69 articles
ROSIE O'DONNELL IS RIGHT: It is a shocking fact that guns kill people. But if we are concerned about people getting killed, we must realize that mere gun control will not put an end to tragic violence. During the past 300 centuries millions of people have died because of the negligent possession of…
WHEN OREGON legalized assisted suicide in 1994, Ron Wyden claimed to oppose allowing doctors to prescribe drugs for terminally ill patients to use in suicide. Now a Democratic senator from Oregon, Wyden has a chance to prove he meant what he said by supporting the Pain Relief Promotion Act,…
JOHN SHELBY SPONG, recently retired Episcopal bishop of Newark, is not letting the grass grow under his feet.
Pop quiz. Who said the following?
Last Thursday, George W. Bush sent a semi-public letter to 450 Republican leaders around the country, the ostensible purpose of which was to solicit advice about a running mate. But it turns out Bush already knows for sure whom he'd most like to choose: Colin Powell. Trouble is, Bush also knows for…
"I THINK it's his school uniform," said Justice Department spokesperson Carole Florman of the white sailor shirt and blue scarf Elian Gonzalez appeared in at Wye Plantation last week. The editors of Cuba's government newspaper Granma recognized Elian's outfit, and that's why they ran five pictures…
Representative Rick Lazio lacks the stature of New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, but he may have a slightly better chance of beating Hillary Rodham Clinton in the New York Senate race. No, really.
Since Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit appeared in 1992, Al Gore's environmental manifesto has been the source of considerable praise -- and considerable ridicule. Time hailed it as "a labor of statesmanship" and Bill Moyers praised it as "a powerful summons for the politics of…
When contemplating all the perks journalism offers, I'm ashamed to complain. Free books, plentiful office supplies, and throngs of eager groupies are but a few of the spoils that come from working at a modest-circulation political opinion magazine. Still, choosing one lifestyle necessitates…
I ATTENDED A PARTY once in Washington, and among the guests was a fellow sporting a small lapel pin in the shape of a saxophone. I had to laugh, if only to myself.
To the left is reproduced an actual fund-raising appeal made to actual graduates of Harvard Law School on behalf of an actual tribute planned for the nation's actual attorney general, Janet Reno. They will call it the Che Guevara Young Pioneer Scholarship, we trust.
FOR YOUR AVERAGE "mild-mannered suburban mom," as CBS dubbed her last fall, Donna Dees-Thomases sure knows how to throw a party. There are several tens of thousands of protesters on the national Mall this Mother's Day for the Million Mom March she has organized (the exact figure will be endlessly…
During the decade since the Cold War ended, the United States has searched in vain for a new national strategy. The Pentagon has undergone a Base Force review, a Bottom-Up review, a review of service roles and missions, and an independent National Defense Panel review. At the moment it is readying…
When a state routinely flouts international norms, menaces its neighbors, and inveighs against the United States, how should American policymakers respond? On this question, the foreign affairs "realists," commerce-minded liberals, and captains of industry who presently guide U.S. foreign policy…
THE Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) sailed through Congress with overwhelming majorities in 1994. Who could oppose a federal statute supposed to counter misogynist violence?
Orlando, Florida
"By this time next year we shall know whether the policy of appeasement has appeased, or whether it has only stimulated a more ferocious appetite."
