68 articles
FOR 20 YEARS NOW, REP. IKE SKELTON of Missouri has been a solidly conservative, even hawkish, voice on military and security affairs. He has supported aid to the contras, the Gulf War resolution, and the B-2 bomber. He has opposed cuts in defense spending, quotas aimed at increasing the number of…
The New York Times went recruiting last month to the journalism school at Berkeley. A number of students showed up, Helen Vozenilek and Philip Dawdy among them. So far, so ordinary. But as the Daily Californian first reported, Vozenilek "said she was stopped at the beginning of the session and…
On December 9, Gary Bauer was a guest at Hickory Hill, the Virginia estate of Robert Kennedy's widow Ethel. The occasion was a dinner for Wei Jingsheng, the dissident recently freed from prison in China. The other guests were mostly Kennedys -- including Democratic lieutenant governor Kathleen…
A bow tie, you might think, is actually nothing more than a simple piece of cloth. But don't be fooled. It's a piece of cloth the way Old Glory is: with the power to stir passions. Bow ties -- take it from me -- inspire love or hate.
Jenny Uglow
NOW THAT HIS REPUTATION has been destroyed, his remains dug up from Arlington National Cemetery and returned to San Diego, it's easy to forget the impressive audacity with which M. Larry Lawrence told lies. Below is an unexpurgated example of Lawrence in action. It comes from a 1993 Senate Foreign…
The world is a simple place in the nursery, and it has stayed a simple place for New York Times columnist Frank Rich: Either you're on his side, or you're a Nazi. Charlton Heston, for instance, thinks that gun control is a bad idea. So he's a Nazi. A talented Nazi, maybe -- Rich compares him to…
When President Clinton bemoans the lack of candor in the national conversation on race that he's been staging, he's not being candid himself. What he really means is that there haven't been enough Hallmark moments -- not enough crackers 'fessing up tearfully that their inner child is a bigot; not…
The American Library Association has an answer for parents who are concerned about pornography on library computers: Buzz off. What's more, the association recommends that libraries furnish private booths in which patrons, including children, may view Internet porn undisturbed. A growing number of…
The Old Vic theater in London has seen its share of weepy melodrama since it was founded in 1818, but Sir Peter Hall delivered a particularly risible performance last week, when the theater, which is being sold, hosted a final King Lear. According to the Daily Telegraph, Sir Peter pointed a heavy…
David King
Section 607 of the U.S. criminal code makes it a felony to "solicit or receive any contribution" for purposes of a federal election campaign "in any room or building occupied in the discharge of official duties." This provision applies to any "officer or employee of the United States or any…
SEVENTEEN YEARS AFTER Ronald Reagan pledged to abolish the Department of Education, few Republicans in Congress will even discuss that goal, let alone pursue it. Perhaps they have lost sight of how some education bureaucrats spend their time when unconstrained by fear of political reprisal.
On the very day last week that Louis Farrakhan held a press conference in Baghdad to accuse the United States of engaging in "terrorism" against Iraq and of being "the greatest threat to world peace," the Nation of Islam leader's supply-side acolyte, Jude Wanniski, penned the essay that followers…
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 23. Eighteen years after the original Alien comes a third sequel, this one called Alien: Resurrection. And what an eighteen years it's been. Back in 1979, Alien featured a special effect more graphic, horrifying, and disgusting than anything previously attempted: A tiny alien…
My great-grandfather Eduard, who had the fine judgment to make America his home, is still vividly remembered in family lore. He was, among other things, a very modern man. His opinions -- he had many of them -- were typically progressive, sometimes strenuously so. He had studied at Heidelberg…
Last week, THE SCRAPBOOK invited the White House to cite an instance in which the president had given a simple yes or no answer to any question -- this, after Clinton badgered conservative scholar Abigail Themstrom at his Akron race-fest to give a yes or no answer about affirmative action. Well,…
Alfred Kazin, who sometimes passes for America's most venerable literary critic, casually perpetrated a drive-by infamy last week. In an essay honoring Murray Kempton in the New York Times Book Review, Kazin gratuitously smeared Adm. Lewis L. Strauss, who in a long and controversial career was…
Feminist bookstores sell T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan, "What part of No don't you understand?" It's a question that might fairly be asked of President Clinton. A majority of Americans have made unmistakably clear their aversion to government-controlled child care. But this aversion has not…
Last month, the Heritage Foundation issued a report, authored by analyst Kenneth Weinstein, cataloguing various relationships between the Clinton White House and powerful Washington lobbies. Included was a discussion of the lucrative federal contracts and intimate Clinton ties of liberal PR hack…
CHANGE THE NAME of the nation's capital and of the bridge that spans the Hudson? Remove the statues of our first president from Boston Common, Wall Street, the state capitol in Richmond, and hundreds of town squares? Close Mount Vernon? Level the Washington Monument and the famous square that bears…
Noel Riley Fitch
My car died last weekend. It was a quiet death, sudden though not unexpected -- she had given me 149,941 glorious, palindromic miles; but I miss her just the same. Actually, I more than miss her -- I'm terrified at the prospect of life without an automobile.
