70 articles
Above, on his perch, the parrot sleeps, but below, in the lobby of the San Diego Marriott, the Pundit Gods sweep by. CNN's William Schneider is soundbiting his way across the room, a radio microphone shoved in his face. James Carville is chatting with the Washington Post's Richard Cohen as Norman…
When a bunch of Olympic athletes hit the podium on Wednesday, their medals swinging around their necks, the band struck up a familiar march that seemed to be making a mockery of their appearance. In fact, a few of us laughed aloud at the sound. Why? Because the march that introduced them doubled as…
If I were to say that the novel is an utterly heterosexual form of art -- simultaneously an instrument and an expression of the relations between men and women -- I would be entering realms so socially awkward and aesthetically complex that it hardly seems worth the effort. An openly homosexual…
Ed Rollins doesn't like Arianna Huffington. We know this. We also know that Ed Rollins got $ 1 million for his new book in part because he decided to attack Arianna Huffington -- even though he worked for her husband's senatorial campaign in 1994 and collected a great deal of money from it.
It's not every day that golfers are treated to a movie about their sport, so they rejoice at every crumb from Hollywood's table -- or recoil from it. The latest such crumb is Tin Cup, a Kevin Costner vehicle about a no- account practice-range operator who gets it together and shines at the U.S.…
Time was, a conscientious reporter could travel to a convention, study the proceedings, interview the delegates, calibrate their controversies, absorb the party's message, filter it through to a waiting nation, and get ripped.
Reporters are deluged at conventions by press releases, faxes, speech texts, free copies of newspapers and magazines, and other forms of printed detritus meant to elevate the profile of a pol, a news organ, or a political party. But the Marriott Corporation took the concept of "spin" to new heights…
Leading up to Susan Molinari's keynote speech, NBC's Tom Brokaw let drop one of those colorful little anecdotes that campaigns love to feed willing anchorfolk. According to Brokaw, Molinari was changing the diapers of her telegenic infant Susan Ruby Paxon the other day when the baby "had an…
Tuesday night, Sidney Blumenthal of the New Yorker -- the most notorious Clinton suck-up in the American media, bar none -- sat having a drink in the bar in the Marriott lobby with a number of fellow liberal scribes, including Jeff Greenfield, Hendrik Hertzberg, Garry Wills, Jacob Weisberg, and…
It is with great pride and humility that we at THE WEEKLY STANDARD present the first set of convention awards. In honor of the spirit of San Diego, we are calling our awards the Treaclys. A partial list of nominees and winners:
The first promise Susan Molinari made in her keynote address Tuesday night was to keep the speech short. She did. She had no choice. Like every other speaker at the convention, Molinari faced three lights as she stood at the podium. The first light was timed to go off when a speaker was 30 seconds…
When 15 or so close relatives of Bob Dole's appeared outside the convention center Monday morning, they were denied entrance by the ubiquitous security guards. Why? It seemed no one in the Dole campaign had bothered to obtain credentials for them. When deputy campaign manager Rick Davis learned of…
The most terrifying moment in journalism occurs when two scientific studies thump on your desk simultaneously. One study, from Ph.D. Smith, says, roughly, that the sky is falling. The other study, by Ph.D. Jones, says, roughly, that the sky is just fine. In fact, the sky may be rising. These…
Martin Mawyer, president of the Christian Action Network, found himself arguing on his adversaries' turf Tuesday when he debated Rich Tafel, president of the Log Cabin Republicans, on "The Role of Homosexuals in the Republican Party."
