68 articles
THE HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE is expected to vote shortly along strict party lines in favor of the so-called Equal Opportunity Act, which would end virtually all of the race- and sex-based preferences now administered by the federal government. The bill is sound in principle: When government favors…
As a man chokes when forced to speak of something he'd rather avoid, the New York Times is having a deuce of a time reporting on the Clinton administration's misuse of the FBI. On June 13, it published a story headed " Most F.B.I. Files Received by Clinton White House Summarized Background…
For ten points, identify the secretary of the interior who once said that his political enemies were out to destroy him because they were "so deeply disturbed by the prospect of religious values entering the national debate" and that they should follow his policies because said policies are…
In the six days from June 6 to June 11, Bob Dole engineered not one but two astonishing developments in internal Republican abortion politics. On the seventh day he rested, sitting square in the middle of the resulting rubble. It is not clear how he will get back up.
Yes, yes, yes! I made the list. The list.
A Clintonite hack who brags of having infiltrated Republican campaigns and passed material on to his fellow Democrats is the most interesting, and shadowy, figure in the new FBI Filegate mess.
Lester Brown and his Worldwatch Institute rarely miss an angle when describing the coming global calamity, the one that is unfolding right before our blinkered eyes. Even the behavior of mosquitoes is worth a melodramatic pause in World-watch's annual book-long jeremiad, the State of the World.
THE FREE AND OPEN EXCHANGE of ideas and information, however unpopular they may be, is supposedly the governing principle of the university; it's called " academic freedom," and it undergirds the system of lifetime tenure for professors, among other things. The Yale University Corporation, the…
The good news is that Whitewater special counsel Kenneth Starr is now looking into the circumstances under which the Clinton White House improperly secured and reviewed highly confidential background information from the FBI on more than 400 Reagan- and Bush-administration employees. A full…
Bob Dole's last day in Congress should have amounted to an uninterrupted string of photo opportunities and warmly reminiscent speeches. Instead, he picked a fight with members of his own party. In a TV interview, Dole attacked conservative Republicans -- one of them, Gary Bauer, by name -- who had…
As I was listening to Margaret Thatcher speak at a conference in Prague last month, I began reminiscing about the four years, starting in 1990, I spent writing from Europe for the Wall Street Journal. I was recalling the devices I would use to trick Americans into reading articles on European…
Since the 1989 publication of Amy Tan's enormously popular The Joy Luck Club, "a substantial literary sub-genre has emerged," according to literary critic Jonathan Yardley, "to rival the fiction from the 1950s and 1960s by Bellow, Malamud, Roth et al." Yardley is not the only writer to compare the…
When you read an essay that begins, "I am an, Orthodox rabbi and gay," what can you say? I mean, this is not like, "I am a Trappist monk who snorkels." We have passed beyond the merely improbable to a world where language is capable of statements like, "I am a vegetarian butcher." It's not so much…
As a columnist for the New York Times, Tom Wicker stood for 25 years among America's preeminent liberal journalists. What he said in the thousands of pieces he has published since the mid-1960s, he is saying again in Tragic Failure: Racial Integration in America (Morrow, 218 pages, $ 25). It is as…
The recent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Romer v. Evans was an unfortunate and disturbing display of judicial activism by Justice Kennedy and his happy band of rights-creating legal eagles. David Frum's commentary on the Romer ruling was on point ("Suspect Jurisprudence," June 3). The…
I've come to rely on THE WEEKLY STANDARD for principled arguments regarding the issues of our time. However, Albert Pyle's treatment of Admiral Jeremy Boorda's death ("Naval Justice," June 3) perplexes me. Pyle conjures up and praises a Navy where the "real sailors. . . . understood" Boorda's…
ONE UNANTICIPATED BENEFIT of Bob Dole's decision to give up his Senate seat and majority leadership is that he may throw the White House rapid-response effort into legal jeopardy. The Clintonires have made brilliant use of White House officials to answer, attack, and preempt Bob Dole, an effort led…
Like the hero in an old Hollywood war epic, Bob Dole leads his battered GOP platoon through e mud, searching for a fiscal-policy highway to 1996 electoral victory. The path ahead divides in two. The map from the brain trust at Republican headquarters suggests a right turn is in order: broad and…
I am sure the "Casual" column is just fun and games, but Victor Matus's " Mom and Deep-Fried Apple Pie" (May 27) brought out what I feel is the Achilles heel of the conservative movement. The article hectors the health- conscious, concluding that "low-fat means low-taste," a dining generalization…
I have received grants from the NEA both as a photographer and a curator, and I share many of Joseph Epstein's anxieties ("W.C. Fields Was Wrong," June 3).
