52 articles
If you were going to look for hidden evidence of a flood, where would you start? The answer -- at least for the greatest of floods, that time in Noah's day when "all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened" -- turns out to be under water.
Melancholy has its Robert Burton (author of The Anatomy of Melancholy), Snobbery has its Thackeray (author of The Book of Snobs), but Boredom, a much more capacious field than either, has no one similar. Boredom needs help. It awaits its Linnaeus, the great taxonomist, someone to classify the bores…
LENORA FULANI has never been ashamed of being called a radical. As a leader of the hard-left (and now defunct) New Alliance party, Fulani ran for president twice on a platform so extreme she was dismissed by the Nation as a fringe case. Long a slogan-shouting fixture at leftist demonstrations in…
In 1986 Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of the Arts and the House of Representatives presented him with the congressional Gold Medal, yet in the 1930s he had openly campaigned for Communist candidates and in 1953 was called before a Senate subcommittee and asked by Senator Joseph…
IF HE'S NOMINATED next summer, George W. Bush will be the first Republican presidential candidate since Jerry Ford in 1976 to owe nothing to the conservative wing of the Republican party. If he goes on to win, he'll be the first elected Republican president since Eisenhower not obligated to the…
There was a time in America when the weather was merely the topic of idle conversation. Now, it's big news, the subject of all-hands-on-deck media coverage, and the results are appalling. A pattern has set in: The press hypes the peril supposedly posed by a hurricane or heat wave or blizzard,…
In 1990, the Minnesota legislature passed a law requiring something called "cultural dynamics training" for anyone licensed to provide child care around the state. An organization called the Cultural Dynamics Education Project then spent nine years designing and pilot-testing a curriculum for the…
The General Office of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party has coined 50 new slogans for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, which takes place October 1. Here are a few of THE SCRAPBOOK's favorites.
The First Amendment's free speech clause is more than dry constitutional doctrine. It's also a gauge on American society: In any given decade, the most significant free speech cases reflect our deepest cultural concerns. During World War I, the major cases involved criticism of the war. Through the…
A successful demagogue needs the ferocity of a lion and the cunning of a fox. Thankfully, Pat Buchanan doesn't quite measure up. He's just Pat the Bunny, hopping around on the fringes of American politics, wiggling his nose in the air and nibbling away at whatever carrots our political system…
Conservative wing of major political party seeks leader. Must be able to articulate Reaganite philosophy on issues of economic freedom, national security, and social morality. Note: This position is available only to candidates who have previously won election to a major political office.
For all their sophistication about paradox, postmodern literary theorists seem not to understand one of the most basic of literary paradoxes: While each age exists as a unique moment in history, its particularity is defined by its non-particularity -- by the particular answers it gives to those…
RACIAL BEAN COUNTERS, always seeking grist for their ever grinding mills, have found their most spurious cause yet -- the lack of "diversity" on network TV shows. The NAACP led the way, with Kweisi Mfume calling last month for boycotts and even legal action against the networks. Now Hispanics,…
PATTY SHEPHERD MICCI is a liar. But don't hold that against her. Hers was a commonplace prevarication, the kind of breakfast-nook embellishment most loving parents feed their children between spoonfuls of Apple Jacks. "When my daughter was young," admits Patty, "I told her she could become anything…
Black Rock Desert, Nevada
Turnout was heavy last Tuesday in Baltimore's mayoral primary election. And when the counting was done, 36-year-old city councilman Martin O'Malley emerged as the big winner. Baltimore being Baltimore, Mr. O'Malley will almost certainly win November's general election, too. He is, you see, a…
HOW MUCH should America spend on its military? Listening to Republicans, you would think the answer was clear: much more than whatever we are currently spending. The charge that President Clinton has "hollowed out" the armed forces has become a favorite among Republican members of Congress. The…
IT'S DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN, only this time the tiny proto-nation we little understand is in East Asia, not Eastern Europe. As was true in the Balkans, the crisis in East Timor would benefit from American leadership, if only Washington could see its way through the present post-Cold War confusion.…
It's easy to underestimate Patrick Buchanan. He seems at times to take more pleasure in causing outrage and being entertaining than in winning votes. He failed in both 1992 and 1996 to capture the Republican presidential nomination, and after finishing fifth in this year's Iowa straw poll, he now…
Before George W. Bush delivered his first big education address, his team briefed conservative education policy experts on what the speech would contain. At these briefings and throughout the following couple of weeks, three things have stood out about Bush's strategy.
