa last week when he strode to the mound in the first game of the American League division series. Mesa is the hard-throwing Indians "closer" -- a pitcher brought into a game in the late innings to…
Harvard University prides itself on its excellence and selectivity, so it's not especially newsworthy when its government department rejects a candidate for graduate-school admission. But Brett Gerry isn't just any applicant. He had a 4.04 grade point average at Colgate University and scored at the…
I like rock and roll, especially Bob Seger, Bob Dylan, and Ray Charles. My son Freddy, 10, also likes rock and roll, especially R.E.M, FIootie and the Blowfish, and Blues Traveler. So when we went to Cleveland in September to see an Indians-Red Sox baseball game, we dropped by the just-opened Rock…
Back in August, you will recall, Ross Perot, ostentatiously concerned to make the two-party system work, issued another peep from his magic flute and summoned a zombie-like procession of leading American political figures to prostrate themselves before a poorly attended meeting of his ragtag…
The agreement Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasir Arafat signed to a chorus of hosannas last week is principally concerned with the material assets Israel is handing over to the Palestinians: military installations, strategic terrain, water.
ON OCTOBER 5, a 75-year-old Pole dressed in the manner of a 16th-century Dominican friar will walk with some difficulty to the great marble rostrum of the United Nations General Assembly, there to address the world, or a goodly part of it. Behind this elderly cleric will be arrayed senior U.N.…
On October 5, a 75-year-old Pole dressed in the manner of a 16th-century Dominican friar will walk with some difficulty to the great marble rostrum of the United Nations General Assembly, there to address the world, or a goodly part of it. Behind this elderly cleric will be arrayed senior U.N.…
Noemie Emery's analysis ("Charles, Clinton and the Boomers," Sept. 18) was worth the entire price of a year's subscription. Her economical use of language to present a most astute diagnosis of that generation marks her as not only a professional writer but a penetrating thinker. Whether one agrees…
FOR MONTHS, REPUBLICANS on Capitol Hill complained that "their" Congressional Budget Office wasn't behaving. The CBO had long been a COP bete noire, subject to constant accusations from the right that its supposedly independent studies were cooked for the benefit of the Democrats in charge of the…
President Clinton never lets you down. At a White House luncheon on September 25 with several dozen media friends (and a few critics), he tossed off a fresh whopper. Gays in the military? "Well, to be fair, I didn't take that on," he declared. "That was an issue that was visited on the presidency..…
In a recent episode of Good Morning America, former first child Patti Davis joined host Joan Lunden to talk about her new book, Angels Don't Die: My Father's Gift of Faith. Davis showed aspiring self-promoters how almost any question -- -even those about a dying parent -- -can be turned into a plug…
WHEN THE LADY from the Arkansas chapter of Right to Life called and asked if I would accept its annual award for promoting the cause, I hesitated. Did she know she was talking not to a saint but a sinner? As an editorial writer back in 1973, I had thought -- and written -- that Roe v. Wade sounded…
The first item in your Sept. 18 Scrapbook caught my eye. Your survey asking how parents, if they died, would want their children raised clearly demonstrated the high level of distrust Americans have for the present foster care and welfare systems.
WHY WOULD A UNIVERSITY refuse to celebrate an offer from some of its most devoted alumni to raise $ 20 million or more for its coffers? For reasons of principle, apparently, because the same university sacrificed a $ 20 million gift for precisely the same reason just last year. The university is…
With Pete Wilson's departure from the presidential race, we thought you would like to know what professional political sage Wfiliam Schneider had to say on the subject of Wilson just days before the California governor's pullout. "Wilson has always had a special genius for positioning. That's…
In the substantial introduction to his collection, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Free Press, 493 pages, $30), Irving Kristol ticks off ambient felicities. He ends by remarking happily the political faith of those who surround him. "My son and daughter, and son-in-law and…
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the first issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. In particular, the article by Marshall Wittmann struck a receptive chord (" Coalition Man," Sept. 18).
Stephanie Gutmann's spirited defense of Mel Gibson's penchant for using homosexual characters as comic relief, or, la Braveheart, signifiers of weakness and villainy, was unworthy of your magazine. ("Mel Gibson, One of Us, " Sept. 25.)
I met Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago in 1956, in a class on Plato's Republic. Allan already had his Ph.D. from the university's Committee on Social Thought, but he kept right on coming to classes while teaching adult education courses downtown in the university's Basic Program of Liberal…
NEWT GINGRICH TOOK THE STAGE at Eastern High School in Washington, D.C., this sum- mer to face one of the toughest audiences of his political life: a thousand or so District residents upset about Republican plans to cut the city's budget. The Speaker was there to convince the assembled that the new…
UNTIL THIS YEAR when Hideo Nomo started throwing fastballs for the Los Angeles Dodgers, most Americans couldn't even name a single Japanese citizen. A recent public opinion survey named Bruce Lee the single most famous Japanese. Too bad he was Chinese, not to mention dead for two decades now.…
If I had to bet today," writes William Kristol, "I'd put my money on Colin Powell." ("President Powell?" Sept. 18.)
