67 articles
Talk about government sponsorship of offensive art. It turns out that a special photo exhibit honoring the fiftieth anniversary of Communist dictatorship in China (death toll, conservatively estimated: tens of millions) went up last week in the U.S. House of Representatives' Cannon Office Building.…
"Journalism ethics" is to many people a mysterious intellectual discipline, riddled with speciousness and ad hoc-ery, but every once in a while a transgression comes along that is so breathtaking in its obviousness that even journalists themselves can understand it. And when it entangles a moral…
I probably shouldn't admit that while in Las Vegas recently for a friend's thirtieth birthday party I spent more time playing "for amusement only" video games than trying my hand at the likes of blackjack or craps. Even more embarrassing, I'd do it again.
This is getting pathological. He did it again! In fact, he did it again even before last week's SCRAPBOOK -- which recorded what was then the latest example -- had hit the newsstands.
Reykjavik, Iceland
THE SCRAPBOOK hears that alarm bells were ringing in Austin two weeks ago when the Associated Press reported "close associates" of Elizabeth Dole were urging her to leave the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Advisers to George W. Bush apparently worry that a Dole exit would leave…
RICHARD NIXON used a presidential press conference -- several of them, in fact -- to lie about Watergate. Jimmy Carter wildly exaggerated the energy crisis. And Ronald Reagan, while arguing for aid to the Nicaraguan contras, described the threat to Harlingen, Texas, from south of the border as…
IF An Affair of State, Judge Richard Posner's new book about the impeachment of Bill Clinton, is indeed as definitive as its admirers insist, my place in history is secure: While the book's index offers only three references to Trent Lott and four to Henry Hyde, it has six to me! (True, Hillary…
After all the fireworks, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty took a drubbing. Fifty-one senators voted against it, 17 more than were needed to block ratification. Yet up until the very eve of the vote, a high-stakes struggle for the heart of Trent Lott was going on behind the scenes. The majority…
CONSERVATIVES will always have a soft spot for the eighties. They'll always have a nostalgic longing for the glory days of Reykjavik and Berlin, for the era of yellow ties, Drexel Burnham, Duran Duran, and Madonna-wannabes wearing their underwear on the outside of their clothes. And the best part…
The Decline of Males
ENERGY GIANT ENRON is considering the construction of a new wind power facility in southern California. A Fortune 500 company, Enron has invested heavily in wind and other "alternative" sources of energy that do not emit carbon dioxide and other green-house gases. Its proposal to erect wind-powered…
Last week's rejection by the Senate of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was the most responsible and courageous action by that body since the 1991 vote authorizing the Gulf War. In the face of a hostile media, a well-organized and well-funded international "arms control" industry, polls showing…
Truman and Pendergast
Postmodernism Rightly Understood
Waste and Want
No one has yet mentioned the horrifying downside of Al Gore's having transferred his campaign headquarters from Washington to Nashville: Being "back home" in Tennessee only gives him that many more excuses to ponder his increasingly mythopoeic roots. True to form, while cutting the ribbon on his…
Guess which presidential candidate wrote the following: "I have consistently opposed federal funding of abortions. In my opinion, it is wrong to spend federal funds for what is arguably the taking of a human life. It is my deep personal conviction that abortion is wrong. I hope that some day we…
The U.S. military has certainly been through some wrenching transformations since the end of the Cold War, but it's still shocking to see it hosting a hagiographical tribute to the life and work of the anti-nuclear fellow-traveler Linus Pauling. Yes, opening on Oct. 20 at the National Museum of…
THE WEATHER WAS GOOD, the setting was beautiful, but all was not well in the land of the tomato growers. The government was not happy. On September 8, the 24th annual Joint Tomato Conference opened at the Naples, Fla., Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Peter Harllee Jr., chairman of the Florida Tomato Committee,…
George Gordon, Lord Byron, is such a heroic figure and exciting storyteller, one can forget what a very good poet he is. The notorious judgment of his lover Lady Caroline Lamb was that he was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Her judgment has resounded ever since, even prompting the movie clunker…
In April 1998, Lawrence Lindsey, the economist and former Federal Reserve governor who is now a principal adviser to Governor George W. Bush, pulled his savings out of the stock market. He's been out ever since. At the time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had climbed above 9,000, more than…
Here's one of the toughest critiques of Patrick Buchanan THE SCRAPBOOK has read of late, and get this: It comes not from George W. Bush or any of the Republican candidates, but from inside the Buchanan campaign, from a "senior policy adviser." Here are some excerpts of what this adviser has written:
As Fred Barnes points out elsewhere in this issue, when George W. Bush accused his fellow Republicans in Congress of "balancing their budget on the backs of the poor," what stung wasn't the jab but the rhetoric: "These are liberal buzz words." And how.
