86 articles
My highly imprecise gauge for determining whether you're growing old is this: You are if your childhood baseball heroes are being inducted into the Hall of Fame. I'm embarrassed to admit I qualify. George Brett, the Kansas City Royals star I idolized in my pre-teen years, was recently inducted. I'm…
Clarence Thomas is conservatism's man of the decade and everything his enemies feared he would become. After taking some of the hardest, lowest blows ever delivered by the Left, he could easily have crumbled or compromised when he joined the Supreme Court in 1991. Instead, he held his ground. Eight…
"EVERYONE NOW UNDERSTANDS there is a problem with Taiwan's status," said President Lee Teng-hui in a recent conversation with American visitors. But in fact, not everyone does seem to understand this. The United States has become locked into a Beijing-flavored One China policy based on a fiction.…
Congress last year appropriated $ 8 million to assist the anti-Saddam opposition in Iraq. Will it surprise you to learn that the Clinton administration has unaccountably failed to do anything useful with the money? The principal backers of the Iraq Liberation Act -- a bipartisan group that includes…
Ames, Iowa
A day after wounding four children and a 68-year-old woman in an attack on a Jewish Community Center in the San Fernando Valley, then killing a postman as he fled, white supremacist Buford Furrow gave himself up in a Las Vegas FBI office. According to an AP story citing an FBI source, Furrow said…
On August 4, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the Boy Scouts of America is a "public accommodation" that must admit homosexuals as adult Scout leaders. Here is legal force used to attack one of the oldest and finest youth charities in our country. That is the bad news. But there's good news,…
There's nothing remarkable about finishing last, but don't tell that to Orrin Hatch. Hours after he brought up the rear at the Iowa straw poll (not counting single-digit returns for non-candidates Bob Smith and John Kasich), Hatch issued a press release that is a model of the…
"Beijing, Aug. 9 -- The Chinese Communist Party has asked its members to study a new book entitled 'Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin Discuss Materialism and Atheism.'"
The Michigan State Court of Appeals did something admirable last week: It dismissed a libel suit brought by Jack Kevorkian against the Michigan State Medical Society and the American Medical Association for publishing essays calling him a "killer" back in 1996.
Reuters story of the year: "Tish, the world's oldest known captive goldfish, has died at the age of (at least) 43. First won by 7-year-old Peter Hand at a fairground in 1956, Tish the fish grew to 4 1/2 inches and outlived all of Peter's other pets. When Peter grew up, Tish moved in with his…
ON AUGUST 2, the Environmental Protection Agency announced new restrictions and bans on the use of methyl parathion and azinphos methyl, two pesticides used widely and safely on fruits and certain vegetables. The next day, representatives of the American Crop Protection Association, the American…
Ames, Iowa
On July 21, a distinguished group of citizens released "An Appeal to Hollywood." Among the 56 signers were William Bennett, Jimmy Carter, Mario Cuomo, Richard John Neuhaus, Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, Elie Wiesel, and James Q. Wilson. Concerned about "an increasingly toxic popular culture"…
As a co-signer of the recent "Appeal to Hollywood" and as one who often criticizes the entertainment industry for polluting the country's cultural environment, I agree with much in Professor Lowenthal's article. He is right, of course, that our popular culture has become not only offensive but…
The Clinton administration's failed China policy -- the diplomatic equivalent of a "kick me sign" on the backside -- bore more fruit last week: a remarkably impudent outburst from Li Zhaoxing, China's ambassador to the United States, that "American politicians" have no business getting involved…
On August 14, the Iowa state GOP's presidential straw poll produced the obvious winner. In George W. Bush, Republicans have the two-term governor of an electorally significant state, a man with a famous name, a formidable organization, considerable charm, and a putative platform broadly congenial…
What follows is a partial transcript of the special CNN Late Edition Primetime with Wolf Blitzer that aired the evening of Tuesday, August 10, after day-long coverage of the shooting at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, California. We pick up the broadcast at about 8:15…
WHEN THE 18-YEAR SENATE CAREER of Alfonse D'Amato came to a crashing halt last November, it was natural to assume he, like most ex-senators, would fade into the gray Washington world of lobbying and rainmaking. That may happen eventually, but, for now, D'Amato is doing what comes naturally: acting…
A DEADLY SERIOUS CONTEST is being played out above the Taiwan Strait between the air forces of China and Taiwan, a contest that underscores both the immediate and the long-term risks of war over the future status of the Republic of China (ROC). The building confrontation is proving similar to the…
Pristina, Kosovo
In a welcome instance of congressional oversight, a House Appropriations subcommittee requested a management review of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The review, recommending reforms, was published last week. After last year's brouhaha surrounding Yasser Arafat's invitation, disinvitation, and…
Legislators in Amsterdam have proposed extending their country's practice of euthanasia and assisted suicide to children as young as 12. Dutch bureaucrats with the Justice and Health ministries were quoted in a Reuters story last week justifying the measure as follows: "In the case of 12- to…
I got Zuzu to the emergency room at 10:20 P.M. Her symptoms were ambiguous but unnerving: lethargy, distension, moaning. Only two cases were ahead of us. The first must have been fairly serious, since the doctor sent the family home without the patient.
