49 articles
LATE IN THE EVENING OF SEPTEMBER 5, Rep. Jim Moran, a Virginia Democrat, received a phone call at home from Rahm Emanuel, a senior White House official. Emanuel wanted to discuss what Moran -- who had emerged as a vocal critic of President Clinton -- was going to say the next morning on Fox News…
"All Clinton, all the time," is how the editors sometimes jokingly refer to our extensive coverage of the presidential scandal at THE WEEKLY STANDARD. No wonder America -- if the Democrats are to be believed -- is sick of hearing about Monica Lewinsky.
"When faced with a scandal, one's objective should be to deal with the president in office without damaging the office itself."
There was a moment in the nineteenth century when it seemed possible that the Yankees might, after defeating the Confederate South, try to annex British North America. So the separate colonies of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and "Canada" (roughly present day Quebec and Ontario)…
Some years ago, in a Poloniuslike mood, I offered my son a bit of advice. I told him that I hoped he would go to a university of which the world has a high opinion. He would find the world wrong, of course, for the school, whichever one it happened to be, wouldn't be all that good. With perhaps a…
Last Thursday, for only the third time in the nation's history, the House of Representatives approved the beginning of a presidential impeachment inquiry. At issue was Bill Clinton's grotesque and illegal manipulation, in the Monica Lewinsky matter, of the English language, the Oval Office, and the…
Is there a usable free-market past somewhere under the debris from Russia's financial meltdown? If the recent flood of media pontificating is to be believed, the answer is a resounding no. This summer's financial crisis, we are told over and over, means the obliteration of all that has been…
LINDA TRIPP MAY NOT BE America's sweetheart, but one fact remains: The Clinton Defense Department -- her own employer -- played a rotten trick on her. And no one has yet been held responsible.
"WHAT PRESIDENTS did you just smear then?" That was Chris Matthews's memorable reply to a guest on Hardball who argued that, after all, Dwight Eisenhower might have had an affair with his wartime driver. The reply shut the guest up: For a brief moment, the viewer wondered, Has a Clintonite been…
TOM EDSALL OF THE Washington Post has picked eight House districts in the Ohio River Valley -- some open seats and some held by embattled incumbents, in Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio -- as bellwethers in the 1998 election. These are "ground zero in the battle for control of the House," says Edsall.…
THE DEMOCRATS ARE DOOMED. They're doomed because Bill Clinton is their leader, and because they are Bill Clinton's party. On Thursday, October 8, only 31 House Democrats broke with Clinton to support an inquiry that would explore "fully and completely whether sufficient grounds exist for the House…
Don't let the pretentious, Freudian title fool you. Erica Jong's What Do Women Want? isn't a manifesto. It's not even much of a polemic. The latest foray into non-fiction by the author of the bestselling 1973 novel Fear of Flying is petty egotism and self-congratulation masquerading as cultural…
Who says Bill Clinton's not a lucky man? The House Judiciary Committee, in its release of supplemental materials from Kenneth Starr's inquiry, publishes any number of embarrassing confidences of Monica Lewinsky, but it delicately and prudishly "redacts" the equivalent material from the president,…
This past February, Gene Lyons, a columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the most zombie-like member of the Clinton cult, went on Meet the Press to clear up a few misconceptions about what he called the president's "totally innocent" relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Far from a seducer of…
Speaking of Sidney Blumenthal: For all that most working journalists in Washington professed to loathe their former colleague when he went to work for Bill and Hillary, they sure did allow themselves to be manipulated by him last February.
"Emotion is what life is all about for me," Tony Campolo has written, as if we couldn't have guessed. Though he is a large and consequential figure in evangelical circles, the wider world was unfamiliar with Campolo until September 11, when television cameras broadcast pictures of him wracked,…
In a recent interview in Rolling Stone -- part of the pre-publication hoopla for the much-anticipated A Man in Full, his first novel since the 1988 Bonfire of the Vanities -- Tom Wolfe bemoaned the state of contemporary American fiction. With only a few exceptions, he declared, fiction writers are…
John Conyers may be the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee -- point man in the effort to protect Bill Clinton as much as possible from the impeachment process -- but that doesn't mean he can't find time in his busy schedule to help Saddam Hussein, too.