For all of Rev. Sun Myung Moon's good qualities -- his business acumen, his robust self-esteem as "Lord of the Second Advent," his dynamic leadership of one of the century's most durable cults -- he's a disaster of a wedding coordinator. The food is bad, there's no cash bar, the entertainment…
Herbert S. Parmet
REPUBLICANS EAGERLY DECLARED that they weren't surprised by Attorney General Janet Reno's decision last week not to seek an independent counsel in the Democratic fund-raising scandal. It's hard to find anyone in the GOP who doesn't think the fix is in -- that the Justice Department and Reno are…
Helen Vendler
Remember when Pat Buchanan "discovered" unemployment in New Hampshire during the 1992 presidential campaign? And shocked George Bush and the political press by flirting with 40 percent of the GOP primary vote? Outside shuttered shoe factories in the snow, he suddenly understood the political blind…
The avant-garde dies but never surrenders, and it seems to have taken its last, brave postmodern stand at the State University of New York. To browse in SUNY Press's latest catalogue of literary and cultural studies is as affecting, in its way, as the end of Beau Geste: one last, lingering look…
The Democrats have been whining, disingenuously, about fund-raising -- not the scandal, but the real thing. Mike McCurry, the White House press secretary, insisted the other day that President Clinton has to continue raising campaign funds like a madman because "Republicans are outspending…
YOU MIGHT THINK THE UNITED NATIONS would want to punish Saddam Hussein for disrupting and nearly killing the U.N.'s own efforts to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Instead, the U.N. Security Council last week effectively rewarded him. Not only did the council extend the misnamed "oil-…
AT FIRST GLANCE at the World Bank's 1997 World Development Report is very depressing. The latest numbers make it look as if the old claim is true, that "the poor are getting poorer" around the world. But numbers don't always mean what they seem to.
The high point of the presidential town meeting on race in Akron came when the president tried to bully scholar Abigail Thernstrom on the subject of affirmative action. "Abigail," he asked, "do you favor the United States Army abolishing affirmative-action programs that produced Colin Powell? Yes…
One morning this past April, Terri Lynn Revere parked in the sun outside Landry's Cafe Bridge City, Louisiana, where she proceeded to play video poker virtually non-stop for more than four hours. When Revere pulled herself away around 2:30 p.m., the boy she was baby-sitting, two-year-old Jared…
The Pentagon cannot fully be trusted to plan its own future. With this sensible thought in mind, Congress established last year a group of experts to provide an independent evaluation of the Pentagon's vision of the future of America's armed forces -- particularly as expressed in the Defense…
IN 1993, REPUBLICANS WON GOVERNOR'S RACES in New Jersey and Virginia and mayor's contests in Los Angeles and New York City, capturing seats (except in New Jersey) controlled by Democrats for more than a decade. In 1997, they held on to all four of those seats. Back in 1993, Republicans retained two…
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7. I am sitting in a movie theater in Reston, Virginia, watching on a screen twenty feet high the most famous person to emerge from the world of the highbrow New York intellectuals. It's true that Saul Bellow played himself in Woody Allen's Zelig, and he once got a phone call from…
It was the kind of statement you have to read a second time to make sure you got it right. Buried on page B-5 of the November 17 Washington Post was this morsel from Newt Gingrich: "There was a long period when Republicans thought education was a local issue and didn't realize it was a national…
George R. Urban
Whatever the 105th Congress accomplished in other fields, in education it muddied everything it touched. The session ended with a debacle on national testing, confusion on charter schools, and utter failure on school choice. The prospects for reforming American education would be brighter if House…
Surprise. The Supreme Court will not hear Piscataway v. Taxman. The court will not review how the Piscataway, New Jersey, board of education achieved "diversity" in its high school -- by retaining the only black teacher in the business department and laying off an equally qualified white teacher.…
The performance artist Anna Deavere Smith is the Walter Cronkite of the nineties, if you see what I mean. Of course, Walter Cronkite is the Walter Cronkite of the nineties, as he was of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. But as the great anchorman sails into the sunset, Smith is taking on…
If American orchestras had a golden age, it was the 1950s, when titanic conductors commanded the podiums: Eugene Ormandy in Philadelphia, Fritz Reiner in Chicago, Charles Munch in Boston, Dimitri Mitropoulos in New York. But the most impressive of them all was the one in the least likely place:…
A local synagogue held a big shindig recently, and I realized in the course of it that talk-show hosting is America's number one performance art.
Gandhi turned himself into a ribcage in a loincloth. The IRA's Bobby Sands starved himself for 66 days until he died in a Belfast prison. But hunger- striking, like other demanding disciplines, isn't what it used to be.
