88 articles
Bob Dole is likely to lose the presidential race to Bill Clinton. He may lose badly. The challenge for Republicans and conservatives is to prevent a Dole defeat from derailing the ongoing Republican realignment and from blocking the emergence of a new era of conservative governance.
HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH is a major advocate of medical savings accounts (MSAs), because, he says, they will inject market-based cost controls into the health-care system. In To Renew America, he wrote that "every American ought to have the opportunity to belong to a [medical savings account]…
The Institute for Policy Research at the University of Cincinnati has released some polling data on affirmative action that bode ill for Bill Clinton in November.
Early in 1993, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, now the administration's drug czar but then an assistant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was exiting the White House through the southwest gate. He encountered a Clinton staffer, young and female. "Good morning," he said. "I don't talk to the military," she…
FOR THOSE WHO-fresh from the annual purgatory of doing their taxes -- already regard the Internal Revenue Service with dread, IRS commissioner Margaret Richardson has a solemn warning: Tax cheats and law-abiding citizens alike, get ready for the audit from Hell.
IF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAD followed the ideological path of David Ifshin -- from student anti-war protester to true "New Democrat" -- it might have remained the majority party. If Bill Clinton had heeded David Ifshin's advice in early 1992, he might not have the Whitewater scandal hanging over his…
ThE AFL-CIO SPENT LESS THAN $ 1 million on TV ads over the Easter congressional recess to attack two dozen House Republicans for opposing a hike in the minimum wage -- and the labor chiefs got their money's worth. The ads were simple: Each GOP House member had "voted to block a minimum wage…
TIn a 1993 interview in Cincinnati Medicine, Dr. Martin Haskell described how he had developed a partial-birth abortion procedure -- and used it more than 700 times. Because of the "toughness and development of the fetal tissues," he explained, late-pregnancy abortions were difficult to complete…
At long last, Beltway comeuppance for the Health Nazis! Two years ago, the Center for Science in the Public Interest gave us the scare that rocked Reddenbacher by claiming "theater popcorn ought to be the Snow White of snacks, but instead it's the Godzilla." Having since done similar takeouts on…
IS IT WORTH remarking, at this late date, on the near-total acceptance of adultery in contemporary society? Or is it like noting that it is dark at night, or that the car has replaced the horse-drawn carriage? It seemed to happen so fast, really. One day, adultery was an acknowledged evil, a grave…
IN HIS RECENT AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Ben Bradlee sums up the schizophrenic feelings many journalists have about the Pulitzer prize. "First," writes the former editor of the Washington Post, "as a standard of excellence the Pulitzer prizes are overrated and suspect." Less than a page later, Bradlee goes on…
He's the "Robin Hood of p.r.," in the words of National Journal. And if your definition of an eminent public-relations man is one who can garner high- profile media coverage -- the truth be damned -- then David Fenton is indeed very good at his work. As boss of the New York- and…
It has been more than a week since the death of seven-year-old Jessica Dubroff, who was trying to become what her daddy and mommy wanted her to become: the youngest pilot ever to complete a cross-country flight. We have since learned several things about the crash itself. First, though fractures to…
The Reading List has been, with a few breaks, going for 32 weeks now, a total of 110 masterpieces commended to the attention of this magazine's audience. That is eight more than the 102 Great Books commended to the attention of the literate by those two University of Chicago listing maniacs, Robert…
Some people write books. But I am pioneering a new, miniaturist form of literary production. I write book proposals. Dozens of them.
Whoever it was who said that journalism is the first rough draft of history was, presumably, a journalist. For no historian would ever suppose such a thing. And what better proof is needed than the periodic spectacle of journalists attempting to behave as historians?
