April 1997

You open a magazine and there's an advertisement -- for blue jeans, for perfume, for a radio station, it could be anything. The ad copy says something like, "Breaking all the rules."

Tod Lindberg writes: I want to correct an error in my article on Richard Ben-Veniste in last week's issue. I noted that the first time the name of John Huang -- the Lippo Group official turned Commerce Department official turned DNC fund-raiser -- came up in an investigative context was at a June…

CONGRESSIONAL LEADERS have to move beyond the Balanced Budget Amendment. It's an intellectual error and a political loser. As evidence, consider the recent debate about the amendment, which had a through-the-looking-glass quality. It wasn't just the politicians running between hearing rooms and…

Speaking of China, no instance of Beijing's brutality is more striking than its oppression of the Tibetan people. The depth of Chinese Communist hatred for the Dalai Lama -- spiritual leader of that captive nation and of millions of Buddhists around the world -- can be gauged by the virulence of…

IN MARCH, JAMES A. BAKER III was summoned from semi-retirement and appointed United Nations envoy to the Western Sahara. His charge: to quell a dispute between the government of Morocco and a rebel group over a sparsely populated tract of land. Less than a month later, the former secretary of state…

"Christ," thinks the wife of Harry Morgan, the hero of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, "I could do that all night if a man was built that way." But, of course, a man isn't. Men aren't built other ways as well. "Men don't like complicated food," says one spinsterish character to another in a…

Joseph Sobran

In the United States, "there is hardly any talk of the beauty of virtue," Tocqueville noted. "American moralists do not pretend that one must sacrifice himself for his fellows because it is a fine thing to do so." They are " forever forming" associations "of a thousand different types" all by…

MAYBE YOU'VE HEARD. Ellen DeGeneres, the sitcom actress, and Ellen Morgan, her TV character (from the aptly titled sitcom, Ellen), are coming out, bless them. It seems like only yesterday I was recounting to a colleague how a month had passed since the announcement that Ellen (the character, not…

Garry Wills

First it tried the Alec Baldwin gambit -- send Hollywood stars to Capitol Hill to do grip 'n' grins with hostile lawmakers. Now the National Endowment for the Arts is stepping up its campaign for survival. With its latest round of grants earlier this month, the NEA has cleverly dropped its open…

Jude Wanniski's crackpot crusade to launder the reputation of Louis Farrakhan proceeds apace. Wanniski, once an influential publicist for supply- side economics and a top adviser to Jack Kemp as recently as last fall, apparently devotes an increasing amount of his time to advising Farrakhan on his…

The Washington debate over the Clinton administration's policy of appeasement -- pardon us, "engagement" toward China is heating up. It will get even warmer as July 1 nears, when Hong Kong reverts to Chinese sovereignty after 155 years as a British crown colony. And there'll be a full boil when…

THE CLINTON WHITE HOUSE thinks it has lured Senate majority leader Trent Lott into supporting the chemical-weapons ban. The tactic: engaging in extensive negotiations with Lott over Senate modifications of the treaty. By making concessions to Lott -- and to Sen. Jesse Helms, the chairman of the…

For evidence that American foreign policy has abandoned its traditional moorings, one need only glance at a newspaper. On a typical day, the national press will report items such as the following: The Navy evicts a Marine Corps battalion from its base in southern California -- to make room for a…

R. F. Foster

Of all the world's opera companies, only New York's Met has the stature to summon to its stage the finest, most appropriate singers for any work in the repertory and present them in a kind of all-star performance. When these well- laid plans succeed, the results are not only glorious but historic.…

Paul Johnson says there is a mutual attraction between Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair that is, at its core, sexual. "Lady Thatcher is incapable of having a relationship with a male politician without a slight sexual element," the historian recently wrote in the Daily Telegraph. Johnson says that…

WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY Mike McCurry told reporters on April 7 that President Clinton and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu get along " almost in a brotherly way." Strange. Clinton, after all, did everything he could last year to keep Netanyahu from being elected. And as often as not,…

MOVIE DIARY

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's new $ 30 million study of the effects of child care on children from birth to three proves very little about child care. But it demonstrates anew that pundits and pols love to seize on social-science findings and "prove" with them…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has a position available for a circulation manager, who will report to the circulation director. Candidates must have several years' experience in circulation planning, budgeting, subscription fulfillment, ABC regs, source management, and direct marketing. Please send your…

