March 1999

IS THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, despite its pro-life platform and rhetoric, becoming operationally pro-choice on abortion? Let's look at some recent evidence.

Acon-game conspiracy stalks the land, using a fantasy of instant riches to bilk financially vulnerable Americans out of their hard-earned nest eggs. Fortunately, however, a bipartisan group of the nation's elected officials is on full alert. In the Senate, Republican Susan Collins of Maine has held…

Whatever clout the Clinton administration once had with congressional Democrats seems to have vanished. This was made abundantly clear during last week's Senate debate and near-unanimous vote to finally deploy a national defense against ballistic missiles. The Democratic posture had been that…

ELIZABETH DOLE DEFIES CATEGORIZATION. She is admirable (one of the "10 Most Admired Women" according to Good Housekeeping). She is fascinating (one of the "10 Most Fascinating" according to Barbara Walters). She is inspiring (the "Most Inspiring Political Figure of 1996" according to MSNBC). She is…

LAST WEEK IN NEW YORK, Democratic State Committee chairwoman Judith Hope dropped a broad hint. She told a Manhattan television station she expected Hillary Rodham Clinton to make a decision within months on whether to run for Pat Moynihan's open Senate seat in 2000. That means Hillary's decision…

You probably thought you knew Al Gore's life story by now. As told in the New Yorker a few years back, the outlines are these: "Gore was a son of politics, a child of Washington, where his father served for thirty-two years as a congressman and a senator. The family residence was an apartment in…

If you didn't know better you might think Steve Forbes and Christine Todd Whitman were friends. The two have known each other since their years together at Far Hills Country Day School in the 1950s. In 1993, Forbes did more than almost any other person to help Whitman become governor of New Jersey,…

The press secretaries were inundated. Reporters were beginning to ask questions about corruption at the European Commission, the bureaucratic and regulatory nerve center of the European Union in Brussels. So Jimmy Jamar, commissioner Edith Cresson's spokesman, sat down and wrote a confidential memo…

There was high-flown talk of dreams becoming reality. The finance ministers were "visibly moved," said press reports. The Italian was "proud" to be able to call himself "a European citizen." The Portuguese called it a page "that can never be turned back," while others beamed about the "new…

When Oregon made "assisted suicide" legal, opponents predicted the law would one day be declared discriminatory against disabled people, because it required self-administration of lethal drugs. This would then open the door to state-sanctioned killing. Well, that day is just about here. When…

ROY BLUNT, A SECOND-TERM CONGRESSMAN from Missouri, may be the most influential Republican no one's ever heard of. GOP presidential favorite George W. Bush just made him his liaison to House Republicans. And Tom DeLay, the House GOP whip, recently tapped him to be his top deputy, the post Dennis…

A FEW WEEKS AGO, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit took the dramatic step of declaring Miranda no longer the law of the land. Then on March 5, the Fourth Circuit stepped even more boldly into the constitutional breach: It struck down a central provision of the Violence Against Women…

Seven years ago, when President George Bush tried to make political hay out of the release of national education statistics, a Washington Post story carried this snippy lead:

Conservatives who like to believe that whites and blacks are fully integrated in the culture should consider this: Not one of the ten most-watched television programs in white America is in the top ten for blacks. In fact, in recent years, television networks have been able to capture nearly the…

Alexander Hamilton has had a very good year. Not only has he been frequently cited as the leading authority on impeachable offenses, but his conduct in explaining his relations with Maria Reynolds and her blackmailing husband has been justly hailed as befitting a gentleman caught, out in a tawdry…

American seems fated to play in the twenty-first century the role Britain played in the nineteenth: Globocop -- the country that protects the weak from the strong (the Ottoman Empire from Russia, Kuwait from Iraq), safeguards international trade while stamping out contraband (slaves, nukes), and…

This hasn't been a good century for heroes. After the First World War, serious American fiction turned instead to figures like Jay Gatsby, Willy Loman, Dreiser's helpless victims, Faulkner's exemplars of decline, and Hemingway's scarred personalities. Unable to believe in the possibility of rising…