"The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body." So said Thomas Jefferson -- with fitting pugnacity -- and who would take issue with him these days, given the horrendous troubles afflicting American cities? One need not…
Punk, the most notorious pseudo-movement in the history of 20th-century popular music, is becoming cuddly with age. The Sex Pistols, punk's most outrageous act, has reunited after almost two decades to travel the United States in the aptly named Filthy Lucre Tour. The Pistols are without their…
THE WEEKLY STANDARD has a full-time position available for a staff assistant/receptionist. The job is administrative, and the responsibilities include phones, mail, back issues, correspondence, and other general administrative duties. The ideal candidate would be organized, hard-working, and…
Republican political consultant Ed Rollins appears on the cover of his new memoir, Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms, wearing suspenders, tie, and -- on his raised dukes -- boxing gloves. In the book's first hundred pages, he talks endlessly about his teenage boxing career. But Ed, isn't "bare knuckles"…
Clay Chandler is a reporter covering economic policy for the Washington Post -- a position held throughout the 1980s by the late Hobart Rowan, the legendary scourge of Reaganomics. Even when he pretended to be merely a reporter, Rowan made it clear in his dispatches that tax cuts of any kind were a…
The so-called war on drugs was ever-present during the 1980s but seems to have disappeared from the public-policy radar screen in the 1990s. Turns out that is a very, very bad development; this is one area where eternal vigilance is clearly called for, especially when you consider just how bad…
The Olympic Games reassured us of one thing: The Iranian government has not lost its rhetorical touch. After an Iranian wrestler won the gold medal in the 198-pound class, President HasheAl Rafsanjani -- was he one of the moderates? -- praised him for "rubbing the nose of America in the dirt." The…
Life is complicated, and politics can be too. Shepherding legislation through Congress and manging a diverse political coalition are difficult undertakings that often require subtlety, indirection, even obfuscation. Those were the skills Bob Dole perfected in his years at the helm of the Senate.…
Another nice example of now-you-see-it, now-you-don't school reform comes to us from the Golden State. California instituted teacher testing 13 years ago, and with it an implicit pledge to the public that their children's teachers would be able to read, write, and do math at least as well as…
As the presidential campaign enters its final phases, I'm struck by something I didn't expect to get struck by: Everybody likes Bob Dole!
The conventional wisdom in Washington is that Whitewater's dead, at least for this election season. White House aides are elated at a Little Rock jury's acquittal of two Arkansas bankers on four felony counts. Deputy counsel Bruce Lindsey, reportedly the president's closest friend in the White…
From the commercials, you might think the hit screen version of John Grisham's first novel, A Time to Kill, is about the trial of a black man who shot and killed the two rednecks who raped his ten-year-old daughter. Actually, it's about air conditioning. Or, more precisely, the lack of air…
THE SAN FRANCISCO Unified School District has a lesson plan for teaching kindergartners and first-graders about homosexuality. It is called "My Family" and is disseminated through the district's Support Services for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth Department.
In the fall of 1995, when Democrats were running ads hammering Ohio Republican congressman Bob Ney for cutting Medicare, Ney cornered Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour and asked why the GOP hadn't countered with a blitzkrieg of its own. "Where are the RNC ads?" Ney asked.
VOODOO II! MORE DISCREDITED supply-side numerical magic! "Loony . . . irresponsible . . . incredible!" So says the team of Panetta and Tyson -- that's Laura D'Andrea, not Iron Mike. The Clintonites consider Bob Dole's long-awaited economic plan, of which a $ 548 billion tax cut over six years is…
In 1969, two little towns came to represent two opposing cultures in America. After the counterculture held its summer festival in Woodstock, N.Y., a counter-counterculture movement was launched in the fall through the agency of a song called "Okie from Muskogee," in which the singer-songwriter…
MIDWAY THROUGH THE OPENING DAY of the Republican party's platform committee meetings, Gary Bauer and Ann Stone met in the hallway to talk, and the encounter between the Christian conservative and the pro-choice activist drew a crowd of reporters. As the two spoke in intense but earnest tones -- "…
Watch the pen when President Clinton signs the Kennedy-Kassebaum health care bill in September. It may quiver. In January 1994, Clinton ostentatiously held up another presidential pen during his State of the Union address. "If you send me legislation that does not guarantee every American private…
Here's a simple fact you'd never know from the media coverage of the abortion controversy inside the Republican party last week: A large majority of Republicans who voted this year chose a candidate named Dole who has never parted meaningful substantive company with the pro-life movement on the…
just after the Republicans took over Congress, budget chairman John Kasich put out a hit list of 386 federal agencies slated for elimination. He said that Washington had become an "evil" city corrupted by special interests and bloated government. The idea was to remove government from large swaths…
August 6, 1996
Charles Murray writes:
Coming home from work the other day, I stopped by our local fancy bread store and bought a walnut olive loaf ($ 4.25) and a bottle of Evian water ($ 1.25). As I counted the change from my $ 10, I began to wonder: Now that staples like water, bread, and coffee come in upscale versions, what will be…
Hey, nice in-kind campaign contribution to the Re-Elect Clinton Committee in the form of that seven-part series on the Clinton record! We were just wondering: Do you really believe all that bilge, or what?