Who's on the Internet? Not Clintonites. The America Online politics page conducts a poll on the presidential race. Between 275 and 700 people post their votes each day. In a head to head matchup, Dole beats Clinton 74.6 percent to 25.4 percent. But Dole shouldn't get too excited. Libertarian…
When Bill Clinton nominated his old friend Mickey Kantor's wife to the board of directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting last week, the embarrassing saga of Martha Buchanan officially became ancient history. Heidi Schulman (Mrs. Kantor) will replace Buchanan, who resigned in March after…
THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION'S Kenneth Weinstein was talking trash about your mother. Or so it seemed shortly before Marian Wright Edelman's 200,000-strong "Stand for Children" at the Lincoln Memorial on June 1, which Weinstein called the "Last Stand for Big Government." Blasphemer! After all, Harper's…
I couldn't agree more with Robert D. Novak's "72 Wins? Big Deal" (June 3). What the Chicago Bulls have done this year is impressive but must be regarded in light of the current dismal condition of pro basketball.
WHEN MOST AMERICANS hear the word "pedophile," they usually think of men like the self-described "child-molesting demon" Larry Don McQuay, who was released from a prison in East Texas in April and driven to San Antonio to begin a closely supervised, but nonetheless semi-free, new life. And when…
When most Americans hear the word "pedophile," they usually think of men like the self-described "child-molesting demon" Larry Don McQuay, who was released from a prison in East Texas in April and driven to San Antonio to begin a closely supervised, but nonetheless semi-free, new life. And when…
A GOOD WORD FOR NAMBLA The most overt attempt by a hip journal to give pedophiles a place at the table came in the form of a May 8, 1995, "Washington Diarist" in the New Republic by Hanna Rosin entitled "Chickenhawk." Ostensibly inspired by a " riveting" documentary of the same name about the North…
Let me say to many of my friends, my wife Judy and my sons Matthew and Danny, and my friends and colleagues standing behind me, we're very honored to have you here.
In a dirt-floored, thatched-roof bamboo hut in the mountainous jungles of northeastern Nicaragua, a group of poverty-stricken campesinos were complaining about the government to a young American woman who was meticulously taking down their grievances in a loose-leaf notebook. Ten minutes earlier,…
"NOT MUCH HAS CHANGED" is hardly an exciting political story. Therefore, we in the American public are repeatedly told that things have changed very much indeed.
It is a common right-wing plaint that the prestige media are reluctant to report on the Clinton scandals. Is it true? Well, on June 5, the House committee looking into Travelgate released documents showing that the White House had requested and received confidential FBI background materials on…
The revisionists cannot understand why Netanyahu won because they simply refuse to see Israel as it is.
On June 4, the Washington Post featured a front-page story criticizing the current round of welfare reform. The reformers, you see, want single mothers under the age of 18 to live at home with their parents. But, the Post's Judith Havemann wrote, that just won't work, and we should all forget about…
Aspecter is haunting Latin America these days -- a book that frontally attacks all of the sociological and economic foolishness that, until recently, kept the region at a developmental dead-end.
