68 articles
Maureen Dowd buried the lead in her New York Times column last week. You had to slog through the jokes about Al Gore -- "so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct, he's practically lactating" -- to get to the really good stuff; i.e., her chat with George W. Bush at the Bush family home…
As a service to readers, THE SCRAPBOOK sat through the entire Diane Sawyer interview of Al Gore last week just to bring you these highlights. One highlight, actually:
There is a scattering of what used to be called hard news in Bob Woodward's latest hot Washington book, Shadow, though it is not clear whether anybody -- even the author -- much notices or cares. For example: Confusion has always surrounded the meaning of President Clinton's violent rage on…
Belgrade
GEORGE W. BUSH expected to be asked about appointing anti-abortion judges at the first press conference of his presidential campaign on June 14. The night before, chief Bush strategist Karl Rove told at least one reporter that Bush was ready with an answer. No, he wouldn't pick judges by the single…
Don't look now, but another high-profile Republican is about to enter the presidential campaign: Orrin Hatch. Sometime before the end of the month, the veteran senator from Utah will announce his bid for the White House. THE SCRAPBOOK tried to reach Hatch last week to talk about his strategy, but…
THE ARAB STATES might well come to rue the day Ehud Barak defeated Benjamin Netanyahu. Widely demonized in the international media as the main obstacle to peace and Palestinian statehood, Netanyahu provided a convenient foil for Arab leaders hesitant to make serious concessions. His government was…
After months in which the mainstream press bemoaned the excessive partisanship in Washington, there were a couple of strikingly bipartisan votes in the House last week. Funny thing, though: This new spirit of bipartisanship went utterly unappreciated.
The Senate Appropriations Committee has zeroed out funding for the National Endowment for Democracy, which was launched by President Reagan in 1983 to help build up and consolidate new democracies around the world. Republican Judd Gregg suggested the administration could find NED's requested $ 32…
I own a Rolodex that I inherited -- took, really -- from someone dear to me after his death, nearly a decade ago. It is black, plastic, hump-backed like a 1942 Plymouth coupe, and made by a firm called Zephyr American Corp. I don't know how long ago it was manufactured, but it already has that…
Two things may be said right at the outset about Francis Fukuyama's new book, The Great Disruption. The first is that it is a learned and impressive work, ranging easily across disciplines, combining fact and argument in subtle and unexpected ways, in the much-praised manner of Fukuyama's two…
New York
Yei, Southern Sudan
ONE WEEK INTO THE IMPLEMENTATION of the Kosovo peace accord, everything appears to be moving more or less on schedule. Fighting, beyond a few skirmishes, has ended. Serb military, police, and paramilitary forces have largely withdrawn. NATO troops have moved into every corner of the…
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) is generally regarded as one of the great realist portrait painters of all time, and his greatness is confirmed by Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch, a collection of more than 150 works showing at the National Gallery in Washington through August 22…
THE DAY AFTER THE 1984 REPUBLICAN convention, Ronald Reagan gave a speech to a group of preachers in Dallas in which he ruminated on the role of religion in public life. "The truth is," Reagan said, "that politics and morality are inseparable. . . . Our government needs the church because only…
NOTHING TURNS REPUBLICANS into awkward, tongue-tied bumblers quite the way the issue of homosexuality does. Take President Clinton's appointment of gay activist and philanthropist James Hormel as ambassador to Luxembourg.
"We have defended the only multiethnic society left over as a remnant of former Yugoslavia. This is another great achievement of our defense." -- Slobodan Milosevic, June 10, 1999. This was obviously a war between multicultural Serbs and a NATO intent on ethnic purity, as high school textbooks (ca…
When my friend Ivan came to visit from Moscow last week, we sat on the back porch, drinking coffee in the 85-degree heat until 1:30 in the morning. Much of our conversation concerned coffee. Ivan has the theory that Russia's opening to the West since Gorbachev has given it a real intoxicant problem…
Men without chests -- that was C. S. Lewis's striking description of graduates of the postwar English schools, with their faculties trained to dismiss the virtues of patriotism and piety. These Englishmen, Lewis worried, would become lifelong enemies of the sublime, unable and unwilling, when push…
Men without chests -- that was C. S. Lewis's striking description of graduates of the postwar English schools, with their faculties trained to dismiss the virtues of patriotism and piety. These Englishmen, Lewis worried, would become lifelong enemies of the sublime, unable and unwilling, when push…
PRESIDENT CLINTON announced on June 3 that he would again waive the law and grant a one-year extension of China's "normal trade relations" (NTR) with the United States. "Maintaining NTR with China," he said, would "promote America's economic and security interests."
