67 articles
Sure, Fred Thompson's committee says it will investigate the "misuse of charitable and tax-exempt" groups. But that doesn't mean that concerned citizens especially readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD -- should be content merely to sit back and watch the fireworks on C-SPAN. You can help to root out tax…
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2. Of the dozen movies I have yet to see, I have ended up at Meet Wally Sparks, an astoundingly vulgar new comedy starring the 75- year-old Rodney Dangerfield. As I was buying my ticket, I felt a rush of fear at the thought that somebody I knew might be on line and would later…
While Washington was feting Connerly, a three-judge "motions panel" of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was upholding his handiwork in California, restoring constitutional order to that state -- and to the national debate over affirmative action. On Feb. 10, the panel unanimously overturned…
Newt Gingrich made a surprise appearance Feb. 12 at a Washington dinner honoring Ward Connerly, the chairman of the California Civil Rights Initiative. It came just a week after Gingrich alienated many conservatives by inviting Jesse Jackson to sit in the speaker's box at the State of the Union,…
Despite reelection, a lofty public approval rating, and discombobulated opponents, President Clinton is in a funk. He whines that the cynicism of the press has finally gotten to him, and that he has grown cynical too. Newt Gingrich is no better off. He can't decide what the Republican agenda should…
More than half a century ago, Lionel Trilling wrote an essay on T. S. Eliot's The Idea of a Christian Society, calling upon his liberal and Marxist friends to be more appreciative of a mode of "religious politics" that was familiar in Victorian times but that was now regarded as reactionary. "When…
Senate Republicans are worried about Democratic efforts to thwart Fred Thompson's investigation of Clinton campaign fund-raising shenanigans. But they're also anxious about Thompson himself, fearing the Tennessee Republican may bend over backward to accommodate Democrats, spend too much time…
The Clinton administration's new education initiative brings a sticky challenge for the president: how to combine his cherished role of National Empathizer and Repairer of the Breach with the unavoidably painful business of enforcing standards? When kids start taking the new math and reading tests,…
With the fall of Richard Nixon, the American media discovered that only suckers and fellow travelers took politicians at face value. The real agendas were the hidden agendas, and these were the product of the men behind the public faces: the consultants. The press soon began to seek out consultants…
Once, a reader wrote a wild letter to William F. Buckley, Jr., condemning him for all manner of failure, not excluding "lousy syntax." Buckley answered tersely: "If you had my syntax, you'd be rich."
RECALL AN ARRESTING IMAGE watched by all the world: that young Chinese student standing alone against a column of tanks in Beijing. As the lead tank attempted to go around him, the fearless young man dodged to the side to head it off. The standoff, which seemed to last forever, was perhaps the most…
PERHAPS THE MOST SERIOUS ARGUMENT the Clinton administration makes in favor of its "engagement" policy towards China is a strategic one: Beijing's military capability requires it. We want to get China to stop selling strategic-weapons technology, and so we must offer Beijing some carrots --…
IN RECENT MONTHS, THE CHINESE government has handed down harsh prison terms to political dissidents. It has made clear its intention to curtail civil liberties when it takes control of Hong Kong in July. It has redoubled its efforts to restrict the flow of information reaching Chinese citizens over…
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans have faced a pleasant but eerie international situation: Not only has there been no other power capable of challenging U.S. preeminence in the world, it has been hard even to imagine where such a threat could possibly emerge. The nations rich enough…
WHEN MIDNIGHT STRIKES on the last day of June, Hong Kong will be delivered into the hands of Communist China, ending 150 years of British colonial rule. For years, some hoped that this event would mark China's readmission into the family of nations and that Hong Kong would make China friendlier to…
THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION, finally and completely converted from candidate Clinton's 1992 attacks on President Bush's China policy, now subscribes religiously to the notion that commercial engagement with the People's Republic of China will leaven the militaristic impulses of nascent hard- liners…
CHINA IS THE LITMUS TEST for American foreign policy, indeed for the will and wisdom of the West. For China is the last of the great dictatorships of this century of wicked dictators, and if we fail in this final challenge it will call into question our previous triumphs.
