51 articles
IN ONE OF THE MOST COMPELLING TV ADS in the White House's new anti-drug campaign, 13-year-old Oakland native Kevin Scott talks about the daily nightmare he faces walking home from school past open-air drug markets. "The dealers are scared of police, but they aren't scared of me. And they don't take…
Nick Hornby stopped in Washington, D.C., a few weeks back to read from his new novel, About a Boy. The bookstore was packed with enthusiastic fans, and I myself soon fell under the sway of his marvelously funny book. Yet as Hornby read, I became aware of another feeling, too -- a distance from his…
Bill Clinton says the darndest things. You never know what will come out of his mouth next. A few years ago, he told a group of farmers that he was "the only president who knew something about agriculture when I got [to the White House]," forgetting, just to begin with, Washington and Jefferson,…
Good news for Republicans: The man in the Clinton administration who's zinged them more effectively and relentlessly than even the president himself is leaving.
Just when you think the Left may have learned something -- how to think, how to see, how to gain from experience -- along comes a book like William Finnegan's Cold New World to show how wrong you can be. A prime example of the feeling-good-about-feeling-bad book, Cold New World is a long, messy…
DONNA SHALALA, the secretary of health and human services, smiles when asked about partial privatization of Social Security and utters not a single unkind word. That she hasn't trashed privatization is significant, Shalala points out, and she's right. Her attitude mirrors what Sen. Daniel Patrick…
Of all the issues congressional Democrats will try to exploit for political gain this fall, there's only one that has Republicans worried: health care. Thus it's no coincidence that in the past few weeks GOP leaders in the House and Senate have blessed health-care reform plans. And while these…
ON JULY 7, AS LINDA TRIPP was testifying for a third day before Kenneth Starr's grand jury, Stephen Montanarelli, a Democratic prosecutor in Maryland, had a surprise announcement: He was going to launch a grand-jury investigation of his own, into Tripp's taping of phone calls with Monica Lewinsky.…
IN 1992, AFTER DAN QUAYLE GAVE HIS "Murphy Brown" speech, the cultural elite went apoplectic. Quayle had maintained that there was evidence to show that single motherhood harms children. But who was Quayle -- or anyone else, for that matter -- to say that single moms can't do the job? The last…
That sure was an ominous headline in the July 13 New York Times: "Gingrich Helped End Panel on the Spread of Nuclear Arms." The article implicitly chastised Gingrich for not allowing a federal commission on nuclear proliferation to be renewed, while downplaying all of the commission's shortcomings.
The only thing that is deliberately fictional about Charles McCarry's new political thriller Lucky Bastard is his disclaimer that the book is "a work of imagination in which no character is based on anyone who ever lived." It is, in fact, a fantasy about Bill and Hillary Clinton -- who, in…
For the last six years, Americans have been debating the question of how much character counts in a president -- and, thus far, the people who answer "not much" seem to be winning. Bill Clinton needs to hold on only two more years to finish his presidency and get safely out of town.
Last Wednesday morning there appeared on the op-ed page of the New York Times a paid advertisement from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The federation wanted Times readers to understand the 105th Congress's various legislative sins against "family planning." The federation also wanted…
Is it just THE SCRAPBOOK's imagination, or did President Clinton (echoing his reference to "that woman, Miss Lewinsky") almost trip over his tongue last Friday morning and call Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals "that judge"?