Toward the end of March a couple of mourning doves joined the crowd of winter birds eating seed on our back deck, and we knew it was spring. Mourning doves are like robins: They can survive the cold weather without going south, but you don't ordinarily see them around our Connecticut suburb during…

THE WASHINGTON LAWYER is the quintessential Washington type. He has the huge house in Wesley Heights or Potomac; the million-dollar partnership bonuses; the Rolodex with everyone's private number; the squad of young associates who do the grunt work and call him Godfather; the easy intercourse with…

The Washington lawyer is the quintessential Washington type. He has the huge house in Wesley Heights or Potomac; the million-dollar partnership bonuses; the Rolodex with everyone's private number; the squad of young associates who do the grunt work and call him Godfather; the easy intercourse with…

Muriel Spark

This was supposed to be a banner year for America's China boosters. The plan was for the Clinton administration to hammer out an agreement for China's accession to the World Trade Organization, maybe in time for a Rose Garden ceremony with President Jiang Zemin this fall. That deal would confer on…

In this season of hysteria over how campaign-finance laws apply to tax- exempt political groups, it's worth noting that House Speaker Newt Gingrich is not the only one mired in controversy. Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper, reported last week that the Federal Election Commission has filed a…

Nathan Glazer

T. S. Eliot

Rick Moody

Despite claims to the contrary, fund-raising by Republican campaigns and organizations in Washington (the national committee, the House and Senate campaign committees) is suffering badly. "Way off," says one knowledgeable Republican. GOP officials have a pretty good idea why: Newt Gingrich's…

Jorge Semprun

On its bad days, the conservative movement is beginning to look like the French Third Republic. Premier Gingrich teeters daily on the verge of collapse as whispers of coups and counter-coups flutter round him. At the rostrum, the supply-siders are accusing deficit hawks of wrecking the Republican…

The correlation of Republican forces in the House is lining up behind Dick Armey and Bill Paxon as the ticket to take over when and if Newt Gingrich steps down as speaker. Armey would be speaker, Paxon majority leader. " There's a certain symmetry to it," says a Republican leader approvingly. Armey…

AN INFLUENTIAL POET and progressive cultural icon had died, and thus the obituaries in the New York Times and Washington Post were unremittingly reverential. At times it was difficult to discern which of Allen Ginsberg's legacies was the more memorable -- Was it his prodigious literary output or,…

Neal Stephenson

The $ 64,000 question among Washington conservatives right now is how Senate majority leader Trent Lott can emerge unscathed from a bubbling controversy over the chemical weapons treaty. The treaty is strongly opposed by Senate conservatives like Jesse Helms and Jon Kyl, but when they met with Lott…

Ward Just

Christopher Lasch

The number-two job at the Department of Justice, which holds the title of deputy attorney general, is vacant. The number-three job, associate attorney general, is vacant. The solicitor general's office, which represents the United States before the Supreme Court, is being run by former White House…

Richard Rhodes

Several years ago, a close friend informed me in the bluntest possible terms that I'd been treating him shabbily. He had a list of specific offenses: I'd been patronizing, puffed up, etc. My first reaction was to feel wrongly accused. But after thinking about what he'd said for a day or two,…

REPORTERS COVERING what they dubbed the Al Gore 1997 Worldwide Soft Money Refund Tour had just settled into their seats at Qinghua University to hear the vice president speak when they were suddenly summoned back to their makeshift press room. Moments later, one of the more recognizable members of…

Rob Long

ON HIS SUCCESSFUL TRIP TO CHINA, Newt Gingrich was treated as America's second or third most important politician. Now that he's back, the House speaker has resumed his less glorious role as Washington's most famous deadbeat. Gingrich agreed to a $ 300,000 fine in his settlement with the House…

Oslo is beyond saving, but peace still has a chance.

WHEN WILLIAM HAYDEN SCORED just 78.9 on e 1994 Nassau County, N.Y., police exam -- score that placed him more than 8,000 names down the list and well out of contention to be hired -- he knew something was fishy. A former New York City police officer and a fire marshal on Long Island, Hayden had…

Last year, David Helfgott was a rmer music student who had fallen victim to a crippling mental illness. This year, he is the most famous pianist in the world. All because of a movie.

