67 articles
There was a jaw-dropping report last week on NBC News about a new disease called -- brace yourselves -- "sudden wealth syndrome." THE SCRAPBOOK'S first impression was that some sitcom writer had penetrated the news division. Here's the transcript:
Reports that the trade-at-any-price business lobby is going to succeed in bulldozing China's permanent trade status through Congress may have been exaggerated. For one thing, China's own behavior is simply too egregious to hide under the business roundtable. In addition to threatening war with…
"Animal rights activists are urging college students this week to guzzle beer to save cows from the 'cruelty' of being milked." (Washington Times, March 13.)
IS THERE A SINGLE PRISON in the United States that hasn't been harassed by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)? Probably not. Ever since the Supreme Court decided its first ADA case, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections v. Yeskey, in June 1998, inmate complaints inspired by the act have…
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.
At some point in this year's presidential campaign, American voters may well be invited to consider a curious, four-minute snippet of videotape, narrated in Chinese and recorded April 29, 1996, in Los Angeles's Hacienda Heights. It opens with a high school marching band straight out of The Music…
RARELY DOES President Clinton encounter a political actor as demagogic as he is, so you could say he finally met the enemy he deserves in his fight with the National Rifle Association. The NRA fired first last week with a TV ad in which president Charlton Heston called on the president to stop…
If there's one breed I can't stomach, it's those who appropriate credit for the accomplishments of others. Not because it's immoral -- though it is. But because I can appreciate how hard-fought accomplishment comes, as one who conceived the Human Genome Project, endured five-and-a-half years in the…
Djakovica, Kosovo
FRANKLIN, NEW HAMPSHIRE -- JANUARY 30
Every spring, like the tulips and the swallows, come the Oscars -- with their relentless press coverage, hype, predictions, film clips, huge audiences around the world waiting for the television broadcast of the awards ceremony, and, almost always, a good bit of controversy.
When secretary of state Madeleine Albright apologized to Iran last week for America's part in aiding a 1953 Iranian coup, she was merely echoing a popular theme of President Clinton and his administration. It's the gratuitous, usually wrongheaded apology that deals with some alleged sin of a…
New versions of Richard Wagner's operas are always epochal, if only because of the effort it takes to mount them. Particularly rare are productions of the complete four-opera cycle of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung. But this spring, the Metropolitan Opera in New York presents the entire Ring, and…
Of all those whom Bill Clinton has seduced and abandoned and then seduced and abandoned and then seduced and abandoned again -- always with the promise of another seduction -- the Hollywood elite has been almost as loyal as Monica was, and with about as much to show for it. Now Hollywood has taken…
The Limits of Privacy
THE SCRAPBOOK can think of several reasons why a person might want to march in New York's St. Patrick's Day parade. But bringing peace to Northern Ireland isn't one of them. Not unless you're Hillary Clinton, running a tin-eared campaign for Senate in New York. "I have worked very hard over the…
SEEMS TIME FOR A BREATHER. By sewing up their respective nominations in the first days of March, vice president Al Gore and Texas governor George W. Bush have booked themselves the longest general election campaign in American history. It's eight months until November, and the candidates have…
Fred Barnes reported last week that Bob Dole had declined to meet with Cardinal O'Connor of New York during the 1996 presidential campaign ("George W. Bush's Catholic Problem"). Mr. Dole informs us that he did in fact meet with O'Connor.