Why depend on faxes from the Democratic National Committee, when you can just read the wires?
Before deciding to offer clemency to 16 imprisoned members of the FALN, the Puerto Rican terrorist group, President Clinton no doubt solicited the opinions of a number of different people -- his lawyers, his political advisers, representatives of various interest groups, and of course -- ludicrous…
A BULLETIN from the Country Club of Little Rock brings word that one of its new members is former Clinton White House chief of staff Thomas "Mack" McLarty. This might ordinarily pass unnoticed, but McLarty is not precisely a new member, and the Country Club of Little Rock is not your ordinary…
When Bill Bradley kicked off his presidential campaign last week in his hometown of Crystal City, Missouri, he recalled that his Little League baseball team had walked out of restaurants in a southeastern Missouri town that wouldn't serve the team because its catcher and left fielder were black.…
There's a well-known story told about Alfred Hitchcock -- one of those anecdotes of a famous man's childhood that are supposed to reveal the origins of all his later work. Hitchcock's father once gave his son a note and sent him down to the police station -- where an officer, following the note's…
Richard A. Posner, chief judge of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, is that rarest thing in government employ, as in life generally. He is a real writer: vivid, witty, conscious of language's weave and rhythm. He also knows quite a lot. Both his official opinions and his voluminous…
Former surgeon general C. Everett Koop has always been a paragon of integrity. How does THE SCRAPBOOK know this? Because that's what the self-described "health conscience of the nation" told THE WEEKLY STANDARD's Matt Labash last summer after the initial public offering of his eponymous Web site,…
THE CULTURAL LEFT IS TIRED of getting beat up for being anti-family. So, a small but influential number of academics, social critics, and policy types have come up with a new gambit: They are anti-marriage but pro-parenthood.
ONE OF THE longest-running and most expensive taxpayer-funded projects at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, has nothing to do with curing cancer.
There it was, right on the front page of the Washington Post two days after Labor Day: "Clinton-Weary Public Has Doubts About Gore." And right under the headline, a pie chart with the percentage breakdown: Bush 56 percent, Gore 37 percent, undecided or neither 7 percent.
Suddenly, unaccountable one-man investigations are back in fashion in Washington. After months of decrying Ken Starr, Donald Smaltz, and other inconvenient busybodies, the Clinton administration has executed a stunning triple-lutz on its latest scandal and appointed former senator John Danforth as…
Desperate East Timorese Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos-Horta arrived in Washington last week to plead the case that the United States should do something to defend his countrymen from the Indonesian soldiers who have been on a murderous rampage against civilians in East Timor ever since they…
THANKS TO THE WAY America's two-party political system has adapted to the ill-conceived campaign-finance reforms of the 1970s, the excitement is being drained from our most important political choice, the presidential election. Almost all the crucial competition now takes place in the realm of…
The hairless man went prime time last week at the U.S. Open, when a newly bare Andre Agassi peeled off his shirt for the apparently adoring crowds. This was not the first such unveiling by Agassi: At the 1993 Wimbledon tournament, he was similarly shorn, giving rise to speculation that…
Listen to Frances FitzGerald and you'll begin to understand why journalists and historians are so infuriating on the subject of the Vietnam war. They've written and uttered so much in the past thirty-plus years, but they've learned nothing. Fire in the Lake, FitzGerald's Pulitzer Prize-winning…
His Honor Anthony Williams
Admittedly, it's not easy to describe the shape and extent of New York's eighth congressional district. In THE SCRAPBOOK's brand new edition of Michael Barone's Almanac of American Politics 2000, the district is characterized as being three-fifths in Manhattan, two-fifths in Brooklyn, comprising in…
The Chinese Communist government in Beijing is fond of beating its breast about supposed U.S. interference in China's "internal affairs," but it apparently has no such compunctions itself. Thus the remarkable fax from the mainland Chinese government to governor Bill Owens of Colorado in mid-August.
