84 articles
THE DUST FROM THE RUBBLE of the Berlin Wall had barely settled when, in December 1989, George Bush inaugurated the post-Cold War era by sending thousands of American Rangers and paratroopers to Panama to arrest a petty tyrant and drug dealer whose thugs had threatened U.S. soldiers' lives. In the…
IF GEORGE W. BUSH is elected president, he'll have many people to thank. One of them is Osama Siblani. During Bush's October 5 meeting with Arab-American leaders at the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn, Michigan, Siblani told the Texas governor about two top concerns of Arab Americans: the use of ethnic…
The Burden of Bad Ideas
Paris
Inspired by the news that Carly Simon had written a song "testifying" to the virtues of Hillary Clinton, THE SCRAPBOOK a few weeks ago invited readers to share their own Carly Simonesque Iyrical gifts. They certainly stand up against Simon's own paean to the Senate candidate: "You are so full of…
WORLD WRESTLING Federation star The Rock has challenged George W. Bush and Al Gore to appear on the WWF's weekly Smackdown! program, watched, the organization claims, by some 14 million young voters. "You have approximately three weeks to decide to join us at Smackdown!," The Rock thundered a few…
DURING THE SECOND DEBATE between Al Gore and George W. Bush, Gore criticized Bush for failing to support a bill that would have toughened the Texas hate-crime law. That measure -- named after James Byrd Jr., a black man dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas -- failed to pass. Bush defended the way…
Sellout
The brilliant British actor Gary Oldman is not only a star of the new political thriller The Contender, but an executive producer. Oldman's manager, Douglas Urbanski, is another of the movie's producers. And they're both outraged by the finished product, which should give you an idea of the…
The importance of John H. McWhorter's new book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, is difficult to overstate. It's thesis is straight-forward and explosive: The principal hurdle faced by African Americans today is their own culture. McWhorter identifies the three major…
There's a message in the trajectory of the presidential campaign. At the beginning of the year, George W. Bush held a solid lead over Al Gore. Then came the Republican primaries, and Bush, battered by John McCain's challenge, lost ground. Polls showed Bush had fallen into a tie with Gore. Over the…
Orlando, Florida
The Death of Character
Last Monday, Oct. 16, a stunning memo arrived at the Voice of America. Officials at the State Department had decided that a VOA editorial condemning the terrorist attack on the USS Cole should not be broadcast to foreign countries. "This editorial will reach an audience that is caught up in the…
WHETHER LAST WEEK'S heralded Mideast summit will achieve either its immediate goal of ending violence in Gaza and the West Bank or its larger aspiration of reviving the "peace process" is unclear at the moment. What is clear, regrettably, is that a fundamental and perhaps irreversible shift in…
Those who know him well keep insisting George W. Bush has a wry sense of humor. The rest of us sometimes wonder if wry is code for paltry. But Bush got a lot of laughs at last week's annual Alfred E. Smith dinner in New York. For those who missed it, here are a few of the better Bush lines:
I hope Americans will take advantage of the Subway Series to overcome their narrow prejudices and recognize that not all New Yorkers are abrasive, arrogant jerks -- that only the Yankees fans are like that. For we are all formed by the things we love, and to be a Yankees fan -- as to be a Cowboys…
During the second debate, Vice President Gore's best line of attack, everyone seemed to agree, came on the issue of health care for children in Texas, which Gore said ranks "49th out of the 50 states."
During last week's presidential debate, Al Gore said that he couldn't promise he would "never get another detail wrong," but that he would "try not to, and hard." THE SCRAPBOOK has found something the vice president would be well-advised to try even harder to do -- suppress old campaign memoranda.…
Jerusalem
Republican Senate candidate Bob Franks has been described by one New Jersey Democratic Senate aide -- very privately -- as "the perfect senatorial candidate for New Jersey." He was a state assemblyman at age 27, chairman of the state Republican party while still in his thirties, architect of New…
Dear loyal reader, I hesitate to tell you this. But I have lately detected in myself stirrings of the personal growth variety. And they have caused me to doubt certain ideas I have promoted in this magazine for years -- like that policies of enforced race and gender equity are foolish.
It ain't over.