There was a lapse, understandable as you will see, in People magazine's Online Daily of Sept. 29. But the next day, THE SCRAPBOOK's favorite online publication corrected itself: "Because of a transmission error, yesterday's opening quote -- 'I'm not saying there's not a lot of perks that you do…
HOUSE DEMOCRATS FACE THEIR most politically charged vote in years this week: whether to support a Republican-sponsored resolution authorizing an inquiry into President Clinton's impeachment. Yet relations between the Democrats and the White House are so strained that Clinton officials weren't even…
Eighty-one languages are spoken in Los Angeles. In California's Orange County, where self-absorption reigns and philanthropy is rare, people who shop in high-toned malls are soothed by the sounds of live string quartets. In booming Tucson, Arizona, a public referendum concerning a badly needed…
A month ago, we noted in this space the obvious fact that Bill Clinton's foreign policy is in tatters. We urged Republicans in Congress to put forward an alternative vision and strategy for the nation. That vision and strategy, we further argued, should be a Reaganite one, organized around the…
Out of about one million Bachelor of Arts degrees awarded each year, only six hundred are in classics. About one classics major graduates in America each year for every four or five classics professors -- and for every twenty journal articles written annually on ancient Greece and Rome. When…
WHEN SHE APPEARED on the Today show in January, Hillary Clinton outlined the parameters of the now-fabled "vast right-wing conspiracy." But she named only three actual conspirators, two of whom happened to be senators from North Carolina -- Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth. (The third was Jerry…
Last week's ABC News/Washington Post poll had some interesting things in it that didn't make it into the summaries. While only 38 percent of likely voters say the president should be impeached, the 60 percent who say he should not be are not a monolithic group. They fall into two camps of roughly…
This past July, Human Rights Watch issued a report claiming that police brutality is "one of the most serious, enduring, and divisive human rights violations in the United States." The report is startling in at least two respects. First, Human Rights Watch usually trains its sights on the world's…
REP. LINDA SMITH OF WASHINGTON drives Republican honchos crazy. She voted against Newt Gingrich's reelection as House speaker. She opposed the balanced-budget agreement in 1997 because it borrowed money from Social Security funds, and she voted against the $ 80 billion tax cut crafted by House…
START WITH THIS ANOMALY: Most Americans say they oppose impeaching Bill Clinton, yet almost all signs point to a victory in the November 3 congressional elections for the Republicans, who are more likely to vote for impeachment. The explanation lies in turnout: All the evidence we have from recent…
Last Sunday, I took about the longest cab ride one can possibly take in Paris: from the Porte d'Auteuil (practically Brittany) to Roissy (practically Belgium). As soon as the cabbie picked up on my American accent (halfway through the word "Bonjour"), he decided to devote our 45 minutes together to…
The undisputed leader in Clinton humor this year is Saturday Night Live. In fact, the show may be funnier now than in its putative heyday. There are a couple of disturbing signs, though, that SNL is going soft. At the beginning of the new fall season, Colin Quinn, who does the fake newscast,…
"Bill Clinton's problem is not a party problem, it is not a New Democratic problem, it's a Clinton problem." That's Elaine Kamarck, a former Gore staffer now decamped to Harvard, as quoted in the New Republic last week, and hers is a line we are very likely to hear repeated more and more as the…
BESIDES FINDING NEW DEPTHS OF MEANING in the words is and alone, President Clinton has enlivened public discourse with his distinction between legally accurate and true. "Legally accurate" is his euphemism for testimony that is not false in the sense required for a perjury conviction. Thus, the…
I used to linger in bed for a few minutes after the alarm went off in the morning. But not since January 21. Now, I jump up, put on my bathrobe, and head for the driveway to pick up the newspapers. There's a spring in my step and a smile on my face. And when I read the three papers -- the…
"I intend to reclaim my family life for my family," Bill Clinton said, petulantly, in his nonapology of August 17, explaining further, "Even presidents have private lives." And so some may, but not this one. This man, who has long since surpassed even Richard M. Nixon as our strangest president…
RARE IS THE CONGRESSMAN who'll bring an overhead projector to a town meeting so he can lecture on the federal debt. And Wisconsin Republican Mark Neumann, to be sure, is no ordinary congressman. But his quirkiness -- along with an aggressive campaign and Bill Clinton's woes -- has put him in a dead…
It's an iron law of American life that each new ruling class makes you nostalgic for the last one. But who could have predicted that we'd so soon be longing for the Rhodes-scholar types who trod the earth like giants in the early days of the Clinton administration? Who could have foretold that we…
The summer of 1998 will be remembered not only for baseball sluggers and Oval Office sex but also for animal cloning. Reports of cloned cows and mice and even the cloning of a nearly extinct breed of New Zealand cow trickled in from around the globe. Curiously, though, the new spate of clonings…
An e-mail from Monica Lewinsky to a friend: "Whew! What a day! I met with the big creep's best friend this morning. It was very interesting. I have never met such a 'real' person in my entire life. You know how some people wear their hearts on their sleeves; he wears his soul. Incredible. He said,…
WHAT A MAGICAL SHAPE-CHANGING BEAST this independent-counsel law is! In its marauding two-decade-long journey through the American political landscape, it has revealed aspects of itself we poor peasants could never have imagined. Republicans and now Democrats have felt the fury of the creature, its…
Since the world learned that Monica had given the president, among many other gifts, a copy of Oy Vey! The Things They Say! A Book of Jewish Wit, sales of the compendium have skyrocketed (from Number 153,339 to Number 1,643-and-rising on the Amazon.com sales charts). This could be a better…
FORGET ARTIFICIAL SMILES AND SWIMSUITS: These days, the Miss America Pageant is all about "the issues." The annual televised glam-fest, aired this year on September 19, has become a bit more high-minded since 1989, when pageant organizers started requiring contestants to articulate a "platform"…
Monica's e-mails to her friends are a window into the soul of the post-Gen-X generation.
The Labor Day parade has begun to wind its way through downtown Denver, and Ellen Moran has to raise her voice above the brass band to explain how Dottie Lamm is going to beat Republican Ben Nighthorse-Campbell in the Colorado Senate race this fall. The presidential sex scandal may be the only…
The supporting documents also reinforce the notion that Lewinsky's original lawyer, William Ginsburg, was indeed an idiot. When Starr's office asks Monica for a handwriting sample, Ginsburg refuses on behalf of his client, saying he will agree to provide one only if Starr gives a sample of his own…
However ambivalent they may be about American culture in general, the British often pay more attention -- and homage -- to American art than Americans do. BBC Radio 3 has just finished airing a year of American music, while the London home of the Royal Shakespeare Company hosted a festival in which…
Young men and women start out believing in giants -- not make-believe giants, mind you, but real, hulking gargantuans who only rarely notice the mortals flitting about them. For someone just starting out on adult life, the world seems full of actual giants, legendary figures who have lived lives…
Not long ago, when Emperor Akihito of Japan traveled to Britain for a state visit, a group of former British POWs demonstrated in protest along the route of the royal parade to Buckingham Palace. Although there are few British cows more sacred than the remaining survivors of Japanese captivity…