72 articles
EARTH DAY IS UPON US, and by way of celebration the publisher of Al Gore's 1992 self-styled "personal journey . . . in search of a true understanding of the global ecological crisis" has decided to reissue an unchanged version of the book. This decision should make George W. Bush a lot happier than…
Stanford, Kentucky
Perhaps the most important piece of legislation Congress will consider this year came before a House subcommittee last week. We're referring, of course, to the repeal of the infamous 1992 law mandating that all new toilet fixtures in America use no more than a stingy 1.6 gallons per flush -- less…
WILLIAM SCHNEIDER couldn't believe his eyes. The CNN commentator and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute felt there must be something wrong with a recent CNN poll. It showed Americans are evenly divided on whether George W. Bush, who doesn't talk much about guns, or Al Gore, who has made…
The Operator
Bad news for the Gore campaign. For months, campaign advisers have had the vice president moving his headquarters from Washington to Nashville, moving from dark suits to light suits, moving from loafers to cowboy boots. But despite all the retooling (or perhaps because of it) 50 percent of voters,…
It's easy to ridicule Bible movies -- and fun, too, because in a sense, they're all blasphemous and silly. The piety is phony, and the titillation and violence hypocritical. The grandiloquent dialogue blended with modern slang is the stuff of high camp, and the miracles glorify cinematic technology…
Some Christians prepare for Easter by taking on a special penance for Lent. Me, I've been watching Jesus movies for what seems forty days and forty nights.
Miami
Mitrovica, Kosovo
Last week's Washington Post interview with independent counsel Robert Ray has occasioned a torrent of chatter: about Ray's active consideration of criminal charges against Bill Clinton once he leaves office, about the propriety of such charges, about the possibility that Al Gore might pardon his…
When I was first married and looking for a place to live, my father said, "Get as much house as you can, because you're going to be in it for a lot longer than you think."
On April 26, the Supreme Court will be told that one of America's premier character-building organizations, the Boy Scouts of America, has drifted dangerously into the woods of bigotry. By expelling an openly gay scoutmaster in New Jersey, the Scouts allegedly violated state anti-discrimination…
The controversial 24-part series Cold War, produced by CNN, is now being foisted on classrooms across America thanks to the self-interested philanthropy of CNN honcho Ted Turner and his turnerlearning.com. While students will learn some important things about the Berlin airlift and the Prague…
Columbine may matter a lot politically, as attested to by the frenzy to exploit the anniversary of that day when two students slaughtered 12 classmates and a teacher, injuring 23 others. Yet the real lesson of Columbine is that very few people care enough about the horrible events of April 20,…
Q: What is the difference between the English and American peoples?
At least we know why Bill Clinton and Al Gore are desperate for a quick vote on granting permanent normal trade status to China. Last week, big labor came to town to protest the pending deal with China. The labor movement held an impressive rally of over 10,000 people on Capitol Hill, and then sent…
Last week, attorney general Janet Reno demanded that Lazaro Gonzalez deliver his great-nephew Elian to Elian's father Juan Miguel, now holed up in the diplomatic residence of the Cuban mission outside Washington. Lazaro did not knuckle under. Had he done so, the boy would now be in Cuba, the…
Every journalist from the lowliest wire-service stringer to the New York Times's William Safire in a recent "On Language" column has by now noticed Al Gore's favorite term of abuse for any George W. Bush initiative: "risky scheme." The phrase was a favorite of Gore and Clinton in their 1996…
In mid-June 1994, Pennsylvania's Democratic governor, Robert Casey, was attempting to marshall support for a welfare-reform package in the state House of Representatives. Those House Democrats who supported the reform had been repeatedly thwarted by fellow Democrat Dwight Evans, chairman of the…
IN THE SPRING OF 1998, the fax machines at certain University of California campuses must have worked late into the night. Humming away, they pumped out press releases designed to create the impression of a racial crisis in higher education -- and they were quite effective in doing so. "Acceptance…
At some point in the past few years, a screenwriter named Stuart Blumberg went to a meeting with Hollywood bigwigs and delivered a pitch that went something like this: "See, there's this priest and this rabbi who want to bring religion to the people -- yeah, I know, boooring -- but see, they're…
The Real American Dream
Surprise! The Clinton Justice Department will not be prosecuting Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon for violating the federal Privacy Act, even though he did. Bacon approved the release of Linda Tripp's personnel information to New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, thereby causing embarrassment to Tripp at…
FRIENDS OF CHINA both inside and outside the Clinton administration are quick to assert that China's accession to the World Trade Organization will also mean WTO membership for Taiwan, as if the two actions were inevitably linked. But this is wishful thinking. China has acted for years to keep…