There's a fascinating argument going on between two Dartmouth Review- niks. But wild dogs couldn't drag us into the middle of this one, so we'll just report the facts. On February 23, Laura Ingraham, a former Review editor who has gone on to fame as a CBS pundit, wrote a piece for the Washington…

What do the following people have in common: Gary Bauer, president of the Family Research Council, Robert Casey, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Princeton professors John J. DiIulio, Jr. (a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD) and Robert P George, Emory University professor…

Thumb through Simon & Schuster's preview of its fall and winter offerings and you quickly see why the publishing behemoth is our most cherished repository of middlebrow eclecticism. There's William J. Bennett with a new collection from our founding fathers on such matters as "civility" and "piety.…

In his ecumenical Easter edition of Fox News Sunday, host Tony Snow interviewed Nation of Islam honcho Min. Louis Farrakhan. In the process Snow showed signs of wanting to be the second journalistic convert, after columnist Robert Novak, to Farrakhan revisionism. This is the view that -- though the…

For three years now, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been running an undercover operation called "Innocent Images" that targets people who use computers to traffic in child pornography -- and the results have been oddly reassuring. Innocent Images has nabbed over 70 people so far, from time…

California's Civil Rights Initiative, whose progress was often chronicled on this page, looks like another one of those cases where California led the nation. An initiative patterned on CCRI, which would outlaw race and sex discrimination in public employment, contracting, and education, is being…

READ THE RAVES! "Essential viewing . . . I can't recommend it highly enough, " gushes Carolyn B. Sheldon, president of the American School Counselor Association. The Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Caucus of the New Jersey Education Association dubs it "compelling . . . incredibly inspiring . . .…

"There is no controlling legal authority that says this was any violation of law."

President Clinton and the Democrats have responded to the burgeoning scandal surrounding their fund-raising methods with a symphony of defenses that sound plausible. At least at first.

For the greater part of the past decade, discourse -- both learned and unlearned -- on the state of American higher education has exhibited an obsession with the phenomenon of "political correctness." Initially the intellectual property of conservatives who saw the ideological chickens of the 1960s…

SATURDAY, MARCH 1. Howard Stern, whose success has been based on his unwillingness to stand for celebrity sanctimony, has now turned sanctimonious, and therefore he must be destroyed. I walk out of Private Parts, his autobiographical movie, in a state of bewilderment. It's a nice, unmemorable…

Something strange happened to me the other day: I got a flat tire. And even stranger, I changed it. I am still dizzy with amazement.

At an airport ceremony marking his arrival in Beijing last week, Vice President Gore made portentous use of an ancient T'ang Dynasty poem called " On Stork Tower." Bilateral relations between our "two great nations and civilizations," the vice president said, are "filled with many rivers, some…

The Washington Post's Reliable Sources column reported gleefully last week that a prominent Democrat received a fund-raising letter from the Republican party! The prominent Democrat was the campaign consultant Bob Shrum -- and the wonder of it all isn't that one partisan ended up on the mailing…

Shortly after Anthony Lake withdrew his nomination to become the CIA director, Anthony Lewis of the New York Times wrote an extraordinary column, titled "Again, Scoundrel Time," in which he accused senators who opposed Lake's confirmation of McCarthyism. In describing the unraveling of the…

Norma V. Cantu, head of the Clinton Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, is a left-wing litigator, a veteran of the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, who has never met a racial quota she didn't like. She is the forgotten second royal in Clint Bolick's famous "Clinton's Quota Queens"…

You're in your twenties, born into the age of selfesteem. From your earliest childhood, television characters from Mr. Rogers to Big Bird have been lovebombing you with messages about how special you are. At school, entire curricula have been established to enhance your sense of self-worth. You've…

The creation of the myth of Bruno Bettelheim begins in the American Midwest during the Second World War. A recent immigrant from Nazi Europe, Bettelheim applied for a position at Rockford College in Illinois, using an impressive, and in those years unverifiable, curriculum vitae. It said he had…

HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER DICK ARMEY is the kind of guy who sports an Adam Smith necktie and worships at the altar of free trade. In his 12 years in Congress, he's never opposed a trade-liberalization agreement, and he's always voted to renew most-favored-nation trading status with China. But asked how…

The "reinventing government" initiative that Al Gore launched in 1993 has begun to reward all sorts of reinvention. His National Performance Review Board has just recognized Richard Green of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, who wrote a computer program to streamline OSHA…

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is a master of the annales school of history, whose adherents have been criticized for shunning politics and focusing instead on demography, social history, and various other minutiae. Le Roy Ladurie himself is best known for his work on artisans, witches, the Languedoc…

Why has Jesse Helms suddenly softened his opposition to the chemical- weapons treaty? The Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, thought to be an implacable foe of the controversial treaty, has now indicated he might allow it to come to the Senate floor for a ratification vote. He made the…