The most improbable story of the twentieth century is the return of the Jews to sovereignty in their original homeland. The establishment of a Jewish state after two thousand years of dispersion and powerlessness is an idea that just a hundred years ago, at the founding of the Zionist movement,…
Pittsburgh
GEORGE BUSH has opened up a startling 8 point lead over Al Gore, according to the latest Los Angeles Times poll, and the conventional view is that he's built this post-primary advantage by moving to the center. But that's not quite right. Over the past month Bush has moved to the center and the…
No, we're not referring to Elian (who is busy on the Democratic party fund-raising circuit these days), but to Mario Miguel Chaoui, member of a college baseball delegation from Cuba, who decided two weeks ago at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport that he would much rather stay here in America than…
A truism about the Washington press corps is the Barone Rule, enunciated in this magazine by columnist Michael Barone. It says the press isn't reliably pro-Democrat, but can be counted on to be anti-Republican. Once in a blue moon, however, there's an exception, and last week House Democratic…
According to a May 8 report in the New York Times, Princeton University's prestigious Chinese language program at Beijing Normal University was attacked by a Chinese academic for "infiltrating American ideology into Chinese Language teaching." As the Times recounted it, "the Princeton-based authors…
Conservative critics of "diversity" policies have argued for years that the word is simply a euphemism for a policy of quotas -- i.e., favoritism on the basis of sex or race -- whose beneficiaries receive jobs or opportunities for which they are otherwise unqualified. Do defenders of diversity…
BY URGING PRICE CONTROLS on prescription drugs, killing Medicare reform, and then proposing a universal drug benefit for senior citizens, congressional Democrats and the Clinton administration have launched a war against drug companies that they hope will help them regain control of Congress and…
Here's good news: The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has just voted 11-0 to ban discrimination against fat people. The District of Columbia had already adopted such a law -- no Ted Kennedy jokes, please! -- and so had the state of Michigan, as well it should. I was just in Michigan, and at…
IF ANYONE WAS EXPECTED to cause fits for the House Republican leadership, it wasn't Pat Toomey. A freshman congressman from Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, Toomey is as straight-laced as the coal-belt district he represents. An Eagle Scout who became an investment banker, Toomey now owns a chain of…
A couple of months ago, House majority whip Tom DeLay gave a powerful speech decrying the Clinton administration's appeasement of China, and making a strong case for a much tougher policy toward Beijing. Now, the same Tom DeLay is working night and day to help Clinton cement his "legacy" by passing…
The first-ever global conference of democratic countries, a gathering hosted by the Polish government and the United States, is scheduled for Warsaw at the end of June. Foreign ministers from democratic countries around the globe will gather there to discuss strengthening democratic institutions…
Just when you thought every conceivable group with a grievance had already mobilized itself and rented offices on K Street, a new one is threatening to rumble.
In the Shadow of the Garrison State
Way Out There in the Blue
Hillary Clinton has been good for business. Exceedingly good. Whole segments of large industries rest on her being. No pundit need want for a topic while she is among us. The cable news channels are much in her debt. Magazines sell out, as do books about her. A Washington think tank sponsored a…
Suburban Nation
The Human Stain
When INS agents broke into Lazaro Gonzalez's house at 5 A.M. on April 22 to arrest his 6-year-old nephew Elian Gonzalez, civil libertarians -- and those skeptical about giving a refugee child the bum's rush back to Fidel Castro's Cuba -- had a lot of questions. Tom DeLay promised Republicans would…
THE LOGIC BEHIND Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge as George W. Bush's vice presidential running mate is almost impeccable. Ridge would make Bush oddson to win Pennsylvania, a marginally Democratic state in presidential races and one Al Gore desperately needs to offset Bush's strength in the South,…
The Kinder, Gentler Military
Completing the Revolution
John Cardinal O'Connor, the arch-bishop of New York, died last week at the age of 80, after suffering for several months from a brain tumor. The number of grieving memorials published about the man has been overwhelming, but no more than he deserved. Even longtime opponents like Mario Cuomo have…
THE ALLURE of the China market has always had a seductive hold on America, and successive administrations have relied on American business to make the case for unfettered trade with that country. This year, however, there's a new twist. The potential influence of the Internet in China is now a…
Growing up in Manhattan in the early years of the twentieth century, the bookish and introverted Julius Henry Marx dreamed of becoming a doctor. Instead, he dropped out of school just before his bar mitzvah and went into show business, at the insistence of his mother. Yes, to please his Jewish…
If there's one thing that Third World Marxist dictatorships seem to have in common, it's a high tolerance for reckless driving. I first discovered this in 1988 after a particularly long dinner party in then-Communist Nicaragua. A friend and I were headed back to our hotel in Managua, doing about 70…
President Clinton isn't often asked about his impeachment these days, for many reasons -- the main one being, of course, that nobody cares about it. Another reason has to do with the president's own way of answering questions about unpleasant subjects, on those rare occasions when such questions…
MARK SILVERMAN, publisher and editor of the Detroit News, is clearly annoyed at being pestered by the press. When I ask to speak with him, his secretary informs me that the photograph of him our art department has requested will be supplied only if her boss can clear our story first. I assure her…
The insta-celebrity of last year's Senate impeachment trial, former White House deputy counsel Cheryl D. Mills, returned to public view May 4 -- for just long enough to prove that she knows only one trick.