President Clinton's yearlong initiative on race, launched with much fanfare in his San Diego commencement address last June, hits its midpoint this week. The president and his "race advisory board" are marking it with a trip to Akron, Ohio, for a "town hall" on racial issues. Akron for a few…
You know that we are confronting one of the momentous issues of our time if the Berkeley, Calif., city council weighs in. Last month, it voted 7 to 0 with two abstentions to lift sanctions against Iraq. The director of the Middle East Children's Alliance, Barbara Lubin, was sanguine about this…
The arrival of the McCaughey septuplets in Iowa last week looked like the ultimate good-news story, and the TV reporters covered it that way at first. But celebrating the birth of lots of apparently healthy children, against enormous odds, to happy and relieved parents is apparently de trop in…
Those looking for a historical antecedent to America's anti-smoking hysteria should search no farther. It may have begun as so many of our century's tragedies began: with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's train ride from Zurich to the Finland Station in Petrograd, where he launched the Bolshevik Revolution.…
CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR PETE WILSON made a splash at last year's Republican convention in San Diego by noisily agitating for removal of pro-life language from the party's platform. That earned him scorn from anti-abortion groups like the Christian Coalition. But times have changed. When Wilson spoke to…
The insights into the workings of the White House that readers will find in this enthralling collection -- a transcript, with commentary, of covertly recorded conversations with Lyndon B. Johnson during his first nine months as president -- are typified by the disclosure of LBJ's intervention in a…
On Nov. 16, just in time for the holidays, the New York Times Book Review treated its readers to a special round-up of the year's best reading for children. This sort of section is meant as a guide to readers shopping for gifts. Instead it reveals the Times Book Review's peculiar view of childhood…
Gen. Colin Powell is the most admired of all Americans and therefore a man unusually well positioned to bring much-needed clarity and candor to the debate about the status of race in the nation's life and laws. Alas, he is not providing either. This sad truth has been emerging in dribs and drabs,…
Last week, two veteran Democratic members of Congress, Ronald Dellums and Vic Fazio, both from California, announced they would not seek re-election next year. Both were party leaders; both are relatively young, by congressional standards (Dellums is 62, Fazio 56). So some explanation was called…
There's nothing, it seems, that Democrats won't blame on "mean-spirited" House speaker Newt Gingrich. The latest example comes from Rep. Sam Farr, a California Democrat. Shortly after the death from a heart attack of his 63- year-old California colleague, Rep. Walter Capps, Farr sent a sarcastic…
Winston S. Churchill
William J. Bennett
Recently, on Tom Snyder's late-night talk show, the celebrated writer- director Quentin Tarantino went into a "these kids today" tirade about how illiterate most young would-be filmmakers are. They want to make movies, he said, but they don't know the first thing about, for example, the work of the…
Jude Wanniski, the one-time supply-side guru and lead adviser to Jack Kemp, is following his new hero, Louis Farrakhan, deeper into the fever swamps of American politics. For the last year, Wanniski has been trying to sell Farrakhan as a misunderstood political leader whom Republicans should be…
Thirty years ago, the New Left launched its long march through the institutions of American society. The record of subsequent years is not unimpressive. The generation of student radicals that once heaped scorn on the work ethic has advanced steadily to positions of influence in the universities,…
IF A SINGLE IMAGE FROM THE GULF WAR is firmly fixed in America's mind, it is that of a guided missile striking the door of an Iraqi bunker. The moment that CNN flashed that image around the world, it became the symbol of America's technological supremacy. The ground war that followed offered no…
The massacre of logic and suppression of facts are routine features of our diversity-obsessed age. We have grown accustomed to seeing university administrators, for example, torture the truth about admission standards to justify their race and gender quotas. But it still comes as something of a…
IF SADDAM HUSSEIN IN 1990 had merely occupied Kuwait's disputed border areas and northern oil fields, he might have gotten away with it. But instead, he conquered the entire country. Unchecked greed was his downfall.
Don't be fooled by artful spinning at the State Department and in the White House press room. The United States has lost badly in its most recent confrontation with Saddam Hussein. The deal worked out by President Clinton's new special negotiator, Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov, will…
AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was in Aspen, Colorado, when President Bush arrived to give a speech there in August 1990. It was just after Iraq had invaded Kuwait, and Bush was pondering how aggressively to respond. He and Thatcher, who was vacationing prior to…
Some people make fun of my old Honda. Not much longer, baby. My wife was in a car dealership the other day when she was invited to enter a contest to win a four-wheel-drive Mercedes. As I see it, the thing is practically in the driveway.
JOHN KENNEDY WAS HAILED FOR HIS TRIUMPH in the Cuban missile crisis. Only later was it understood that he had secretly promised the Soviets the quid pro quo they had asked for -- removal of U.S. missiles in Turkey -- and acquiesced in the restoration of the Soviet-Cuban military alliance. And…
Free-market pundits in Washington have leapt to the defense of Microsoft in its shootout with the Justice Department's antitrust lawyers. Most of them see the government effort to force a change in Microsoft's business tactics as yet another example of Washington's heavy hand crushing Adam Smith's…