Cliche has it that the Reform party is a car looking for a driver. But with over $ 12 million in federal campaign funds at its disposal for the 2000 election, the party's more like an airplane looking for a hijacker. And according to reports last week, Pat Buchanan might be fishing out his ski mask.
ASKED FOR A DEFINITION of compassionate conservatism at a recent luncheon in Washington, Stephen Goldsmith didn't miss a beat: "To me it means that Republicans have an obligation to help those who are in difficult straits, and that we can do that and still be conservative at the same time." He…
For a remarkable bit of puffery, check out the New York Times's August 30 profile of former Tennessee senator Jim Sasser, who has just wrapped up a three-and-a-half-year stint as Bill Clinton's ambassador to China. From the first overheated line -- "He faced down the rampaging mobs in the streets…
In 1995, the Ohio legislature enacted its Pilot Project Scholarship Program for disadvantaged elementary school students in Cleveland. Under PPSP, low-income families became eligible for state grants covering up to 90 percent of tuition costs at any Cleveland private school or nearby suburban…
THIS WEEK, THE PRESIDENTS OF CHINA and the United States are poised to strike a historic and probably irreversible agreement paving the way for China to join the World Trade Organization. Unfortunately, although China's membership in the WTO would allow some in both countries to declare victory,…
I wasn't mad -- really I wasn't -- but I was surprised. A notice in a newspaper in Nairobi, Kenya, announced that I would be delivering a major address at a local university the next day on the highfalutin subject of globalization and the American media. This was news to me. True, I planned to drop…
IT CAN SEEM SO TERRIBLY UNFAIR. Newt Gingrich led the Republicans to their first majority in the House of Representatives since 1955, and then to two successive majorities for the first time since the 1920s. He forced welfare reform and a balanced budget onto President Clinton. His reward for this…
At first blush, the Republican presidential field doesn't exactly overflow with new ideas. Steve Forbes updates the free-market policies and themes of Jack Kemp's 1988 campaign. Gary Bauer's campaign echoes the social conservatism of Pat Robertson's 1988 run. Elizabeth Dole reprises the Main Street…
IF REPUBLICANS ARE SERIOUS about wanting to protect health care consumers, they should revive the campaign for medical savings accounts. Rather than joining the Democrats' push to let people sue their HMOs, Republicans should insist that MSAs be part of any Patients' Bill of Rights.
There is an ancient Chinese proverb that warns: "Too little food, one problem. Too much food, many problems." What an appropriate diagnosis for this year's farm "crisis." This summer the media have saturated the airwaves with Norman Rockwell-type portraits of beleaguered family farmers in their…
It's been twenty-five years since the only resignation of an American president, but our fascination with that complicated man, Richard Nixon, seems to continue unabated.
The most striking recent evidence that mystical and supernatural forces may be at play in America is this: The best movie of the year is a horror flick starring Bruce Willis as a psychiatrist.
It's "Burning Man," a bizarre hightech Woodstock held annually on the Black Rock Desert. It's U.S. 50, "The Loneliest Road in America." It's state-sanctioned prostitution (and the final closing last month of the infamous Mustang Ranch, complete with tearyeyed hookers caught on TV). It's the…
The Salvation Army, with its brass bands, blue uniforms, and Christmas kettles, seems to be everyone's favorite charity. The $ 1.2 billion that the 121-year-old Army receives yearly in private contributions makes it the nation's top-grossing philanthropy, dwarfing such rivals as the YMCA, the…