EVEN BEFORE George W. Bush stomped Al Gore in the second presidential debate, there were signs that Bush's campaign was gaining ground. One big sign, actually. A Gallup poll commissioned by CNN and USA Today showed Bush ahead nationally by 8 points. A poll by Gallup released three days before had…
On Friday, October 6, Charles Bakaly, former spokesman for Kenneth Starr's Office of Independent Counsel, was acquitted of contempt of court charges brought by the Clinton Justice Department. The charges were the product of a leak investigation instigated by Clinton lawyer David Kendall, who in…
DAVID SMICK, then an aide to Jack Kemp, invited a group of reporters and columnists to his house in October 1980 to watch the debate between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. "Every one of them thought Carter won," Smick says. So did I. As a political reporter for the Baltimore Sun, I watched the…
The First American
In the world of literature for adolescents -- "young adults" as the publishers call them -- fantasy stories have a particular power to inspire loyalty. Think of J.R.R. Tolkien's sagas of Middle Earth, Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea books, Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, Madeleine L'Engle's…
Bakersfield, California
Every few election years, some presidential candidate gets tagged as an intellectual. The evidence is usually thin. Adlai Stevenson claimed to write his own political addresses, and his speechwriters declined to contradict him. John F. Kennedy hired the diminutive Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to slip…
ON THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5, it was revealed that biotechnology researchers had successfully created a hybrid of a human being and a pig. A man-pig. A pig-man. The reality is so unspeakable, the words themselves don't want to go together.
The movie Pay It Forward is a fable about an eleven-year-old boy who comes up with a plan to change the world for the better -- and it's a prime example of a moviegoing phenomenon that might be called "the wilt factor."
As Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop suggest in the remarkable introduction to their new translation of Democracy in America, almost everyone claims Alexis de Tocqueville for their side these days.
Elkins, West Virginia
Burlington, Vermont
How could anything so preposterous have ever been thought beautiful? You can see the low end in the cheap commercial imitations that still stock the flea markets and junk stores of America. Ceramic snakes entwining puce-colored vases. Oak chairs with undulating arms and legs. Electric lamps formed…
The triumph of democracy in Serbia last week may well rank as the most important international event of the post-Cold War era. As a practical matter, it almost certainly means the end of a decade of extraordinary brutality and misery in southeastern Europe, a decade that witnessed four wars and the…
Tune in Wednesday evening, Oct. 11, to www.weeklystandard.com for more instant debate analysis from the staff of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
"MARRIAGE EDUCATION" in the schools? Before you object that any self-respecting school ought to have its hands full teaching history and algebra, consider that most public school systems are already teaching kids about sex, family, and relationships in courses like sex ed, health, and that…
This page has previously noted the tendency of politicians, when driven from office, to maunder on about how happy they are to be closing a rewarding chapter in their careers, embarking on new adventures, and -- most hypocritically of all -- spending more time with their long-suffering families.
Noticeably absent from last week's presidential and vice-presidential debates was any reference to what one might have thought would be one of the most compelling differences between the two tickets: their disagreement on the deployment of a national missile defense. The silence is all the more…
The big campaign news of the week turned out to be not the debates, but the fact that the New York Times's Rick Berke finally noticed Al Gore's exaggeration problem. Of course, it was hard not to notice after Gore's false and gratuitous boast that, like Bush, he had toured Texas disaster areas with…
Editor's Note: Cathy Seipp (1957 - 2007) died last week after a five-year battle with lung cancer. She was 49. Seipp wrote this piece for THE WEEKLY STANDARD in 2000 and it became an instant classic.