Thirty years ago, in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Philip Rieff identified the goal of the cultural revolution of the 20th century as the " permanent disestablishment of any deeply internalized moral demands." Under the tutelage of Freud and his successors, Rieff wrote, modern man was learning a…
is it worth remarking, at this late date, on the near-total acceptance of adultery in contemporary society? Or is it like noting that it is dark at night, or that the car has replaced the horse-drawn carriage? It seemed to happen so fast, really. One day, adultery was an acknowledged evil, a grave…
I anticipated something very different from Michael Anton's "The Hyper- Entertaining of America" (April 15). The development of a very important subject was not there.
Jane Eyre is an intelligent, judicious, and sober cinematic adaptation of an overripe, overrich, hysterical masterpiece. The movie is an honorable and respectable effort undone by its good taste and emotional reticence.
IT IS NOT EVERY DAY that a New York Times reporter, even after his death, is lauded as "a brilliant correspondent" by the president of the United States, celebrated by nationally syndicated newspaper columnist Cal Thomas as having brought "honor and distinction" to the profession of described by…
The clock is ticking away for Hong Kong, and understandably the city's residents are growing nervous. But a number of Western observers are contending that a takeover by a huge totalitarian state is nothing to get the shakes about. Richard C. Hottelet, longtime foreign correspondent for CBS, put it…
HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH could have used his stint hosting Larry King Live on March 29 to preach free-market environmentalism. With a zookeeper, a Bengal tiger, an iguana, a wallaby, a mountain lion, and a cockatoo among his guests, he could have denounced failed government programs and laid out…
TAKE OUR DAUGHTERS TO WORK DAY, the girls-only school holiday, will be commemorated for the fourth year in a row this April 25. According to the Ms. Foundation for Women, which originated and organizes the holiday, more than 30 million adults and "millions of girls" participated in the last one.…
This time last year, Newt Gingrich bestrode the narrow political world like a colossus. The exhaustingly productive first hundred days of the 104th Congress had concluded, and opinion was unanimous: It was a triumph of ideological vigor and political logistics. Gingrich and the Republican House had…
On June 16, 1970, a Nixon White House aide I named Jack Gleason called Ross Perot to ask for money. Months before, Perot had agreed to contribute $ 250, 000 to a secret fund set up by the Nixon administration to finance Republican Senate candidates running in the fall elections. To the exasperation…
Among the "controversial" provisions Democrats are refusing to accept in a health-insurance reform bill are medical savings accounts.
Set against the backdrop of the multicultural and progressive All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, Henry Louis (call him Skip) Gates and Cornel West fearlessly fought the conservative backlash and reaffirmed their commitment to radical chic, affirmative action, and world revolution -- all…
This has been a long week for those of us who loved Ron Brown."
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES PRIDES ITSELF on being Sensitivity Central in American journalism. Its editor, Shelby Coffey III, created a media frenzy when he championed a new stylebook for the paper that epitomizes political correctness. What, then, explains the paper's decision to pull three "B. C."…
When Kweisi Mfume ended a 10-year congressional career to become president and CEO of the NAACP in February, House colleagues asked if he had gone out of his mind. Just 47, Mfume had a carefully tended and impregnable seat. He had been chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus during its period of…
The Reading List has just paid its taxes, and therefore thought to itself: What are the great "income tax" novels? The problem is, the Reading List is unaware of many books whose plots center, or even tangentially touch, on the income tax. One reason for this is perhaps that the Reading List…
A FEW MONTHS BACK, the New York Times reversed itself on the flat tax: In the recent past it supported the idea without reservation, today it opposes the fiat tax unequivocally. Now the Times has done it again on the minimum wage. On April 5, it endorsed an increase in the minimum wage from $ 4.25…
THE IRON CURTAIN IS A MEMORY, but the Communist debris has not been swept away in the former Eastern bloc. In Hungary, for example, the main journalists' association is still dominated by leftist former apparatchiks. And the United States is providing it significant infusions of cash.
