60 articles
Warren Beatty's world extends from the hotel in Beverly Hills where he lived for thirty years all the way to the House in Beverly Hills where he now resides. The man who won an Oscar for directing Reds, the endless 1981 movie glorifying the Russian Revolution that would murder more than sixty…
With President Clinton gearing up for a trip to China next month, Congress is set to highlight the many shortcomings in U.S. policy toward Beijing. Republicans, in particular, have been stirred to action by a series of stories in the New York Times alleging that two American companies may have…
I once watched my gentle, white-haired grandmother browse through Last Exit to Brooklyn, the avidly obscene novel of life in the projects ca. 1960. When she had finished, Grandma put down the book and said with great dignity, "Well, when I was growing up there, Brooklyn was a very refined place."
AT THE CORE OF late-20th-century liberalism are two impulses: ratcheting government up, and defining deviancy down. The American people dealt the first of these impulses a decisive blow in the 1994 congressional election. They will have a chance to confront the second this coming November. For if…
You might say it was a bad week for Bill Clinton's foreign policy. India detonated five nuclear weapons -- a direct consequence, according to Indian officials, of Clinton's appeasement of China and of his administration's inability to prevent China's sales of weapons and missile technology to…
President Clinton fancies himself the political and policy mentor of British prime minister Tony Blair. Clinton steered the Democratic party to the right. Blair did the same with Labor. Clinton embraced conservative social values (in theory, that is). So did Blair. Clinton . . . well, you know all…
CONSIDER O. J. SIMPSON and Bill Clinton. Save a homicide or two, they're not entirely different. Both cheat on the links and on their wives (Simpson's being former and late). Both do their best acting under penalty of perjury. Both compel us, under a crush of evidence, to pressure their guilt even…
"Civility in politics: going, going, gone." So complained a headline in the New York Times this winter, and sine then hardly a week has gone by without some new offense being reported against good manners and even common decency. Cuddly felon Webb Hubbell worries that a deranged special prosecutor…
Potential good news for Clinton-bashers from the latest Zogby poll on presidential greatness: The public's rating of perhaps the greatest White House Lothario ever is finally on the way down. Bad news for Clinton-bashers: THE SCRAPBOOK refers not to the sitting president but to JFK, who has slipped…
IT'S OFFICIAL: THE ERA OF GOOD FEELING and fruitful dealings between congressional Republicans and President Clinton is over. So says House speaker Newt Gingrich. That era began with the passage of welfare reform and a minimum-wage hike in 1996 and continued through the balanced-budget agreement of…
By all accounts, Judge Norma Holloway Johnson was not enthusiastic about the arguments put forward by the Clinton administration last week for creating a new "Secret Service privilege" -- which would exempt the president's bodyguards from testifying to the Monica Lewinsky grand jury.
A FEW MONTHS AGO, Republican education policy was in disarray. Proposals from the Clinton administration had put the GOP on the defensive, and the only Republican idea that was gaining any prominence was one many Republicans considered at odds with party principles -- the federal funding of 100,000…
Leo Strauss
A. Bartlett Giamatti
A shooting war was lurking in Asia on the morning of April 11, 1963, though of course none of us knew it. Memories of the missiles of October lingered, and we were impatient young Cold Warriors -- finally about to move on from the Navy's submarine school at New London, Conn.
ON FRIDAY, MARCH 13, at least one Pentagon hand knew something strange was going on. Les Blake, head of an office dealing with confidential files, decided he needed to write a "Memorandum for the Record." Earlier in the day, he had received a call from Cliff Bernath, a deputy in the public-affairs…
Okay, maybe in some sense they deserve what they get, but I still can't help feeling sorry for the baby boomers. They're like a gigantic herd of wildebeests starving to death because their own hooves have trampled all the grass.
