94 articles
Kurt Andersen is most famous, or infamous, or notorious, or something for founding and editing Spy, the satirical magazine from the 1980s that pioneered, for instance, the amiable practice of pasting the faces of celebrities into compromising photographs. And now he has written a novel, Turn of the…
Larry Summers is smart. Too smart to work as a temp. Which is what he would be if he had agreed to replace Bob Rubin as Treasury secretary for the waning months of the Clinton administration with no assurance -- too strong a word in this administration; perhaps "indication" is more apt -- that he…
"When a woman with servants spends the weekend cleaning out her closets, it usually is not a good sign," Joyce Milton begins her new biography, The First Partner: Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first in what promises to be a torrent of post-Monica Hillary books. The woman, of course, is Hillary…
The personal may not be the political, as the feminists used to say, but it's still true that the political is often purely personal. I once made the mistake of working for the federal government, and the only insight I took away from the year's unpleasantness was an understanding, small but…
WHY ARE WE PROCEEDING with an air campaign that made no dent in ethnic cleansing? Why were ground troops ruled out as an option from the start, against the advice of military and strategic experts? I can't speak to the military issues, but I suggest that the real explanation may lie elsewhere,…
WHY ARE THE WHITE HOUSE and congressional Democrats afraid of reforming Medicare? Three months ago, when the co-chairmen of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare produced a plan for saving Medicare, the White House instructed Clinton appointees to the commission to vote…
Stephen Cox, a literature professor at the University of California-San Diego and a Titanic buff, makes no apology for this little bout of intellectual slumming.
MEG GREENFIELD, the editorial-page editor of the Washington Post, who died May 13, was one of the great patrons of conservative ideas over the last 25 years. Not that she was a conservative herself: Her views were still recognizably rooted in 1950s liberalism, in the ideas that were in the air…
AL GORE IS NO FOOL. He knows that education is on voters' minds and has been a political winner for Bill Clinton. He knows he has no track record as an education reformer. So on May 16, he seized an opportunity -- a college commencement address in a tiny Iowa town -- to stake out a forceful…
HOTELS LIST PORNOGRAPHIC VIDEOS on their guests' bills as "room charges." College liquor stores itemize keg purchases as "provisions" or "supplies." And for the last year and a half, the Federal Communications Commission has levied a phone tax and called it a "universal service charge." It comes to…
Ehud Barak did not win last week's Israeli election so much as Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu lost it. He lost it badly, 56 percent to 44 percent. In Israeli terms, that is a landslide.
LAST NOVEMBER, after Hurricane Mitch devastated Nicaragua and Honduras, President Clinton dispatched a delegation led by Tipper Gore to assess the damage. "The scale of the disaster is beyond anything we have ever witnessed," she would write in a "Report to the President" that's featured on the…
Last Thursday, the New York Times ran one of its "At Home With . . . " features on Tony Hiss, son of the late Communist spy Alger Hiss and author of a new memoir. It would be churlish to fault Mr. Hiss's wife Lois Metzger for comparing Alger Hiss to her own grandmother, who survived the Nazi…
Joseph Epstein's new collection of essays, Narcissus Leaves the Pool, has just been published by Houghton Mifflin, and at $ 25.00, it's a steal. Epstein is one of the country's premier men of letters and (no coincidence) a contributing editor to this magazine. In the new collection, readers will…
It's really not about guns. And it's not only Gary Bauer and Dan Quayle who say so. In their post-Littleton speeches, President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore have made the same point, indirectly but unmistakably. When they list cures for what ails America, they get to gun control last. No…
Contributing editor Charles Krauthammer seeks a research assistant. Contact Borden Flanagan at 1225 19th St., NW, Suite 620, Washington, DC 20036.
Dick Gephardt's new book won't get much attention since the ranking House Democrat decided several months ago not to run for his party's presidential nomination. There's probably no book quite so deservedly forlorn as the campaign biography without a campaign. Nonetheless, the Gephardt volume…
And it simply will not go away. Occasional WEEKLY STANDARD contributor John J. Pitney Jr. of Claremont McKenna College has been trying valiantly for years to exterminate the most widely circulated bogus quotation in hack-punditdom: "America is great because America is good," and so on, inevitably…
Does Ted Turner, as they say nowadays, have issues with young people? Not long ago CNN's aging frat-boy CEO was regretting that he had, in his words, had "five kids -- boom, boom, boom -- by the time I was 30," adding, "If I was doing it over again I wouldn't have done it, but I can't shoot them…
In 1990 a British prime minister sought to stiffen the spine of an American president trying to decide whether to reverse Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Margaret Thatcher's famous injunction -- "George, this is no time to go wobbly" -- helped give President Bush the moral courage to take Americans to…
In the latest reminder that racial preferences in college admissions will not go quietly, the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education has been circulating draft guidelines that propose penalizing universities that use SAT scores as a leading criterion when making admissions…
First there were anti-Chinese demonstrations in Suharto's Indonesia; now there are anti-American demonstrations in Jiang Zemin's China. Signs of government weakness in both countries, the disorders were orchestrated by the regimes. In Indonesia, of course, they ended unhappily for Suharto: That…
Beijing, China
IT'S NINE O'CLOCK WEDNESDAY NIGHT. I'm leaving work, a couple hundred yards from Union Station. A solitary figure is walking ten yards ahead of me, a tall black man in an Italian suit . . . big frame, familiar walk . . . and trembling hands. The hands give him away.
