69 articles
The James Carville stories just keep flowing in. Carville was invited to debate Robert Novak at a Forbes magazine get-together for its advertisers. Carville, having taken advantage of the liquid refreshments at dinner, got crude fast in the ensuing debate. He capped it off by joking that since he'd…
Until recently, the American "death with dignity" movement celebrated the Netherlands as a model for the humane treatment of the terminally ill and other such unfortunates. Holland is the only nation on earth that offcially condones euthanasia. It does not punish doctors who accede to the "well-…
NOW THAT REPUBLICAN VOTERS have said rather emphatically that they want Bob Dole to be their party 's nominee, what does the race for the White House look like ? Much is bound to happen between now and November 5 to shape the election. Still, we already know enough to declare a favorite.
A 58-page report from the president of Harvard on "Diversity and Learning" may not seem like hot stuff -- and it isn't, really -- but it shows where American education is today. Since Harvard is run by liberals and has been for some time, it is no surprise that Nell Rudenstine should write a…
The favorite of the Clinton White House in the Republican presidential race was not Pat Buchanan, despite the harm he's done Bob Dole. Nope, they believe Steve Forbes had a much bigger and more deleterious impact on the race.
It snowed for the first time in three years in Paris, and it was .freezing cold, to boot. But how glad I was to come out of the Muse d'Orsay at 9 o'clock on a Thursday night, into a full roaring blizzard on the Quai Anatole France. On the Seine, barges were combing their searchlights through the…
ON MARCH 25-27, MOST OF THE governors, along with a business leader designated by each, will convene in an education summit co-sponsored by the National Governors "Association at the IBM facility in Palisades, New York. The co-hosts are Louis Gerstner, chairman and chief executive offcer of IBM,…
Two months ago, the leading candidate for president in Nicaragua barely survived an assassination attempt when his motorcade was attacked by masked gunmen. You may be forgiven for not knowing this, indeed for never having heard of Arnoldo Aleman, the former mayor of Managua who is far ahead of all…
When graduate students at Yale University went on "strike" at the beginning of the year, all manner of delicious comedy was sure to result. We have not been disappointed.
THE RAUCOUS Republican presidential race more than the folks at the Clinton White House. "It's hard for me to accept that something this entertaining is coming to a halt," says a senior White House aide, chuckling as he speaks. "I've had a ball." Another presidential adviser derides Senate majority…
THE PROPOSED BAN ON "PARTIAI. BIRTH" abor- tions-passed by the Senate in December and scheduled for a final House vote the week of March 25 -- is the work of one of Washington's least well-known but most influential lobbyists. Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life…
The Reading List wishes this week to share with you what is surely the book review of the year. It comes from Publisher's Weekly, the bible of the industry, whose short reviews are usually the first a book receives. This is for a tome entitled First Comes Love, by Marion Winik, in bookstores next…
Last month, the son of a senior Clinton administration official was suspended from one ofWashington's toniest private high schools after teachers caught the boy and a few of his friends drinking vodka and smoking dope at a school dance. Despite efforts to keep the embarrassing event secret, it…
While my wounds are fresh, let me offer several ways to fix how we nominate presidents. First, for those who only see it on Inside Politics, let me describe what running for president really feels like (especially when you have just lost). It is like scaling a cliff for three years in the dark to…
When I was a teenager and vulnerable to fashion, I was much taken with Bertolt Brecht's acid observation that those who desire heroes are saps. Now that I have put off childish things, I see Brecht for what he was, and that heroes, like ideals, have their place. In my boyhood, there were many…
The Birdcage is about a drag queen who hardly ever dresses in drag, believes in family values, and never touches his live in lover of 20-plus years. These plot points are essential to the movie's commercial prospects; indeed, The Birdcage is going to make a lot of money because of its boundless…
Sill in his thirties, Anthony Julius has an uneven fame in today's England: He is both the high-flying lawyer representing the Princess of Wales, in her impending divorce from Prince Charles, and the unadvertised author of a book, T.S. Eliot, AntiSemitism and Literary Form, which threatened enough…
It was the sort of thing that really doesn't make you angry unless you see it for yourself. Well, I've seen it, and now I'm angry. I was half paying attention to some nature program on TV when I looked up to see a pickup truck full of grown men with guns. They were part of a larger hunting party…
