75 articles
As Matt Labash detailed in these pages last week, for the past 13 months Al Gore has effectively served as slumlord to the Mayberry family of Carthage, Tennessee, his tenants in a decrepit four-bedroom rambler roughly 150 yards from the Gore family farmhouse.
Ulysses S. Grant
The Greatest Threat
On the website for Stockport College in northwest England, an article about the school's "very caring" tutorial system and its many study groups carries the headline "Individualism Reigns." Which is almost as funny as the article describing the school's recent Diversity Day celebration, featuring…
Much to his credit, George W. Bush has made national missile defense the central plank in his foreign policy platform. This may or may not prove to be good for Bush's electoral prospects (though we suspect it will help him). But there is no question that Bush has done the nation a real service by…
The second annual Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, named in memory of the late, great New York Post editor and columnist (and occasional WEEKLY STANDARD contributor), has been won by essayist Tom Flannery of the Pennsylvania weekly Carbondale News.
Thomas L. Friedman, the actual foreign affairs expert at the New York Times, in his June 12 column: "If Syria were in Asia, it would be called North Korea." Syria is in Asia.
The difference between a good high school commencement address and a bad one is very simple: The good one is shorter. There's an additional requirement, however, if your own child is one of the graduates and sitting among friends in the audience. In that case, a good commencement address is both…
HAFEZ AL-ASSAD was not a diplomat, he was not a peacemaker, he was not a great leader. He was a murderer. In his three decades in power, the Syrian dictator terrorized his own nation, the people of Lebanon, and countless others.
The American Bar Association has found some freelance work for Bernardine Dohrn, the former Weather Underground terrorist and fugitive. Ms. Dohrn, who now heads the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University, is scheduled to lecture a roomful of lawyers at the ABA's annual…
FOR most of the armies taking part, it was a routine exercise that involved little more than turning up at the right place.
Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the Media Research Center, writes to explain "the mystery of why Greg Craig received no hostile questions" during a Washington Post online chat session about Craig's legal service to Fidel Castro. Turns out Craig's easy time of it, reported a couple of…
THE BRITISH have a joke about the curse of Hello!, a glossy magazine that specializes in sucking up to international celebrities. No sooner does the latest issue hit newsstands than the "perfect marriage" falls apart or the "brilliant businessman" turns out to be a serial embezzler. Perhaps…
PAT BUCHANAN likes to fight. But only on TV. Off the air, the bellicose talk-show-host-turned-third-party-presidential-candidate can be surprisingly meek, even timid, the sort of person who structures his life to avoid the mildest confrontation. This spring, Buchanan was booked for a live interview…
David Talbot, CEO of Salon.com, an actual company trading shares on an actual stock exchange, as quoted in Mediaweek: "Profits are a major mantra right now."
Starting July 1, any two adults not closely related by blood can enter into a "civil union" in Vermont. They must apply for a license and recruit a member of the clergy or a justice of the peace to conduct a ceremony and sign their license, whereupon the town clerk will duly register their union.
Before I moved to Vermont in the late 1970s, everything I knew about the state could be summed up in three names: Ethan Allen, Calvin Coolidge, and George Aiken.
Burt Lancaster
AT UNITED NATIONS headquarters in New York last week, diplomats from around the world were trying to work out remaining details for the proposed International Criminal Court. U.S. ambassador David Scheffer tried to persuade other nations to include, among these details, some assurance that no…
Senate Republicans took conservative fire last month for initially accepting the nomination of Bruce Lindsey's attorney, Allen Snyder, to a federal appeals court. That criticism stalled Snyder's judgeship. But an even loopier White House nomination remains alive. Bonnie Campbell is up for an…
EDITOR'S NOTE: Owing to a production error in last week's issue, an article by Tucker Carlson was mistakenly printed in place of this piece by Christopher Caldwell. Our abject apologies.