Days before the California primary, Bob Dole stopped at a pagoda-roofed mall in Orange County's Little Saigon to remind voters of his support for the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), the fall ballot proposition that would end state affirmative action programs. The site was chosen…
THE WEEKLY STANDARD will, of course, be chronicling the ups and downs, the maneuvers and gyrations, of the Republican VP possibilities in the coming months. This week, we note a particularly striking invitation from one hopeful, California attorney general Dan Lungren -- striking because it seeks…
The politics of abortion has affected so many different aspects of public policy that its intrusion should come as no surprise in any activity of the federal government. Even so, it is disappointing to find abortion partisanship at, of all places, the Internal Revenue Service.
The people chanting slogans in front of the Health and Human Services building in Washington one morning in March looked mostly like standard-issue left-wing demonstrators -- angry-faced women wearing backpacks and big earrings, slope-shouldered men with ponytails and workers-of-the-world boots - -…
Adisembodied voice with an impeccable English accent speaks. "We're talking with Natalie Merchant, whose new solo album Tigerlily is topping the charts and wowing the critics." It sounds like an MTV interview, or maybe a radio clip, but there is no commercial, no station ID, nothing to indicate the…
On August 18, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled that a U. S. District Court had inadequately considered the Eighth Amendment claims of one Josephine Brown. Brown is a transsexual prison inmate who argued that Colorado's refusal to provide her with estrogen and other medical…
At a time when the winning alliance between . social and economic conservatives seems ready to unravel, here comes a book on the American Revolution designed to reassure and inspirit today's aspiring revolutionaries.
FOUR WEEKS AGO, CONGRESS was on the brink of passing radical immigration reform. Legislation sponsored by Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming and Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas would have beefed up controls on illegal immigration and dramatically reduced legal immigration. But when the House easily passed its…
THERE'S A NIFTY DIVISION OF LABOR at the Clinton White House for handling the public relations side of the Whitewater scandal. "As a general proposition, I try to stay out of it," says Mike McCurry, President Clinton's press secretary. If he agreed to answer questions about Whitewater routinely,…
Mention Maastricht and eyes glaze over. That is, of course, unless discussion is punctuated by anecdotes about Brussels bureaucrats working feverishly to "harmonize" rules on everything from the size of condoms to the curvature of bananas. According to new legislation, "visually challenged" truck…
Irving Howe was on the warpath. The year was 1954, and Howe saw the forces of depravity closing in. He saw the great maw of middle class commercialism -- magazines, publishing houses, movie studios. Vast institutions that could buy you off, beat you down, crush your spirit. Howe surveyed the…
Behold the unharnessed desire that is H. Ross Perot: "Get me the fucking list!" he shrieked at longtime sidekick Tom Luce during a television shoot four years ago, as the poor man fumbled for some now-forgotten piece of paper. "Don't you understand? When I say I want something, I want it!" All of…
TOURING MAN QUENTIN PRISON in California on March 23, Bob Dole highlighted a budding theme of his presidential campaign: Bill Clinton's liberal judicial appointments. "We don't need judges who try to find excuses for more criminal behavior," Dole said, and he called on Judge Harold Baer, a Clinton…
A YEAR AGO EVERYONE -- Republican and Democrat -- was predicting that by now President Clinton would be relegated to irrelevance and on his way to unemployment. Instead, the Republican Congress has been stalled by a very-far- from-irrelevant Clinton, and the Republican presidential nominee trails…
Los Angeles
In the six weeks since Rep. Peter King began pressing for an investigation into Louis Farrakhan's travels to Libya, Iran, and Iraq, the congressman has received four telephoned death threats. All of the callers mentioned tioned King's Farrakhan-related work, and one said he would come to King's…
ON MARCH 14, KATHLEEN WEINSTEIN, a 45-year-old special education teacher in Middletown, New Jersey, stopped to buy a sandwich on her way to take a graduate-course exam. When she returned to the parking lot, she was forced into her car by a youth who claimed he had a gun.