Your planet seems to be in good condition," Secretary of State John Hay once serenely reported to Theodore Roosevelt. One wonders whether Warren Christopher can say the same to Bill Clinton about his planet these days. Let's sum up the past few weeks: Fidel Castro shot two unarmed planes out of the…
It is the afternoon of the Arizona primary, and James Carville is talking on the phone in his office on Capitol Hill. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, his belt unbuckled, Carville is leaning back in his chair with his running shoes on the desk while a friend brings him up to date on the latest exit…
The Republican party continues to be attacked for its use of the Willie Horton case in 1988, but the issue of granting furloughs to convicted killers will not go away. Now terrorists are getting the Horton treatment. In 1985, a group of Palestinian gunmen hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro.…
HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH now relies on what staffers call "the Jupiter graph." In meetings, Gingrich refers to the planet Jupiter and the attention devoted to the "spot" marring its appearance even though this "spot" is unimportant to understanding the planet. Gingrich sees Washington as the "…
The Clinton admimstration's endless internal review of federal affirmative action programs won another headline trophy the other day. "White House to Suspend a Program for Minorities," announced the New York Times on page 1 last week. And not just one program, "officials said," but all federal…
Each year the AFL-CIO releases ratings of the voting records of senators and House members that purport to show how friendly each is to union interests. A member's rating (from 0 to a perfect 100) is based on the dozen or so votes the AFL-CIO considers most important to unions. The 1995 ratings,…
W. H. Auden was a self-destructive chain-smoker, an amphetamine addict, an alcoholic of titanic proportions, an unhappy homosexual, a man who fled embattled England just as the Second World War began, and, for a time at least, an active proselytizer for the Communist party. But to say that he was…
Inge Kummant of Sewickley, Pa., has offered up a timely and valuable Reading List dedicated to the state and fate of Russia:
It takes a be,ating nearly every day, this "Washington culture" of ours. Mostly, it is thrashed by aspiring practitioners, like Steve Forbes. "The culture of Washington is not the culture of America," Forbes intoned at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (known as CPAC). Not true,…
Give Jack Kemp credit. He spurned Bob Dole and endorsed Steve Forbes for the Republican presidential nomination on a matter of principle. But the way he delivered his endorsement -- well, that's another story.
WHEN SADDAM HUSSEIN'S sons-in-law returned to Baghdad from their haven in Amman only to be murdered promptly by the grandfather of their children, Israelis were flabbergasted. What they could not fathom was not the routine Iraqi atrocity, but how men born and bred in the Middle East could be…
JOHN MCLAUGHLIN, THE TV TALK SHOW HOST, cornered Colin Powell at a wedding reception in Washington in February and asked the obvious question: Can you envision a Bob Dole-Colin Powell ticket this fall? "I answered that last November," Powell said, referring to his statement that he wouldn't run for…
Imagine yourself a tough, widowed, sixty-something Western rancher -- Atticus Cody -- with two sons who are polar opposites: Frank, a successful businessman and a state senator with a large family; and Scott, an irresponsible thirty-something drifter whose bad driving caused the death, several…
It is a sign of the times that Mary Lefkowitz deserves great credit for writing Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (Basic Books, 222 pages, $ 24.00) even though it is a book that, as she herself recognizes, should not have needed to be written. Lefkowitz…
Recent partisan politics is a mess of apparently contradictory evidence about American ideological appetites. The 1992 Democratic presidential campaign serves up nouvelle liberalism-less fat, light sauces, and lots of fresh ingredients in unusual, artistic combination. Voters swallow it but can't…
WHEN SENATE MAJORITY LEADER Robert Dole anounced last July 27 that he wanted to ban set-asides for women and minorities in federal contracting and hiring, he didn't do it quietly. He published an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled "A New Civil Rights Agenda" and held a press conference…
Aconsensus seems to be developing among conservatives opposed to Patrick J. Buchanan that the best way to express their opposition is to avoid "name- calling" and "ad hominem attacks," to treat him with "respect," to acknowledge the validity of the issues through which he seems to have struck a…
