58 articles
David Klinghoffer is one of thousands of late-twentieth-century Jews to make the journey from secularism to Orthodox Judaism. Indeed, the phenomenon of the ba'al teshuva, the returning Jew, is common enough nowadays to deserve the term "movement." But Klinghoffer's particular odyssey -- recounted…
Remember President Clinton's slogan on affirmative action, "Mend it, don't end it"? Well, now we know what the meaning of "mend" is. It means a huge expansion of federal power to enforce hiring quotas on American companies.
A few weeks ago in this space, THE SCRAPBOOK reported on remarks delivered by the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain at a luncheon in London hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce (UK). The ambassador, according to our estimable source, had remarked on the problems of governing multiethnic…
HENRY HYDE and the other House managers who are prosecuting the Clinton impeachment are on solid ground in demanding the right to present live testimony. Trial evidence does not merely establish the facts, it draws the jurors into the story and gives them the moral resolve to do what the facts…
HUSTLER PUBLISHER LARRY FLYNT is a hard man to peg. He's a bounty hunter to Republicans, and a child molester to his estranged daughter, Tonya (he calls her a "liar" and a "retard"). He's a "hero" to First Amendment fetishist Milos Forman, director of the hagiographic The People vs. Larry Flynt.…
Washington publicist and one-time Dole adviser Craig Shirley caught Larry Flynt in an interesting lie last week. Following an exchange with the president's favorite pornographer on a cable talk show, Shirley mailed a letter asking Flynt a number of questions that probed his ties to the White House…
IT WAS A WOMAN, COKIE ROBERTS, who dared blurt out the real reason why Elizabeth Dole has been catapulted into the first rank of potential Republican presidential candidates. "The difference is, she's in a skirt, and I think that the fact she's in a skirt does make a difference. I really do,"…
This week advocates for the Clinton White House will speak from the Senate rostrum. At first blush, they will seem -- to any serious student of the Lewinsky scandal -- to be making an implicit, highly unflattering judgment about the intelligence of the 100 senators. If extensive legal documents…
The other day I pulled up to a stop light in Los Angeles and heard a man in the next car screaming bloody murder into his cell phone. When I looked over, it turned out to be the actor Adam Goldberg. Generally, I try not to stare at famous people -- it's not polite -- but this time, I couldn't help…
With On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950-1970, Elizabeth Siegel Watkins has labored and brought forth an intriguing artifact: an articulate study of a turning point in American mores, full of worthy material -- yet so distorted by ideological myopia as to be more valuable as…
"Doctor Laura" -- Laura Schlessinger, Ph.D. -- has something like twenty million listeners in America, and she is, as Larry King dubbed her, "the hottest thing in radio." The ratings for her call-in, psychological-advice program are equal to Rush Limbaugh's and nearly triple Howard Stern's.
BOBBY KNIGHT, WHO IS INFALLIBLE, SAYS THAT Michael Jordan is the "best player who,s played anything." If there were any argument with the Indiana coach,s dictum, consider Jordan,s three most impressive statistics: He led the National Basketball Association in scoring 10 times, more than any other…
THE SCRAPBOOK is pleased to note the establishment of the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, in memory of the New York Post columnist and WEEKLY STANDARD contributor who died last March at the age of 42. News Corporation, Breindel's employer and the corporate parent of this…
THERE'S A DOG THAT HASN'T BARKED during President Clinton's impeachment trial in the Senate. It also didn't bark as his State of the Union address was being prepared. That dog is the liberal wing of the Democratic party.
SHORTLY AFTER JAMES ROGAN of California was elected to Congress two years ago, he set out on a mission: to have a conversation with each of the 434 other members of the House of Representatives. It took him two years, but eventually Rogan collected a signature for every person in his congressional…
Two years ago, in the courthouse of Sarpy County, Nebraska, a 25-year-old man named Aaron Pattno admitted that he had sexually assaulted a 13-year-old boy. George A. Thompson, the district judge hearing the case, sentenced Pattno to serve 20 months to 5 years in prison. And that, as they say, was…
UNITED STATES CAPITOL, JAN. 14, 11:00 A.M.
THE 106TH CONGRESS, ONCE IT GETS PAST THE impeachment drama, will have a rare chance to tackle another set of Washington-style crimes and misdemeanors: 34 years of federal education policy and programs so misguided that today they undermine the prospects of reforming the nation's woeful schools.
