86 articles
George W. Bush's November 19 speech at the Reagan Library represents the strongest and clearest articulation of a policy of American global leadership by a major political figure since the collapse of the Soviet Empire. In his call for renewed American strength, confidence, and leadership, Bush…
WITH CONSIDERABLE fanfare, the Clinton administration last week struck an agreement with China that should clear the way for its membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO). On paper, the deal has many positive features. But U.S.-China trade relations are a saga of great press releases and…
The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently distributed a brochure, intended for tenants in subsidized housing, entitled "Resident Rights and Responsibilities." It appeared in various translations, including Spanish, French, Korean, and Portuguese. But it was the "Creole" translation…
There was a shocking outbreak of humor in the Democratic race last week. First Al Gore told a decent joke on himself to the New Yorker's Joe Klein and Jane Mayer. "Bill Clinton sees a car going down the street and he says, 'What are the political implications of that car?'" Gore said, with a…
New York
"I've tried to be president . . . the way Ed Rendell serves as mayor."
One Nation, Two Cultures
In response to popular demand, THE SCRAPBOOK is now reachable 24/7. To paraphrase Alice Roosevelt Longworth, if you don't have anything nice to say, e-mail it to Scrapbook@Weekly-standard.com.
What you remember about a film by Federico Fellini are the images. A clown walks a high wire above a village square and sits down in the middle to eat a plate of spaghetti (La Strada, 1954). A prostitute is hypnotized and responds to the suggestion that "Oscar" loves her with a "pure and simple…
THE SCRAPBOOK'S favorite liberal columnist, Dan Kennedy of the Boston Phoenix, last week updated the long-running saga of America's self-dealing PBS aristocracy, aka Bill Moyers, Inc. As recounted here a few weeks ago, Moyers moralizes at ponderous length about the malign influence of money on…
BY THE FIRST WEEK of November it had become clear to the people who run Hillsdale College that the school's president, George Roche III, would have to step down. Roche's daughter-in-law, Lissa Roche, had recently shot herself to death on campus. Rumors that she and Roche had been having an affair…
For most people, New Year's and birthdays are the annual events that remind us we're getting older. Another year, another birthday. But for me, that prompting comes in the form of football. Not the kind you watch, the kind you play.
Pat Robertson did a remarkable interview with Li Zhaoxing, China's ambassador to the United States, on the November 10 700 Club, Robertson's long-running Christian Broadcasting Network show. Not surprisingly for a Pentecostal evangelist whose CBN WorldReach is the self-proclaimed "first Christian…
THE NEW YORK TIMES'S lead education reporter seemed surprised by his own discovery: Hiring more teachers for U.S. schools is harder than it sounds. In New York City this year, seven-eighths of those teachers hired with Washington's help have been doubled up in classrooms with other teachers. There…
Gerald Ford has perfected the art of ingratiating himself with the liberal establishment that once scorned him for his pardon of Richard Nixon. Last year, Ford put himself at the service of the "let's-find-a-responsible-way-to-save-Clinton" coalition, writing two New York Times op-eds. The first…
In Baby and Child Care, Dr. Benjamin Spock complained of parents who "transmit their excessive competitiveness to their children. An extreme example is the attempt to teach reading to two-year-olds and, in general, to create 'superkids.'"
Jules Witcover has written a presidential campaign book that ranks with Jeff Greenfield's The Real Campaign, Theodore White's The Making of the President 1960, Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, and Dick Morris's Behind the Oval Office among the best of the genre.…
HERE'S HOW BADLY Republican prospects for holding the House of Representatives in 2000 have deteriorated: A new poll suggests that even a solid victory in the presidential race by George W. Bush wouldn't guarantee GOP control. "Everyone is trying to put the best face on it," says a Republican…
George W. Bush is giving a major foreign policy address at the Reagan Library on Friday, Nov. 19. The Scrapbook looks forward to his thoughts on U.S. policy towards China. If he plans on sounding tough, he may want to alert Uncle Prescott before he signs too many embarrassing consulting deals with…
Hamburg, Germany
The celebrations last week marking the tenth anniversary of the Berlin Wall's collapse were marred by what seemed at times a willful refusal to give Ronald Reagan proper credit for his contribution to the triumph of freedom in Europe.