For those still keeping track, the score remains Juanita Broaddrick: 5 (as in, witnesses she contemporaneously told about the Masher in Chief); Bill Clinton: 1 (as in, number of feeble denials issued, and that denial not by Clinton but by his lawyer). And as time passes, her story is only gaining…

This is the dramatic and disturbing story of one woman's struggle to defend herself against the untrammeled power of the American criminal justice system and its leering media accomplices. It is a "fascinating human story of love, betrayal, and obsession." It is, in fact, a revelation. For…

EVER SINCE PRESIDENT CLINTON proposed adding a prescription-drug entitlement to Medicare in his State of the Union speech, drug coverage for the elderly has been the number-one health issue for Democrats. The Democrats on the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare are pushing for…

IT SEEMS AS IF HE HAS ALWAYS been part of the American cultural landscape, leaving dead bodies at hospital emergency-room doors, wearing Founding Father costumes to court, accusing his opponents of conducting a modern-day Inquisition. But only nine years ago, no one had heard of Jack Kevorkian,…

Bill Clinton is great at apologizing to foreign governments for the policies of his predecessors. A year ago, on a trip to Africa, he apologized for past American support for some African dictatorships. Last week in Central America, he apologized for U.S. support of the Guatemalan military during…

SENATOR RICHARD LUGAR is one of the few congressional Republicans who have supported the president on issues of foreign affairs and national security. The Indiana Republican strongly backed the president on NATO expansion, the chemical weapons treaty, and the nomination of William Weld for…

WOULD A STUDY PURPORTING to show that small children suffered "significant harm" when their mothers worked full-time be heralded by major media as vindication for mothers who stay home? Would networks lead their nightly news with the proclamation that mothers who put their children before their…

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Last week was not a good one for Al Gore. Not only did he fall further behind George W. Bush in various polls, but he made an extraordinary comment in response to Wolf Blitzer on CNN that will come back to haunt him. Blitzer asked Gore why Democrats should support him and not Bill Bradley.

So a Marine Corps jury, after a fair and open trial, unanimously acquits Capt. Richard Ashby, the pilot whose jet accidentally sent 20 skiers in a cable car plummeting fatally to the ground. It was a horrible accident, the jury decided, but it was an accident. Nonetheless, Italian prime minister…

On March 8, 1999, Joe DiMaggio died in his 85th year, a baseball legend, but also an American hero who represented the virtues and ideals of his era. His achievements as a player were extraordinary: a lifetime batting average of .325, with a seasonal high of .381. He had seasonal highs of 167 runs…

The reaction of the political establishment -- Democratic and Republican -- to Pat Buchanan's decision to have another run at the White House is both amusing and worrying. First, the amusing part. After months in which political discourse consisted of discussing what the meaning of "is" is, it is a…

With all the hubbub over George Stephanopoulos's supposed "betrayal" of Bill Clinton, one could easily lose sight of this: Amazingly few of his employees and associates have actually felt compelled to "betray" him by telling the truth. After all, so much to betray, so little betrayal.

WHILE MANY INTELLECTUALS on the left are content to complain about America's rightward drift, Steve Kangas prided himself on a pragmatic approach. A few years ago, Kangas, a 37-year-old Internet pornographer from Las Vegas, created a Web site called "Liberalism Resurgent: A Response to the Right"…

Austin, Texas

Well known for his social satire on British law and jurisprudence -- represented by his famous character Horace Rumpole, the crotchety barrister of the Old Bailey -- the novelist John Mortimer now ranks as one of Great Britain's premier mystery writers.

In examining Sen. Bob Kerrey's review of Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, it should be noted that while the World War II generation's achievements are comparable to the Revolutionary War and Civil War generations', those two generations were not followed 20 years later by anything like the…

Andrew Peyton Thomas is an excellent historian of country music, but he is a little shaky on the history of colonial immigration ("'I See by Your Outfit,'" March 8).

Paul Davies is an Australian professor of mathematical physics, a highly successful scientific popularizer, and the winner of the million-dollar Templeton Prize for "progress in religion."

