55 articles
CONSERVATIVE OPINION OVER THE KOSOVO campaign seems about equally divided between those who consider it a debacle turning into a morass and those who consider it a fiasco turning into a quagmire. These views prevail across the spectrum of where-we-go-from-here opinion--that is, among the bug-out…
New Orleans
It's a reminder of socialism's lingering prestige that people still refer to the tyranny that ruled Germany as "fascism" and the tyranny that ruled Russia as "Stalinism" -- as though one country had succumbed to a vast ideological system and the other simply to the evil of a single man. It would…
For fifty years it has been a big project of the American academy to rescue the poet Robert Frost from his admirers -- to show that his traditional rhyming sonnets and odes were not merely beautiful ditties, that his blank-verse narratives of ordinary New Englanders were more than just nice stories.
PERHAPS THE ONLY HAPPY SURPRISE so far in the NATO campaign against Serbia is that our major allies, Britain, Germany, and France, have for once proved as tough as Washington. Indeed, as the bombing campaign entered its fourth week, popular support in Europe was increasing. Far from being pressured…
U.S. and NATO aircraft are now engaged in operations few anticipated when the strikes against Serbia began. Transports are moving Kosovar refugees to "temporary" homes outside the Balkans and bringing in relief supplies for hundreds of thousands in camps in Albania and Macedonia. War-planes are…
Chinese premier Zhu Rongji's visit to America was not supposed to end this way. Leading up to the summit on April 7-9, administration aides had proudly announced that trade negotiators had agreed to double the air traffic between China and the United States. But in the end, that modest step --…
According to a fascinating story last week in the New York Times, the Labor Department "will neither confirm nor deny" that it is investigating the use of volunteer labor by America Online, the nation's leading online service and portal to the World Wide Web. For years, it turns out, AOL has given…
The National Poetry Competition is not only Great Britain's most prestigious poetry prize. It's the most generous, paying £ 5,000 for the poem that's judged the best. And it's meant to be the most fair, since all submissions must be previously unpublished and submitted anonymously. But it's…
Almost everywhere John McCain goes on the campaign trail, he gets the Hanoi Hilton introduction. A local poobah will be up on the podium, and he'll be saying what an honor it is to welcome Senator McCain to town. Except that when he says the word "honor" it's with an extra ripple in his voice so…
THE SCRAPBOOK is in receipt of a remarkable revelation by the National Center for Public Policy Research. The Center issued the following press release last week: "Sun Plays Key Role in Global Warming." No kidding.
One of the silly little rituals of American politics is the quadrennial fight over which state will host the first presidential primary. New Hampshire, of course, clings fervently to its first-primary tradition, and always threatens to make life miserable for any candidate, or party, that doesn't…
WHILE WRITING HIS ACCOUNT of the 1995 Dayton peace accords, Richard Holbrooke had a dispute with his publisher. Holbrooke, still flushed from his starring role in the agreement that halted the fighting in Bosnia, wanted to call his book, To End a War. Random House, fearful of being overtaken by…
At Bar Betico Mata in Turrialba, the beer is cheap, the cuisine is hearty, and the service is congenial. But I don't think they take American Express. Actually, I don't think they take Visa either. They might not even take U.S. dollars. At Bar Betico Mata, you won't find too many people speaking…
Despite the best efforts of its opponents in the educational establishment, the cause of school choice continues to gain steam. This week, the investment banker Ted Forstmann and Wal-Mart executive John Walton will announce plans to expand their privately funded initiative to restore competition to…
With so much in print -- most of it worthless -- claiming to explain the unprecedented economic growth of the last decade, it's tempting to ignore Michael Wolf's new book. But that would be a mistake. Wolf, a lawyer with a media and entertainment practice, offers in The Entertainment Economy an…
Just past sundown on April 12, Chuck Bartels of the Associated Press had some news he thought might be of interest to the most famous woman in Cabot, Arkansas. So he rang Paula Jones's doorbell -- it plays the spooky five-note theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind -- and informed her that…
The war in Kosovo is going badly. The Clinton administration has compounded its initial disastrous misjudgment of Slobodan Milosevic with an inadequate military strategy driven more by fear of negative polls than by the imperative of victory. THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned that General Wesley…
Fungoes and free agents. Infield fly-balls and incentive clauses. Double baggers and deferred compensation. Suicide squeezes and salary arbitration. You can smell it in the April air: Spring is sprung, and baseball's back.