Upon taking office January 20, 2001, our forty-third president, Democrat or Republican, may face an unpleasant but important unresolved matter from the tenure of the forty-second: the issue of a pardon for Bill Clinton.
Tallahassee, Florida
The courtier press of the Clinton-Gore era is a wonder to behold. It comprises journalists more dogmatically loyal to Bill and Al than the staffers who do this sort of thing for a living.
Sterling
THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE of State Legislatures carted its members to Capitol Hill last month to protest the failure of the Internet tax commission to recommend a vast expansion of state and local tax authority over Internet sales. The commission, known formally as the Advisory Commission on…
The General Board of Church and Society (GBCS) of the United Methodist Church has been raising money to pay the fees of Washington lawyer Gregory Craig -- so that Craig's client, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, can take his 6-year-old boy back to Castro's Cuba. But the decision has prompted a harsh and…
I have never been a particular fan of Lucian Freud's painting. On the contrary, I have always thought there was something distinctly repulsive about it.
At age eighty-four, matched with a young wife and a new-born child, Saul Bellow has gathered his energies and delivered another novel, his first full-length work in fourteen years.
SINCE ELIAN GONZALEZ was rescued on Thanksgiving Day 1999, most liberals and many conservatives have been certain about what to do with this boy whose mother died trying to bring him to America: Send him back to his father in Cuba.
The gay lobby is seeking a trophy, and the target is Dr. Laura Schlessinger. "Dr. Laura," as she is known, is a radio therapist, dispensing advice to 18 million listeners. For sheer radio popularity, she has only one rival -- Rush Limbaugh. An Orthodox Jew, Dr. Laura takes a traditional view of…
Last week, Jefferson County (Colorado) Attorney Frank Hutfless began selling grisly videotapes of the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre -- for $ 25 a copy. Survivors, relatives of the dead, and school officials were aghast and enraged at the tasteless move. THE SCRAPBOOK shares their…
War crimes are of course no laughing matter, but that didn't stop senator Jesse Helms from penning what may be the drollest letter (reproduced at right) ever written to a secretary of state by a chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (not that there is much competition in this…
HERE'S WHAT attorney general Janet Reno would like you to believe: that she actually wanted television cameras and photographers to record the commando raid that plucked Elian Gonzalez from his relatives' home in Miami. To avoid any charges of a coverup, she decided that agents should not block…
Last week, Juan Miguel Gonzalez filed a motion with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals asking to be given the sole right to speak for his son Elian. The motion characterized Lazaro Gonzalez, Juan Miguel's uncle, as an "intruder and uninvited meddler in Elian's life." His Miami relatives, Juan…
My wife (an office she's held for all of a month now) asked me if I would help out with the thank you notes for our wedding presents. Tradition holds this is the bride's responsibility, but, being a modern guy, I agreed to lend a hand. Which is when the writer's block set in. My mind reeled at all…
THE SAGA OF ELIAN GONZALEZ has been a gripping one for everyone, it would seem, except members of the press. They have almost universally loathed the story, reserving special contempt for Cuban-Americans. Thomas Friedman, for one, could barely contain himself last week. In fact, he didn't: "Yup, I…
If you'd like to be tortured with dignity and humiliated with respect, you really ought to check out the Internet newsletter of the Arizona Power Exchange, an S&M group headquartered in Phoenix. The organization offers a full array of services to what is now genteelly known as the leather…
Since Allan Bloom died on October 7, 1992, those of us who knew him and studied with him have felt his loss like a wound, Ravelstein, Saul Bellow's novel based on Bloom, reopens this wound and brings forth a confusing array of sentiments. But Bellow has it exactly right when he ends the novel by…
THE UNIVERSAL OUTRAGE on the right over the raid on Lazaro Gonzalez's Miami house has reminded fratricidal conservatives of the glue that held them together before the collapse of the Soviet Union: anti-communism. The once close-knit strands of the conservative movement that have been threatening…
FORMER PRO FOOTBALL wide receiver Steve Largent of Oklahoma is now one of the more prominent social conservatives in the House of Representatives. The Hall of Famer, father of four, and born-again Christian bears watching as a bell-wether of opinion and sentiment in the rightward reaches of the…
Truth at Any Cost