AL GORE and the reporters who tail him have a strained relationship. He feels the coverage of his campaign has been excessively negative; they resent his seldom making himself available for their questions. The solution may be Gore's new deputy campaign manager for communications, Mark Fabiani, who…
Two Cuban baseball players -- the star Andy Morales, the record-holding slugger who helped Cuba defeat the Baltimore Orioles with a dramatic three-run homer in an exhibition game last year; and Carlos Borrego, whose only record consists in his having been caught nine times by the Cuban Coast Guard…
Last year, Frank Sutherland, editor of Nashville's Tennessean, paid personal tribute to Al Gore in a film produced by Gore's presidential campaign. Newsmen aren't supposed to behave that way, and Sutherland later apologized. "If I breached the credibility of my readers by appearing on that video I…
Editor's Note: The death of psychologist and sexologist John Money, on July 7, 2006, prompted us to reread this review, published in The Weekly Standard six years ago. We should note also a relevant development since the essay first appeared: Dr. Money's former patient, David Reimer, committed…
Every American over the age of fifteen remembers Bob Hope, and I suppose everyone under the age of fifty remembers him in a particular way. We might see him in army helmet and flak jacket, waggling his golf club at the troops from a massive outdoor stage in Khe Sahn. Or maybe we can unspool a few…
The paperback edition of Michael Isikoff's bestseller on the Lewinsky saga, Uncovering Clinton, has just hit the bookstores. It includes a freshly penned "Afterword" wherein interested readers can find the following remarkable account of how exactly Bill Clinton got elected president in the first…
Since we published Dennis Prager's essay on John Rocker two weeks ago ("Hating John Rocker: A Case Study in Liberal Hysteria"), the Atlanta Braves reliever has been demoted to the minors -- ostensibly to regain his control. But his 3.85 ERA is better than the major league average, and it seems the…
Though I own my house and have made certain commitments to it, I've begun sneaking out and seeing other houses on Sunday afternoons. The homes I spend time with are flashier and younger than the one I live in. They put ads in the Sunday paper announcing their availability and thrusting their charms…
Munich
ACCORDING TO a just-released study by the Center for Media & Public Affairs, the American news media have performed a minor miracle: They have managed to cover religion without actually discussing religious doctrines.
"There is a difference between talking about compassion and actually putting your highest ideals into practice."
The Millionaire Mind
Where is the charter school movement headed? Although these independent public schools of choice were once seen as release valves for disgruntled families or safe havens for kids with problems, in urban America, they're looking like a possible alternative to the system itself, foreshadowing a far…
Buffalo, N.Y.
A recent Wednesday night, on a business trip to Los Angeles, a colleague and I had a bite to eat at the hotel restaurant. I returned to my room about 10:15 -- to find it ransacked. My laptop was the first thing whose absence I noticed. "I must have put it somewhere else," I said to myself, though…
THE WEEKLY STANDARD has a full-time entry-level staff position available for an individual with excellent communication skills to manage the front desk and other administrative tasks. Please send your resume and a letter describing your qualifications to: Business Manager, THE WEEKLY STANDARD, 1150…
ACCORDING TO a news report, the Unabomber has a 548-page book on the list of a small publisher, who's quoted as saying that parts of the book are "disarming, even funny."
Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot
THE LATEST JOURNALIST to fall for the academic pseudo-science of election predicting is the Washington Post's Robert Kaiser. In a dramatic front-page article on May 26 headlined "To Researchers, Election Is All Over but the Voting," he writes: "You didn't realize that Gore has won the election? A…
Over the course of the Elian saga, Gregory Craig, the attorney for Juan Miguel Gonzalez, has stayed extremely busy not returning phone calls from skeptical reporters. So it seemed rather sporting of him to subject himself last week to pointed inquiries during an on-line chat hosted by the…
John Derbyshire, an occasional contributor to these pages, writes to alert THE SCRAPBOOK to the death of John Coolidge, son of the twentieth century's most conservative president.
Buffalo, N.Y.
Last week's 11th Circuit opinion, which effectively resolves the Elian Gonzalez case and clears the way for young Elian to be sent back to Cuba, leaves us feeling a sickening sort of vindication.
When Juanita Broaddrick came forward with her allegations last year that Bill Clinton had raped her in a hotel room in the late 1970s, she was prepared for the worst: public incredulity, Clintonista attacks, even, she used to joke with her family, "an IRS audit." Having suffered the two former, she…
Congratulations to presumptive GOP presidential nominee George W. Bush, whose proposal for a global missile defense system to protect American allies -- coupled with dramatic reductions in offensive ballistic weapons -- won a partial endorsement last week from . . . Bill Clinton. Vice President Al…
GEORGE W. BUSH sparked the first foreign policy skirmish of the 2000 campaign with his surprise announcement that, as president, he would consider making unilateral cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, coupled with deployment of a national missile defense -- whether or not other nations followed suit.