Seneca Falls, New York
IN WASHINGTON, RICHARD HOLBROOKE is known as an "in and out guy," a Wall Street dealmaker short on history, long on tactics. Here in Kosovo, where Washington believes the wildfire insurgency led by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) could trigger another Balkan war, Holbrooke, architect of the Dayton…
DURING THE SIX MONTHS he's been running for Congress, Paul Ryan, a Republican, estimates he's spoken to 30,000 people. When he's asked questions, Social Security and taxes almost always come up. So how many people have pressed him for his views on campaign-finance reform? "Somewhere between three…
In rhetoric not ordinarily heard from the business community, the new lobby known as USA*Engage warns that "two-thirds of the world's population" is now "threatened" by a novel form of "proliferation." The threat that alarms USA*Engage is not the proliferation of, say, ballistic missiles, but the…
July 4, after nine days of self-congratulation in China, Bill Clinton returned to the United States, where for six months he has declined to respond -- in public or under oath -- to swirling evidence that he has committed felony crimes while president. He immediately addressed the nation by radio.…
Newsgathering by nature is the province of voyeurs and jacklegs. It is best practiced by grifters whose conscience seldom hinders them from separating marks from their secrets. My conscience suffered a rare flare-up last February.
WHEN PRESIDENT CLINTON returned from China on July 4, congressional Republicans were in a bind. A number of GOP leaders, most notably Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp, had praised the president's performance. Other Republicans had quietly stuck with their criticism of Clinton's China policy on issues…
The early morning is platinum, even before sunrise in the arid uplands of eastern Turkey. And amid the hills, scrub oaks, and rolling miles of empty land stands St. Gabriel's -- a monastery where the visitor may still hear the predawn chants of monks and nuns and the lessons of students learning…
CNN and Time's retraction of their false story on nerve-gas use by American soldiers in Laos has made one thing clear: CNN gave free rein to left-wing conspiracy theorizing masquerading as investigative journalism. The media establishment doesn't want to admit this, but it's the case. How do we…
Any man who has the capacity to make art also has the capacity to destroy it, and Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) was a master-artist of destruction. Successful artists are usually high-pressure, steam-driven personalities. When such people get angry at their work, they hit hard. Thus Michelangelo…
In 1968, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, headed by Illinois governor Otto Kerner, released its report on the race riots plaguing American cities during the 1960s. The Kerner Report's introduction, written by aides to the commission's vice chairman, New York mayor John Lindsay,…
I have never been a cigarette smoker. I have never doubted that cigarette smoking is dangerous. I believe that American tobacco companies have systematically lied about the dangers of cigarettes. I accept the public-health statistic that one out of three cigarette smokers will die prematurely.
Robert Berdahl is profoundly unhappy about the demise of racial preferences for admissions to the University of California. The lower enrollment of black students, Berdahl complains, "diminishes us." The royal "us" is Berkeley, the prestigious University of California campus over which Berdahl…
The war on tobacco has turned upside down. For decades, as new information emerged about the health effects of smoking, public policy relentlessly emphasized individual decision-making. This brought real achievements -- notably, a 40 percent reduction in U.S. per capita cigarette consumption…
"Sex wasn't on my mind when I sat down across from the president," writes the reporter Nina Burleigh in an article in this month's Mirabella magazine. Notwithstanding the implausibility of these words -- who can sit across from the president these days and not think about sex? -- her words have…
One month ago, House speaker Newt Gingrich responded to the National Right to Work Committee's questionnaire for congressional candidates. The first question was: Would he "co-sponsor and seek roll-call votes on legislation to repeal the provisions in federal laws which authorize compulsory union…
Among Republican presidential candidates, John McCain looks to have the inside lane for winning the support of that scarce but highly sought after constituency, the Hollywood celebrity Republican.
Long ago, in March, the Pentagon promised a report on its disclosure of information from Linda Tripp's confidential security file to the media. By the time the middle of June rolled around, Congress had gotten restless. Gerald Solomon, chairman of the House Rules Committee, demanded to know when…
Gerald and Sara Murphy, born wealthy well before the turn of the twentieth century, lived long and richly varied lives: Gerald dying at age seventy-six in 1964, Sara eleven years later at ninety-two. But the reason for their fame rests almost wholly on the years from 1921 to 1929 that they lived in…
While the more euphonious "Latinos" is heard often in California and sometimes in Texas, the Census Bureau prefers the clumsy word "Hispanics" to describe them -- the people descended from the European colonists, American Indians, and African slaves in Spain's former possessions in the New World.