For roughly twenty years, between the 1950s and the 1970s, Malcolm Muggeridge was perhaps the most amusing writer in the English-speaking world. I do not say the wittiest, or the most humorous, but the most amusing. More efficiently than anyone else, he could set one to musing, chiefly about how…
In the world of rock'n'roll, as in the world of sports, a performer is often considered over the hill at an age when some people are in graduate school. Since the 1950s, pop music has celebrated the young and ephemeral; maturity, longevity, and ties to traditions have all become anathema to…
When Bill and Hillary Clinton turn themselves loose in the supermarket of ambition, others are meant to pay the bills. The couple began preparing their daughter, Chelsea, for her share of this debt when she was six, according to Mrs. Clinton's jaw-dropping "we're hoping that we have another child"…
Jerusalem PRIME MINISTER SHIMON PERES'S defeat was far more dramatic than the result of his head-to-head contest with Benjamin Netanyahu might indicate. His government coalition, which commanded a bare but unshakable one-seat majority in the Knesset (61 of 120), suffered a shattering trouncing in…
Like Bill Clinton, Western European leaders are declaring the end of the era of big government -- a radical development indeed for the world most highly developed welfare states. Unfortunately, Western Europe's politicians are about as reliable as the American president in this regard. The era of…
In her recent interview with Time magazine, Hillary Clinton boasted that she had supported legislation facilitating interracial adoption. Maybe Mrs. Clinton does, now that she supposedly wants to adopt a child; but where was she a couple of years ago?
Under what a pan-European government might do?
HERE IN WASHINGTON we mark life in weeks -- good weeks, bad weeks, weeks that end in a draw -- and when the Whitewater verdicts came down last Tuesday, everyone had to agree that the president was in for a bad week. Nothing could change that. A carload of Redskins cheerleaders could cruise up to…
On a recent evening, a colleague of mine at the Baltimore Sun arrived back at the office, her face aglow, from a ceremony on Capitol Hill where the evangelist Billy Graham and his wife Ruth were given the Congressional Gold Medal. She was impressed by Graham's noble presence, and surprised to be…
PESIDENT CLINTON'S TACTICAL cleverness knows no bounds. He fiummoxed Republicans by saying he would agree to sign a bill letting states bar gay marriage. He devilishly upstaged Bob Dole, his GOP rival, by seeming to endorse a conservative welfare reform plan in Wisconsin authored by Republican…
With Boris Yeltsin trying hard to deal with the problem of Russia's imperialist domination of Chechnya, The Reading List is reminded of two Leo Tolstoy works that shed real light on the subject even though they are 100- plus years old:
THE METHODICAL WORK OF A Little Rock jury has put an end once and for all to the proposition, advanced tirelessly by the defenders of Bill Clinton, that nothing really wrong was going on at the intersection of politics and money down in Arkansas during the 1980s.
Has any event ever been the subject of more blatantly biased news coverage than the Israeli elections? Ted Koppel said the Netanyahu win was "a devastating setback." Stephen Rosenfeld of the Washington Post argued that Israelis who voted for Likud are irrational and psychologically weak. Thomas L.…
Bob Dole seems to be working overtime to recruit Colin Powell as his running mate. For example, Dole commented last week that he has asked his vice-presidential search team to look for candidates "outside of politics." More telling (and disturbing), Dole has stopped talking about racial preferences…
In 1994, Alan Isler published The Prince of West End Avenue, a hilarious first novel about a zany production of Hamlet in the "Emma Lazarus," an Upper West Side Jewish retirement home. So engaging were Isler's ambulatory octogenarians and so nutty were their theatrical schemings that the book,…
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is by general agreement the greatest German- language lyric poet of this century-indeed, of any century, by an agreement scarcely less general. He is a Mount Everest of translation: Because his poetry relies so heavily on the consonantal logjams of German vocabulary…
I am an avid hockey fan--and also a great admirer of Ronald Reagan. As I watch the Stanley Cup playoffs this year, I can't help noticing the influence Reagan has had on the National Hockey League. Just look at some of the names playing in the NHL.