What finally drove anti-con intellectual Michael ind over the edge? A good case can be made that it was Bob Dole's use of the third-person singular when talking about himself. Lind, by contrast, likes to use the first-person singular when he's talking about other people. This could be what created…
Leading conservatives in the House of Representatives are angry, yet again, with Newt Gingrich for caving too quickly to Bill Clinton. The subject: anti- terrorism legislation. When Clinton convened a summit meeting with the leaders of Congress on the subject two days after the bombing at the…
Newspapers love to report on pieces of partisan fund-raising mail that are mistakenly sent to the opposing camp. It doesn't happen every week (quite), but it happens often enough to have become an annoying trope. We live in a world of junk mail, and the fact that a Republican receives a form letter…
Modern liberalism's central pretension -- its insistence that the federal government must guarantee national solutions to our most glaring domestic problems -- is dead. The centerpiece of the American welfare system is to be abolished by Bill Clinton's signature on Republican legislation. "I never…
If conscious novelists are the novelists who cannot begin writing until they know what they're going to say, then unconscious novelists are the ones who have no idea what they're going to say until after they've said it. Though no writer has ever managed to achieve either perfect consciousness or…
AT THE POTOMAC JOB CORPS CENTER in Washington, D.C., disadvantaged youths aged 16 to 24 live in dorms, work on reading, and learn trades. Some study to become house painters, others to become bricklayers, carpenters -- even cosmetologists. And all of them study American history. Well, sort of.
WHATEVER THE MEDIA SAY, the skirmishes at this week's Republican platform committee meetings in San Diego leading up to the GOP national convention won't amount to much. The real battles have already been fought in Washington, behind closed doors, with conservatives, mostly congressional staffers,…
LATE ON THE NIGHT OF JULY 27, Pat and Shelly Buchanan were getting ready to go see Indepenence Day when they found a message from Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour on their answering machine. Reached at home, Barbour informed Buchanan that his speaking duties at next week's…
IF BUCHANANITES THOUGHT they were the only ones being jilted by officials at the Republican National Convention, they now have dinner companions. Grousing over coveted space in the packed-to-the-rafters San Diego Convention Center has become something of a hobby horse for conservative advocacy…
Report that you are just going to, or have just been back from, Israel, and the response is invariably the same: "How are things there?" people ask, in the manner in which they might inquire about a relative whom they feel a little guilty for not visiting lately. How are things there? The question…
Even on cable television, it doesn't get much stranger than the episode of Lenora Fulani's public-access talk show, Fulani!, that aired last month in cities across the country. The program's introduction, a 60-second montage of film clips and still photos set to music, opens with footage of the…
BOB DOLE DOESN'T LIKE the gender gap. "It annoys him," says an adviser to his presidential campaign. According to Dole pollster Tony Fabrizio, "it irks him that the White House says he's done nothing [for women]." Dole believes this is a "bad rap," says another senior Dole adviser. And it is,…
Everybody's so focused on the Republican platform that it comes as a bit of a surprise to learn that there will be a Democratic party platform as well. And we've gotten our hands on a document that spells out what the administration wants the platform to say. Stamped "DRAFT, NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION,"…
A specter haunts Republicans as they finish preparations for Bob Dole's forthcoming presidential nominating ceremony in San Diego. And they freely admit it. "Every meeting on planning this convention," a senior Dole aide tells the New York Times, "begins with what went wrong in 1992."