AS A CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT, Bill Clinton said America should stop " coddling dictators." He promised that U.S. trade relations would be driven by human rights policy, not vice versa. Many Americans believed him, but the Chinese dictators never did. On a visit to China in early 1994, I reminded…
EVEN AS THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT was telling the Wait Disney Co. to do business elsewhere if one of its subsidiaries proceeded with a movie about the Dalai Lama, it was arresting and executing tens of thousands of Uighur minority separatists in its far northwest province of Xinjiang. Now, perhaps…
VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE won't defend the integrity of his own legislation. Consequently, 15,000 American servicemen and women are threatened by modern Chinese cruise missiles in the hands of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Navy.
First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieve the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
ON THE BASIS OF WHAT President Clinton has revealed so far, his second term won't add much to his reputation. His top priority is a balanced budget, a goal he embraced reluctantly and only because Republicans insisted. Second, he's pushing a costly education package. But even if the whole thing…
One week after being sworn in as secretary of defense, William S. Cohen held his first news conference. Cohen's opening statement -- his first substantial public remarks as manager of the most powerful military force in history -- contained a total of 902 words. Cohen devoted 74 of those words to…
ON FEBRUARY 3, 1997, at its midyear meeting in San Antonio, the American Bar Association called for an end to the execution of violent criminals " unless and until greater fairness and due process prevail." The association's policy-making House of Delegates approved the measure 280-119, over the…
IN 1989, WHEN ANTHONY LAKE was toiling as a professor at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, he published a well-received book about U.S. policy toward Nicaragua entitled Somoza Falling. Among the explanations he offered for the Carter administration's slow response to the Sandinistas' rise was…
LAST TUESDAY NIGHT, the Simpson verdict and the Clinton speech competed for the nation's attention. O. J. won. And he deserved to.
"We are the experts in Hollywood on what you can and can't get away with," says Scott Alexander, one half of the screenwriting team that just won a Golden Globe award for its latest film, The People vs. Larry Flynt. " Lawyers love us, because we know the rules. And as long as you don't have Jerry…
A boozy housing agent once told me that the golden rule of urban real- estate speculation was "follow the homosexuals." Gays, he said, sought to maximize pretty architecture and proximity to museums and restaurants, even as they minimized grime and drab vistas. A neighborhood in which flower shops…
Who's responsible for the seemingly endless chain of White House fund- raising scandals now coming to light? Listening to Bill Clinton's recent press conference, it was hard to tell. "No one is blameless here," said the president, since "at the edges, errors are made, and when they're made, they…
Gerry Adams
Bill Bradley was the first prominent political figure in either party to come right out and say that we might want to rewrite the First Amendment in order to enact what now passes for campaign-finance "reform" on Capitol Hill. An editorial in these pages ("Silencing Free Speech in the Name of…
President Reagan's chief of protocol Selwa Roosevelt took to the op-ed page of the Sunday Washington Post a week ago in despair over the valedictory op-ed written by outgoing Republican party chairman Haley Barbour. He had urged the party to "act boldly, but speak temperately" and to "stand up for…
Deserving of at least a footnote in the history of Bill Clinton's second inaugural is the document distributed by the Presidential Inauguration Committee that offers "a helpful hints reference guide for politically correct speech when interacting with individuals with disabilities." Distributed to…
Once a year, and for only as long as the dutiful questioning of the press corps requires, the Clinton administration is nominally tough on Communist China. The State Department's annual "country reports" on international human- rights practices fall due. These reports follow a standard analytical…
MOVIE DIARY
There's been a well-publicized campaign these past few months to raise American consciousness about the alleged, um, religious persecution of Scientologists in the Federal Republic of Germany. Some of our great country's most prominent public intellectuals have joined the cause: Mario Puzo, Frank…
Dmitry Mikheyev
Jon Katz
INTELLECTUALLY DOMINANT for most of the last two decades and ideologically dominant for the last two years, the GOP is the de facto majority party in America. And yet these days, as the 105th Congress begins its work, it is clear that the faithful are paralyzed by ennui and the party is…
The guests at the Washington banquet were just getting their dessert when the image of a woman named Sally Nungesser appeared on two enormous video screens. The videotape of Nungesser showed her standing at a podium making strange facial expressions -- twitching her eyebrows, crinkling her nose,…
IN THE PAST TWO MONTHS, Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic has learned the hard way that flying in the American orbit can be dangerous to a dictator's health.