YOU CAN UNDERSTAND WHY THEY created an environmental panic, those deformed frogs that have starred in media scare stories since 1995, when a group of them were first discovered in a Minnesota pond by schoolchildren on a field trip. They looked bizarre. Extra limbs and missing limbs were the most…
The conventional wisdom these days is that China is going to be a big issue in the 2000 campaign. We wonder.
Whom should Americans "thank for the country's extraordinary eight-year economic boom?" Or, put another way, who "helped create the boom by persuading President Clinton to balance the budget?" Who is "steely" and "respected" and "market savvy" and blessed with "sureness of purpose?" And who cut…
GARY BAUER WAS TWEAKING the text of his announcement speech for the Republican presidential nomination when he first heard about the school killings in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20. The speech, drafted by former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Ben Elliott, emphasized what were to be three big issues…
Jonathan Swift remains the most enigmatic of conservatives. He may have espoused all three of the principles by which T. S. Eliot defined his own conservatism in 1928 -- "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion" -- but Swift preferred defining himself not by…
Peter Berkowitz is a sharp thinker and a clear writer, so it came as no surprise that Harvard denied him tenure.
MIT made headlines earlier this year by claiming to have proved a pattern of discrimination against its female faculty. The media were impressed with the study because it came bearing the prestigious imprimatur of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and because it purported to be…
AS THE HOUSE AND SENATE hammered out the final details of the more than $ 13 billion "emergency" spending bill for Kosovo last week, the real issue was never whether this extra military funding would be approved, but how it would be paid for.
In the preface to their new book, Blinded by Might, Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson write, "We don't pretend to have all the right answers . . . and we don't pretend that some of those whose behavior and actions we critique are all wrong." "In this book," they assure the reader, "we have tried to be…
Among congressional supporters of the NATO bombing and the Clinton administration's Kosovo policy, Sen. Dianne Feinstein has been one of the most ardent. As the San Francisco Chronicle's Carolyn Lochhead reported last week, Feinstein in an interview was "strongly supportive, ticking off the number…
HOT ON THE HEELS OF THE CARNAGE IN Littleton, Colorado, President Clinton has proposed a grab bag of new gun-control measures-- never mind that they wouldn't have stopped the Littleton murders, whose perpetrators broke a dozen laws already on the books. An unspeakable event rocks the public, and…
Movie critics don't like the new Star Wars movie -- or perhaps it's better to say that they were so sick of hearing about it, they heartily wished the picture ill from the moment it began. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace has become a blight upon entertainment journalists' lives.
In Hudson, Ohio, they'll be having no more of this nonsense about "honor," thank you very much.