Students of "paleoconservatism" have long argued that the paleos" radical dissatisfaction with contemporary America could eventually veer into an anti- Americanism almost indistinguishable from the more familiar variety on the left. From an item in the March newsletter of the Rockford Institute --…
Now more than a week old, the Don Imus affair shows no sign of weakening its hold over Washington's moralists. This means that as an inside-the- Beltway obsession it has outlasted the North Korean nuclear crisis, the Steve Forbes surge, and the debt ceiling extension combined. Only a true outrage…
Lawrence Walsh, famous as the world's worst-ever, least successful independent counsel, has slung another arrow at Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr. Walsh has been carrying Bill Clinton's political baggage for more than three years now, ever since he chose October 30, 1992 -- five days before…
On the seventh floor of a nondescript office building just north of Dallas, Russell Verney is considering what may be the most pressing question of the presidential campaign season so far: Is Ross Perot crazy? Verney, a former Democratic operative and air-traffic controller from New Hampshire,…
James Stewart, the celebrated investigative reporter, has performed a remarkable job of reconstructing the Whitewater affair in Blood Sport (Simon & Schuster, 479 pages, $ 25). But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the book has been the reaction to it.
The Reading List was a tad chagrined when Braveheart swept the Oscars. How could men with blue faces storming fortresses in kilts top Emma Thompson's exquisite Sense and Sensibility? Yet so emphatic was the Academy's verdict that the Reading List felt chastened and reminded of the enduring…
Whatever happened to the homeless? Not so long ago they haunted Americans at almost every turn. In our largest cities, aggressive panhandlers blocked the sidewalks by day and street people dozed on the bus-stop benches and steam grates by night. On our living room TV sets, their grievances were…
When it comes to government funding of the arts, I support the Spanish Court option. Which is to say, I believe the federal government should lavishly fund the arts, but should also be able to determine content. The Congress could budget $ 10 million for a statue, but it would have to be Newt…
If you can judge a cause by its enemies, the California Civil Rights Initiative is looking pretty good. Campaigning prominently against it has been University of California at Santa Cruz professor Angela Davis: Communist, Black Panther, gun-runner, darling of the Che-Lumumba Club, and recipient of…
You have to feel sorry for Democrats, what with 200 of their elected offcials switching parties since Clinton was elected and almost no Republicans returning the compliment. So it's not surprising that Frank Rich rushed to embrace Tanya Melich and her "profusely documented, tell-all account," The…
BOB DOLE EXASPERATES CONSERVATIVES. Caught in philosophical contradictions, condemned for inarticulateness, carped at for lack of personality, he is content to claim he is a doer, not a talker. And yet he wins our reluctant votes, and now we're all stuck with him.
James Stewart's new Whitewater book, Blood Sport, is a scurrilous attempt to blacken the reputation of the Clinton administration. Or at least it would be if it contained any new and damning information. Which it doesn't.
Affirmative action bleeds anew. And this latest wound might eventually prove fatal. Ruling March 18 in the case of Hopwood v. Texas, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has now sharply limited the circumstances under which a state-sponsored institution of higher education may give…
For the first time in three decades, a fundamental challenge is being mounted to the legitimacy of America's system of corporate governance and to the distribution of the rewards produced by Ameri- ca's free enterprise system. This is a serious challenge, coming as it does from the conservative…
BOB DOLE LOVES BEING Senate majority leader so much he'll try to hang on to the job even if he's elected president. That's a joke, first told by Michael Barone of U.S. News & World Report. But there's an element of truth in it. Having captured the GOP presidential nomination, Dole went "back to…
As everyone remotely familiar with higher education knows, the Berkeley campus is home to one of the most byzantine, impenetrable -- and jealously guarded -- affirmative action programs in the United States. It would take pages to fully explain this Orwellian system -- if you have a copy of Dinesh…
My introduction to organic foods came as a college freshman late in the Jimmy Carter era. A roommate in my group house baked "brownies" whose main ingredients, substituting for chocolate and sugar, were carob and sorghum molasses. These came from a natural-food cooperative where she volunteered --…
The roller-coaster trajectory of this year's Republican presidential primary campaign left many pundits humbled and out of breath. Not Jude Wanniski. The supply-side guru, Forbes adviser, and tireless disseminator of newsletters has concocted the most original interpretation thus far of the…
The Reading List first must absolve Contributing Editor Robert Kagan of responsibility for the misattribution of an allusion to Ozymandias in the midst of his article "Remember Nicaragua?" last week. As reader Alan Vanneman of Washington, D.C., alertly points out, "It was that damn hippie Percy…
Your editorial "It's Foreign Policy, Stupid" (Mar. 18) gives solid advice to Bob Dole, but permit me to take exception to the word "internationalist" to describe what Reagan was and what the Republicans should be.