I first met George W. Bush in 1976 at a very extravagant and fairly wild wedding in the Mississippi Delta. He was eight years out of Yale then and working in the oil business in Midland, Texas. His father was serving as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and so the Bush name was not yet a…
BILL CLINTON AND TRENT LOTT, the Senate majority leader, are the two most important politicians in Washington, and, from all evidence, they really like each other. They've talked about ten times since the election -- about the balanced-budget amendment, Medicare, tax cuts, and education. Twice, the…
AS IS ALWAYS THE CASE following a jury verdict against a news organization, media critics have rushed to explain what precisely it meant last month when 12 women and men in Greensboro, N.C., ordered ABC to pay $ 5.5 million to Food Lion. Obviously the jury meant to punish ABC's Primetime Live for…
Lest you wonder whether it has been an advantage, or a disadvantage, to be openly gay in the world of pop culture these days, consider the case of Gregg Araki. Araki is one of the premier homosexual writer-directors of the day, with highly praised examinations of gay life ranging from the…
Several readers correctly point out that it was not King Lear, as we had it three weeks ago, but Hamlet who asked, "who should "scape whipping?" Clearly, we shouldn't.
David Carkeet
Thomas Mallon
One of the more indignant passages in Dick Morris's soon-to-be-forgotten memoir Behind the Oval Office concerns Alex Castellanos, a Republican media consultant in Washington. As Morris tells the story, a Washington Post reporter called him in 1995 or 1996 and said that Castellanos had told her that…
One night in 1980, I went to see Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining. I liked it: the creepy music, and that classic scene where the Jack Nicholson character, deranged by writer's block, busts through a bathroom door to attack his wife with an axe. "Heeeere's Johnny!" he bellowed. Great fun.
Fred Goodman
We should begin with a brief recapitulation of the California Civil Rights Initiative story. CCRI is an amendment to the California constitution, with language lifted almost verbatim from the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, that would ban the use of racial and gender preferences in statefunded…
THE ARGUMENT THAT NEWT GINGRICH deserved his reprimand and $ 300,000 fine because he used tax-exempt money to fund a college course at Reinhardt College is based on the idea that the course was actually "political" -- that Gingrich taught the course to further specifically partisan aims. I am one…
We swore off coverage of Jude Wanniski after the election last fall, but Jack Kemp's guru has outdone himself. That's no easy feat for the man who called himself Kemp's "puppeteer" and who almost managed to talk Kemp into becoming a sort of junior Warren Christopher -- conducting shuttle diplomacy…
The story is told of the diva who, shipwrecked, fell into the clutches of cannibals. Before they put her in the pot, she cried, "You can't do this to me, I'm an opera singer!"
And while we're on the subject of outdoing oneself, the Larry King Live special Jan. 17 on the death of Ennis Cosby featured what may be an untoppable teaser line, to get you to hang around during the ads. Said Larry: "We're going to take a break and ask Jesse Jackson to help us deal with death.…
Lawrence E. Harrison
WHEN THREE ONE-TIME secretaries of state and three one-time national security advisers who served under different presidents in different parties act in concert, it makes news -- especially when they do something right in the middle of one of the few newsworthy foreign-policy events in the last…
HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A PRESIDENT SO hungry for a notable place in history? Bill Clinton can't .stop talking about how history will regard him, as if he wants the affection of future generations as cravenly as he seeks the love of his own.
February is Black History Month, an especially opportune time to reflect on the role played by African Americans in helping the United States live up to the principles of its founding fathers. And yet since its establishment, black intellectuals, educators, and leaders have seen fit to use Black…
A prominent Hong Kong developer with links to Beijing explained China's cavalier attitude toward its commitments on Hong Kong. China, he said, views its treaty with Great Britain returning the colony to Chinese rule as it would a business contract -- perpetually open for renegotiation. In societies…
ONE OF THE CURIOUS THINGS about the bitter battle over preferences and quotas that came to a head in the California Civil Rights Initiative is how many critics of affirmative action were missing in action when the issue faced its first test at the ballot box. After the fight was won without them,…
Benjamin Netanyahu's subtle, tenuous achievement.
ONE WEEK AFTER LAST November's election, President Clinton met privately at the White House with Senate majority leader Trent Lott. Among the subjects discussed was the balanced budget amendment. Lott, pragmatic in his conservatism but zealously in favor of the amendment, insisted it has a good…
For many days leading up to its actual delivery, the White House staff took pains to keep a waiting nation informed of the president's preparations for his second inaugural address. The president, we were told, was drafting and re-drafting, night after sleepless night, greeting the dawn. He read…