LET'S ASSUME THE NEXT CONGRESS overrides President Clinton's veto of a ban on partial-birth abortion. This isn't far-fetched. Even in the unlikely event Republicans lose a handful of seats in the House, that chamber will probably retain a solid two-thirds majority for overriding Clinton. And in the…
CNN and Time's bogus scoop -- in which April Oliver and Peter Arnett claimed that a 1970 U.S. military raid in Laos, Operation Tailwind, involved a deadly nerve-gas attack on civilians -- continues to unravel. As Eric Felten reported in these pages last week, CNN's key eyewitness, Robert Van…
My family and I just got back from Disney World, and we had so much fun I was never once tempted to commit cultural commentary. But the guidebook I read beforehand was so odd I can't help it. There are over 2.5 million copies of The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World in print (published by…
While all charter schools make academic promises, the Academy of the Pacific Rim, a Boston charter, may be the first to put a guarantee in writing. The "Learning Guarantee" instituted by the school this spring says that students who have attended the school for four years will pass a statewide…
Old soldiers fade away, but Monica Lewinsky's old lawyer is just getting nuttier. The latest William H. Ginsburg foray into the realm of the bizarre is a letter in the June 24 Los Angeles Times. The context is unimportant since the letter doesn't make any sense. But here is echt Ginsburg: "Let's…
Members of Congress don't come much more conservative than John Shadegg, an Arizona Republican first elected to the House in 1994. But last year, Shadegg cosponsored a bill many conservatives derided as "ClintonCare II." Before long, interest-group ads excoriating Shadegg were running on the radio…
STEVEN BRILL IS A STICKLER FOR ETIQUETTE, and he doesn't mind telling you so. Here's a story he told last week on Meet the Press. On June 11, he gave the Office of Independent Counsel a heads-up about "Pressgate," Brill's novella-length article identifying Kenneth Starr as the source of illegal…
Those with long memories will recall the uproar that followed the Reagan administration's 1981 attempt to declare ketchup a vegetable for purposes of the federal school-lunch program. Indeed, Democrats still joke about it. When House Republicans proposed modifying the lunch program in 1995, House…
Just when THE SCRAPBOOK vows never again to bait Jane Fonda, she has to go and give another speech. At the National Press Club last week, she denounced "abstinence-only" programs (efforts to encourage teenagers to refrain altogether from sex). Asked why conservative Christians disagree with her,…
A QUIET REFORMATION is afoot in medical circles, one that is perhaps symptomatic of a turn in the culture toward "alternative" cures. At the forefront is the National Institute for Healthcare Research in Rockville, Md., which investigates what it calls "the interface between spirituality and…
What is it about Robert Kennedy that continues to fascinate students and practitioners of American politics thirty years after his death?
The United States Senate in its infinite wisdom effectively killed federal tobacco legislation late on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 17, and an hour or two after the final vote, the bill's sponsor, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, was sitting in his office, looking happy.
The Millennium Dome that Britain is constructing to celebrate the year 2000 is intended as a big World's-Fair-type space, dripping with uplifting sentimentality. The central feature, as David Brooks reported in April, was to be a huge statue of a person sitting in the middle of the dome, through…
IF YOU ARE CONFUSED over the adoring press coverage of Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin for his intervention in global currency markets, you're not alone. Rubin himself must be scratching his head.
THE BODY OF HOMICIDE VICTIM Joseph Tushkowski underwent "a bizarre mutilation," proclaimed Oakland County (Mich.) medical examiner L.J. Dragovic in mid-June. According to the autopsy findings, the mutilator, after killing Tushkowski with a lethal injection, crudely ripped out his kidneys. He didn't…
As the Clinton undertow gradually drags Democrats under, Republicans will be tempted over the next few months to sit back and play it safe. Raise lots of money, neutralize the Democrats on health care, snipe at Clinton's China policy, and coast into November -- with majorities in both houses of…