As reported by the Washington Post's Steven Mufson and Robert G. Kaiser:
Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen
As Thanksgiving approaches, I am once again taking inventory of blessings large (good health, loving family, gift certificate to the Outback) and pleasures small (children's laughter, a whippoorwill's song, Internet porn). But it was while sorting through my mail some weeks ago that I most acutely…
THE FIRST PART of the decision in U.S. v. Microsoft is in. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson excoriated Microsoft as a bullying monopolist in his findings of fact released November 5. These findings came as a surprise to some, although it is difficult to discern why they should be at all surprising to…
Podgorica, Montenegro
As reported by the German press agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur:
Michael Lewis's The New New Thing isn't, as its title suggests, about the search for the next great intellectual or commercial break-through. Rather, it's a book-length magazine profile of Jim Clark, the man who founded Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon, and his search for that new new…
No one any longer contends, as Kate Michelman of NARAL did when initially confronted on the subject in the fall of 1995, that "there is no such thing as a partial birth" -- in other words, that the hideous abortion procedure in question is an outright hoax perpetrated by the pro-life movement. At…
NO PRESIDENT SINCE Herbert Hoover has linked his fate so closely to the stock market as Bill Clinton, and unlike Hoover's bet, Clinton's has thus far paid off brilliantly. In fact, the 1990s have not been a time of unusual economic prosperity. The gross domestic product rose faster in the 1980s;…
Lenora Fulani, a pro-choice, homosexual rights advocate, joined Pat Buchanan's Reform Party presidential nomination campaign yesterday.
James B. Conant was president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, a chemist by training who -- through the influence of his books on education -- helped create the huge, comprehensive American high school. But he also helped create the modern American college, for it's thanks in part to Conant that the…
Not that it was going anywhere, but Donald Trump's much-buzzed-about plan to impose a 14.25 percent wealth tax is probably unconstitutional. The Constitution originally permitted Congress to impose direct taxes only in proportion to each state's population. That's why the income tax was declared…
All Souls
With much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth, a Greek chorus of managed care executives is chanting a recurrent refrain: Prescription drug costs are spiraling out of control. Customers are demanding treatments that will raise their quality of life and keep them out of hospitals. What happened…
In May 1986, state senator Jack Lindsay engineered an unnoticed amendment to a South Carolina budget bill. The amendment made legal the distribution of "property" but not "money" to anyone playing a commercially operated game of skill. By the time Lindsay died in January 1991 -- while a focus of…
Julian Watkins knew a good pitch when he saw one. In 1949 the veteran copywriter published The 100 Greatest Advertisements. Most of these first appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, but they promoted products -- Coca-Cola, Camel cigarettes, and Campbell's soup -- that remain mainstays in the marketplace…
It was in 1990 that John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory hit certain theology circles like a bombshell.
The end of the century has been a good thing for the publishing industry. Indeed, 1999 could be called the Year of Lists, bombarding us with catalogues of the century's best books, best movies, best advertisements, and so on -- and on and on.
THIS POLITICAL SEASON, the pundits tell us, "personal narrative" is the driving force behind a candidate's popularity with the electorate. If that's the case, Bill Bradley owes his appeal -- the really catchy stuff at least -- almost entirely to sports. Basketball to be more precise. College…
At a book party for Erica Jong's What Do Women Want? at the Town Hall Theater in New York last January, Naomi Wolf tried to answer the question herself. "More!" she declaimed. "Better orgasms. More touching. More love. . . . We really are demon goddesses of lust."
