64 articles
CANDIDATE BILL CLINTON'S RALLYING CRY was that America needed "the courage to change." After four years of George Bush, who could have argued? President Bill Clinton, apparently. Last week the White House released a 50-page manifesto listing 82 reasons for the president's veto of the GOP balanced…
The French, always on guard for infections of Englishism on their precious corps culturel, have suffered another blow. An international study of basic literacy, conducted by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, has ranked France last among seven Western…
ON THE EVENING OF DECEMBER 13, with the Senate tied in knots over the deployment of 20,000 American troops to Bosnia, Majority Leader Bob Dole shuttled back and forth from his second-floor Capitol office to the Senate floor, working to ease political tensions. Legislation that would have blocked…
IT'S OFFICIAL. JOHNNIE COCHRAN is now a society and media darling, virtue incarnate, a double-breasted, hand-tailored Atticus Finch, having garnered the Turner Broadcasting Trumpet Award, the Black United Fund's pioneer award, and even, rumor has it, consideration for Time's Man of the Year.
If ever there was evidence that the United States is hypersensitive to political corruption, it came with the Dec. 6 announcement that a special counsel would begin examining whether House Speaker Newt Gingrich breached the tax code when he used tax-deductible contributions to underwrite his…
A week after last month's government shutdown, 200-some federal workers flew at public expense to Orlando, Florida, home of Disney World. The ostensible purpose of the junket was a (week-long) "training workshop."
Democratic Rep. Robert Torricelli of New Jersey inaugurated his campaign for the Senate seat being vacated by Bill Bradley at an elementary school in his home town. But, according to the Associated Press, the sixth-grade students in the audience "became distracted when one of them threw up during…
THE WEEKLY STANDARD has obtained a Nov. 21 memorandum from Harvard University's government department chairman, Kenneth Shepsle, that attempts to answer questions about the department's use of quotas in admissions that were originally raised in Elena Neuman's Oct. 9 cover story, "Harvard's Sins of…
The Speaker of the House finds himself in an almost unprecedented position these days. Without changing his views, his strategies, or his tactics one iota from his triumphant first hundred days; while holding fast to the principles that helped elect the first House Republican majority in four…
WHAT A DIFFERENCE a few months make. In June, at the G-7 summit in Halifax, incoming French president Jacques Chirac emerged as the star, convincing fellow leaders to push for a new peace initiative in Bosnia. Yet during last week's signing of the Dayton accords at the Elysee Palace in Paris,…
REPUBLICAN GORDON SMITH, running for Bob Packwood's Senate seat in Oregon's special election in January, was defensive on the subject of House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Responding to charges he's an ideological twin of Gingrich, Smith emphasized his differences with the GOP leader. Then Republican Tom…
Arthur Frommer laid out his "do as the Romans do" philosophy of tourism in the 1989 edition of his book New World of Travel: "[Travel] at all price ranges is scarcely worth the effort unless it is associated with people, with learning and ideas," wrote Frommer, who has published dozens of travel…
A December 5 House committee hearing on race and sex preferences provided a long-overdue opportunity to put egregious quota schemes on trial. Instead, the session (on the Canady-Dole bill, which would ban preferences in federal contracting) turned into an unfortunate object lesson in how not to…
ASKED IN A POLL TAKEN December 6-7 by Yankelovich Partners for Time and CNN how they would vote if the 1996 presidential election "were being held today," 50 percent of respondents said they would support Bill Clinton, just 32 percent Bob Dole. The average of recent polls has Clinton ahead by 10-12…
The Reading List again hangs its head in shame. A correction in last week's issue contained a doozy of a mistake itself: It is not true, as we said, that in the last paragraph of Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief, the hapless newspaperman Boot of the Beast gets cannibalized. In the first place, Boot of…
Editor's Note: We'll be on vacation this week, so I've cobbled together some of my favorite Casuals from Standard's past. Should make for good summer reading. Enjoy.