This is not a coffee table book about dinosaurs, but it comes close. The Last Dinosaur Book is cleverly, colorfully, and lavishly illustrated. It is filled with movie stills, comic strips, cartoons, and, if that is not enough to hold your interest, you can flip pages 95 to 227 and watch an animated…
ALL PARTIES, FROM THE PRESIDENT TO THE new speaker of the House to the Joint Chiefs of staff, now agree that America's armed forces are underfunded. There remains disagreement only on the size of the shortfall. When questioned in January by members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the chiefs…
IT MAY NOT LOOK LIKE IT, BUT THAT GUY, LYING all bloodied on the mat, surrounded by clumps of his own hair and fragments of his own teeth is actually winning the fight.
BOBBY KNIGHT, WHO IS INFALLIBLE, SAYS THAT Michael Jordan is the "best player who's played anything." If there were any argument with the Indiana coach's dictum, consider Jordan's three most impressive statistics: He led the National Basketball Association in scoring 10 times, more than any other…
The sexual counterrevolution is at hand. And contrary to the darkest fears of some, it is being led not be Bible-thumping fundamentalists or prune-faced matrons with beehive hairdos. It's being led by young women looking for romance.
"The president's enemies played on his weak character to get him to commit crimes, then used their majority . . . to try to drive him from office." This is how Jonathan Alter summarized last year's events in a recent Newsweek column. It may be the most fatuous journalistic sentence written in a…
"HAVE YOU EVER COMMITTED ADULTERY?" The question has already been posed to Dan Quayle, and it's very likely to be asked of every other prospective candidates for president in 1999, the Republican candidates anyway. Diane Sawyer even asked it of Ken Starr. Starr and Quayle, it's the wrong answer.…
On December 1, 1998, Vice President Al Gore told an audience of farmers that he favors a review of American use of economic sanctions. "All this excessive use of sanctions in willy-nilly form should be reevaluated," he said. That Gore chose to thus opine at the very time the administration he…
Move over Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, there's new cleavage in town: stasists versus dynamists. And their embryonic conflict will soon -- or so argues Virginia Postrel in her new book, The Future and Its Enemies -- become the main division in American politics.
"Woman is an imperfect creature," a character in Cervantes's Don Quixote declares, "and you must not put stumbling-blocks in her path, so that she may trip and fall, but rather clear her road of every obstacle, so that she may run free and unburdened to gain the perfection she lacks, which consists…
The creative use of the Nexis database to embarrass journalists and other public figures with their past utterances is a technique pioneered by Dan Seligman in the brilliant column he used to write for Fortune magazine. Happily for Seligman fans, if unhappily for the New York Times, he now trains…
THE THING TO UNDERSTAND about Trent Lott is that he's never wanted to be a Senate majority leader like George Mitchell, who mostly obstructed the agenda of a president (George Bush) of the other party. Lott's style is closer to that of Lyndon Johnson, who as Democratic majority leader in the 1950s…
Oakland, Calif.
Richard Epstein, one of the great legal scholars of his generation, describes Principles for a Free Society: Reconciling Individual Liberty with the Common Good, as a defense of "laissez faire." It certainly offers many illuminating and compelling analyses of particular legal issues, but as a…
IF YOU ARE PERPLEXED about the state of the American economy, join the club. For most traditional economists, the rules aren't working. No matter how tight labor markets are, how seemingly overvalued the stock market, how dangerous the interest-rate spreads, somehow growth keeps spiraling higher.…
Reading along in My Name Escapes Me, the diary of Alec Guinness, that most subtle and modest of modern actors, I came across Sir Alec's avowal of his shame at being a slow reader. In his mid eighties, he notes: "I think it stems (apart from slowness of the brain) from the fact that when I come…
Think the meaning of the Clinton scandal hasn't penetrated the countryside? Last week in a criminal court is Stafford County, Virginia, 50 miles south of Washington, the judge asked potential jurors in a burglary and sexual assault case if they could decide the matter fairly and impartially. A…
Anyone who watched TV in the 1970s will remember the image: A morose Indian paddles a canoe through a polluted stream, a belching smokestack in the background. At the edge of a highway cluttered with litter, a piece of garbage is thrown from a passing car and lands at his feet. The narrator of the…
Last week as the Senate took up the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton, and as Republicans argued with Democrats and the talking heads talked away, the dominating spirit in Washington was that of a man whose name was never mentioned: Ross Perot. Twice rejected at the ballot box, he has…
Journalists by reputation are supposed to be a cynical, hard-bitten lot, so can someone please explain to THE SCRAPBOOK why more reporters don't chortle whenever Bill Clinton and his aides chant their favorite mantra, the politics of personal destruction?