IT'S SATURDAY AFTERNOON at the Feminist Expo 2000, and generational change is in the air. Seven thousand women -- mostly young, mostly pierced, and mostly earnest -- have gathered in the cavernous main hall of Baltimore's Convention Center. Blue and purple coiffures nod in nervous anticipation of…
A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes
In the category of you-heard-it-here-first: The State Department has announced it is charging Lockheed Martin with violating the Arms Export Control Act by providing Chinese companies with information on satellite rocket technology that could be used to improve ballistic missile capabilities.…
Baseball movies are seldom about baseball. For American cinema, baseball is a metaphor for something about the human condition: manhood, mortality, love, justice, reconciliation, second chances, dignity in defeat, the mystery of compassion, the value of friendship, simple grace, and impossible…
The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., is one of the finer history museums in the country, so naturally the people in charge are trying to muck it up. Unlike the Museum of American History, which has become a breeding ground for fashionable multicultural grievances, the Portrait Gallery…
THE LATEST SKIRMISH in the struggle for the soul of the Episcopal Church in the United States is over the consecration on January 29 of two American priests as bishops without dioceses to serve as missionaries to the United States. Odder still, the two were consecrated at St. Andrew's Cathedral in…
ABBA EBAN, the Israeli diplomat, used to skewer the Palestinians by saying they "never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity." The same could be said about George W. Bush's presidential campaign, at least as it coasts through the weeks before the Republican convention at the end of July.
DURING AN APRIL 4 press conference in the Capitol, Dick Armey, the House majority leader, was asked whether Congress should get involved in the dispute over Elian Gonzalez. "I think Congress has done a good job of restraining itself," replied Armey. "While we still feel some sort of residual…
In 1975, the National Council of Churches, an organization of about 30 mainline religious denominations, published an informational pamphlet entitled Cuba: People-Questions. Written in perfect irony-free Albanian-farm-report prose, the pamphlet offers church members a short history of U.S.-Cuban…
"Are you sitting down?" the mechanic asked, and I knew I was in trouble. I chuckled nervously and told him to shoot. By the time he took a breath, the bill to get my old Buick running again was over $ 4,000, and I suddenly felt like someone considering whether to take a close relative off life…
One of the first news photos of Juan Miguel Gonzalez arriving at Dulles International Airport to reclaim his son Elian showed him in mid-stride, so you could see the soles of his shoes. They were unmarred by any contact with pavement; they'd obviously been in a box when the plane took off from…
THE AGE WHEN politicians and journalists publicly denounced entire ethnic groups as "a bunch of wackos" or "crazies" or possessing a "mob" mentality is long gone, right? Not if the group in question is Cuban-Americans. It's been open season on Cuban-Americans ever since they took the lead in trying…
ALMOST SINGLE-HANDED, senator John McCain has revived the concept of personal honor as both the basis of a candidacy for president and the core of a governing philosophy. As his notable success in several winter primaries recedes into the past, McCainism may prove to have been a short-lived…
When last the world heard from Robert Parry, the formerly half-respectable journalist (Newsweek, Frontline) was trumpeting his discovery of the "October Surprise," an alleged mega-conspiracy by which Republican greybeards bribed the Iranian mullahs to delay release of their U.S. embassy captives…
The English novelist Anthony Powell (pronounced "pole"), best known for his 12-volume masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time, died last Tuesday at 94. The New York Times devoted generous space to his obituary as well as a photo of the author at his home but, as Arnold Beichman points out, failed…
We'll say it again: The rush to send Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba is wrong. The 6-year-old rafter, rescued in the Straits of Florida last November, deserves at least a full hearing in an appropriate court before anyone considers allowing his father to take him back to the dictatorship his mother…
New York
Miami, March 30
Fasten your seatbelt, kiddo, we're going over a bumpy bit of language, another little pot-hole on the rocky road of thought, this puppy yclept -- no hyphen, please -- "multitasker." The word is popping up of late with a fair regularity in that thesaurus of faux pas, that ample warehouse of wretched…
Abraham Lincoln
When Robert Swope, a senior at Georgetown University, submitted his regular column to the school newspaper last week criticizing the campus production of The Vagina Monologues, the editors of the Hoya were swift in rejecting it. Why? They thought the columnist's repeated attacks on the Women's…
Peepshow
Moscow
A History of Shakespeare on Screen
Further evidence that the Clinton administration's propitiation of China is creating a more Beijing-like Washington rather than the other way round: Reporter John Berlau of Investor's Business Daily tried unsuccessfully to attend a meeting last week at the Department of Housing and Urban…
Jerusalem
Trent Lott surprised a lot of people last week on Meet the Press with his Oscar pick. Asked by Tim Russert, "Who's going to win the Oscars?" Lott replied, "Well, I saw The Cider House Rules. I enjoyed that tremendously. . . . It was great. Best movie."