Most people get annoyed when salesmen call during dinner. Not at my house. We love it. A call from somebody hawking burial plots or new long-distance service may interrupt the meal, but it also gives us a chance to play Scare the Solicitor, my family's favorite parlor game. The object is to say…
WHEN STEVE FORBES STARTS A SENTENCE, you now for a fact that he's going to finish it on me. The language is straight Reagan -- America is "the last best hope on earth," our "greatest days are just ahead" -- but there's no Reaganesque dallying for a lump in the throat, no misty-eyed gaze into the…
Jonathan Kozol has made a career out of crying. Over the span of 30 years and nine books, the 59-year-old author has shed tears for nearly every segment of America's mistreated underclass, from illiterate welfare mothers in Boston to migrant farm workers in New Mexico. When you care as much about…
It's not an evening you've been looking forward to. Guests are coming in from out of town, and they want to go to the Pavarotti blow-out at the sports arena. You are fraught with dread. The last thing you want is to hear the Pay Man like this. It will pain you to see him debase himself, tossing out…
With the recent electoral triumph of conservatism, the question will increasingly be asked: What is this "conservatism"? How that question is answered is important, for it is no longer merely an academic one, fought out among out-of-power conservatives. Rather, how the question is answered will…
IT WAS A STORY OF ALMOST UNSPEAKABLE HORROR. A bright, vivacious six-year- old was brutalized by her mother and stepfather, sexually abused, hung from a shower rod "just to see if she would die," tattooed with ring imprints that police first thought were cigarette burns, and beaten until her bones…
Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History -- a book I wrote in the late 1980s and completed in January 1991, months before the first shot was fired in ex-Yugoslavia -- seems to have become a litmus test among the policy nomenklatura in Washington. Apparently, if you like the book, it means that you…
Proof positive that President Clinton isn't reading THE STANDARD came on Dec. 6, when the president addressed a White House conference on HIV and AIDS. Just weeks before (in our November 13 issue), John J. Pitney, Jr. had scolded politicians who quote Alexis de Tocqueville as saying things…
Misunderstanding is afoot in America. People are talking, which is good, but they are not understanding each other, which is bad. There is a significant divide in American culture, a divide between a certain variety of intellectual and, not to put too fine a point on it, the rest of the country.…
Budget reform, welfare reform, Medicare reform -- this formidable combination of reforms has been proudly heralded by a new breed of conservatives as a "conservative revolution." Yet an old-fashioned conservative may find that label disquieting. Surely it is a contradiction in terms. Surely…
A new buzzword dominates the Washington political lexicon these days: devolution. It offers a one-size-fits-all solution to vexing issues ranging from welfare to health care to education: Pack it up and ship it to the states and localities.
There is much good-government mourning over the Senate retirements that will end some of Washington's most famously nonideological Republican and Democratic careers next year. They were angels, these Mark Hatfields and Sam Nunns, always rescuing the infant compromise from a legislative building…
THE MYTHICAL MURPHY BROWN -- the highly paid professional woman who chooses to have a child out of wedlock -- is back, courtesy of the U. S. Census Bureau. On November 8, the bureau released a Current Population Report entitled "Fertility of American Women" by Amara Bachu, which purported to have…
PERHAPS NO FEDERAL PROGRAM PROVIDES more damning testimony of the law of unintended consequences, and the grotesque mockery that can be made of our best intentions, than the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. What began in 1973 as a modest effort to aid the aged, blind, and physically…
Try to imagine how Norman Mailer must have pitched his ltest poem to New Yorker editor Tina Brown: "Tina, I've been trying my hand at verse, and I feel I've touched on something quite profound . . ." In any case, here, in its entirety, is Mailer's poem, which was publi;hed in last week's "Talk of…
AT THE ENTRANCE TO THAISS PARK, a carefully landscaped patch of grass, trees, and Little League fields just inside the city line of Fairfax, Virginia, stands a bright enamel sign mounted on a steel pole. "AmeriCorps Adopt-a-Spot," it announces in eye-catching letters. Below is the word " LITTER,"…
THE 164 PAGES OF THE Dayton Peace Accords set forth numerous commitments by the parties. Notably absent, however, are additional commitments made by the United States and Europe to coax the parties into signing. These offcial but unwritten commitments are in many cases as important to a workable…
In announcing his retirement, Sen. Alan Simpson said he no longer had "the old fire in the belly" for politics. The use of "fire in the belly" to describe political commitment has become a cliche more desperately in need of retirement than Simpson himself: A Nexis search reveals that the phrase has…
THE TAX CUTS MAY BE IN PERIL, the line-item veto languishing, welfare reform at a stalemate, and the unzeroed-out National Endowment for the Arts busily preparing for its next foray into the bowels of our culture. But say this for the 104th Congress: You can drive faster.
BY THE TIME PRESIDENT CLINTON returned from his trip to Europe on December 3, the struggle at the White House over forging a budget deal with Republicans was over. Those arguing for no deal -- George Stephanopoulos, various aides in Hillary Clinton's orbit, even political adviser Dick Morris for a…
When John Boehner, the House Republican conference chief, informed a roomful of lobbyists of House speaker Newt Gingrich's plan to hang tough in budget talks with the White House, he was almost immediately contradicted by Senate GOP leader Bob Dole.
IS THE AMERICAN MISSION about peace in Bosnia, or is it about preventing the next European-sown world war? Neither, in truth. The real issues at stake in the Bosnia incursion are the future vitality and the future scope of NATO.
