55 articles
Last week, Secretary of Defense William Cohen announced, as part of his larger reorganization, the downgrading of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, headed by legendary strategist Andy Marshall. For more than two decades, every secretary of defense from Melvin Laird through William Perry has…
Remember back when Republican presidents were trying to pack the federal courts with right-wing judges? These judges were going to fashion an America, as Sen. Edward Kennedy memorably put it, in which "women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters,…
Our president's compulsive bragging erupted on Meet the Press last week, when host Tim Russert cited a poll in which 6 percent of Americans associated Bill Clinton with eating at McDonald's. "It's funny," said the president, about to uncork one of his gratuitous whoppers (and we don't mean the…
MUCH OF OFFICIAL WASHINGTON has been mulling over what the "Clinton legacy" will be. On the second Saturday in November, President Clinton may have provided the answer. For it was on that day that, for the first time, an American president conferred upon homosexuals the blessing of the highest…
The Minnesota State Board of Education has provided the best argument so far for school choice: a chance to escape from the diversity police the board wants to unleash. Under a proposed set of "Rules Relating to Educational Diversity," each school district in the state would have to set up a…
FOR 10 YEARS AS A VIRGINIA STATE SENATOR, Mark Earley rose on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion to talk about the lives of unborn children. No colleagues joined him. Several years ago, he spoke at a church-sponsored event called "Field of Blood," which honored the…
In the mid-1960s, William F. Buckley had a famous debate with James Baldwin in which Baldwin remarked that, in Harlem, black people threw garbage out their windows for purposes of "protest." Buckley, incredulous, replied that this was no protest at all but merely self-injury.
The first law of journalism is that the reporter is the one who gets to ask the questions. It may not be a fair arrangement (though I like it), but it is customary. So it was a little disconcerting when I got a phone call the other day from the subject of an unflattering article I was writing.
LAST MARCH, House speaker Newt Gingrich assembled all House Republicans in a basement room of the Capitol, planning to force 11 of them to stand up and explain why they had helped defeat a routine appropriations bill. One of the renegades, Rep. Steve Largent of Oklahoma, realized he'd been in a…
President Clinton labors tirelessly to remind the American people how hard he works for them -- selflessly totin' dat barge, liftin' dat bale so all of our children may have a brighter future as they cross his bridge toward a newer tomorrow in the new American whatever. And there he was doing it…
Thomas E. Ricks
Terry Schwalier was what the warrior class calls a fast burner. He had zipped through the Air Force ranks and was about to pin on his second star, making him a major general. He was praised by superiors, respected by peers, and loved by subordinates. Then on June 25, 1996, 19 airmen under his…
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Wallace Stevens
Ann Devroy, White House correspondent of the Washington Post, fought a heroic battle with cancer for more than a year. She beat it back and returned to the paper this June. Then she suffered a recurrence. On October 23 she died. To all who knew her, which means most of political Washington, the…
AT HIS OVAL OFFICE PRESS CONFERENCE following the off-year elections, President Clinton cited only a single result as having "national significance. " It was the defeat in Houston, 55 percent to 45 percent, of an initiative to ban racial preferences in city contracts and hiring. Of course, there…
ONCE AGAIN, THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION has made known its unwillingness to get tough with Beijing. A few days after Chinese president Jiang Zemin left Washington in late October, the administration announced its opposition to six modest legislative proposals intended to stiffen U.S. policy toward…
Fairly or not, Republicans from Trent Lott on down have been grousing lately about Sen. Fred Thompson and his handling of the campaign-finance hearings. It turns out that grousing about Thompson has a long history among Republicans, a history stretching all the way back to the martyred President…
I'm in a room with 2,000 New Yorkers, none of whom knows who Frank Rich is. It's about 9 p.m. at Rudy Giuliani's midtown victory celebration, but the crowd is area-code 718. These are the bridgeand-tunnel people from Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, where few people read the columnists on the…
For conservatives, the 1997 elections could hardly have turned out better. Conservative Republicans won a sweeping victory in Virginia, hardline mayor Rudolph Giuliani was handsomely reelected in Democratic New York City, and Republican right-to-lifer Vito Fossella carried the New York 13th…
Do congressional Republicans still believe in a colorblind Constitution and equality before the law? It's hard to know after their schizophrenic performance on racial preferences last week.
Some nations can afford to suffer more humiliation than others. When you're the United States, even a little humiliation exacts too high a price. This isn't just a matter of national pride. When the world's strongest power abases itself, allies begin to worry, adversaries start whetting their…
IF YOU WERE A POLITICIAN and wanted to enact a law forbidding private citizens to criticize you, what would you call it? If you possessed any flair for publicity at all, you'd do what nearly half the Senate and almost all of the media have done: You'd call it "campaign-finance reform." Proponents…
He has a birth certificate from the land of Og, but he can't carry it around because the certificate is inscribed on a boulder. He grew up before the nation-state, but he grew up singing a national anthem that ran, in its entirety, "Let 'em all go to hell -- except Cave 76!" He has over 42,000…
Tom Wolfe wrote the first draft of his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities as a serial in Rolling Stone magazine, in 1984 and 1985, and he was only halfway through before his story was, as the phrase goes, overtaken by events. Novels are not supposed to be overtaken by events, of course. We're used…
Attracks on the methodology and ideology of pioneering sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey have come out piecemeal over the decades. The recent biography by James H. Jones gathers the record together for dispassionate consideration. And it turns out that Kinsey was . . . a masochist, a sadist, a…
Jan Swafford
In a world brimming with publicity-hungry porn stars and talkative lesbian mud wrestlers, it takes a special kind of politician to win air time on Howard Stern's radio show. Christie Whitman has done it effortlessly. Stern, whose support of the New Jersey governor in 1993 was so effective that she…
Confounding Washington Post predictions and conventional pundit opinion, Virginia attorney-general candidate Mark Earley, strongly backed by Christian conservatives, won his election and led the Republican ticket in that state.