Back home in New York recently, I spent a day at the protests. I made a point of getting there early -- before 9 A.M. -- to survey the field.
ALBERT EINSTEIN IS PURPORTED to have once remarked that the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. My favorite example of the power of compounding effects was recounted recently by George Gilder: The emperor of China was so excited about the game of chess that he offered the…
George W. Bush is renowned among Republicans for his ability to attract Hispanic voters. Along with John McCain, Bush has made a point of distinguishing himself from the Republican pack by pointedly not opposing bilingual education. And now he has further distinguished himself by becoming the first…
NATO turns 50 this year, and in honor of the occasion the Clinton administration is throwing quite a party. Later this month, heads of state from over 40 countries are assembling in Washington to participate in what organizers are billing as a "Once-in-a-Lifetime Event."
* THE WEEKLY STANDARD has a full-time position available for a staff assistant working with the circulation and business staff. Please mail your resume to: Business Manager, THE WEEKLY STANDARD, 1150 17th Street, NW, Suite 505, Washington, D.C. 20036. Or fax us at (202) 293-4901. No calls, please.
YOU PROBABLY MISSED the first primary in the 2000 Republican presidential race, but Sen. John McCain won it. So says Vin Weber, the former GOP congressman from Minnesota and a McCain adviser. No, it was the "first quarter" in the fight for the presidential nomination that McCain just won, says Rick…
New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani has always struck THE SCRAPBOOK as one of those guys who read the Cliffs Notes version of Machiavelli -- "It is better to be feared than loved" -- and thought this was just the coolest thing he had ever heard. But of course if he'd read further, he would have…
People used to rag on poor Bob Dole -- the pre-Viagra Bob Dole -- for his verbal tics as a presidential candidate. For instance, he used to say "Whatever" whenever he was stumped for something to say, which was often. Another tic, on display hourly on the campaign trail, was "That's what it's all…
Last week congressman Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland held a press conference with Mrs. Robert E. Lee IV, the regent of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association familiar to readers of last week's cover story, "Updating George Washington." With Mrs. Lee's enthusiastic support, Bartlett has introduced…
Sacramento, California
In 1605, Matteo Ricci, the renowned Italian Jesuit missionary hard at work in China, reported back to Europe that he had discovered the existence of a community of Jews in Kaifeng -- a city situated on the Yellow River about five hundred miles to the southwest of Peking. He had learned of them when…
WHICH U.S.-LED MILITARY ACTION of the past decade will set the pattern for the current Balkan war? As the United States moves closer to committing ground troops, the choice is stark.
THE FINELY CALIBRATED BOMBING of Serbia exemplifies a conventional wisdom that emerged soon after the 1991 Gulf War: The only wars American public opinion will sanction are those that may be fought bloodlessly and, hence, from the air. There is a paradox here. During the era of universal…
WHEN THE HISTORY OF NATO'S DEMISE is written, the entire affair, it will be said, was rich with irony. It was on the eve of the Washington Summit in April 1999. Western leaders were preparing to toast each other in the American capital when a defining moment inconveniently emerged, courtesy of…
Kill PBS. Or at least kill the "public" part of it. That was a well-publicized plank in the Republican revolution of 1994.
Before he died in 1993 at the age of eighty-four, Wallace Stegner was asked what the difference was between his view of the American West and that of Louis L'Amour, the enormously popular pulp western writer. Stegner laughed and replied, "About two or three million dollars."