HENRY WAXMAN WAS OUTRAGED, and the Webb Hubbell prison recordings hadn't even been released yet. "The tapes," Waxman wrote in a letter to attorney general Janet Reno on April 21, "contain extremely personal conversations that are wholly unrelated to any investigation relevant to Mr. Hubbell or any…
And while we're on the subject: THE SCRAPBOOK's favorite reformed plagiarizer in the U.S. Senate, Delaware's Joe "Don't Make Any More Neil Kinnock Jokes, Please" Biden, made the most confusing case possible for a good cause, NATO expansion. Said Biden, portentously: "World War I, World War II . . .…
Last week in these pages, Philip Terzian summarized the plagiaristic career of Salon magazine's Jonathan Broder, an ardent exponent of the view that Bill and Hillary Clinton's problems are the work of a vast right-wing conspiracy. Terzian pointed out that Broder, a serial plagiarist, really…
We may no longer be able to praise the Communist Manifesto for its accuracy in predicting the end of capitalism. We may no longer be able to laud the incendiary tract for its power to incite the proletarian masses to throw off their chains and rise up against the bourgeoisie. But Sunday before last…
Florence Rubenfeld
HOUSE REPUBLICAN WHIP TOM DELAY recently sent House committee chairman a simple message: Act boldly. DeLay had a particular episode in mind. In April, President Clinton had threatened to veto a supplemental spending bill because it lacked money for the International Monetary Fund. Go ahead,…
A riveting clipping from the April 23 Fresno Bee: A marriage-counseling session in that city's St. James Episcopal Cathedral turned into a shootout between husband and wife, both of whom, it turned out, had armed themselves before therapy. Luckily, neither of them was a very good shot. The two…
In military parlance, Maj. Jacquelyn Parker was a water-walking blue-flamer, with a resume that would quicken the heart of any service flack. She was born on the Fourth of July, had a genius IQ, and was flying solo before getting her driver's license. In 1989, she became the first woman to graduate…
THE SCRAPBOOK is really, really pleased to report that Special Mudslinger to the President Sidney Blumenthal just had a very bad PR week. Extended excerpts from his recent speech at Harvard are circulating around Washington (courtesy in part of last week's WEEKLY STANDARD editorial). Blumenthal…
The California governor's race -- with two millionaires, Democrats Al Checchi and Jane Harman, and two statewide officials, Democrat Gray Davis and Republican Dan Lungren, contending -- is easily the most important election this year. For one thing, it is the Democrats' best chance of picking up a…
It is worth recalling, at this troubled point in our political history, why we have a president in the first place. There are many reasons; ours is a sophisticated constitutional design. But the simplest reason is among the most important: The president exists to be respected.
For sheer dazzling gorgeousness, precious few man-made objects hold their own against the paintings of Titian, the long-lived and enormously productive sixteenth-century Venetian, creator of the celebrates Assunta, the Baccus and Ariadne, the Venus of Urbino, and dozens of other masterpieces. The…
The East Building of the National Gallery of Art turns twenty on June 1, and in honor of the occasion let us throw caution to the winds and do something unheard of in a story about an art museum. Let us quote Jimmy Carter.
Milovan Djilas
I. A SMALL NATION
Stephen L. Carter
There was a great deal of discussion last week about Bill Clinton's "moral authority." Then at week's end came a vivid reminder that it is not only by their personal comportment but also by their official conduct that presidents can squander their moral standing.
