70 articles
A memorable exchange on Hardball, brought to THE SCRAPBOOK's attention by the Media Research Center's CyberAlert; host Chris Matthews and USA Today's Tom Squitieri are discussing Hillary Clinton's appearance on David Letterman's show:
Last week, lawyers for 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez filed a motion in federal court to prevent the boy from being sent back to Cuba. It's an uphill battle.
IN THE PRESENT political silly season, no subject has generated more heat and less light than that of campaign financing. John McCain has practically made it the center of his drive for the presidency, and Al Gore and Bill Bradley have been close behind. The only public official who has…
AT THE BEGINNING of Christmas break, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst was reeling from a string of rapes perpetrated, possibly by the same man, in November. The police presence on campus grew as the university expanded its campus escort services, installed additional outdoor emergency…
A. J. Ayer, A Life, by Ben Rogers, Chatto & Windus, 402 pp., £20
Newt Gingrich sent out a press release the other day announcing the formation of a new "platform from which Newt Gingrich can communicate his vision for America." According to the release, this "solution-oriented institution," called the Committee for New American Leadership, will be "profoundly…
The Debt, What America Owes to Blacks, by Randall Robinson, Dutton, 288 pp., $ 23.95
Dr. Laura Schlessinger is getting her own TV show. The popular radio host, who boasts 20 million daily listeners and has another book coming out this spring, Parenting by Proxy, is developing a syndicated program with Paramount Television. Unless the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation…
There's a 73-year-old guy, born in East Harlem and named Salvatore Lombino, who writes under two different noms de plume. One of those names -- either Evan Hunter or Ed McBain -- is now his official name, only I can't remember which.
If you were to say to a physicist in 1899 that in 1999, a hundred years later . . . bombs of unimaginable power would threaten the species; . . . that millions of people would take to the air every hour in aircraft capable of taking off and landing without human touch; . . . that humankind would…
AT FIRST GLANCE, the Republican Leadership Council and the National Right to Life Committee have little in common. The RLC was formed in 1997 by a group of wealthy pro-choice Republicans who feared the GOP was being increasingly defined, in the words of their executive director, "by the actions of…
I OPENED THE New York Times the other day to discover that Jervis Anderson, "New Yorker Writer and Biographer of [Bayard] Rustin, is Dead at 67." I realized, with a stab of hopeless sadness, that we hadn't spoken for nearly three years -- a long time for someone I liked as much as I liked Jervis.…
JIMMY JOHNSON RESIGNED as head coach of the Miami Dolphins on Sunday, January 16, the day after the Jacksonville Jaguars beat his team like a rented mule, as they say in football circles. The final score was 62-7 and it wasn't that close. This was the second consecutive year in which the Dolphins…
Chinese authorities have arrested Yongyi Song, a Chinese researcher from Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, for the "crime" of collecting documents on the Cultural Revolution. In response, more than a hundred Sinologists have signed a letter of protest, complaining that Song's arrest jeopardizes…
THE CAMPAIGN SEASON is young, so I could still be proved wrong, but for the moment this much seems likely: History will record that the most revolting moment of the election year came during a recent debate among the Republican presidential candidates, held in the otherwise inoffensive city of…
A Vast Conspiracy, The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President, by Jeffrey Toobin, Random House, 422 pp., $ 25.95
ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, Ella Goldberg Wolfe died in Palo Alto, California. She was 103. Given her age and infirmities, the news was not a shock. Yet her passing is much more than obituary fodder. To scholars of 20th-century communism, and to a few ex-Communists, her death is a landmark, for Ella…
Barbra Streisand explains to TV Guide why she'll be supporting Al Gore this year: He's easy to brush off.
Andrew Cuomo, the secretary of housing and urban development, has been a busy man recently. In just the past six weeks, he's threatened to sue the gun industry, thundered against Fannie Mae for refusing to knuckle under to his demands for privileged information, and seized $ 60 million in New York…
Is crime dead as a national issue? Ever since the nation's crime rates began their historic surge in the 1960s, crime has been one of a handful of social problems that have reliably dominated presidential campaigns. The current contest, however, is shaping up as the first in 40 years in which crime…
Last fall, Al Gore launched his most ambitious reinvention yet: of his own persona. He changed the color of his suits, hired new campaign staff, moved his headquarters to Nashville, and sent his flacks out to spread the word that, after seven years of loyal servitude to Bill Clinton, he was now his…
To the Editor:
It looks like CNN won't be keeping Pat Buchanan's Crossfire chair warm for him.