Nirad Chaudhuri was a scholar and artist, an exile, a man with a tragic view of life but also a comedian, in every way a free spirit. Just five feet tall, he filled the room with the solar energy of his extraordinary personality. He was rightly proud to publish a book at the age of 100, and up to…
Comedians, beautiful women, and the writers of popular fiction all suffer from the same affliction: a yearning to be taken seriously. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was born in 1859, wanted above all to be considered a serious writer, and it was no consolation that he had created the most enduring…
I want to welcome David Lowenthal to the Walter Berns-Robert Bark-Irving Kristol Club. Each of us has, in the last three decades, argued in favor of censorship, using some of the same arguments as David Lowenthal. Many of our friends and colleagues assure us that, compared with the anti-censorship…
"A good poet," wrote Randall Jarrell in 1951, "is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great."
One of the great showbiz adages came from the febrile mind of quipster playwright George S. Kaufman, who said, "Satire closes on Saturday night." Kaufman meant that it's almost impossible to please large audiences by making savage fun of the ideas and people they hold sacred. Kaufman wrote The…
Historians nowadays are typically a timid lot, shrinking the grand story of human action to an anxious little academic discipline in which tenure is purchased with endless volumes calculating such minutiae as the quantity of grain consumed by fifteenth-century Guatemalans.
Last week, while many China experts inside and outside the Clinton administration were confidently predicting that China would not escalate the conflict with Taiwan, we warned that Beijing might well be contemplating an attack. This turned out to be correct. According to the Washington Post and New…
A couple of weeks ago, Tim Russert of NBC's Meet the Press read his audience choice bits of U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright's latest and perhaps final decision in the Paula Jones litigation. Bill Clinton, Wright had written on July 29, has "violated this Court's discovery orders by giving…
"LOTTO JUSTICE" has struck again. Last month, a Los Angeles jury required General Motors to pay a badly burned family of five and their traveling companion $ 4.9 billion -- the largest personal injury award in history. That's enough money to place all six of the plaintiffs and their contingency fee…
Nothing would please the press more than proving that House Republican whip Tom DeLay is single-handedly running Congress behind the scenes. (Well, maybe finding that George W. Bush had done cocaine, but you get the point.) So when the staff of J. C. Watts, the chairman of the House GOP conference,…
Who can really say if little Billy Clinton was abused, as his wife suggested in her interview published in Talk magazine last week? According to David Maraniss's authoritative biography of Clinton, the president's domineering grandmother "assumed that she was in control," ordering every area of his…
DURING THE JANUARY 1998 INTERVIEW in which Hillary Clinton became the first American politician since Joe McCarthy to link the words "vast" and "conspiracy" in a single sentence, there occurred a little-remembered exchange on the Monica Lewinsky affair. NBC's Matt Lauer asked, "If an American…
BY ANY LIGHTS D.C. seemed like the last place in America where taxes would be cut. Along with high crime rates, poor services, and a dysfunctional educational system, the District of Columbia has a poverty rate that, if it were a state, would be the second worst in the nation. (Instead of…
Surely few things in life can be as frustrating for a writer as thinking that you have written a puff piece about a politician you admire, and then having it backfire. That must explain the astonishing spectacle of Lucinda Franks's desperate explanation to the New York Times last week that her…
Belle Plaine, Iowa
Last week, the Chinese navy seized a Taiwanese freighter carrying provisions to Taiwanese soldiers stationed on the tiny Taiwanese island of Matsu a few miles off the coast of the Chinese mainland. Meanwhile, China was launching military aircraft on hundreds of sorties over the Taiwan Strait,…
And speaking of old files, THE SCRAPBOOK was startled to find a clipping from President Clinton's favorite evangelical, his spiritual adviser Tony Campolo, warning that "To tie up evangelicalism with any particular presidential administration is a serious mistake. It should be obvious that if that…
Des Moines, Iowa
I suppose it was the time I beaned the historian Wilfred McClay with a wine cork -- blat! right between the eyes -- that I knew I'd never be one of Washington's great formal-dinner hosts. It's true he'd just claimed that if St. Ignatius Loyola were alive today, he would make a first-class director…
It's hard to predict who's going to have more fun running against party-switching Long Island congressman Michael Forbes next year -- his Republican opponent in the general election or whatever Democratic rival he ends up attracting in the primaries. Both sides will find a tantalizing paper trail…
ON JUNE 17, 1998, President Clinton made an unscheduled appearance in the White House briefing room to attack senators who had blocked a comprehensive anti-tobacco bill earlier that day. The president said he'd been "working for three years now to protect our children from the dangers of tobacco."…