He says his followers are peasants. He speaks for working men and their grievances. He rails and rouses audiences like a carnival barker. But Pat Buchanan's presidential run is in fact as close to an intellectual's campaign as we have seen in modern politics. The Buchanan campaign doesn't have a…
Buchananism is not mere 19th-century populism warmed over and updated. Rather, it is grounded in a set of ideas, particularly about trade and the nature of the American corporation, that have a firm basis in recent economic research and thought. That doesn't make Pat Buchanan right. But it does…
You keep hea,ing that Bob Dole has trouble 'articulating' -- articulating his message, his vision for America, the reasons he wants to be president. It seems to be the one enduring consensus to have emerged from the general electoral chaos of the past several weeks.
The Washington-based Pew Research Center recently asked 750 people for one- word descriptions of Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and Pat Buchanan. The answers are, at the very least, illuminating. The four words most frequently used to describe Clinton were "good," "trying," "okay," and "fair." Tied for…
With all the hoopla in California about CCRI, other initiatives are getting precious little press. Two that deserve more attention concern the legalization of marijuana. One allows for medical use with a doctor's prescription; the other essentially opens the doors for free toking. Now, if you…
What is the most despised profession in America? Judging from the amount of public scorn its practitioners receive, you might think the answer would be the law. And yet being a lawyer is still a position of high status in American society, a job that still gives a lawyer's parents some bragging…
Revisionist historians usually wait more than 25 years before coming up with radical new theories to explain old events. George McGovern, the Democratic party's candidate for president in 1972, has jumped the gun by a few years. In a February 26 letter to the Wall Street Journal, he cited six…
The new movie version of Shakespeare's Richard III is remarkable for several reasons. The actor Ian McKellen and the director Richard Loncraine, who adapted it for the screen, have managed to distill a complex three-hour play into a successful, fast-moving film that isn't quite two hours long. It…
Political ideas have consequences. But political consequences don't always have ideas. Not very big ones, at least. Sometimes in politics things just happen, almost at random, products of unconnected choice and chance that only remotely involve The Issues. This naturally unsettles the serious…
The Reading List has a headache this week, because for almost a month now it has been attempting to plough through the Big Novel of 1996, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Test. The book runs more than 1,000 pages and is virtually impossible to decipher -- it seems to be about a school in…
Look! There's Pat Sajak! And there, there's Ron Silver, fresh from his triumph as Henry Kissinger on TNT, having a cup of coffee. That's Linda Obst, the producer of Sleepless in Seattle. And over there, reclining in his chestnut leather sportsjacket, is John McTiernan, director of Die Hards 1 & 3…
The most moving objects in the current exhibition of Winslow Homer's work are not the paintings at all, but a pair of banged-up paint boxes in a display case. They seem to have soaked up considerable love. Homer never succeeded in getting a wife, though apparently he was in love at least once.…
WHEN WASHINGTON ATTORNEY Robert Lighthizer, a former Senate aide of Bob Dole and now a senior adviser, returned from New Hampshire the day after the February 20 primary, he got an earful. On the plane, Lighthizer encountered Bay Buchanan, manager of her brother Pat's presidential campaign. She…
UNTIL NOW, LAMAR ALEXANDER has been the Canada of politics. He's got some radical ideas -- like ending the welfare state or adding another branch to the Pentagon -- but everything he touches turns boring. Pat Buchanan calls on his followers to "Lock and load!" For Alexander, it would be "Chip and…
FEW ASPECTS OF THE NATION'S criminal justice system seem more nonsensical to the average person than the fact that incarcerated criminals do no work. With more than one million offenders behind bars -- the vast majority of them young men in their prime work years -- America asks its prison inmates…
HOPE YOU'RE NOT THE FEARFUL TYPE," says Yehuda Levin, Orthodox Jewish rabbi and national co-chair of the Buchanan for president campaign, as he maneuvers his aging aqua Oldsmobile through the streets of the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. "The wipers are on the blink and it's kind of hard to see." In…
The key to a sane result in the November elections may be some combination of CNN's Larry King, Ted Turner, and Time Warner honcho Gerald Levin. For if they don't satisfy Ross Perot's perpetual hunger for attention, he might be obliged to throw his hat in the presidential ring.