Council Bluffs, Iowa
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
It's no secret that the Republican party has made "outreach" to minorities a priority. Last May, we reported on the Republican National Committee's Cinco de Mayo celebration, which included the hiring of three sombrero-wearing guitarristas to serenade partygoers in front of the party's Washington…
If you thought Major League Baseball overreacted when it sentenced John Rocker to the therapist's couch for bigotry, consider the treatment meted out to Vaclav Prospal, a forward for the Ottawa Senators, by the National Hockey League. During a game against the Montreal Canadiens in December,…
WHAT IS JOHN McCAIN UP TO? Until now, McCain has appealed to voters and wowed the press by presenting himself as something bolder and better than an ordinary politician: a man beholden to nobody, a risk-taker, a truth-teller. The tax plan he unveiled last week, however, is the work of quite a…
The world of the theater has ever been the source of great and wacky backstage stories, and one of the greatest and wackiest came about in 1937, when a twenty-two-year-old impresario named Orson Welles marched several thousand people waiting to see the premiere of a new musical twenty-one blocks…
When a writer's imagination fails him, and he runs out of things to write about, he often turns to writing about writing. This explains the large number of books that have been produced over the years about the New Yorker magazine, most of them by former contributors who have pretty much played out…
LAST SPRING, representative David Dreier of California, a George W. Bush supporter, telephoned Steve Forbes. Dreier is an old pal of Bush, having met him in 1978 when both attended a Republican training school for House candidates (both lost that year). Dreier, genial and gregarious, had come to…
I struck out Frank Thomas the other day. He was sitting on an 0-2 count when I blew a 58 mile-per-hour rocket past him. A little something I like to call my high heater. He never had a chance.
IF BILL BRADLEY'S CANDIDACY isn't finished off by a defeat in New Hampshire on February 1, it will be doomed by the five Gorefriendly Southern primaries on March 14 -- so goes the emerging conventional wisdom. But this misses the mark. For several reasons, Gore will find it difficult to deliver a…
"WHAT? Are we giving up?!" That's what one McCain loyalist moaned as the Republican tax debate raged in New Hampshire last week. His man, John McCain, had just proposed tax cuts far smaller than the ones George W. Bush has on the table. Moreover, McCain launched his program amidst a swell of…
A unique opportunity will arise next week for Congress to resolve some controversies involving Chinese military intelligence. General Xiong Guangkai, deputy chief of the general staff for the Chinese army, is coming to town Jan. 24 to meet with Pentagon officials. Xiong has been intimately involved…
When the Boston Globe broke the story of John McCain's phone call to the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of a campaign contributor, the media briefly savored the spectacle of America's chief campaign finance reformer caught in a little old-fashioned influence peddling. What they didn't…
TWO DAYS BEFORE Boris Yeltsin resigned on December 31, a retired captain in the Russian navy, Alexander Nikitin, was acquitted of espionage in a St. Petersburg courtroom and released from custody. Nikitin's alleged crime was passing information about Russian nuclear submarines to a Norwegian…
Each morning, when the New York Times arrives, after checking the obituaries, I go right for the letters to the editor. What I am looking for is a man or woman after my own heart: someone publicly announcing a heterodox opinion that is courageously, elegantly congruent with one of mine. I am…
The Iron Wall
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@weeklystandard.com.
IT MUST HAVE BEEN A SHOCK to people in communities from Maine to California to learn that the party chiefly responsible for contaminating their drinking water these past few years was none other than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Yet in overseeing a congressionally mandated program to…
ASKED AT THE JANUARY 5 debate in New Hampshire whether any of his positions had been misrepresented by Al Gore, Bill Bradley cited one "particularly offensive" example: Gore's criticism of the Bradley health care plan as racially insensitive to African Americans.
Last Tuesday, Jan. 4, the Clinton moving van (left) pulled up in Chappaqua, N.Y., at the new official residence of Hillary Clinton, Senate candidate, bringing to an end the "buy one, get one free" era. As is customary with the Clintons, the event was heavily spun. Everyone officially referred to it…
John Rocker, meet Donna Brazile. Why not? The two have much in common -- the same intellectual expansiveness, the same tolerance for diversity of views, the same willingness, as they might say, to "reach out."
In the mad dash leftwards that the race for the Democratic nomination has become, Al Gore is proving to be a hard man to beat. A few weeks ago, he promised to overturn his own administration's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy to permit open homosexuality in the military. When Bill Bradley matched…
Conversations with Wilder
This was no doubt bound to happen once THE SCRAPBOOK started making fun of corrections in other publications: An article in our most recent issue ("Three Cheers for Russian Democracy," January 3/January 10, 2000) got badly scrambled. The piece can be read in its entirety on THE WEEKLY STANDARD's…
Aiding Democracy Abroad
Where are they when they're needed, all of our allegedly pro-family politicians? Two weeks ago, the Vermont supreme court handed down the incredible ruling that marriage violated the state's 1793 constitution. With that decision, the long-simmering theoretical argument over rights for homosexuals…
Campaign finance reform is one of the issues that the Democrats will seek to capitalize on in 2000, targeting Republicans for resisting any change. It's very much like the tax issue. If the Republicans don't have an alternative to present, they play into the Democrats' hands.