Joseph Epstein's "Can't Take That Away From Me" left me shaking with emotion (Casual, March 1). Epstein eloquently describes what I have been feeling for over 40 years. The maddening fact that generations of young people have never heard, much less appreciated, the sublime voices of Dick Haymes,…

One of the great but seldom-heard stories of the Cold War is the subject of Ted Morgan's superb new biography, A Covert Life, and its hero, Jay Lovestone, is crisply summarized by the book's sub-title: Communist, anti-Communist, and spymaster.

The desire to flatter Hillary Rodham Clinton apparently knows no bounds. Barely a month after a campaign began to urge the first lady to run for the Senate in New York in 2000, some admirers, including ABC's Carole Simpson, are pointing out the obvious: Hillary is already a national figure, so why…

A ferocious government crackdown in Cuba has angered the Europeans and Canadians but has yet to faze the Baltimore Orioles. Fidel Castro's new and harsher laws, a mass detention of dissidents, and show trials of four democratic leaders have led King Juan Carlos of Spain to announce that he may have…

Like the careless Buchanans of The Great Gatsby, Bill Clinton is known as the man who leaves friends wounded and bleeding in his wake. But of all the casualties littering his trail -- the jailed business partners, the disgraced aides, the character-assassinated former lovers -- the most serious by…

I got a call from a friend of mine the other day asking if I'd write a letter of recommendation on her behalf to a medical school. No problem, I said. I write a lot. I can handle it.

When New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman cashiered her embattled police chief the other day, she took pains to stipulate that she doesn't think he's a racist, and neither does she buy his critics' charge that he tolerated "racial profiling" in his department. Instead, the firing offense was…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has a full-time position available for an entry-level staff assistant. This is an administrative position working with the business and circulation staff. Please mail your resume to: Business Manager, THE WEEKLY STANDARD, 1150 17th Street, NW, Suite 505, Washington, D.C. 20036.…

Buried in last Thursday's Washington Post, in a story on how the president and virtually everyone else in Washington are "Looking Past Scandal, Focusing on Future," were these extraordinary paragraphs:

Once upon a time, it is now hard to believe, feminists thought that rape could be serious. Very serious. Exceedingly serious. One of the most serious accusations you could make. It was not only grim in itself, it was also a metaphor, a symbol for the whole sorry state of sexual matters that…

WHAT WAS MOST REMARKABLE about the Barbara Walters interview with Monica Lewinsky was its revelation of the moral derangement of Monica's world. Consider, first, the embarrassing nature of the program itself. What exactly was this disconcertingly childlike woman doing baring her love life in our…

SOON AFTER PRESIDENT BUSH nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, Timothy Phelps of Newsday and Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio heard rumors that a law professor in Oklahoma had accused Thomas of making crude sexual remarks to her when they worked together almost a decade before.…

When seven Republican presidential candidates turned up at California's recent state party convention, they expected to be star attractions. Instead, they were eclipsed by James Rogan, the second-term congressman who leapt to prominence during the president's impeachment trial. Countless…

Weirton, West Virginia

The first time Ezra Pound ever flew on a plane was in November 1945, when he was brought from Italy to the United States to stand trial for treason. He was guarded for the forty-eight-hour trip by Lieutenant Colonel P. V. Holder, who described him as:

WHERE ARE THE DEMOCRATS? Only a few weeks ago, they were indignant that anyone would think they took a permissive attitude toward President Clinton's wrongdoing. While opposed to impeachment and conviction in the Monica Lewinsky case, congressional Democrats insisted President Clinton should not go…

Dan Seligman, THE SCRAPBOOK'S favorite New York Times watcher, has a new addition to the list of articles at the paper of record that have ended up as ideological embarrassments. That would be the story of gay Marine Rich Merritt. As Seligman noted in his New York Post column last week, Merritt was…

Los Angeles

I'M WILLING TO DO A LOT FOR YOU, dear Reader, but I'm afraid I couldn't quite drag myself to the "Call for Reconciliation" meeting Republicans and Democrats threw for themselves last Thursday at 8:00 A.M. The sight of a bipartisan congressional scrum of high-minded members from both sides of the…

Who does Vice President Al Gore believe -- his best bud Bill Clinton or Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who accuses the president of raping her in 1978? This question arises not from malice on the part of THE SCRAPBOOK but thanks to a press release from the Office of the Vice President, marking an…

Davenport, Iowa

JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS, President Clinton addressed the families of the victims in the Pan Am 103 tragedy. He left a clear impression: Their long wait for justice would soon be over.