Sacramento, California
So Hillary, it turns out, is Clintonian, too, and not just by marriage. In her first major event as candidate for the Senate in New York, the first lady had the Yankees over to the White House last week to celebrate their 1998 World Series victory, eight months after the fact. Well, better late…
Overshadowed by the accounts of Rudy Giuliani's successes in New York have been the achievements of the other big-city Republican mayor, Richard Riordan of Los Angeles. Having already reduced crime and overseen an economic rebirth in the city, Riordan scored his biggest victory yet last week -- 60…
What a piece of shameless zealotry this whole campaign finance "reform" business has become. The movement's favored piece of national legislation at the moment, the Shays-Meehan bill in the House of Representatives, is an almost unbelievable atrocity against the Constitution. It would, among other…
The New York Times reported last week that one of its favorite Republicans, the famously moderate New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, "May Have to Move to Right," as the headline forebodingly put it. One of the "conservative proposals" she may end up signing to lure voters for her…
"The homeless got a lot of air time in the 80's, but that's over," complained Bob Herbert in his New York Times column last week. "The mask of the triumphant suburbanite is the face of the 90's, and poverty is no longer discussed in polite company." This couldn't have anything to do with which…
In the final eleven years of the twentieth century, time seems to have run backwards. The Red Army withdrew from central Europe, rescinding 1945. A dictatorship fell in Berlin, undoing 1933. Statues of Lenin toppled across Russia, annulling 1917. War in the Balkans was the first horror we passed on…
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION seems to be entering a new phase: As the public turns against it, universities are growing increasingly desperate in their support. I teach at Yale, where the administration has made it clear that (in particular) it wants more female professors in technology and the hard…
Fred Astaire -- classy, charming, elegant -- was born one hundred years ago this spring, and by the time of his death in 1987, he had become one of the most vivid cultural images of the century.
The name of the British novelist Barry Unsworth rings only a vague bell for American readers. But it should ring louder. He won England's Booker Prize in 1992 for Sacred Hunger, a work of fiction that deserved high literary honors. And his 1988 Sugar and Rum, which has just been published here in…
IN THE FINAL FRENETIC DAYS of campaigning before his June 3 reelection victory, Ontario premier Mike Harris unveiled a shockingly unCanadian stunt: He produced at his speeches a lifesize fiberglass replica of a pair of blue jeans. His aides poured thousands of Canadian one-dollar coins into them --…
These days there are six members of my family: me and my wife, our three kids, and Baltimore Orioles left fielder B. J. Surhoff. I suppose we should count Mr. Surhoff as a member in absentia since he doesn't actually know we exist. But for the past three seasons, our older son, who is 8, has…
LAST FALL, AFTER SERVING THIRTEEN YEARS as the dean of the Harvard University Divinity School, Ronald F. Thiemann resigned. The reason has just been made public.
Fast forward to January 20, 2001. The steps of the U.S. Capitol. The president-elect raises his hand to take the oath of office. Forming the backdrop to the scene: a who's who of the best and brightest of the Republican party, now preparing to sit as the most illustrious cabinet in a generation;…
When director Spike Lee, everybody's favorite bug-eyed militant, successfully bid to produce five recruiting ads for the United States Navy, it signaled a sea change in the Navy's hipness quotient the likes of which haven't been seen since it nearly appropriated the Village People's "In the Navy"…
WHEN THE PRESS CAME KNOCKING to ask William Eisner how his Milwaukee-based ad company planned to get Steve Forbes elected president, Eisner gave them a lecture on Mrs. Paul's Fish Sticks. Eisner specializes in rebranding products that have drifted off to the penumbra of public attention. And after…
Austin, Texas
In 1992, Alicia Munnell, research director for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, wanted to conduct a study of racial discrimination by area mortgage lenders. Known for her liberal politics, Munnell was discouraged by Fed officials, who wanted to duck the touchy issue. But she finally got the…
At a May 27 subcommittee hearing, California Democrat Pete Stark became visibly agitated during an upbeat presentation on welfare reform. The representative of San Francisco's East Bay communities never met a welfare program he didn't like. He's also notoriously rude. Both these traits made for a…
When Florida State finished its 14-3 drubbing of Providence College in the second round of the NCAA regional baseball tournament on Memorial Day, it wasn't just the end of the season for the Friars. It was the death of the team.