In its French edition, published by Gallimard, Slowness -- La lenteur -- comes scarfed with a red paper bandanna on which the word KUNDERA appears, a huge one-word promise. Gallimard's habit of singularizing its A-ream of authors is not uncommon in France. However, to be elected to the band of the…
Playing "gotcha" at the slightest sign of hypocrisy is a game for journalism's cheap shot artists. Nonetheless, the case of Newsweek's Jonathan Alter deserves special mention. Last week, in a piece on Newsweek's role in the suicide of Adm. Jeremy Boorda, Alter gave his magazine and his profession a…
THE DEFENDANT WAS LATE when the Episcopal church's Court for the Trial of a Bishop convened shortly before last Christmas. The presiding judge, a fellow bishop, asked him to introduce himself. "I'm Walter Righter," he said -- " heretic."
THE DAY AFTER BOB DOLE RESIGNED his Senate seat, he made his first post- resurrection campaign appearance, at a rally in Chicago. That evening in Washington I happened to be at a gathering of Republicans who could barely contain their delight. Conversations went like so:
Rod Grams of Minnesota scored a rare twofer last week. The freshman Republican senator first took a swipe at President Clinton in a splashy article the Washington Post led its op-ed page with. The Post then piled on with an unsigned editorial two days later, taking the Republican's side against…
The Court has mistaken a Kulturkampf for a fit of spite. The constitutional amendment before us here is not the manifestation of a "'bare . . . desire to harm'" homosexuals, but is rather a modest attempt by seemingly tolerant Coloradans to preserve traditional sexual mores against the efforts of a…
A couple of weeks ago, having plumbed the depths of our own ideas, we asked readers to suggest how Bob Dole might close the yawning gender gap that threatens to swallow his campaign for president. The flood of responses to our Let's Close That Gap! contest, we're happy to report, has far exceeded…
Bill Clinton's announcement last week that he will seek unconditional renewal of China's most-favored-nation status is the latest evidence of a metamorphosis remarkable even for this president. Though he relentlessly attacked the Bush administration's China policy as bereft of human-rights concerns…
JUDGMENTS ARE RENDERED QUICKLY below decks in the Navy. Enlisted men (women are still a small minority in the seagoing ranks) hold court on the spot, and they are far more interested in truth and justice than in mercy and reform. Political correctness is not a consideration in seagoing…
SOME REPUBLICANS ARE ON A RENDEZVOUS with impotence. Not wanting to appear insufficiently progressive as the year 2000 approaches, they say they want what Bill Clinton wants, but in a way kinder and gentler to budget constraints. Like their me-too predecessors in the 60s and 70s, " conservatives"…
WHATEVER ELSE IT ACCOMPLISHES, Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in the Colorado gay-rights case isn't going to win a niche in the Legal Reasoning Hall of Fame. In fact, the decision is so illogical one wonders whether it deserves to be called "reasoned" at all.
If you received a poor education, there are a couple of things you can do: You can gripe about it for years afterward; or you can set out to rectify the situation. I had the misfortune to go to school just as the New Left was solidifying its grip on American education -- primary, secondary, and…
Joe Trento has a hot tip. Yet the 48-year-old chief reporter for the Washington-based National Security News Service seems strangely nonchalant as he lays out what could be the story of the decade: Bill Clinton was a CIA agent. As Trento tells it, the future president did a lot more than protest…
Want to know how decisions are really made in Washington -- how a company can be bankrupted, how an effective medical procedure can be terminated, how science can be brushed aside, all in pursuit of a bureaucrat's ambition? Read on.
On Sunday afternoon, April 21, I watched the Chicago Bulls mop up the meaningless season finale against the Washington Bullets, collecting their 72nd victory in the process. No team in the National Basketball Association had won as many as 70 games before -- thus suggesting to many that the 1996…
The problem is they write too well, our literary boys. There's hardly a novelist now alive whose schooled prose cannot paint in sharp detail almost anything you'd care to name: a catastrophic train wreck, the death of a giant redwood tree, the way the tone-arm on an old Philco hi-fi would quiver…
Do the arts, with all their oddity and intricacy, have a peculiar resistance to being discussed in the frame of reference known as policy? Consider a September afternoon in 1939 on which was hatched what the Times Literary Supplement of January 2, 1987, dubbed "The Plot to Save the Artists."