After Ruth Shalit's recent 13,000-word New Republic article, "The Washington Post: In Black and White," about affrmative action at the Post, several fiercely independent writers popped up to discuss the piece -- which meant attacking Ruth Shalit. First the Post's Howie Kurtz weighed in, then the…
Two weeks ago, we asked readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD if they could guess the name of the book we inadvertently left off our first Reading List. It was the fourth novel on a list of great works about money (the other three were The Titan and The Financier, both by Theodore Dreiser, and Framley…
In honor of Ross Perot's return to the presidential stage, here are three works by three authors that remind us, for some reason, of the $ 3 billion man:
The way the media tells it, Republicans on Capitol Hill are producing more change than the public wants. Or as Vice President A1 Gore explains, everything Newt and Company are doing is "extremist." We asked pollsters Fred Steeper and Steve Lombardo of Market Strategies to check on this. So in late…
Speaking of the New Republic, its most recent issue expresses concern that because Rupert Murdoch has business dealings with China, THE WEEKLY STANDARD will pull its punches with respect to that regime: "We'll be watching for the STANDARD'S hard-hitting attacks on the Communist tyrants in…
Last week was Banned Book Week in Washington, whose ostensible purpose is to celebrate freedom of speech. So why, at Borders Books downtown, could Dinesh D'Souza's The End of Racism not be found?
Even for a politician, the story Bill Clinton spun this spring when he visited Des Moines to shore up support in the Farm Belt was a lulu. "I am the only president," he said, "who knew something about agriculture when I got there?
Read the Explosive New Conservative Affirmation by one of the most controversial thinkers of our time! No writer is as bold! Makes P. J. O'Rourke look like a weenie! Here are six excerpts from a recent Washington Post piece that will blow your socks off:
At long last, with Jerry Garcia gone, the book is now shut on the Sixties -- or so it's been said in no fewer than 54 news stories describing his passing as the "end of an era."
Sources tell THE WEEKLY STANDARD that Massachusetts Gov. William Weld will announce in the next two weeks a race against Sen. John Kerry in 1996. As a result, Weld will say, he's resigning his duties as finance chairman of the Pete Wilson for President campaign. This new nail in Wilson's coffin…
If the California Civil Rights Initiative were in a popularity contest, the judges cbuld go ahead and hand out the award. As inititives go, CCRI -- which would ban race and gender lreferences in state employment, education, and contrating -- is very popular, popular enough to receive a 63 percent…
POST-COLD-WAR COMM1E UPDATE: Hundreds of Russians demonstrated outside the U. S. embassy in Moscow last week in protest of NATO actions in the former Yugoslavia. Soviet flags were unfurled, and placards hoisted that read "We will bury you, America" -- a touching echo of Nikita Krushchev's most…
There' s been talk among Jessie Jackson supporters that a run for presid ent m 1996 would be a great way for Jackson to help the Democratic Party -- not by winning but by energizing borderline Congressional districts and helping Democrats take the House of Representatives back. Of course the…
I was in Tupelo, Mississippi, for the big George Jones and Tammy Wynette reunion and saw right away that the whole thing was going to work out badly for the president and Mrs. Clinton and that' there was nothing David Gergen, even the new and improved Gergen, Dick Morris, could do about it.
As Donnie Graham and Pinch Sulzberger congratulate themselves for thdir decision to accommodate a murderer, here are two great novels they mi ght consider reading if they actually want to understand the mind of a psychotic revolutionary:
AT 9:30 P.M. ON SEPTEMBER 20, Newt Gingrich met with Republican Reps. David Mcintosh, Ernest Istook, and Robert Ehrlich to discuss their fear that Gingrich might compromise away their measure to curb political advocacy by groups that receive federal money. The issue, dubbed "welfare for lobbyists,"…
In the late 70s I was working as an editor in a publishing house whose special claim to fame was that it made serious profit from serious books.
If you believe, as we do, that affrmative action is inconsistent with common fairness, and has become irrelevant to the problems of race it was created to address, then perhaps you are disheartened these days. Just a few short months ago there existed a very real prospect of significant reform. But…
Like all actors these days, Elizabeth Berkley is a student of the human condition, engaged in diligent research that might deepen her artistic understanding. And so when she won the role of the professional stripper Nomi in Showgirls, the big-budget "adults-only" movie that opened to much fanfare…
THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT -- already notorious for creating super -gerrymandered congressional districts and an unusual alliance between the Republican party and the Congressional Black Caucus -- may soon produce its strangest progeny: prison voting booths.
BOTH REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS are predicting the federal government will undergo a "train wreck" this fall -- a temporary widespread shutdown due to a lack of funding. Once President Clinton and the Republican Congress come to terms on the budget, the "wreck" will be over, and the bureaucrats will…
AS ADVANCE PUBLICITY GOES, Maureen Dowd's column on Malcolm "Steve" Forbes, Jr., the billionaire magazine publisher who announced for the presidency Sept. 22, wasn't the best the candidate could have hoped for. Writing in the New York Times last month, Dowd described the 48-year-old Forbes as…
ECONOMIC CONSULTANTS Jeffrey Bell and John Mueller broke a taboo when they met in mid-September with the National Commission on Economic Growth and Tax Reform, better known as the Kemp Commission. They raised the issue of the middle class squeeze, the stagnation of average Americans' wages for the…
AT A WASHINGTON STRATEGY SESSION for conservatives last week, Paul Weyri ch was pounding the table about the disasters attendant upon the Republic shoul d a lobbying reform defr to right-wing hearts fail in Congress. The next day, L amar Alexander came to the Cato Inst itute to declare that the…