The U.S. Department of Education ruled Nov. 30 that Chief Illiniwek can stay on as the University of Illinois's Native American mascot. Some were quick to claim a reversal for Indian-rights groups. Yeah, sure. Here's what's happened in the week since:
The Reading List must apologize for its sloppiness in recent issues. Literate readers have written in to call attention to some gaffes and blunders, all committed in the haste brought about by deadline pressure. Peter Hansen of Walpole, N.H., writes: "Fabrizio doesn't plot to assassinate anybody in…
On Nov. 30, something virtually unprecedented happened in Washington: Before a battery of cameras, an elected official publicly apologized to one of his former staffers for her wrongful firing. And so, House-historian-for-a- week Christina Jeffrey, the notorious Nazi, anti-Semite, racist, and…
Dudley was staring at my I refrigerator. A neighbor, he had come by at the suggestion of a mutual friend to measure my small fireplace for a custom-made screen. As it turned out, my house had strong associations for him. He'd known the couple who bought it in the late 1950s and lived here until…
It kind of iumps right off the page at you. There in the "Christmas Issue" of the New York Review of Books, leading the letters section, is a strongly worded complaint about a Robert Block essay on Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic. David Binder writes that Block has appropriated from…
Were you a newspaper editor, imagine your reaction if a cartoonist came to you and proposed a comic strip that would offer the reader moral instruction conveyed by the antics of a self-centered six-year-old boy whom only saintly parents could love and no other child could tolerate. The strip would…
It seems quaint now, but there was a time, during the middle 1950s and after, when critics spent a lot of their energy arguing over what was specifically "Jewish" about the Jewish writers who were beginning to dominate the American literary scene. That decade witnessed an explosion of fiction by…
Finally, after waiting patiently in line behind women, blacks, gays, and countless others, men are pounding out the drumbeat of victimization. In his new book, The Masculine Mystique: The Politics of Masculinity (Ballantine, 320 pages, $ 23), Andrew Kimbrell offers a litany of male woe more…
In movie theaters across the country, audiences are increasingly being encouraged to laugh at things no sane person should find amusing -- at the sight of extreme, graphic, bloody, sickening violence. The trend began almost 30 years ago when audiences saw Bonnie and Clyde, perhaps the first…
A REPUBLICAN OFFICIAL who attended Majority Leader Bob Dole's gathering with Senate leaders, then dropped by a session of House Speaker Newt Gingrich's advisory group later the same day, experienced quite a contrast. " It was like going from ancient Greece to the planet Mars," the official said.…
TWhat is Jack Kemp going to do with the commission on tax reform he's chairing? The commission, assembled in the spring to help unify the Republican message on taxes, holds its last session in December, and there's no consensus on what to recommend. But Kemp wants to deliver a full-fledged,…
THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned that a major Republican polling firm surveyed New Hampshire Republicans last week on behalf of Jack Kemp. The poll found interest among New Hampshirites in the possibility of a new entrant to the GOP field, and good approval ratings for Kemp. But Kemp has informed…
CLINTON'S FOREIGN POLICY," says a friend of the president who discusses policy with him, "belies the idea that he's always watching the polls." Sure do es. For months, administration offIcials have been touting last year's invasion to restore Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, but all that…
THE CRISIS IN BOSNIA has sparked the beginning of a profound debate within the Republican party over the direction of its foreign policy, and not a moment too soon. For the past three years, the party has been drifting toward the edge of its third great transformation in this century. The first…
President Clinton has decided to deploy U.S. troops in Bosnia. By doing so, he tests Republicans on a yea-or-nay question concerning America's continued engagement with the rest of the world. At this point, all too many of them are flunking that test.
TBill Clinton regularly touts the importance of science and technology and calls for increased government influence over research. He decries congressional budget-balancers who would trim mediocre technology programs such as those at the Department of Commerce, asserting that the federal government…
London
ACCORDING TO THE RECEIVED WISDOM early in the Clinton administration, most Americans wanted the new president to concentrate on domestic matters and substantially ignore foreign policy. In the spring of 1993, for example, Clinton pollster and strategist Stanley Greenberg remarked that "America is…
BOSNIA WILL BE BILL CLINTON'S second military venture -- after Haiti. Fifteen months ago he sent 6,000 American troops there with the promise that they would restore democracy and then leave. What is the situation in Haiti as 1995 ends, and are there any lessons in it?
ON NOVEMBER 20, 1990, 45 House Democrats filed suit in federal court to prevent President Bush from taking military action against Iraq without congressional approval. "The president of the United States on his own cannot make that kind of determination," said Rep. Ron Dellums of California, who…
READ ENOUGH INTERVIEWS, and you'd half expect Teresa Heinz (now Mrs. John Kerry, though she wisely refrains from using the Massachusetts senator's name) to enter Washington's Willard Hotel for the presentation of her Heinz Awards with a communal pacifier dangling from her spare yet tastefully…
Would the anonymous seminarian who keeps offering multi-crayola'ed screeds on the outside of his envelope (the latest of which reads "Watch out!. . . POWER SEEKERS. . . . Pride. . . The Self Righteousness of the Right . . Satan Begone! ") please include a return address on your next correspondence?…
TO MY OWN SURPRISE -- maybe amazement would be a better word -- I find myself siding with Bill Clinton on the issue of sending American troops to Bosnia, and hoping against all odds that my fellow conservatives in general and the Republican party in particular will wind up doing the same. For it is…
Frank Sinatra turns 80 on December 12, setting off one of those familiar convulsions in the vast publicity machine of American show biz. The smoke has barely cleared from the last convulsion, concluded only a week or two ago for the Beatles, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of their breakup as " the…