Alexandra Richie
WHEN HOUSE SPEAKER Newt Gingrich arrived in Lemoyne, Pa., on February 21 to speak at a fund-raiser for Rep. Bill Goodling, fewer than 50 people were present. Gingrich, who is accustomed to fund-raisers attended by at least a few hundred, wasn't amused. At a House GOP leadership meeting a few days…
HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH is the Republicans' newly self-appointed attack dog, excoriating President Clinton and congressional Democrats for crippling the investigations of White House abuses. Had Republican leaders been asked to pick an appropriate spokesman, they probably wouldn't have picked…
Poor Richard Cohen. THE SCRAPBOOK's favorite liberal columnist, who usually writes entertainingly and often manages to think independently at the very same time, must have gotten suckered by his sources last week. Cohen's Tuesday column in the Washington Post was a full frontal defense of convicted…
White House ideologist Sidney Blumenthal flew up to Cambridge, Mass., two Thursdays ago to give a speech at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. We are living in history, he reminded his audience. We are witnessing the epic struggle of Bill and Hillary Clinton to fashion something called…
LAST YEAR RON UNZ WENT TO Sacramento to meet with Republican state legislators about Proposition 227, the so-called English for the Children ballot initiative Unz created that would eliminate California's vast system of bilingual education. The meeting should have been the beginning of a fruitful…
I just finished reading a new essay collection on the future of the labor movement. Half the articles were about how horrible "temporary employment agencies" are; the other half were about the importance of learning skills on the job. Where do these experts think people are going to get this…
WHO TO BELIEVE in the war of words between Salon, the feisty Internet magazine, and journalists who complain that its "scoops" and well-publicized charges against the American Spectator, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications are little more than nuggets of disinformation, sponsored by the…
Okay America, how dumb are you? According to members of the Clinton administration, pretty dumb. Seventy-seven percent of administration officials believe Americans don't know enough about public issues to make wise decisions, according to a survey done by Pew and the National Journal. Meanwhile,…
Chairman Henry Hyde of the House Judiciary Committee won't be emulating Newt Gingrich and loudly criticizing President Clinton for stonewalling and worse. But Clinton should not take heart. Hyde is as appalled as Gingrich at Clinton's effort to cover up the truth, obstruct independent counsel…
Nick Hornby
HERE'S THE THEORY: Get enough members of Congress voluntarily to limit themselves to six years in the House or twelve in the Senate, and you will produce a long-overdue revolution in Washington. A conservative revolution, that is. The new members won't be careerists, won't be inclined to cool their…
This spring, apologizing became the hottest fad among heads of state since televised town meetings. President Clinton didn't quite apologize for slavery while in Uganda last month, but he did say that "we were wrong" to hold slaves. Britain's Tony Blair has begged pardon not only for the Bloody…
President Clinton is doomed.
THE ARRIVAL OF CHINESE DISSIDENT Wang Dan in Detroit last week marked the end of a phase in the sordid collusion between Beijing and Western capitals on human rights. With the exit from China of the last big-name political prisoner linked to the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, the diplomats have…
Who says Gandhi is dead? His spirit keeps popping up in the unlikeliest places -- most recently in the pages of Smith and Hawken, the high-toned gardening catalogue for yuppies who want to pretend they enjoy getting their hands dirty. This spring, Smith and Hawken is offering an electronic mosquito…
John T. Noonan Jr.
Just last year, the book industry in America was bracing for its demise. Bookstores were returning unsold copies in shockingly high numbers. Sales of " trade books" (the commercial titles that are normally the most secure portion of a publisher's catalogue) seemed to be dropping precipitously.
One of the primary arguments for gay marriage is that it will curb promiscuity and promote fidelity. That may depend on whether you define fidelity by the dictionary or with Clintonian creativity. A publication called the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review was glowingly reviewed in the April 18 New York…
EACH OF OUR MAJOR POLITICAL PARTIES is really three smaller parties stacked in a pyramid. The chart below is a handy reference guide. The critical challenge for each party's elite is to attend to its base. These days, the base of the Republican pyramid is cracked.
Last week, President Clinton was presented a choice whether to authorize federal spending on distribution of injection equipment to heroin and cocaine addicts. He chose correctly. He did not know he was choosing correctly. He made his choice for the wrong reasons. The manner in which he made his…
THE SCRAPBOOK promises it will stop picking on the New York Times if the editors there will only promise to ratchet down their level of inanity. Last week brought a classic instance -- even for the Gray Lady -- of finding the cloud behind the silver lining. The headline read: "Drop in Crime Leaves…
One of the lessons House Speaker Newt Gingrich claims to have learned the hard way is that in a policy fight with President Clinton, the press will always side with Clinton. He got more proof last week. When the president jumped on Gingrich for declaring that teen smoking "has nothing to do with…
Marilyn Manson
It's embarrassing for one working in an office full of writers with the true reporter's knack for getting interviews with the newsworthy and the notorious, but all the famous people I know I know vicariously.
Believe it or not, the Clinton administration has finally managed to work up some outrage over international arms-dealing last week.