After an eight-year hiatus from the abortion controversy, the Supreme Court will decide later this month in Stenberg v. Carhart whether Nebraska may outlaw partial-birth abortion, a practice that even so resolute an abortion-rights supporter as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan says cannot be…
Juilliard
Orestes Brownson
Time for Truth
It's just a small matter, in all the Clinton grossness, but it counts. Linda Tripp was the victim of a dirty, and illegal, trick. It was played on her by her own bosses at the Pentagon. And now those men -- Kenneth Bacon and Clifford Bernath -- have escaped with the wispiest slaps on the wrist.…
Bradley A. Smith, the First Amendment and election law expert whose persecution by various campaign finance "reformers" has been chronicled in these pages over the past year, was confirmed to a seat on the Federal Election Commission May 24. The Senate vote in favor of Smith's nomination was 64-35.…
A recurring theme in the mainstream press is that the presidential race doesn't offer much of a choice. George W. Bush and Al Gore aren't quite two peas in a pod, the story goes, but as candidates struggling to occupy the political center, they aren't that far apart either. In truth, there's some…
Woodrow Wilson
LAST WEEK, George W. Bush finally came out and said it: "Leave the Cold War behind," he implored. Let us "build effective missile defenses" designed to protect "all 50 states and our friends and allies and deployed forces overseas."
In the fall of 1975, Saturday Night Live premiered on NBC and instantly worked like a fibrillator on moribund American comedy. The show had a crazed energy made up of equal parts countercultural rage and sophomoric high spirits: full of itself, gleefully mean-spirited, and dripping with irony. It…
Nazi Terror
Aristotle, in The Rhetoric, describes the metaphor as the joining of dissimilars to show their similarity. He offers a number of examples from Homer, the franchise player of Greek literature, at one point noting his choice of the dawn as "rosy-fingered" as so much better than "crimson-fingered" or,…
It has been said that while comic books may be nonsense, the history of comic books is scholarship. That is the spirit in which to approach the John Rocker controversy. A pitcher for the Atlanta Braves baseball team, Rocker made disparaging remarks about minorities and New York City that merit as…
THE WEEKLY STANDARD has a full-time entry-level staff position available for an individual with excellent communication skills to manage the front desk and other administrative tasks. Please send your resume and a letter describing your qualifications to: Business Manager, THE WEEKLY STANDARD, 1150…
HE QINGLIAN is a Chinese journalist, famous in her own country for fearless criticism of her government's policies. Her book, The Pitfalls of Modernization, is currently being translated by Lawrence Sullivan of Adelphi University. She has been visiting the United States to meet with other…
THE NEW YORK TIMES has described Rick Lazio, the 42-year-old Republican congressman running for the Senate against Hillary Rodham Clinton, as someone who "looks more like Beaver Cleaver than most other members of Congress." The paper is not alone in making light of his appearance. The New York Post…
May was a bad month for presidential historians of the James Carville school. By majority vote, a six-member committee of the Arkansas Supreme Court -- at least three of whom appear to be Democrats -- recommended that Bill Clinton be disbarred for his various violations of legal ethics during the…
Two of America's leading newspapers ran important stories on China last week. The Wall Street Journal's Helene Cooper and Ian Johnson, in a front-page piece, laid out in minute detail the fact that many of the American corporations most eager for access to China's market actually have little…
OVER THE YEARS, Tom DeLay has suffered an impressive array of insults. Former senator Al D'Amato called him a "crazy right-wing wack-job," while George magazine deemed him "The Meanest Man in Congress." Columnist Molly Ivins suggested he bore the "air of a small-town car dealer." And during a spat…
Add sloppy opposition research to the list of problems plaguing Al Gore's listless presidential campaign. In the course of a May 2 speech on crime, Gore launched a crude complaint about the criminal justice policies of Texas governor George W. Bush. It's really quite simple, Gore contended. Bush…
How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (And Found Inner Peace)
THE RECENT RELEASE of the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office report on the Columbine High School murders provides a great deal of horrifying detail about the tragedy -- but carefully finesses the police inaction that gave the killers a free hand inside the school building.
The Long March
Taipei, Taiwan
ALL THAT WAS MISSING FROM the scene were the helicopters lifting people off the embassy roof. Otherwise, Israel's panicked evacuation from Lebanon last week looked eerily like America's last hours in Vietnam.
Seymour Hersh's allegation in the May 22 New Yorker that then-Major General Barry McCaffrey unleashed his 24th Infantry Division in an unnecessary attack that mercilessly pummeled retreating Iraqi soldiers two days after the Gulf War cease-fire in 1991 has created the usual furor. Even though the…
IN MARCH, the chairman of the Constitution party, a little-known but very conservative political party based in suburban Virginia, wrote a letter to Alan Keyes urging him to leave the GOP. "We encourage you to come and join with us," the letter said, "in firm reliance on God's divine providence and…
The Triumph of the Moon