ALL OF US HERE in the vast media-politico-windbaggio-academic complex are feeling blue these days, and have been at least since early March, when it became clear that the presidential campaign had entered a period of quiescence from which it would not emerge for many months. If ever. Within the…
WHEN A STATE COURT overturned Florida's eight-month-old school-choice program earlier this month, both sides reacted with emotion. It was "probably the worst day of our lives," said Tracy Richardson, mother of one of the 53 children who had received state "opportunity scholarships" to attend…
WHEN GEORGE W. BUSH aired a TV ad in mid-March criticizing "Al Gore and Bill Clinton" on education, he had an obvious purpose in mind and one not so obvious. The obvious aim was to assert himself on education, normally thought of as an issue aiding Democrats. Less obviously, Bush and his chief…
On March 16, as the people of Taiwan were preparing to make history by turning out the ruling Nationalist party in the most momentous election in the 5,000-year history of the Chinese people, and as the Chinese rulers in Beijing were thundering ever more ominous threats of war should the Taiwanese…
Creating Equal
Taipei
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.
When reporters for the Washington Post interviewed George W. Bush last week, they found him untalkative about whom he might pick as his vice presidential running mate. THE SCRAPBOOK didn't have this problem at all. On the contrary, Bush yakked at length about a number of Republican bigwigs…
Shortly after 3 A.M. on March 11, Officer Joseph Simonik of Nashville's Metro police department observed a car near the intersection of Charlotte Pike and Hillwood traveling 85 miles per hour in a 40 mile-per-hour zone.
The case of James H. Armstrong, M.D. v. The State of Montana should have been merely a skirmish in the never-ending national struggle over abortion. Instead, relying on the reasoning of certain "experts" in the moral choices surrounding health care, the Montana Supreme Court issued in October 1999…
Can you really negotiate peace, when you teach your children that the other side is the devil incarnate? This is a question President Clinton no doubt neglected to ask Syria's president Hafez al-Assad when they met in Geneva on Sunday March 26, but it certainly would have been appropriate.
JOHN MCCAIN RETURNED TO Washington last week from his post-campaign vacation in Bora-Bora. His first appearances on Capitol Hill had the kind of fanfare that greeted Elvis when he returned from Germany. McCain is a rock star, and, to their chagrin, his Senate colleagues are now like 99 roadies.…
For the dwindling band of folks who doubt the existence of liberal bias in the media, there's fresh evidence they have their heads in the sand. Remember when John McCain tossed hand grenades at George W. Bush in the Republican presidential primaries? Every bit of criticism was lovingly reported, to…
Las Vegas
The legacy of Evelyn Waugh is curiously divided. Readers of serious fiction revere his masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited, popularized by a faithful BBC television movie. Wordsmiths, particularly those with a taste for the put-down, credit him as one of the few twentieth-century writers to have…
To secure the promised wonders of the biotech future -- the miracle cures and abundant, nutritious foods -- but to do so responsibly and ethically, politicians and scientists have put in place a web of laws and regulations intended to check the hubris of researchers and the greed of entrepreneurs.…
Hard as I might try, I'll never manage to forget my first collegiate spring break, one March too many years ago. Friends asked me to join them in Jamaica, and having just endured my first Connecticut winter, I pounced at the invitation. But by the time we arrived, I wasn't so sanguine about the…
As John Podhoretz noted in last week's cover story on The West Wing, creator Aaron Sorkin mysteriously claims his show is not liberal, even though every political debate it stages is won by liberals. Which liberals at least recognize, even if Sorkin does not. The March 23 Daily Variety reports:…
The one thing American moviegoers are likely to know about the great French director Eric Rohmer, who turns eighty this month, is Gene Hackman's dismissive comment in Arthur Penn's 1975 film Night Moves. In turning down an invitation from his wife to go see My Night at Maud's, Rohmer's notoriously…