There was an uptick in the unemployment rate last week, which sent stock prices tumbling. Well, maybe I don't have that exactly right. I may have it backward -- there might have been a down-tick in the unemployment rate last week, which sent stock prices soaring. In any case, it was one or the…
Jonathan Yegge spent months preparing his performance project for a class in the New Genres Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. Then, Jan. 25, the big day arrived. And everything went just as Yegge had planned. He asked another student to volunteer as his assistant. He secured that…
C-SPAN HAS JUST RELEASED its rankings of American presidents. Several dozen notable historians and professional observers of the presidency were surveyed and asked to rank the presidents in 10 different categories. Most of the categories are somewhat subjective, such as "moral authority" and…
Home Comforts
With the price of gasoline in some parts of the country headed towards $ 2 a gallon this summer, the hotel industry worried that such prices will deter Americans from piling into their SUVs for a family vacation, the airline industry hiking fares to cover the rising cost of jet fuel, and truckers…
Hard Green
New York
The effort to gut U.S. export controls that was detailed on this page three weeks ago has been put on hold, thanks to senators Fred Thompson, Jesse Helms, John Warner, Richard Shelby, Jon Kyl, and Pat Roberts -- chairmen of key national security committees and subcommittees. As currently drafted,…
IN THIS HIGH SEASON of political battles, three different wars have gone on. There was the faux contest on the Democrats' side, where Al Gore mopped up Bill Bradley. There was the battle royal on the Republicans' side, where John McCain and George W. Bush locked antlers. And there has been, under…
THE MAN TO WATCH NOW is George W. Bush, not John McCain. He starts the eight-month presidential campaign against Al Gore on a note of uncertainty: McCain may or may not become a full-throated Bush supporter. So Gore is a slight favorite at the outset. But Bush has it within his power to seize…
The Trouble with Principle
An article in the March 10 Chronicle of Higher Education takes THE WEEKLY STANDARD to task for our Nov. 1 editorial that suggested Princeton University professor Peter Singer was suffering from "megalomania" for holding "a vision of himself in which the gigantic figure of Peter Singer sits across…
"THE ONLY THING vice presidents can do is hurt you." So says Democratic senator Joe Biden when asked whom Al Gore should select to be his running mate. Biden is right, with one big exception: Gore, who was a major asset to Bill Clinton in 1992.
President Clinton was right when he said last Wednesday that the decision to grant China permanent most-favored-nation trading status will have a historic significance equal to Richard Nixon's opening to China and Jimmy Carter's normalization of relations. But if that's true, why is the president…
Did'ja ever wonder what happens to pompous curmudgeons who get paid millions of dollars to sound off in "humor" segments on TV news-magazine shows for several decades after they've ceased being funny? Well, if you're Andy Rooney, you get invited to New York's Overseas Press Club of America, there…
Though still in its early stages, the Washington Scholarship Fund, a pioneering program of private assistance to enable poor children in Washington, D.C., to attend private schools, has received its first outside assessment. A new report from Harvard University's Program on Education Policy and…
LAST MONTH'S DEBATE at the Apollo Theater in Harlem remains one of the more ill-covered campaign events, not least because the press failed to notice that, on a key policy question, Al Gore moved to the left of not only Bill Bradley but also Bill Clinton. The moment came early in the debate after a…
Most moviegoers -- if they remember him at all -- picture Buster Keaton as an absurd, slapstick clown, a charming but somewhat inferior rival to Charlie Chaplin from the days of silent film. And most movie critics -- if they write of him at all -- present Keaton as a tormented genius, abused by his…
I went to the University of Chicago, which is considered, as the world reckons these things, a fairly serious place. Heavy, grey, false yet nevertheless massively impressive Gothic architecture. First atom split in a handball court by Enrico Fermi & Co. Enough Nobel prize winners to field a weak…
It wasn't supposed to be this way. This was to have been the year when our political controversies over U.S. engagement with China were finally put to sleep. So, at least, was the hopeful orthodoxy in American business and diplomatic circles. As recently as a few weeks ago.