LONG AGO AND LONG FORGOTTEN at least in today's Kremlin, is Boris Yeltsin's decision on November 6, 1992, to outlaw the Communist party as a criminal organization. Party leaders challenged that decision in the Constitutional Court. Today the Communist party is making its comeback. And with a…
Becky Cain, president of the League of Women Voters, doesn't like labels. " We don't characterize people by labels," she says. "I think that's part of the problem of taking the issues and saying if you're one way or another, you are therefore in this category." Known primarily as the sponsor of…
I'VE ALWAYS BEEN TOLD one can never have too many friends, which perhaps was what drew me to the Learning Annex's Inner Child Workshop. Their ad promised not only to put me in touch with my inner child, but "to heal this child and thus make him/her one's own best friend." An avid churchgoer in the…
I've always been told one can never have too many friends, which perhaps was what drew me to the Learning Annex's Inner Child Workshop. Their ad promised not only to put me in touch with my inner child, but "to heal this child and thus make him/her one's own best friend."
We may yet have cause to be grateful to Patrick J. Buchanan, for his success poses the most important political challenge of the year for Republicans. How the other serious Republican candidates, Robert Dole and Lamar Alexander, respond in the next few weeks to that challenge will demonstrate…
With the disastrous showing of the Forbes campaign in the New Hampshire primary on February 20, different political soothsayers have reacted in different ways. Some have asked: "What will Steve Forbes do now?" Others have asked: "What will the pro-growth, low-tax, social moderates do now?" And…
TODAY'S LESSON, BROUGHT TO YOU by the California Teachers Association: When you flunk a test, sue.
In his his 1991 Autobiography, Kingsley Amis recalled "a small group of posh chaps," the literary critics who exercised undue sway over London writers of the 1950s: "They were second-generation Blooms-buryites, I suppose, junior and dilute modernists . . . men of small original output and uncertain…
Bob Dole seems inarticulate. But entertain the possibility for a moment that he is actually pioneering a new form of eloquence. Imagine if the great orators of history had used the Dole style: the choppy delivery, the random word asociations, the tendency to speak about oneself in the third person.…
By an overwhelming margin, readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD have voted to keep the Reading List. The vote was 18 in favor, 3 against (though the " against" ballot cast by American Scholar editor and noted literary critic Joseph Epstein we gave the weight of six ordinary votes; remember, this is a…
An evolutionary biologist and a black man, Joseph Graves took pleasure in the coincidence: His symposium "Pseudo-science, Biology, and the Education of African American Students" was held on February 12, the birthday of both Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln.
Late last year, Walter Anderson, the editor of Parade magazine, was summoned to the White House to meet the president. Anderson had just been nominated to serve as a member of the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, a little-known post whose primary perk appears to be a…
The recent passing of former California governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown brought back a flood of political memories. Journalist David S. Broder hailed him as "one of the true blithe spirits of 20th-century politics," "avisionary, " and "the most amiable of companions." Remarked a former Brown press…