I hope it isn't too early to begin predictions for the new millennium, because I have a small, modest, even parochial one to make, and here it is: Before the first decade of our third millennium, a Jewish high holiday service will be led by a rabbi -- I do not say an Orthodox rabbi -- wearing a…
David Ignatius devoted his Oct. 31 Washington Post column to the increasing narcissism of the American male. Reporting from the health spa of a Beverly Hills hotel where an attendant is stripping the hair from his back, Ignatius says he can't "help thinking that something bad is happening to men in…
Rumors of Warren Beatty's pro-life sympathies turn out -- small surprise -- to have been greatly exaggerated. Matt Drudge reported in September that since the birth of Beatty's three children with Annette Bening, the man who was once the inspiration for Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" had become an…
-- News item
Quickly now: Which nation in East Asia receives the largest amount of U.S. aid? Is it our impoverished, long-time ally, the Philippines? Wartorn Cambodia? Is there an emergency relief package in the works to help East Timor create a viable, independent democracy?
Remember that "encouraging" news for Al Gore a few weeks ago? A Pew Research Center poll showed Gore gaining on George W. Bush in a head-to-head race: Bush's 54-39 percent September lead had shrunk to only a 51-44 percent advantage in the poll's October tally. The Pew press release even implied…
IT IS RARE THAT U.S. SENATORS fall apart on the floor of the Senate under questioning from one of their colleagues, but Senator Barbara Boxer did just that during the October 20 debate on partial-birth abortions, and there was nothing random in the spectacle. Her frustration sprang from the flaws…
In his 18 years in the Senate, Bill Bradley built a reputation as the rare Democrat who is committed to cutting taxes. He even wrote a book about it. Similarly, Vice President Al Gore has positioned himself as a moderate since the day he was elected to Congress in 1976. Far more than President…
Shortly after Bill Clinton was inaugurated, he promised to make college more affordable by reforming the student-loan program. Now, the administration is opposing a bipartisan proposal that would reduce interest rates on student loans, and do so in a way that both the Congressional Budget Office…
Hampton, New Hampshire
ONCE UPON A TIME, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division opposed the assignment of students to public schools on the basis of race. No more. Now the division defends schools that want to take race into account in deciding who gets in and who doesn't. Consider several friends-of-the-court…
"Leo McCarey," said the French director Jean Renoir, "understands people better than anyone in Hollywood." Ernst Lubitsch, the creator of brilliant, delightful screen comedies, said, "That boy McCarey is one of the best." Charles Laughton called him "the greatest comedy mind now living." Orson…
IF THERE IS ANYTHING to complain about in the selection of Doctors Without Borders for this year's Nobel Peace Prize, it is the timing. The group should have received the honor 15 years ago, when its volunteers were repairing the shattered limbs of Afghan victims of Soviet land mines and treating…
The quintessential C-SPAN moment came during a Booknotes program in 1991, while host Brian Lamb was interviewing Martin Gilbert, the author of a biography of Winston Churchill. Gilbert was talking about the interplay between private scandal and public life when the following exchange took place:
Patrick Buchanan's splenetic outburst on the political loyalties of New York Times columnist William Safire puts THE SCRAPBOOK in mind of the old adage, "Better to keep your mouth shut and have people suspect you of being an anti-Semite than open it and remove all doubt."
The Oct. 23 New York Times featured a striking story, to say the least. "To the horror and disgust of mainstream infertility groups," Times reporter Carey Goldberg earnestly wrote, "a longtime fashion photographer has begun offering up models as egg donors to the highest bidders, auctioning their…
The fate of China's effort to join the World Trade Organization is unclear; matters involving internal deliberations in Beijing usually are. There is always the possibility that China is waiting until the last minute to wrap up WTO negotiations, hoping that the Clinton administration's desire to…
Back in 1950, the nation's largest corporation and the leading industrial union signed a contract that set the pattern for labor peace and widespread prosperity in postwar America. General Motors agreed to substantial wage increases, plus cost-of-living adjustments and improved health and pension…
REPUBLICANS BOTH INSIDE and outside Congress have been pleasantly surprised by how well they are doing politically in this year's budget fight with President Clinton. Ever since Clinton squashed the Republican Congress over the government shutdown in 1995-96, the autumnal rites of appropriation…
At the end of September, the various candidates running for president released their financial statements. Beneath the minutiae was a striking fact: So far this year, Steve Forbes and George W. Bush have spent roughly the same amount of money, about $ 20 million. But that number alone doesn't tell…
I was about 13 at the time. It must have been a Saturday night and I was walking down Bell Boulevard in Bayside, Queens. The sidewalks were thronged with barhoppers, the traffic stiff with cars, the crosswalks crowded, parking spots few. My sister Ann was with me. So was Peggy, a friend of Ann's,…
LAST WEEK, Congress took up the issues of pain control and physician-assisted suicide, with the House voting 271-156 to pass the Pain Relief Promotion Act. The legislation, if passed, would improve pain control while deterring physician-assisted suicide. Doctors who prescribe lethal drugs for the…
Ever since the Senate Republicans defeated the fatally flawed Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the White House has been whining about what it describes as a new and dangerous level of "partnership" on the GOP's part. What will the administration's complaint be now that the members of the House…
Everyone who reads this marvelous memoir -- and it deserves to have many, many readers -- will have a favorite anecdote among the countless tales that Jack Germond piles up, so I might as well begin this review with mine.