. . . that contributing editor J. Bottum, whose fiction criticism has been a regular feature in THE WEEKLY STANDARD for the last two years, becomes our Books & Arts Editor with this issue. Jody's recent contributions to these pages include "The End of the Academic Novel" and essays on Thomas…
Before putting off the fast-track trade vote, Bill Clinton showed just how accommodating he can be when he really, really wants your vote. He invited Rep. John Mica to fly with him on Air Force One to the dedication of the George Bush Library in College Station, Texas.
James Ledbetter
"It's a movie, not a snapshot," Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger like to say when pleading for patience with their "strategy" of engagement with China. And apparently it's one of those movies in which nothing happens for a very, very long time.
WHEN THE MERCEDES LIMOUSINE crashed in Paris during that awful night two months ago, reaction in most of the world dwelt on the sad fate that had befallen Diana, Princess of Wales. But not so in Egypt and the rest of the Arab Middle East.
BUY A COMPUTER RUNNING Microsoft's Windows 95 these days, and you get something extra. There is an icon on your screen that looks like a magnifying glass above a globe. It is labeled simply "The Internet." Activate it and it takes you through the process of setting up Microsoft's World Wide Web…
Fred Siegel
In the mid-'80s, I had an idea for a book modeled on Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen's wonderful instant history of the 1920s. Allen's book was written during the Depression, and it firmly established the enduring image of the previous decade: its flappers, rum-runners, a nation driven to…
Voters in the city of Houston, Texas, will decide this week on a ballot question, "Proposition A," that would end racial preferences, much as the California Civil Rights Initiative did. Gov. George W. Bush has declined to endorse the initiative, citing a policy of not "intervening" in local…
Dinesh D'Souza
Editor's note: A look back at President Reagan, from the November 10, 1997 issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
In a just-mailed fund-raising letter on behalf of the Republican National Committee, Steve Forbes concludes with characteristic enthusiasm that " History is on our side!" Whose side? The side of wholesale, root-and- branch tax reform, not just "a minor tax cut or a few new loopholes." A brand- new…
Chinese strongman Jiang Zemin's Victory over America Tour produced a level of self-abasing moral-equivalence mongering not seen since the Jimmy Carter era. Some of the highlights:
Thomas G. West
LAST WEEK, AS HILLARY CLINTON turned 50, a film crew from the Arts & Entertainment channel tailed her, gathering footage for a special to air this month. And, boy, were they kept busy. Hillary's birthday wound up being the most pageant-filled week of personalized adulation in living memory. Time…
I've been thinking a lot recently about weekend footwear options for middle- aged men. Most men enter adulthood wearing sneakers for Saturday and Sunday outings, but very few men go to their grave shod that way. At some point in between puberty and senility, there is a moment in every man's life…
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, John Glenn is not the most shameless apologist for President Clinton in Congress. That distinction belongs to Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the senior Democrat on the House committee probing last year's fund-raising abuses. Waxman and his staff have gone to…
Even modest attempts to control the export of sensitive technology are being rebuffed by the White House these days. Included in the conference report of this year's defense authorization bill is a provision requiring computer exporters to notify the government in advance of prospective sales of…
It hasn't been a good couple of weeks for Tom Daschle, the Senate's minority leader. On Oct. 10, the Washington Post revealed that Daschle had recently taken $ 5,000 donors for a visit to the face of Mount Rushmore an area off-limits to the general public but not to South Dakota senators. Then on…
The Republican pollster Frank Luntz -- the ineffable Frank Luntz, the one, the only, whose Clintonesque advice to Republicans has often been reported in these pages ("Frank Luntz Does It for the Children," Sept. 22, et seriatim) -- gave an interview to Capital Style magazine recently. We highly…
It's happened again, I won't say against my best efforts, but there it is, or rather there they are, books all over the joint with my bookmarks in them. Do I have more than 20 books going at once? I am a bit nervous about counting them, for they are all-too-vivid a sign of the lack of organization,…
Kaye Christian has given new meaning to the term "judicial activism." Or perhaps we should call it "judicial brain-dead-ism." She is the D.C. superior court judge who has taken it upon herself to protect the safety of the schoolchildren of the District of Columbia -- and protect them she has these…
Just when we are about to forget the horror that is Jane Fonda, something else always comes up. Margaret Carlson of Time devoted her column to the queen of workout videos last week, beginning, "Where is Jane Fonda?"
The U.S. defense budget has been falling steadily throughout the Clinton administration, and under the terms of this summer's budget deal it's due to keep failing into the next century. In five years we will be spending a smaller share of our national economy on defense than at any time since…