Cedar Key, Florida
Don't be put off by the book's opaque title: Kay S. Hymowitz's Ready or Not: Why Treating Children as Small Adults Endangers Their Future -- and Ours is a fresh and grimly convincing look at what we're doing wrong in the way we socialize the young.
Until fairly recently, my morning movements had a kind of ritualistic purity -- the quick, business-like ablutions while the household slept, then the quite descent to the dark kitchen to switch on the coffee marker, the brief detour to gather the newspapers from the front lawn, and then a quick…
HEALTH CARE REFORM is in the air again. Just released census data reveals an increase in the number of uninsured women and children. Bill Bradley outlines a health care package to cover the uninsured just as the House passes the Patient's Bill of Rights. Old hands from the first-term Clinton White…
What must have been the largest fleet of Lear jets ever assembled began touching down at Shanghai's brand-new international airport on Monday, September 27. It was like a Renaissance Weekend for the U.S. corporate power elite. Henry Kissinger was there, of course. So were Carla Hills and Mickey…
George Weigel has written a very good book about a very great man.
IN THE INCREASINGLY DULL, narrow, methodologically obscure world of the social sciences, it is hard to find a mind that speaks not only to its students but to its nation. Most scholars can't write, many can't think. Ed Banfield could write and think.
AFTER YOU HIT A DOG, you pet it." This is how an unnamed adviser to George W. Bush explained (to the New York Times) the governor's revised and softened appraisal of the vices of his party, after howls of protest from conservatives greeted Bush's recent speech to the Manhattan Institute. The dog…
HOW CLEVER is George W. Bush? Before his October 1 speech to the Christian Coalition in Washington, Bush and his advisers debated how far he should go in tailoring his remarks to the specific interests of religious conservatives. Some aides felt Bush should talk up his Christian beliefs and…
In the late 1960s, the Democratic party encountered in its ranks a New Left contemptuous of American institutions but powerful in the most prestigious of them. A few Democrats in the old Harry Truman mold were willing to confront the radicals head on. But the party establishment decided to be…
SCRAPBOOK fans will remember a Dec. 21, 1996, conference call during which members of the House Republican leadership discussed pending Ethics Committee actions concerning then speaker Newt Gingrich. They will remember this phone call because a full account and partial transcript of it was…
Winner of THE SCRAPBOOK's prize for boneheaded environmental feeble-mindedness is the story in the New York Times metro section of Sept. 27 (brought to our attention by alert reader Jonathan Balsam), headlined "Malathion Spraying May Affect Monarch Butterflies."
Los Angeles, California
For four long years now, Professor John J. Pitney Jr. of Claremont-McKenna College has provided THE SCRAPBOOK with dispatches from the front lines of the war against "fake Tocqueville" -- the most widely circulating falsely attributed quotation in all America. The news has been uniformly bad; the…
AN ARTICLE by Elliott C. Rothenberg in our July 20 issue ("The Terrorist Next Door") mistakenly attributed to Jay Benanav of the St. Paul, Minn., city council the statement that Symbionese Liberation Army fugitive Kathleen Soliah, a.k.a. "Sara Jane Olson," had been a "great citizen of our…
For those who decry the amount and role of money in politics, the problem has an obvious solution: Simply outlaw certain campaign donations and strictly limit spending. To accomplish this, however, reformers must get around a long line of court decisions holding that restrictions on political…
Shark in Sea of Dark Suits
In the late 1980s, when Prince Charles visited the United States, he asked to meet his American counterparts -- the people who shared his pressures and problems. And so he dined with the blood heirs of publishers: Donald Graham, the son of Philip and Katharine Graham and the grandson of Eugene…
Elsewhere in this issue, Robert D. Novak dismantles Edmund Morris's bizarre "memoir" of Ronald Reagan. But THE SCRAPBOOK's friend, Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson, has a footnote to add: Morris's ludicrous mistreatment of Reagan's celebrated "Berlin Wall" speech (which Robinson drafted).