Wars of Hatred
According to the polls, a majority of the American people support sending U.S. and NATO ground troops into Yugoslavia to defeat Serb forces and stop the slaughter and ethnic cleansing of the Kosovar Albanians. Or, to put it another way: to win this war against Slobodan Milosevic and his army of…
My pity goes out to the monolingual, those poor devils trapped in the prison of a single language, their linguistic horizons occluded by knowing only the language of their own country. My pity, I had better quickly insert, is self-pity, for I am such a prisoner -- a lifer, it is beginning to become…
Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana is widely admired as one of the more modest fellows on Capitol Hill -- which is, as they say, a little like being one of the tallest buildings in Cedar Rock, Nebraska. But even Sen. Lugar's modesty knows it limits. Last week, his office helpfully faxed out his…
At last we know what New York Times editors really think about George W. Bush. In a Richard L. Berke story a couple of weeks ago on the large number of policy experts going to Austin, Texas, to advise Bush for his run at the GOP presidential nomination, there was this catty line about all the…
CONGRESS HAS BEEN ATWITTER over a minor measure it just passed known as "ed-flex," which snips red tape in some federal education programs. Since 1994, a dozen states have been permitted to modify these regulations; ed-flex would allow all the states to do so.
LAST FALL, while Texas governor George W. Bush was pretending he might not run for president, Karl Rove was on the phone with Haley Barbour, the former Republican national chairman, and a horde of others. Rove was recruiting. He wanted well-known Republicans, mostly in their 40s and 50s, who…
THE WEEKLY STANDARD has a full-time position available for a staff assistant working with the circulation and business staff. Please mail your resume to: Business Manager, THE WEEKLY STANDARD, 1150 17th Street, NW, Suite 505, Washington, D.C. 20036. Or fax us at (202) 293-4901. No calls, please.
On February 11, 1994, during a zoo-like Washington press conference organized by some of the president's least cautious ideological opponents, a woefully inarticulate woman named Paula Jones suggested that Bill Clinton had once done something horrible to her at a "Quality Management Conference" in…
Republicans say they want to make foreign policy and national security a big issue in the 2000 campaign. But when Republican senators voted 38-16 against NATO airstrikes in Yugoslavia last week, they gravely damaged their ability to do so. As a result of that vote, and of the neo-isolationist…
Ever since offering a million-dollar bounty last October for dirt on Republican officials, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt has vowed to defend Bill Clinton against the politics of personal destruction -- even if he had to destroy people's personal lives to do it. But his highly anticipated Flynt…
During the weeks before the Academy Awards, Army Archerd raged a ruthless campaign against Elia Kazan in his column in Daily Variety. Archerd implored the Hollywood glitterati to stand up to the supposed evil of Kazan by sitting down and folding their arms when Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese…
New York
BEFORE AL GORE became the father of the Internet, he invented a toll-free number for enrolling children in government-provided health insurance. Last month, at a press conference with the first lady, the vice president unveiled the number, which parents can call to get information on Medicaid and…
It's hard to remember while perusing Jude Wanniski's Web site these days that the man was, until recent years, an intimate and trusted adviser of serious Republican presidential candidates like Jack Kemp and Steve Forbes. Then the New Jersey-based publicist for supplyside economics started falling…
You can say this for George Stephanopoulos: He's emerged from his brush with Bill and Hillary Clinton in much better shape than have a lot of others. He's gainfully employed, unindicted, able to pay his legal bills, with full-time work, and now has a New York Times bestseller to his credit. Not bad…
Later that week, I was sitting at my desk when the phone rang. A woman was on the line. You know that story you had in the magazine this week about the woman Clinton made sexual overtures to in the hideaway office? she asked.
November 8, 1996, was, by special order of Mayor Tom Menino, "Robert J. Lurtsema Day" in Boston. And since he isn't Larry Bird or Roger Clemens, it must have pleased Lurtsema immensely that his widely broadcast public radio show, Morning Pro Musica, had finally garnered for him the kind of tribute…
Just in time for filing your taxes -- due, in case you've forgotten, on April 15 -- Amity Shlaes has produced The Greedy Hand. An analysis of our failed tax system, together with suggestions about how it might be reformed, the book has already leapt to the top of the bestseller list on Amazon.com…