LAST SEPTEMBER, 23 Catholics trekked to Austin, Texas, for two hours of conversation with Gov. George W. Bush. The group included Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, Father Robert A. Sirico of the Acton Institute, and Deal Hudson, editor of Crisis, the conservative Catholic magazine. Few were…
The National Interest is looking for an assistant editor. College graduates with an interest in international affairs, a strong command of the English language, computer/Internet skills, and preferably some editorial experience should send a resume and two brief writing samples to: Managing Editor,…
Correction of the week, from the Feb. 19 International Herald Tribune: "An article in some editions Friday about a lawsuit in Israel filed by the heirs of Charlie Chaplin misstated Woody Allen's assessment of the number of comic geniuses of the past century. In addition to Chaplin and W. C. Fields,…
Inventing Al Gore
WHEN THE SOVIET UNION went under, Russian historians and citizens' movements began to confront Communist crimes. Mass graves were unearthed. New documents pointing to Lenin's culpability were uncovered. In Western Europe, as well, the recent publication of The Black Book of Communism and Francois…
Bob Jones University last week clarified its reasons for forbidding interracial dating:
Salisbury
The 2000 presidential campaign is surprising analysts by breaking the seemingly ironclad rules of the game, and many of its oddities are traceable to one pervasive fact: The American people hold a bifurcated view of the Clinton presidency. Since early 1998, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted,…
There aren't many concepts as beloved by conservatives as the great economist Joseph Schumpeter's notion of creative destruction. Capitalism is superior to socialism because it is dynamic: Old forms and structures have to change or give way -- or be destroyed -- so new ones can prosper. Government…
The Kansas City Star made a huge splash in late January with an exclusive survey of Catholic priests, purporting to show an epidemic of AIDS cutting a swath through the clergy, which presumably makes a mockery of the church's practice of priestly celibacy. Priests, of course, like all people,…
"CAN YOU CALL your campaign a hostile takeover of the Republican party?" one of the boys on the bus asked John McCain in South Carolina. Yes, said the candidate cheerfully, adding that the party would learn to love it later on.
Grand Rapids, Mich.
Harlem, New York
For many years now, the state of Hawaii has authorized its "Office of Hawaiian Affairs" (OHA) to disburse substantial sums of money -- derived in part from general tax revenue -- exclusively for the benefit of people who trace their ancestry to the pre-1778 inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands.…
It's now three months since little Elian Gonzalez was discovered lashed to an inner tube three miles off the Florida coast, after a crossing in which his mother and 10 other Cuban rafters died while attempting to reach the United States. In recent days, the case has begun to take on the bizarre…
According to a Newsweek story, campaigns for student office in our nation's colleges and universities have gotten divisive, corrupt, and occasionally violent. Ballot-stuffing took place at Duke University; a fake e-mail accusing some candidates of being racist and homophobic circulated at UCLA; and…
The Department of Housing and Urban Development has reported that residents of public housing are more than twice as likely to be affected by gun violence as the population nationwide. You might think this is an indictment of public housing, but, no, it's part of HUD's branching out into gun…
C-SPAN recently surveyed 58 American historians and asked them to rank the 41 presidents in each of 10 categories of "presidential leadership." As has been widely reported, Bill Clinton, overall, finished right in the middle of the pack at number 21. As has been even more widely reported, Clinton…
Phoenix, Ariz.
JOHN MCCAIN needs Republican voters. His ability to attract independents and Democrats produced smashing victories over George W. Bush in New Hampshire and Michigan. But now he faces primaries in which either crossover voters are not allowed or there's a competing Democratic primary likely to draw…
Once Upon a Time in New York
Constitutional Interpretation
New York
Here in Washington, up Connecticut Avenue, past Dupont Circle, there's a business with a sign that reads "Academy for Educational Development." As near as I can figure, that means it's the School for School School, and every time we drive by, my wife and I invent parallel names we'd like to see:…
The fight over the permanent extension of most-favored-nation trading status to China is likely to be one of the hardest- fought congressional battles of 2000. Last week, the administration launched a high-profile campaign in favor of MFN for China; labor is vigorously countering. But for all the…
Knights of the Brush
Germany, the self-proclaimed "land of poets and thinkers," has been doing a lot of thinking lately about German poetry -- and German novels, and German monographs, and the whole of German literature. As the workhorse of modern Teutonic letters, Gunter Grass, put it: The German writer appears to be…
ON MARCH 7, the day of the presidential primary in California, Golden State voters will approve or reject Proposition 22, an initiative that contains just 14 words: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."