In a memorable news analysis of the first Gore-Bradley debate (headlined "Surprise Possibility: A Dignified Democratic Race"), the New York Time's Adam Clymer inadvertently demonstrates how fine the distinction can be between "thoughtfulness" and fatuousness.
Republicans took a courageous and principled stand when they defeated the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty three weeks ago. Now they need to show some political smarts, too. With the 2000 election campaign fast approaching, they should deprive the Clinton administration of one cheap, but sometimes…
IT WASN'T EXACTLY the rhetoric of a surging candidate: "We are beginning to solve some of our problems," Al Gore told reporters on October 20. His campaign, of course, has had countless fits and starts over the past six months. But Gore and his allies say he's "turned the corner." In the words of…
Noting that "meat consumption is just as dangerous to public health as tobacco use," the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has recommended that the Justice Department "begin preparing a case against major meat producers and retailers." Obviously, they haven't heard of the Atkins diet.
Any time I e-mail a friend that I'm working on an article in Paris, he'll send me back a short note reading: "Tough assignment!" or "Life is hard, huh?"
"Governor Bush is the first candidate in the history of the modern era, when we've had federal financing, who has given it up so that an unlimited amount of money could be raised, so that puts all the others at, I think, a relative disadvantage. It's something that some people urged on me four…
Readers may recall Matthew Rees's description several months ago in these pages of how Andrew Cuomo, secretary of housing and urban development, had been waging war on HUD's inspector general, Susan Gaffney. The General Accounting Office has now reviewed the lucrative legal contracts awarded by…
A Sense of Where You Are
Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?
The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton
Richmond, Virginia
Steve Forbes has it right: The presence on the Princeton University faculty of Peter Singer -- the Australian animal-rights activist who proclaims that a baby is of less value than a pig and who advocates a 28-day trial period before accepting newborns into the human race -- is "intolerable and…
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Further proof that the secret to success is complaining. Tom Joyner, host of a popular, nationally syndicated morning radio show with a predominantly black audience, and Tavis Smiley, a host on the cable network Black Entertainment Television, recently took aim at computer superstore CompUSA. The…
One of the overlooked highlights of the debate on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was seeing Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia lecture Trent Lott on Senate rules and decorum, after Lott had denied him the right to speak. Byrd didn't take kindly to this, and when given the opportunity to speak…
"A NEW ISOLATIONISM" -- that is the motive that President Clinton attributed to the Republican senators who opposed his test-ban treaty. His slogan was echoed on the front page of the New York Times in a news analysis by R. W. Apple: "The Senate's decisive rejection tonight of the Comprehensive…
House Republicans have now spent roughly $ 450,000 on television ads blasting eight of their Democratic colleagues for supporting a raid on the Social Security trust fund. The ads appear to have been successful at beginning to make the Republicans, for the first time ever, the party that defends…
Heterophobia
Zbigniew Brzezinski is not alone in his judgment that the Cold War was won in 1986 at Reykjavik, though the fact that Brzezinski was President Carter's national security adviser shows that this is no partisan judgment. At Reykjavik, Ronald Reagan was offered the most sweeping arms control proposal…