66 articles
The Columbine killers are back. Back in grainy pictures from the surveillance camera in the cafeteria that caught a portion of their rampage through their high school in Littleton, Colorado, last April 20. Back in quotations taken from the five videotapes they made to explain and publicize…
A few weeks ago THE SCRAPBOOK reported how, during the Nov. 10 edition of his Christian Broadcasting Network show the 700 Club, Pat Robertson played a particularly craven game of flatter-the-tyrant with his guest Li Zhaoxing, China's ambassador to the United States. Pretending to "question" Li…
Why do so many conservatives have so little use for John McCain? They find his unceasing agitation for more restrictions on campaign finance grating. For partisan Republicans, it's enough that Democrats agree with McCain. For small-government conservatives, the anti-money bias that McCain shares…
Peanuts, A Golden Celebration
Spartanburg, S.C.
The Sword and the Shield
SUDDENLY I AM SURROUNDED by a sea of Palm Pilots, Handspring Visors, Psions, Palmtops, and Microsoft Windows CE Personal Data Assistants. At every meeting these handheld computers lie on the table alongside people's pens and eyeglasses. Run into someone on the street, and he whips one out to check…
Rembrandt's Eyes
IF YOU BOUGHT ANYTHING over the Internet this holiday season, chances are you're a tax cheat. That's because online retailers from Amazon.com to Yahoo! rarely include sales taxes in the prices their customers pay. As a result, most buyers don't realize they're supposed to remit the tax themselves…
My grandfather, who never had a son, made himself responsible for my education. He did it by following his enthusiasms. He taught me the alphabet with Red Sox box scores, told terrifying bedtime stories about explorers in the Dark Continent (as Africa was once invariably called), and set math…
At the most recent Washington, D.C., Drug Court "graduation" -- a monthly event for drug defendants who have successfully stayed in treatment -- Mark Williams stole the show. Williams, a transvestite dressed in checkered hot pants with matching pocketbook, gave spirited testimony. "I want to thank…
The most devastatingly probing question of the presidential campaign thus far was asked not by a reporter but by New Hampshire voter Katherine Prudhomme (formerly a Democrat, now a McCain supporter), at A1 Gore's Dec. 14 town meeting in Derry, N.H.
CONSERVATIVES are quarreling again about American foreign policy -- about how forceful it should be and to what extent it should reflect the nation's values and ideals. But this time, far from remaining the exclusive property of pundits and intellectuals, the debate is also being waged in the…
In one of their earliest decrees upon reaching the New World, the Puritans outlawed Christmas. It was a heathenish holiday that had nothing to do with Christ's birth. Worse, its festivities were unseemly if not immoral. There was to be none of that in the New Jerusalem. Governor William Bradford…
IRAQ IS BACK IN THE NEWS -- in a context that should pointedly remind us how completely American policy toward Saddam Hussein has collapsed. The immediate issue is U.N. Security Council debate over a resolution that would recreate some semblance of the old UNSCOM weapons inspection program in Iraq.…
Los Angeles
Too bad for Steve Forbes that presidential campaigns don't rise or fall according to the number of ludicrous press releases faxed: He would have an insurmountable lead by now. Indeed, on Dec. 9, THE SCRAPBOOK'S fax machine could hardly keep up with the whir of publicity from the Forbes campaign.…
It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
FIRST THERE WERE "miserly Jews." Then there were "sneaky Orientals." Now, thanks to the power of the media to transmit ideas across borders, another ethnic stereotype has entered the English language. Translated from the Russian, the hitherto unfamiliar "Chechen terrorist" is slowly becoming part…
The distinguished political scientist Everett Carll Ladd, an occasional contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, died last week. Professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut and head of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research there, Ladd was the author or editor of more than 20 books on…
There are conservatives, mostly among the followers of Russell Kirk, who hold a special place in their hearts for the old pulp fiction of Ray Bradbury. And there are others, mostly libertarians, who hold a special place in their hearts for the old pulp fiction of Robert Heinlein. But they may all…
LAST MONTH during an interview on Meet the Press, host Tim Russert asked George W. Bush if he planned to meet with the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay political group. "Oh, probably not," Bush replied. How come? asked Russert. "Well, because it creates a huge political scene," Bush said. "I mean, this…
The Gore campaign must have been relieved last week when the latest "Internet Al" gaffe failed to gain traction. According to the initial New York Times account, Gore had claimed credit for discovering one of the key environmental disaster stories of the 1970s, the dump leaking toxic waste under a…
Joseph McCarthy
Paris Drake is quite a piece of work. His criminal career started when he was 14, and he has been arrested 22 times in the intervening 18 years. Drake, a New York native who has no fixed address, has served time for drug-dealing, assault, weapons possession, larceny, and burglary. His prison…
The Natural Law
Correction of the week, from the Guardian (London): "In a letter, page 25, December 4, about a fashion spread in the Style pages of G2 the previous day, the author lamented the decision to show 'whey-faced bony child-women in dressing-up frocks whose bodices are tragically empty and dimpled.' This…
THE GAME OF "GOTCHA," as we practitioners of gotcha journalism call our craft (we call it a "craft" too), is getting way out of hand, people now tend to agree. The turn in the road seems to have come with George W. Bush's famous interview several weeks ago with Andy Hiller, a "television…
What fades in memory is not the fact, but the feeling. I can call up every detail of those Christmases of my childhood. A cold sparrow peering out across the lawn from under the snow-covered lilac hedge, while I sat at the window, waiting for my parents to wake. My father cocking his head to the…
New York
Dan Seligman notes in his monthly New York Post column that the new style manual of the New York Times seems to spell the end of one of the Times's favorite phrases for slamming Ronald Reagan, "voodoo economics" (which was actually coined by George Bush in 1980). THE SCRAPBOOK counts at least 250…
DURING THE COLD WAR, Soviet propagandists and Western "progressives" routinely charged that the United States had "political prisoners" of its own: "freedom fighters" locked up by the Justice Department for "crimes of conscience." The complaint has lost steam in recent years. There is no longer a…
Baltimore
Amsterdam
The Black Book of Communism
The last weekend in October, Harvard University played host to a group of university presidents -- five from the United States and seven from China. According to the account in the Harvard Crimson, the agenda consisted of "fundraising, academic planning, admissions, and computer technology."…
The Soul of Battle
Yesterday's mail brought a book from a friend -- not a close friend, but someone I like a lot -- and I was pleased to see that my name wasn't mentioned in his acknowledgments. Instead the book bears an inscription that states "Thanks very much for your help and good advice during the past couple of…
Correction of the week, from the Washington Post: "In yesterday's paper, reviewer Peter Carlson kvetched that Jackie Mason's performance at the Kennedy Center was too short. The schlemiel! He left when the lights came up -- the program said there would be no intermission -- and missed the second…
TWO MONTHS AGO IN BRUSSELS, I interviewed European Commission president Romano Prodi with a dozen other American journalists. "Sorry for the confusion," he said, as he hurried into his office five minutes late, "but we're getting ready for Seattle." And a puzzled, sidelong look went around the room…
"The last thing I ever wanted to be was the mayor of a city where I had to call out the National Guard, where I had to see tear gas in the streets," said [Seattle Mayor Paul] Schell, who pointed out that he was an anti-war protester during the 1960s.