I am a bit surprised that Miles isn't showing up more nowadays as a name for boys. Not that it has ever been a wildly popular name. The only boy I knew named Miles was Miles Uritz, with whom I went to grammar school and whose father was a bookie working out of a cigar stand in a building on Lake…
For a minor masterpiece of evasion, check out Maurice Isserman's recent review in the New York Times Book Review of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr's new book Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. Klehr and Haynes have spent much of the decade doing yeoman work, mining the archives of the…
More data from the Federal Election Commission filings of the presidential candidates, compiled by New Hampshire political consultant Chip Griffin, whose Web site www.griffinsg.com usefully organizes all the numbers:
WANT TO MAKE ECONOMISTS REALLY SQUIRM? Tell them that Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan should receive the next Nobel Prize for economics. It's not that the extraordinarily successful Fed chairman isn't highly respected within the field. It's just that a prize for Greenspan, based on policy…
I wouldn't mind editing a glossy lifestyle magazine, unless it meant having to write one of those editor's notes that go in the front. I'm talking about the single page columns with names like "Welcome" and "From the Editor's Desk" that are supposed to establish rapport between editor and readers.…
September 9, 1998, will be remembered in Washington as the day Kenneth Starr delivered his impeachment referral to the House of Representatives. But on the same day, another drama was playing out on the other side of Capitol Hill. Susan Gaffney, the inspector general at the Department of Housing…
SEPTEMBER 9, 1998, will be remembered in Washington as the day Kenneth Starr delivered his impeachment referral to the House of Representatives. But on the same day, another drama was playing out on the other side of Capitol Hill. Susan Gaffney, the inspector general at the Department of Housing…
Tallahassee, Florida
FOR NEARLY A YEAR NOW, THE MEDIA have detailed how China has been stealing America's strategic technology. Last week, though, the New York Times dropped a bombshell. Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist already suspected of handing China information about a U.S. nuclear warhead…
Cassie Bernall, whose courageous life and death were memorably chronicled by Matt Labash in last week's WEEKLY STANDARD, was not the only young Christian attacked in Littleton, Colorado, for affirming her faith. There was also Valeen Schnurr, an 18-year-old senior at Columbine High. Schnurr…
THEY CALL IT "THE DANCE OF THE LEMONS," the ritual by which ineffective teachers manage to retain teaching jobs despite their incompetence. Principals, wary of union hurdles, legal costs, and the emotional scorched-earth politics that accompany teacher dismissals, simply pass their "lemons" on to…
All military buffs start innocently enough. Once upon a time, for instance, there was a boy who loved toy sailboats:
One of the finest congressional speeches on Kosovo received almost no media coverage. This was probably owing to the fact that it was delivered on behalf of a lost cause -- a Senate resolution urging the president to use "all necessary force" to win the war against Slobodan Milosevic -- and because…
"La inclusion es el simbolo de nuestra fuerza," says Republican National Committee co-chairman Patricia S. Harrison. "Inclusion" -- decoded from the original Spinnish -- is the hallmark buzzword of a GOP eager to evade its share of responsibility for the fact that American law continues to stink…
Rockville, Maryland
ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND It is 11:00 p.m. on a Sunday night, and David Dyche is standing at the head of the line in front of Toys "R" Us. He seems to be the most normal Star Wars nut in America: Wearing khakis and a navy blue shirt, the blond-haired, 33-year-old Boeing computer analyst just happens to…
TEXAS GOVERNOR GEORGE W. BUSH and his aides think there are only two ways he can lose the Republican presidential nomination. One is if Steve Forbes spends millions more than any other candidate and emerges as a serious challenger. The other is if Bush screws up as a candidate. Naturally, Bush is…
You have to feel a little sorry for Robert Kaiser. Not long after being dethroned as managing editor of the Washington Post last year, Kaiser was left with a stalled career and little to do. So he set about digging into what he presumed to be the fons et origo of Hillary Clinton's fabled "vast…
Talk about dumb. A venerable foreign policy think tank in Washington, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has driven away its president, Robert Zoellick, because he's advising Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush. Zoellick is a brainy, politically astute veteran of the…
When, in 1971, Alexander Solzhenitsyn published August 1914, the first volume in his projected magnum opus, The Red Wheel, the general response was that he had written something brilliant. But the emphasis was on the something, rather than the brilliant, for, whatever the book was, it wasn't a…
ON THE ENDLESS CABLE-TV TALK SHOWS, the call-in radio programs, and the newspaper editorial pages across America, the topic since April 20 has been Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the high-school murderers in Littleton, Colorado. The violence experts, the child psychologists, and the grief…
Bad academic writing is nothing new. Back in 1912, the critic Brander Matthews damned the scholarship of his day for its "endless quotations and endless citations and endless references," its shameless taste for "interminable controversy over minor questions," its careless assumption that every…
Davenport, Iowa
Littleton, Colorado
Republicans and Democrats often sound alike when it comes to economic and even some social issues. It's sometimes enough to make one wonder where their differences lie. But the parties do have radically opposed visions of the proper role of judges -- one of the most important issues of the 2000…
The congressional Republican party hit bottom last week. On Wednesday, April 28, a majority of Republican House members cast two deeply irresponsible votes on the U.S. military action against Yugoslavia. Most press attention focused on the vote that denied President Clinton support for the air…
No one has done more to roll back affirmative action than Ward Connerly of California, author of that state's successful Proposition 209. In the past several months, at least three Republican presidential contenders -- Steve Forbes, Dan Quayle, and Lamar Alexander -- called to set up meetings with…
I've been reading books about education since 1948 -- book after book after book, in what seems now, fifty years on, to have been a never-ending stream. But I still have no hesitation in saying that Andrew J. Coulson's new study, Market Education: The Unknown History, is the most challenging book…
In striking contrast to the pusillanimous Congress, Margaret Thatcher proved on April 20 that she is an Iron Lady for all seasons. Her remarks on Kosovo in an address marking the 20th anniversary of her first election as Britain's prime minister were tough, well reasoned, and eloquent. Some…
Ask aides to presidential campaigns how their candidate is faring and you'll get as much candor as you used to get out of the Kremlin: No matter how bad things are, they're always perfect. But the truth is out there, as they say, and it's just gotten a bit easier to find. New Hampshire political…
I'd like to make plain at the outset that, though British by birth and upbringing, I'm avidly pro-American. And you'll have to concede I have the bona fides to prove it: an American wife. She made clear early on that, wherever the next few years might take us, a future together will eventually mean…
THE LAST THING any of us has a right to expect from politicians is a dignified silence, and this is true even in the face of a transcendent horror like the murder of schoolchildren. But the initial reaction to the Littleton shootings was unexpectedly promising. "I don't know how you stop it," said…
According to a fascinating account in the New York Times last week, Clinton administration officials claim their boss could successfully spin a "compromise" on Kosovo: "'Clinton is a better communicator than anyone else,' said a senior Administration official. 'Once Clinton decides that's what he's…
The best way to wreck the art of movie-making is to think that movie-making is an art. Especially a high art, a deep art, a weighty allegory who skewed camera angles symbolize the crooked timber of humanity and whose fractured story lines illustrate the incapacity of human reason to grasp the moral…
Could serious artists survive without the National Endowment for the Arts? Could Americans tell what constitutes worth-while art? There are enough American club rooms hung with pictures of poker-playing puppies and doe-eyed waifs to suggest that the answer is no.