America has become schizophrenic about manners. By the millions we flock to scatological comedies, from the toilet-mouthed South Park to the masturbatory American Pie. And at the same time polls reveal that a huge majority believe American manners and morals have undergone a precipitous and…
So you want to buy a book. Maybe you're too busy to stop off at the local bookshop. There's a funny moment in Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road, the charming 1970 collection of letters between a New York writer and the London bookstore manager from whom she would order books by mail, in which…
The American historian Bernard DeVoto died in 1955 at the age of fifty-eight, and in the years since he died, the academic study of history has become entirely the province of those whom the critic Harold Bloom once labeled "the resentniks." The topics of multicultural grievance that purchase…
Everyone's a sucker for a free baseball cap. Or a coffee mug. Which is why Silicon Valley salesmen aren't famous schmoozers: They don't need to paint the town red with their clients; almost anything with a corporate logo will do.
Adelaide, Australia
Dearborn, Michigan
The American Spectator, the conservative monthly, has now been cleared of the spurious charge that it participated in a scheme to pay off an anti-Clinton witness, David Hale, in the Whitewater case. Which raises a question: Where was the outrage? Normally, the national press, media critics, and…
THE WEEKLY STANDARD has an entry-level opening for a staff assistant/receptionist. Duties include answering phones, greeting visitors, sorting mail, and handling back-issue requests. Please mail your resume to: Business Manager, THE WEEKLY STANDARD, 1150 17th St., NW, Suite 505, Washington, D.C.…
LAST TUESDAY the Legal Services Corporation celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary with a tea party at the White House. "Of course," said the first lady, herself a former LSC chairman, "we've all encountered people who don't believe in legal services for the poor. We still have to fight for every…
MAKE NO MISTAKE: The push for universal preschool is on. Already the state of Georgia offers free preschool to every 4-year-old, and New York is phasing in a statewide system. Legislators in California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey are itching to follow suit. If Al Gore is elected president in…
THE SCRAPBOOK doesn't pretend to understand newsroom politics at the New York Times but dimly recalls a tradition at the paper of record of pretending that its reporters, as a matter of policy, should stay above the fray -- should not appear as partisan hacks on television, not cheerlead for their…
The federal treasury (barring a recession) will run an astonishing $ 3 trillion cumulative surplus over the next ten years. The prospect of so much ready money has brought Washington's legislative and policy engines, largely cold and silent since the end of 1995, roaring back to life.
Maybe you watch movies on airplanes the way I do. I glance periodically at the screen, never bothering to attach the earphones. I'm ready, though, if something interesting happens, to hook up and pay attention. Not once had this occurred -- until last week, while I was flying back to Washington,…
Taipei, Taiwan
The temperamental ex-Republican congressman and sometime Soup Nazi Michael Forbes (see "A New Democrat" by Tucker Carlson in the Aug. 2 WEEKLY STANDARD) appeared on CNN's Crossfire last week claiming that his old staff hadn't quit en masse because he suddenly became a Democrat. Instead, "Republican…
WITH ITS PICTURES of earnest schoolchildren busily learning, Regie Routman's book doesn't look dangerous. But like many textbooks used in colleges of education, Invitations: Changing as Teachers and Learners K-12 (Heinemann, 1994) may be keeping thousands of children from mastering basic academic…
One of the signal failures of the Republican Congress has been its neglect of oversight responsibilities and opportunities. God knows, the Clinton administration does enough appalling or at least embarrassing things to keep the congressional committees busy, but most of them seem remarkably…
Maybe you didn't know that "what we would call 'S and M' was highly popular among the Victorians." In that case, you should read A. N. Wilson, "award-winning novelist, biographer, and journalist," who in his new volume God's Funeral, devotes some twenty-five pages to musing about the life, work,…
Sculptor, painter, architect, and poet, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) is probably the most famous artist ever to live, and his most famous works all depict man as a beautiful creature made for great things and deserving to rejoice in his own majesty. The heroic male nude was Michelangelo's…
George Eliot -- of all people! -- once called correct English "the slang of the prigs." I happen to be one of those prigs, who not merely slings that slang on every possible occasion but takes a certain quiet but smug pride in using such words as "decimate" and "transpire" with sweet precision. I…
MIKE FORBES LIKES SOUP. But he doesn't like corn. So when Forbes, a third-term congressman from New York, found corn in his dehydrated soup-in-a-cup, he had a member of his congressional staff remove every kernel.