Clarence Thomas understands "the politics of personal destruction." After President Bush nominated him to succeed Thur-good Marshall on the Supreme Court, liberals threw a fit. With no evidence of felonious conduct from a special prosecutor, Thomas's opponents had to make the most of a single…

A pundit who switches sides late in life risks losing the affection of one group without ever entering the good graces of the other. And that, in a nutshell, was the fate of newspaper columnist Max Lerner: His evolution from liberalism to something close to conservatism made him a heretic among…

For all of Nathan Landow's admirable traits -- his Democratic fund-raising prowess, his real-estate tycoon acumen, his apple-butter winter tan -- he spends a great deal of time standing accused. Two decades ago, the Washington Post accused him of doing business with organized-crime figures. Two…

IN 1997, THE YOUNG CHINESE-AMERICAN writer Iris Chang published The Rape of Nanking, a compelling account of the infamous Japanese capture of China's capital in December 1937. Timed to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of an episode that has become, like Auschwitz, a defining example of a…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has a full-time position available for an entry-level staff assistant. This is an administrative position working with the business and circulation staff. Please mail your resume to: Business Manager, THE WEEKLY STANDARD, 1150 17th Street, NW, Suite 505, Washington, D.C. 20036.…

President Clinton's legal defense fund last week announced results for its most recent six months of hat-passing -- a period that began last August when the House received Ken Starr's impeachment referral and ended with the president's acquittal. All that publicity was a boon to the cause: $ 2.3…

Clinton Asks 'Benefit Of The Doubt' on Medicare," read a Reuters dispatch last week. And with that wonderful headline, THE SCRAPBOOK hereby inaugurates a semi-regular feature on Inappropriate Clintonian Rhetoric. The president, to an audience of labor unions, said that in any future argument with…

It's unfortunately too late to vote -- the deadline was Feb. 28 -- but THE SCRAPBOOK would have recommended stuffing the U.S. Postal Service ballot box in favor of a "Fall of the Berlin Wall" stamp to commemorate the 1980s. Not that THE SCRAPBOOK is necessarily in favor of commemorating the 1980s,…

"My boyfriend and I used to have a lot of phone sex," said a girl sitting next to me at a dinner party in Boston in 1989.

The Smithsonian should give Dale Watson a fellowship, if only to make up for the money and stardom that have eluded him. The iconoclastic thirty-six-year-old from Austin, Texas, has emerged as a leader of the traditionalist backlash against today's country music. But rebellion in defense of…

Last week's debacle at Rambouillet, the French chateau where Secretary of State Madeleine Albright failed to win agreement from both Serbs and Kosovar Albanians, was more than just a humiliation for the Clinton administration. In the coming days and weeks the awful consequences of that failure will…

Colin Powell was scheduled to be in Nigeria Feb. 27 to join a bipartisan group of members of Congress monitoring the country's presidential election. May be he's trying to compensate for impolitic comments he made about the country in 1995. That was when he told Henry Louis Gates Jr., in an article…

Zhu Rongji, premier of China, will visit Washington in April. As preparations go forward in both countries, some officials are expressing the hope that the visit will complete the more than decade-long negotiations over China's accession to the world trading system. China's membership in the World…

Anyone whose parents belonged to the generation that Tom Brokaw chronicles in The Greatest Generation has heard many times a phrase about the struggles they faced: "You kids don't know what it was like."