Lawyers never sleep. The Chicago Tribune reported a couple of weeks ago on a class-action suit just filed in Cook County Circuit Court against Colgate-Palmolive, drugstore chain Walgreen Co., the American Dental Association, and assorted other defendants. The charge: failure to warn consumers of…
Even making allowances for hasty writing on deadline, the initial New York Times editorial on the Columbine High massacre was a revealingly lamebrained piece of work: "It is not too early to begin drawing lessons," the Times intoned, before proceeding to prove that, yes, it was a bit too early.
AN AMAZING THING HAS HAPPENED on the NATO side in the war against Slobodan Milosevic. The American president, Bill Clinton, has declined to lead, and British prime minister Tony Blair has filled the vacuum. Blair arrived early in Washington for the weekend NATO summit, met with congressional…
WHAT HAS LAMAR ALEXANDER to show for his six years as a presidential candidate? According to a recent poll, only 2 percent of New Hampshire Republicans are behind him, while another poll of Republicans nationwide puts his support below 1 percent. He has less cash on hand than any of his announced…
Next month, a delegation of elected officials from Newark, New Jersey, is scheduled to depart on a two-week, taxpayer financed trip to Ghana. Billed as part of a "cultural exchange program," the trip includes $ 225-a-night luxury hotel rooms, jaunts to what the itinerary describes as "splendid…
On Sunday, August 15, 1993, the Rev. Bob Meneilly mounted his pulpit at the Village Presbyterian Church in the Republican stronghold of suburban Johnson County, Kansas, and proceeded to pour fire and brimstone on an enemy at work in metropolitan Kansas City.
It's past time to consider America's Second World War fighting airplanes as a body of artwork -- one of the most remarkable the world has ever seen. As artworks they are arresting and the best are gorgeous, and they have the overwhelming importance, here and now, of Banquo's ghost. They represent…
Owing to the fact that my normal five o'clock shadow had of late begun to appear around noon, three weeks ago I bought a new safety razor, a Schick, with a red handle, called, in good pseudo-macho manner, the Protector. This may not at first seem significant, but my buying a Schick razor marks a…
Their first-day editorial was the low point of the Times's coverage of the Colorado massacre. A lengthy story on Friday about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two killers, was an exceptional bit of reporting. It did have some under-explained details, though. The boys, according to the story, came…
SOMEWHERE IN THE BARELY NOTICED and long-forgotten middle of his last State of the Union address, President Clinton said, "Parents should never face discrimination in the workplace. I will ask Congress to prohibit companies from refusing to hire or promote workers simply because they have children."
The sheer magnitude of the demand for better public schools was revealed last Wednesday when billionaire philanthropist Ted Forstmann and WalMart heir John Walton revealed that there were 1.2 million applicants for the 40,000 private-school scholarships they are awarding to low-income kids for the…
LAST WEDNESDAY, 40,000 low-income kids around the country got good news: They'd been awarded four-year scholarships to attend private schools, the winners in a lottery whose applicant pool was an astonishing 1.2 million. Plainly, the privately financed Children's Scholarship Fund is responding to a…
With the Stuart Restoration of 1660, the tide of English politics turned sharply against the Puritans, and it became illegal for any man who refused Holy Communion in the Church of England to hold public office. What, then, was a dissenting politician to do? To a good many of the most influential…