By the 1950s, the classical form of liberalism that we call conservatism -- enshrined in the Constitution and prevalent through the 1920s presidency of Calvin Coolidge -- was clearly moribund. Conservative notions about capitalism, free markets, and limited government had been indicted by Hoover's…
We published a letter last week from Joseph Cerrell, a longtime Democratic operative who's also the president of the National Italian American Foundation. Cerrell's main complaint was that THE WEEKLY STANDARD had targeted Andrew Cuomo, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, for special…
Slobodan Milosevic's capitulation to U.S. and NATO demands represents a triumph for American power and principle, for the U.S.-led alliance, for President Clinton, and for the small but stalwart group of Republicans, led by John McCain, who supported the war from beginning to end. Assuming that…
When Congress reconvenes, right near the top of Trent Lott's and Denny Hastert's "to do" lists will be figuring out how to respond to the Cox committee's report on Chinese espionage and the transfer of sensitive technologies by U.S. companies. One idea under review is to create a joint House-Senate…
Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones, once famously defined the novel as a "comic epic in prose." This turns out to be a surprisingly negative definition, when you think about it. A novel is prose, you see, because it's not poetry. It's an epic, since it's not a lyric; novels tell stories rather…
The CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, was recently named in honor of George Bush, who served there only one year as its director and whose connection with the spy business was tangential at best. The honor should have gone to Allen Dulles, called, by his British counterpart Sir Kenneth W. D.…
The newly released Notting Hill is as pretty a film as you're ever going to see. The gloss is high, the writing skillful, the editing brilliant, the leading actors dazzling, and the supporting actors superb. The film has so much going for it, in fact, that the only remaining question about it is…
The name of John Dewey generally evokes hissing from conservative intellectuals. But there is at least one way in which even they ought to find his example admirable. Dewey was easily the most prominent American philosopher of his time, and over the course of an enormously long life -- from 1859 to…
We thought we had heard every meretricious explanation for the April 20 Columbine High shootings by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, but Barry W. Lynn -- the Methodist pastor who heads Americans United for the Separation of Church and State -- has come up with a new one. "Evidence indicates that the…
For years, Lanny Davis wagged his friendly tail from the petshop window of local politics in suburban Washington and dreamed of life downtown, where the lucky dogs do their business not on last week's Potomac Value-Shopper -- but right there, live, on CNN. But no one would buy him. Then, one day,…
It's ten years exactly since Jim first took me to his farm in Casey Country. I'd read about it often. A lot of Jim's columns in the paper we worked for, the Cincinnati Post, were set on the farm where he'd grown up in Kentucky, in the foothills of the Cumberlands. Yet somehow what I'd read had…
Okay, it's not an impeachable offense, but there's something cheap and tacky about Bill and Hillary Clinton's freeloading on their vacations. This is not what other presidents and first ladies have done -- all those folks the Clintons claimed they'd be more ethical than. The Fords and Carters paid…
PASCAL FORGIONE WITNESSED A HIJACKING and it cost him his job. Last February 10, Forgione, who heads the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), was due at an Education Department press conference to announce the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a periodic…
Charles Krauthammer seeks a research assistant. Contact Borden Flanagan at 1225 19th St., NW, Suite 620, Washington, DC 20036.
BOSTON
Watch Rep. Patrick Kennedy, the 31-year-old son of Senator Ted, mount the stump at any event, and you can't help but be overcome by pathos. Take February's National Treasury Employees Union conference, when Joe and Rose's grandson appeared at the Capitol Hill Holiday Inn. Our civil servants, in…
In 1984, in Biloxi, Mississippi, deep in the heart of the old Confederacy, the future Senate majority leader Trent Lott declared that "the spirit of Jefferson Davis" now lives in the Republican party.
JANET RENO FACED A DILEMMA in August 1997. A senior FBI official named John Lewis informed her that her Office of Intelligence Policy and Review had rejected three FBI requests to tap the phone and computer of a government scientist accused of nuclear espionage. Reno knew little about the case, but…
In the 1940s, the British astronomer Fred Hoyle was puzzling over the origins of the element carbon. According to the science of his day, virtually no carbon should be made by stars, the nuclear furnaces that forge almost all the other elements. Yet carbon, essential for life, indisputably exists.
One often learns the most when politicians are forced to speak from least immediate knowledge about a subject with greatest long-term implications. The release last Tuesday of Rep. Christopher Cox's House select committee report on recent Chinese military espionage against the United States is a…
After several decades of planning, fund-raising, and other forms of bureaucratic back-and-forthing, the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden opened the other day on the Mall, across the street from the National Archives in our nation's capital. As art lovers know, Washington already had a…
Let's say you've brought your kids to Washington, D.C., on their summer vacation. You've taken them to the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, shown them the U.S. Capitol, and you find they're charged up about American history, maybe more than at any other time in their lives. Along the…
For those who missed it, something remarkable happened on Face the Nation last week. During a discussion of the Chinese spying scandal, Sen. Robert Torricelli became the first Democrat in the Senate to suggest that Janet Reno should resign. Torricelli accused Reno of exercising terrible judgment in…
LAST YEAR I WAS PART OF A DELEGATION sponsored by the International Republican Institute to monitor parliamentary elections in Ukraine. I chose to be an observer in the city of Zhitomir because my parents, who came from Ukraine in the early 1900s, used to talk a great deal about this city as the…