Isaiah Berlin's "The Hedgehog and the Fox" is one of this century's most famous essays -- a virtuoso performance in which Berlin lays down his convenient distinction between two basic intellectual personalities, foxes and hedgehogs. Berlin's main topic is Tolstoy's historical thinking in light of…
President Clinton surely had a great lot of fun at the women's World Cup soccer championship, what with post-game visits to both team's locker rooms -- hubba, hubba! But according to Soccer America, the sport's paper of record, "not everyone was so happy." It seems the First Fan showed up at the…
I don't expect ever to write anything that will gain me less sympathy than this, so I might as well get right to it: I bought a new car this week, rather a grand car, I'm afraid. It's a Jaguar, something called the S-Type sedan, with the smaller of the two engines offered, and I would like everyone…
LOOK HOW FAR THE REPUBLICAN PARTY has traveled in just four years. In 1995, the main thrust of the Republican Congress was to get government off our backs. The Gingrichites called themselves the Leave Us Alone Coalition. Government was the problem, and the GOP mission was to cut and devolve federal…
Rep. Earl Hilliard of Alabama beefed to the congressional newspaper The Hill last week that there aren't enough black staffers working for congressional committees. "Prejudice, discrimination, and outright racism," are the reasons, he said, but simply calling his colleagues racists, Hilliard knows,…
Picture this: A hungry young man of ethnic and immigrant background, a lone wolf and in some ways a predator, rises by means fair and foul, marries a religious and serious woman, settles over one million dollars on each of his numerous children, ends his public career in a battle with Franklin D.…
WITH THE LONGUEURS OF SUMMER pleasingly upon us, the demand for beach reading is brisk, and so the Federal Trade Commission's Report to Congress: Cigar Sales and Advertising and Promotional Expenditures for Calendar Years 1996 and 1997 arrives just in time. The report was released last Thursday,…
AT THE CRITICAL MOMENT in the House debate, speaker Denny Hastert was handed a list of eight Republican moderates leery of voting for a tax cut of nearly $ 800 billion. At first, Hastert flinched. He needed to persuade four of them to vote yes for the tax cut to pass and was skeptical that he could…
THE WEEKLY STANDARD has an entry-level opening for a staff assistant/receptionist. Duties include: answering phones, greeting visitors, sorting mail, and handling back-issue requests. Please mail your resume to: Business Manager, THE WEEKLY STANDARD, 1150 17th Street, NW Suite 505, Washington, DC…
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON? Yes, in their verve and grace. Yes, in that their lives were sadly cut short. Yes, in that both men lived, in important respects, admirable lives.
I have never seen such a blatant, raw attempt to harass and silence a whistleblower who simply told the truth."
Was there something just the slightest bit royal about Hillary Clinton's "listening tour" in upstate New York? Faithful SCRAPBOOK reader Margaret Morell thought so and tracked down this charming description of Queen Elizabeth's 17th-century "royal progresses," as described by Prof. Edward P.…
A week ago Sunday, New York Yankee ace David Cone threw just the 16th perfect game in major-league history. Baseball experts say it may well have been the most perfect game ever pitched: only 88 pitches, 68 for strikes, not a single three-ball count to any batter. Most baseball analysts now say…
"We've apologized, we've expressed our regret, we've offered compensation, we're talking about compensation, we've provided a report" -- so said State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin last week describing the U.S. response to the accidental bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade. But his plaintive…
At a rare White House press conference last Wednesday, President Clinton, reminiscing about the late John F. Kennedy Jr., recalled a tour of the presidential residence he'd once given his younger friend. It must have been a bittersweet moment for Kennedy. All the more so, according to Clinton,…
Remembering John F. Kennedy Jr.
The initials "DDT" still give Americans the jitters -- and that fact alone demonstrates the remarkable success of the environmental movement at (as the activists say) "raising our consciousness."
Despite their remarkable progress since 1991 -- the year Moscow recognized their independence -- the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are little noticed on this side of the Atlantic.
This summer, in three performances, Lincoln Center in New York presented something rarer than Halley's Comet: The Peony Pavilion, the classic Chinese opera written at the end of the sixteenth century by Tang Xianzu (who died in 1616, the same year as William Shakespeare). Part of the rarity of the…