Ashattered, divided city, its war-weary population kept alive by airlift. A nation scarred by horrifying genocidal violence. American and allied troops warily keeping order.
As South Carolina's attorney general and Bob Dole's state chairman, I took offense at Andrew Ferguson's unremarkable remarks about the senator's recent visit to Charleston ("Campaigning with Bob Dole and the Pips," Mar. 11). He referred to former governor Carroll Campbell, Gov. David Beasley, and…
There's just no getting around the fact that Jerzy Kosinski was a toad. James Park Sloan's new biography, Jerzy Kosinski (Dutton, 505 pages, $ 27.95), is as fair an account of the Polish-American novelist as we are likely to get, and Kosinski still comes off as a liar, a cheat, and a world-class…
Kent Bain's column truthfully exposed sport hunters for what they are (" Hunting, Dirty Harry Style," Mar. 18). It is a shrinking segment of the U.S. population that still finds fun in entering the woods to boldly match wits and test their virility with, say, a mourning dove.
Believe me, I'm no fan of James Carville or the gang he and Ross Perot helped bring to Washington ("James Carville, Populist Plutocrat," Mar. 18). But slamming him for "cashing in" on his luck and pluck seems, well, downright un-American.
Michael Anton asks, "Has Hollywood created a demand for depravity or merely responded to one that already exists in the hearts of people?" ("When Lefty Met Righty . . . , Or, Sleepless in Hollywood," Mar. 11).
John Podhoretz's "Mau-Mauing the Flacks" (Mar. 11) was charming. However, I must point out your error in etymology. Although "Esq." after a lawyer's name is admittedly pretentious, it is an appropriate honorific, even for women lawyers.
Matt Labash's article drawing an analogy between the CPAC convention and the Star Trek convention ("To Boldly Go Where No Conservative Has Gone Before," Mar. 18) contained a number of flaws.
n his fine article "Affirmative Reaction" (Mar. ll), Matthew Rees describes congressional Republicans" considerable support for, and reluctance about, the eliore to end racial and gender preferences. Some regard that effort as in conflict with empowerment agenda. They are complementary.
In his 1996 State of the Union address, Bill Clinton crowed that "for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, there are no Russian missiles pointed at American children." As if the fiends in the Kremlin targeted their ICBMs at the under-18 set next, well hear that " they aimed their…
Invading armies can be resisted, Victor Hugo once wrote, but nothing can stop an idea whose time has come. Hugo's famous sentiment captures the arrogant historicism of the Left, which is convinced that its agendas are " progressive" and that its progress is the destiny of mankind. But what about a…
Inever thought I would see the day when Jack Kemp, the one unifying Republican, could be dismissed from the Republican party for promoting and supporting a pro-growth agenda ("Trying, As Ever, to Understand Jack Kemp," Scrapbook, Mar. 18).
VcKOletta was not a classic GB "swallow," trained to ompromise foreign officials. She was a "sparrow," say, in the sense that the late Evil Empire kept as keen an eye on its citizens as Providence is supposed to on each small bird. Clayton was a target of opportunity, not too swift a boy and…
There has been no more successful effort to discredit a great writer and thinker than that carried out against Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for over two decades. In his Letter to the Soviet Leaders (1974), Solzhenitsyn searingly criticized the role played by Marxist-Leninist ideology in the destruction…