Somewhere in this collage of fancy, notes, and errant musings might be found a legitimate biography of the fortieth president of the United States. Certainly, Edmund Morris did not spend the last fourteen years idly waiting for the muse to seize him. Quite apart from his unprecedented access to…
Every Saturday morning, from early June until late October, I go to the farmer's market in our town and feel as if I have stepped into a Koren cartoon. People look a bit shaggy, strange, rather as if they were themselves animated fruits and vegetables. While there, I myself sometimes feel a bit…
The ideological fog that often blurs coverage of the judiciary seems particularly thick as the Supreme Court convenes this week for a new term. The press routinely describes Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, Bill Clinton's two nominees to the Court, as "centrist," or "moderate." In…
In 1993, the Washington Post dismissed Christian conservatives involved in national politics as "largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command." Offered as simple fact rather than someone's opinion, the characterization was not only a slur. It was incorrect. And the Post ultimately apologized for…
CULTURE WARS, CHAPTER 36.
WHEN DAN QUAYLE announced last week that he was abandoning his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, comedians reacted like depositors during a bank run -- banging at the gates to withdraw all the jokes they'd saved up for dead winter nights. Craig Kilborn noted, ruefully, "Quayle…
"For the environmentalists here, the first word I learned to spell was green -- G-R-E-E-N!" -- Al Gore on the campaign trail, as reported by the New York Times's Katharine Q. Seelye. And Gore wonders why his campaign's floundering.
The problem with the Reform party, as Paul Gigot archly pointed out last week, is that it's not a political party, it's a Halloween party. And that was before the self-immolating Playboy interview by Jesse Ventura, governor of Minnesota and the party's leading elected official. A sample:
Bournemouth, England
ALL THE BLACKS who got Ph.D.s in physics last year and all the American Indians who got Ph.D.s in math could ride comfortably on one tandem bicycle. Blacks make up 13 percent of the population, but only 1 percent of engineers and 7.2 percent of computer techies. Lump them together with American…
Scandal stalks the new authorized biography of Ronald Reagan. The author -- Pulitzer Prize winner Edmund Morris -- was granted unprecedented access to a sitting president and seems to have been so deeply burdened by this good fortune that he needed an extra decade to finish the book. And that's not…
America is an enormous country speckled with all manner of random foolishness. It is also a nation of laws, earnestly accumulated and amended since before the Revolution. And sometimes it is both things at once, spawning an entire sub-genre of newspaper humor devoted to "weird state statutes."…
After flirting with Ross Perot for his blessing and the Reform party nomination, will Pat Buchanan actually turn tail and run away from the race for the Reform party nomination before it even starts?
Suddenly everyone is asking, Who lost Russia? The New York Times Magazine posed the question in a cover story last August, and it has since been the subject of long articles in the Times and the Washington Post, as well as of innumerable columns in major newspapers. The op-ed pieces in the New York…
DEBATE OPENED LAST WEEK in the Fifty-fourth United Nations General Assembly, highlighted in the media by President Clinton's annual address. But Secretary General Kofi Annan had made the real news even before the session started, by publicly proclaiming that only the U.N. Security Council can…
When the great Parisian Hegelian Alexandre Kojeve searched for an image of the end of history, he finally hit upon the Japanese tea ceremony. Coming from Brooklyn, I am a bit less sophisticated and turn to American professional wrestling instead. For wrestling has been as much a victim of the end…
Mike Kinsley, while editor of the New Republic, had a half-serious piece of advice for his writers. If you're doing a story about a politician or public official, don't interview him. You might like him, or her. Mike was onto something. Actually liking the person you're writing about -- or holding…
FOR AN ORGANIZATION with a reputation for exclusivity and intolerance, the Republican party is surprisingly reluctant to kick anyone out. Earlier this month, after years of embarrassing fellow Republicans with his sniping at Jews, Pat Buchanan released a book suggesting the United States should…
September 21, 1999, "GENEVA (Reuters) -- U.S. and Asian experts flew to Taiwan Tuesday to help rescue operations after a massive earthquake, while the United Nations awaited a go-ahead from China before launching its own coordinating mission. . . . The United Nations was held back by the fact it…
Over the years, there have been an enormous number of popular books to explain how our "male culture" oppresses American women and children. Indeed, Susan Faludi wrote one of the most popular in the early 1990s, entitled Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.
It's hard to imagine a book more misconstrued than The Elements of Style, or a writer more misjudged than E. B. White, who co-wrote "the little book" with William Strunk Jr. This year is the centenary of White's birth, and looking through the handful of news articles that have marked the occasion I…
NBC's White House drama The West Wing, created by self-proclaimed liberal Democrat and enfant terrible Aaron Sorkin, debuted last week. The central conflict of the first episode revolved around the Harold Ickes character (played by Brad Whitford), who belittles the faith of a religious pundit on a…