It's not just corporate pork that is surviving the "merciless" budget axe of the Republican Congress. Feminist pork is making out nicely, too.
The conservatives are rumbling up on the Hill. The most recent complaint has to do with House speaker Newt Gingrich's decision to punish two prolife House Republicans, Chris Smith and Bob Dornan. Their offense: lending support to a pro-life Republican, former representative Joseph DioGuardi, who is…
Southern Maryland's Calvert County is where the wife and I perch. Bordered by the Patuxent River and Chesapeake Bay, it lies just 30 miles south of D.C., but to most of my snooty Northern-Virginia-dwelling colleagues it might as well be French Lick, in sensibility if not topography.
In the search for answers in the wake of the TWA 800 disaster, the role of the Athens airport is coming under scrutiny -- and is the subject of some peculiar politicking in the United States. A good thing too. TWA Flight 800 originated in Athens before landing in New York and then departing for…
THE WEEKLY STANDARD is looking for full-time, unpaid, enthusiastic undergraduate interns for the fall. Our internships involve administrative support and some research. Please send resume cover letter to: Internship Coordinator, THE WEEKLY STANDARD, 1150 17th St. NW, Suite 505, Washington, D. C.…
On one of the last mornings of 1970, Elvis Presley arrived in Washington, D. C., to meet Richard Nixon. Or so the rock idol hoped. In a five-page letter to the president scrawled on American Airlines stationery, Presley introduced himself: "I am Elvis Presley and admire you and have great respect…
I'm no newspaperman, but the following sure looks like a front-page, above- the-fold story to me:
"THE MOST BRUTAL ACT of social policy since Reconstruction" is how Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, characterizes the welfare legislation that will soon land on Bill Clinton's desk. Could the president dream of signing such a bill into law?
THE MOST STIRRING MOMENT on television this year was Kerri Strug's glorious final vault -- achieved despite a lateral tendon sprain so severe that she had to be carried from the gym on a stretcher -- to secure the U.S. Olympic team the gold medal in women's gymnastics. It was the most extraordinary…
Why are some men attracted sexually to other men, rather than to women? Since one of the most powerful forces in nature is the drive to perpetuate the species, the origin of this perverse sexual orientation is clearly of great interest to biologists. In A Separate Creation (Hyperion, 354 pages, $…
THE KLEIN AFFAIR -- the savaging of Joe Klein for having lied about his authorship of Primary Colors and the charge that he thus betrayed the standards of his journalistic profession -- is indeed kleine nachtmusik. But when the self-importance meets the self-righteousness of the American press,…
By the late 1940s Pablo Picasso was convinced he could turn lead into gold, and he was right: He bought things (houses included) with pictures instead of money, and people fought over his merest tablecloth doodle. His transformation into history's only successful alchemist had an amazing effect. He…
IF A TERRORIST GROUP CAUSED THE DEATHS of the TWA Flight 800 passengers, politicians and pundits will inevitably redouble pious calls for heightening security at airports. Some may even call for a limited military strike against a particular group or its sponsor. Such measures, while consistent…
Anyone tempted to believe in the inevitability of historical progress should consider where things stood at the beginning of 1942. In Europe, having driven first to the English Channel, Hitler had turned on his erstwhile Soviet ally and advanced east all the way to the outskirts of Moscow. Only…
DONALD RUMSFELD has tried this before: turning a career legislator from Capitol Hill into a national politician and chief executive. In 1974, it was Gerald Ford, the accidental president fresh from years as House Republican leader. Ford thought tactically, not strategically. He was chronically…
ON MAY 8 THE WINE INSTITUTE, one of Washington's most effective lobbying groups, held a reception at the Library of Congress attended by some 300 senators, House members, pals of the administration, congressional staffers, U.S. Department of Agriculture employees, and businessmen. Even by…
THE GLOBAL WARMING DEBATE is in a rut. In mid-July, for example, Undersecretary of State Timothy Wirth called for a crackdown on the emission of so-called greenhouse gases that are the inescapable byproduct of burning coal and oil. Any effort to choke off carbon-dioxide emissions will hit the…