Early this century, on New York's Lower East Side, where the Yiddish theater thrived and Shakespeare was an audience favorite, the playbill for a famous Second Avenue production read: "Hamlet, bei William Shakespeare, fartaytch un farbessert" -- Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, translated and…
In the early 1990s, the owners of the major league baseball teams held a meeting in Denver. Jerry McMorris, the owner of the new Colorado Rockies, decided to host a lunch not at a restaurant near the meeting site, but at a country club in suburban Castle Rock. It was a mistake. The men who own…
Gracanica, Kosovo
Earlier this year, James Milgram of Stanford University got curious about something called the Connected Mathematics Project (CMP), an intermediate-school math curriculum lately developed at Michigan State. So he carefully analyzed CMP's sequence of 24 student booklets. And in one of the…
In mid-November, after repeated attempts to ignore the scandal exploding on its own campus, Hillsdale College announced plans to hire a law firm "to guide" the school "in an investigation of reported incidents that have led to the retirement of former President George C. Roche, III."
Choosing Equality
A BUSH ADVISER was asked recently what's likely to happen in the months leading up to next November's presidential election. "Nothing," he said.
Capitalism, Democracy, and Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery
Buried in the New York Times the day after Thanksgiving was an amazing interview with Thomas Constantine, head of the Clinton administration's Drug Enforcement Administration from March 1994 until his retirement last summer. Despite being the nation's top drug-enforcement official for five years,…
SENATOR CHUCK HAGEL of Nebraska says he first got wind of the whisper campaign against John McCain while listening to columnist George Will on ABC's This Week on November 7. Will cited Republican senators as remarking on McCain's "personal pique" when opposed. It goes, said Will, "to the question…
Geneva
ON NOVEMBER 17, federal district judge Dean Whipple dismissed the Kansas City school desegregation lawsuit that had placed the city's schools under the control of federal judges for two decades. Not since boxer Roberto Duran held up his gloved hands and whimpered "No mas" had the world seen such an…
In George W. Bush's autobiography A Charge to Keep, which arrived in bookstores last week, there is a photograph that reveals far more about the governor than the thousands of words that come before and after it. It shows Bush in the front row of Arlington Stadium in Arlington, Texas, chatting with…
From the Nov. 22 edition of the Israeli daily Ma'ariv, translated for THE SCRAPBOOK by David Wurmser: In a speech to the Israel Policy Forum on Nov. 20, Israel's prime minister, Ehud Barak, tried to help the Clinton administration extricate itself from the embarrassment caused by Suha (Mrs. Yasser)…
WHEN WE THINK of China's problems with its minorities, we tend to think of Tibet. The spectacle of a picturesque and eccentric culture (the Tibetan official who met the 1904 Younghusband expedition bore the title "Grand Metaphysician") being stomped into the dust by a brutish and amoral despotism…
I have an unfortunate prejudice, one that living in the District of Columbia has only heightened: I dislike drivers with diplomatic license plates.
Reflections on a Ravaged Century by Robert Conquest
Correction of the week, from The Guardian (London): "An article about food in Ireland (Weekend, page 86, November 6) commended a guide-book for showing that 'industrial food production has never penetrated Ireland in the way it has mainland Britain.' This careless inclusion of the word 'mainland'…
Top aides to Republican presidential front-runner George W. Bush briefed senior House and Senate Republican staffers in a closed meeting Nov. 23 on the status of the campaign. They emphasized that senator John McCain does not pose a threat to the Texas governor in the New Hampshire primary. "The…
Dr. Seuss Goes to War
Conversations with God
Good news for George W. Bush. Turns out that a loose grasp of certain foreign policy details -- not knowing much about the Grecians, to be precise -- doesn't disqualify a fellow for the White House, after all.
Vienna, Austria
Once upon a time, not so long ago, Communist regimes dotted the globe and Americans knew what we thought of them. We disliked them. Because we saw ourselves as the heart and mind and muscle of liberty, we felt obliged, as a matter of principle, to resist the advance of these dictatorships -- and to…