THE INDISPENSABLE Michael Kelly in a recent column deplores the silence of the U.S. government in the face of a massive ethnic cleansing currently under way in Kosovo, this time "conducted by the Albanians against their ethnic Serb, Croatian, Roma and Muslim Slavic neighbors." I certainly share…
With her language dial set to "Academic-ese," Ernestine Schlant Bradley, wife of Bill, recently explained why you shouldn't go by first impressions: "You can't judge a text by a first reading." Yes, and remember also to never deconstruct a book by its cover.
What exactly had happened? This was the big question on December 20, when the Vermont supreme court issued its long-awaited ruling on same-sex "marriage" in Baker v. State. Three same-sex couples had claimed that Vermont's marriage law violated the Vermont constitution. The court did not rule on…
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
BILL BRADLEY'S PROPOSAL for replacing Medicaid with tax credits for the private purchase of health insurance drew a furious attack from A1 Gore, but it deserves a closer look. Tax credits have two substantial advantages as an approach to health coverage: They break the arbitrary link between…
HOW THE SCRAPBOOK wishes it had never heard about the latest controversy involving Andrew Sullivan. But, alas, he made it impossible to ignore -- starting the whole damn thing himself, after all. And right there in the New York Times.
The convention of selecting a man of the year, decade, or century is one of the more annoying features of the modern age. But one has to live in one's time. And in this case, we are happy to observe the convention, because it offers us the occasion to honor what deserves to be honored, and to…
Over the past two years voters in seven states and the District of Columbia passed initiatives favoring medical marijuana or decriminalization of marijuana generally and treating drug offenses as a health issue rather than a law enforcement issue. Recently, a wide array of groups, including the…
Back in early November, when George W. Bush was stumbling over the names of South Asian political leaders, and the New Yorker had just published Bush's Yale grades and SAT scores, the Gore campaign enjoyed a little snicker at Bush's expense: "I guess we know that 'C' at Yale was a gentleman's 'C,'"…
Five Days in London
IN THE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL debate on December 13, George W. Bush asked John McCain why he hadn't proposed a tax cut for single moms with two kids making $ 40,000 a year. McCain responded that his plan to extend the 15 percent income tax bracket -- all the way to $ 70,000 -- would "go a long way…
Janet Reno told Congress that the Justice Department didn't approve FBI wiretaps of suspect nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee because Lee by reputation was pro-Taiwan and anti-Communist: "How are you [a spy for China] if you are clearly working with the Taiwanese government on matters that apparently…
The correction of the week is actually a Dec. 16 Editor's Note in the New York Times, which read in part:
In the forgotten 1979 film Natural Enemies, the narrator informs the audience, "My life stretched out before me like a bad movie" -- to which the critic Renata Adler responded, "It is precisely the sort of line no author should attempt." Frank Darabont, the writer and director of The Green Mile,…
Hillary's Choice
HOW SEVERE IS THE HEALTH care crisis? I'll tell you, said Al Gore during a speech at a New Hampshire hospital recently. Thanks to the greed and unchecked power of the pharmaceutical industry, many Americans must leave the country in order to find affordable life-sustaining drugs. "Does anybody here…
On a cold, drizzly night in November 1989, rumors flew in East Berlin that the Brandenburg Gate might be opened. People started to gather, hoping to be among the first to cross over to the West. Wading into the crowd, I tried to find out, with my limited German, what freedom meant to them. I asked,…
THE DECEMBER 19 Russian parliamentary elections marked a remarkable shift to the center-right -- toward acceptance of capitalism and market reforms -- across virtually the entire Russian political spectrum. It broke the Communists' controlling plurality in the Duma, brought forth a new generation…
"He understood that reality is more than the facts before you; it's also how you feel about them, how you react to them, what your attitude is." That was one of President Clinton's reasons for choosing Franklin Roosevelt as his "man of the century," and a mighty revealing reason it is, too. After…
Flying down to Texas the other day, I sat beside a man who pilots helicopters for lumber operations in the West. He'd learned to fly in the Army, long ago, and had hundreds of combat missions in Vietnam under his belt. When I told him I was on my way to Kingsville to watch my son Tom graduate from…