The accusation is serious: rape. The accuser is credible: an Arkansas businesswoman named Juanita Broaddrick. The accused, then the attorney general of Arkansas, is now the president of the United States. The question is: Will he get away with what no other American could get away with -- not…

REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS impeached the president for doing what Republicans would have loved to have done if the Mrs. hadn't hidden the Viagra and the intern hadn't cracked the Republican across the face with a Prada backpack full of cell phone batteries. Congressional Democrats know Democratic…

The Cultural Literacy Monster first raised its ignorant head for me some fifteen or so years ago, when I gave a lecture to several hundred freshmen at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. It was a lecture no doubt too heavily peppered with proper names, and even as I gassed away, I saw that what…

Ted Turner, the vice chairman of Time-Warner and founder of CNN, gave a speech last week in Washington to the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, in which he displayed the qualities that took him to the top of American journalism.

Manchester, New Hampshire

THE SCRAPBOOK is pleased to announce the publication of A Passion for Truth: The Selected Writings of Eric Breindel (Harper-Collins). Edited by John Podhoretz, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, the collection is a memorial to Breindel's work on the first anniversary of his untimely…

If you have any doubt whether George W. Bush is going to run for president, consider this: On the evening of February 10, a Republican state representative from New Hampshire named Tim McGough called Bush's office, hoping to talk with him about charter schools. Bush's secretary politely told…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has a full-time position available for an entry-level staff assistant. This is an administrative position working with the business and circulation staff. Please mail your resume to: Business Manager, THE WEEKLY STANDARD, 1150 17th Street, NW, Suite 505, Washington, D.C. 20036.…

It's testing time again for the United States and its NATO allies. As this magazine goes to press, Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic is continuing to reject a U.S. plan to put NATO troops in Kosovo to keep the peace and give the Kosovar Albanians a chance for real autonomy. With this weekend's…

Thanks to its habitual viewing of Chris Matthews's Hardball, THE SCRAPBOOK was under the impression that it had become well acquainted with every harsh Democratic critic of Bill Clinton in America -- all three of them (former congressmen Ben Jones and Paul McHale, and Carter pollster Pat Caddell).…

Compassionate conservatism? Yes, one sees how the phrase might put some people's backs up. It implies that there exists some group -- presumably a large group -- perhaps even a dominant group -- of un-compassionate conservatives. After all these years of enduring that line of abuse from liberals,…

THERE MUST BE A WAY to beat those guys. There must be a way to beat the Bill Clinton/Tony Blair triangulators, those political magpies who steal ideas from the right and left and mix everything into a Third Way souffle, light on intellectual coherence but apparently delectable to voters. There must…

OVER THE PAST 15 YEARS, an important and underappreciated shift has occurred in U.S. pension policy. The change has been away from "defined-benefit" plans -- company pension funds that pay a guaranteed benefit based on years of employment -- toward "defined-contribution" plans -- a remarkable, and…

Republican leaders, worried about their party's lack of success among ethnic minorities, are reaching for just the wrong remedy. The GOP, they say, should stress symbolic ethnic outreach, while downplaying its principled opposition to affirmative action, bilingual education, and multiculturalism.…

Bill Clinton deserves to get demagogued over Medicare. The federal health insurance program for senior citizens will be insolvent before long, and Clinton has double-crossed the Republican Congress every time it dealt with him on the subject. But as much as Clinton is owed any amount of abuse for…

ON ONE THING ABOUT our otherwise deeply polarizing impeachment experience nearly everyone agreed: "The System worked." As Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard put it, "the impeachment drama will have yielded few heroes -- except the Constitution's Framers, whose wisdom that drama will again have…

Israel was founded fifty years ago. It has been a fixture in our lives for all of that time. It has played and continues to play a role -- in our emotional lives, economically, politically, and militarily -- way beyond its size and its population. Whatever our personal feelings and background, life…

When it comes to dazzling political spectacle, no regime in history can touch the Fascist powers. Inducing mass rapture by convincing one's countrymen to abandon themselves to the leader's will -- goose-stepping legs and saluting arms by the tens of thousands jerking upward like those of…

These are disorienting times for social conservatives. It has been hard enough to rally Americans on such contentious issues as abortion. Now we can't even seem to agree on the moral status of perjury.

Political families, similar in some ways, differ in the politicians they produce. The Adamses gave us two indifferent presidents and three brilliant diplomats. The Kennedys gave us one president, three senators, and two martyred icons. The Bushes have given us, so far, one senator, one president,…