According to wire-service reports on Dec. 29, former Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan now regrets his leading role in Pol Pot's genocidal Communist regime that murdered two million Cambodians in the late 1970s. "Yes -- sorry, sorry, sorry, I am very sorry," Samphan told reporters. Another top aide…
LAST WEEK, WHITE HOUSE press secretary Joe Lockhart explained why Bill Clinton beings the Senate impeachment trail at a profound disadvantage. The case that Republicans will bring against the president, Lockhart told the New York Times, is based on "the most prejudicial record that could possibly…
I'M DELIGHTED WE HAVE THE prospect of calling witnesses. I'm disappointed we have to go through so many hurdles to get there." That's how Asa Hutchinson, one of the House managers prosecuting the case against the president, views the deal approved by the Senate on January 8. Hutchinson and his…
United States senators -- following the lead of the 101st senator, the New York Times editorial page -- are scrambling to fashion a "deal" for the "censure" of William Jefferson Clinton. The deal is proposed in the gravest possible tone of voice. Its advocates claim to be acting only with the…
THE DAY AFTER HE WAS IMPEACHED, President Clinton gathered with several hundred friends at the White House for a Christmas party. He acted like a man who'd just received an honor, not a rebuke. He joked about Larry Flynt, the porn publisher bent on exposing Republicans as philanderers. And he noted…
There's an old Russian joke about how the second-worst thing that ever happened to the country was the rise of Lenin -- the worst thing, naturally, being the death of Lenin. Americans interested in tobacco legislation may be living a version of that joke. If the second-worst turn of events in the…
I spend part of my time in the art world and part sulking among technologists. The technology world has loads of energy but not enough ideas. The art world has ideas but not enough energy. The "conservative" art world is especially energy-deprived -- the community that believes in the spiritual…
When Henry Hyde dispatched those 81 questions from the House Judiciary Committee to the president last month, maybe he should have asked the Clinton administration's inquisitors at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to toughen up the wording.
It was at the end of the nineteenth century that Friedrich Nietzsche denounced the "flatheads" who imagined they could preserve morality without God. Nietzsche didn't think much of the Western ethical tradition, but he sensed that it needed the continuing presence of religion: The culture that…
Not long ago, the executive director of Boys Town USA, Fr. Val J. Peter, felt compelled to write a letter to the boys and girls in his charge about the recent goings-on in Washington. "If you are old enough to know about these matters," Fr. Peter wrote, "then surely you are old enough to learn some…
LAST WEEK, PENTAGON OFFICIALS provided damage assessments of the four-day missile strike against Iraq. But they focused their attention on the wrong country. The most significant damage was not to be found in Iraq, where nearly half a billion dollars worth of U.S. missiles destroyed a handful of…
Feminists have spent the past year in ideological contortions over President Clinton's transgressions, but that doesn't mean they've lost their voice on other important causes -- like the decision by the U.S. Mint to terminate the failed Susan B. Anthony dollar coin and replace it with one bearing…
In July 1997, CNN posted a poignant "photographic essay" on its Internet news site about the discovery in Russia of what it called a "horrific reminder of the nation's past." The network reported that a mass grave of more than 9,000 people had been excavated in a forest glade in Sandermakh,…
The new mayor of Washington, D.C., Anthony Williams, is planning a "common folks" inaugural party with "tickets cheap enough for everyone to afford." According to the account in the Washington Post, "Williams said he and his wife . . . decided that the [last inaugural] parade wasn't well-attended,"…
During the presidential campaign of 1960, John F. Kennedy, addressing a group of Baptist ministers in Houston, declared that he believed "in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute." His religion, he swore, was "his own private affair," and no public official should request…
The enduring political photo of 1998 will be the one of the president on his trip to Africa, caught unawares by a TV camera as he triumphantly chews a stogie and pounds a tom-tom drum to celebrate the end of Paula Jones's sexual harassment lawsuit. It is -- or should be -- an enduring image because…
IN THE END, THE CENTRAL QUESTION in the House debate over the impeachment of President Clinton was whether perjury or lying under oath is an impeachable offense. There are two ways of approaching this matter. One is historical: What did the Founders mean when they wrote in the Constitution that a…
Before his death in 1972, Abraham Joshua Heschel was widely considered to be one of the most influential Jewish religious thinkers of the twentieth century. In 1951, reviewing Heschel's Man Is Not Alone on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune, no less a figure than Reinhold Niebuhr…
With all the publicity given in the last few years to the rise of the Religious Right, it's hard to remember that there was a time, as recently as twenty-five years ago, when evangelical Christians were regularly criticized for their lack of participation in American politics.
It will begin like this: The presiding officer of the U.S. Senate will ask the man before him in the Senate chamber, William H. Rehnquist, the chief justice of the United States, to raise his right hand and take this oath: "I solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the…