WHEN RICHARD BUTLER once shared with the United Nations Security Council a series of high-altitude photographs of some 130 heavy Republican Guard trucks gathering at an isolated spot in the desert -- they had just fled an inspection site as Butler and his arms inspection team were approaching --…
The Bombing of Auschwitz
The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce
I fancy myself a connoisseur of the naming of Americans, and as such have discovered that we gringos do a few things in this line that no one else does. George W. Bush -- whose middle initial has all but become his last name -- may be mildly amused to learn that only Americans go in for middle…
GONE WAS THE AL GORE whose high-energy, big-necked huffing and puffing about policy led one to the sure conclusion that if presidential debating were an Olympic event, the veep would have been disqualified for steroid use. Gone, too, was the George W. Bush who looked like a diffident, 5-foot-2…
Of all the shots aimed at Rep. James Traficant (that he is a profane, ethically shaky, showboating vulgarian, for starters), there are none so cheap as those directed at his appearance. "It's tough being a fashion leader," the Youngstown Democrat admits. Knight-Ridder said Traficant's hair bespeaks…
BACK IN AUGUST, Al Gore told a Carthage, Tenn., audience, "If I was the parent of a child who went to an inner-city school that was failing, and I felt that there was absolutely no chance . . . of reform that would dramatically improve that school, I might be for vouchers also." It was a rare…
Except when they want to ridicule someone, reporters (or their editors) "clean up" the spoken words quoted in their stories. The stammers and ahems and false starts and missteps of a speaker -- any speaker -- look um, uh, ah, er, ridiculous in print.
Operation Rollback
Hollywood has a checkered record in its portrayal of communism. On the occasions when it has dealt with the subject, it has tended -- not surprisingly for a mass entertainment industry -- to reflect the public feeling of the times: solidarity with the Soviets during World War II, a general…
This year's first presidential debate will take place Tuesday evening, Oct. 3. For instant analysis -- well, almost instant -- you can turn to our website, www.weeklystandard.com, in the wee hours of late Tuesday, or Wednesday morning for the late risers.
Not War but Murder
Good news: Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy, edited by our own Robert Kagan and William Kristol, is now available. The volume, published by Encounter Books, consists of essays by 15 luminaries ranging from James Ceaser and William Bennett to Paul…
The Nader campaign has been something of a dud ever since Al Gore started imitating it at his convention. But the Green party candidate could still tip a state or two to Bush.
Fedwa Malti-Douglas holds an endowed professorship at Indiana University, where she practices feminist criticism in the departments of gender studies and comparative literature. Judging from the big-name blurbs on the jacket of her latest book, she is a well-known and admired figure in American…
Glendale, California
I'm not impressed by Al Gore's Internet boasts, because I was surfing the web before the web was invented. In 1979, I enrolled at the University of Chicago, and in lieu of a social life, the university offered us a really great library with open stacks. While students at other schools were wasting…
Long Island
It seems naive, moralistic, even "Wilsonian" to say it, but say it we must: Elections matter. The consent of the governed matters. Democracy matters.
One of the more amusing spectacles during this otherwise unamusing session of Congress has been the willingness of representatives Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer to launch campaigns for House majority whip. Pelosi and Hoyer are, if you hadn't noticed, Democrats, and thus their campaigns will be for…
Brighton, England
ON SEPTEMBER 15, Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush's campaign manager, got a call from the FBI. An agent informed Allbaugh that one of Al Gore's closest advisers, former representative Tom Downey, had received confidential information from the Bush campaign, including a book of internal strategy memos…
ALAS, POOR MARY. She's the conjoined twin in England, united at the chest with her stronger sister Jodie, and she's been called a parasite, a tumor, a bloodsucker: someone whose "primitive" brain makes her life unworthy of protecting. And all that by two British courts, which have wrenched away…
LAST WEEK, Larry King asked George W. Bush a question that, more often than not, discombobulates tax cutters. Do the top one percent of income earners really need tax relief? According to Al Gore, Bush "could pay for every other program" if he eliminated the cut for the wealthiest Americans in his…
Before the phony pet dog/Mother-in-Law anecdote enters the pantheon of Al Gore whoppers, it's worth giving proper credit to Walter V. Robinson, who first reported it in the Sept. 18 Boston Globe. As Mickey Kaus joked the next day in Kausfiles.com, Robinson "must have misplaced his orders from Media…
Nashville
On April 15, 1953, in a note attached to the typescript of his first novel, Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis told his editor, "Serio-comedy is the formula really, though if it gets by at all I imagine it'll get by chiefly on the score of the comic angle."
"The chief practical use of history," James Bryce wrote, "is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies." That fairly summarizes the dim view the profession has of analogies that reduce complex issues to, say, another Vietnam or Munich. If two events seem similar in one way, the determined…
Robert Kennedy
STATUS IS the shiniest currency among those who pull the oars of governance in Washington. Their salaries may be a hoot to the Fast Eddies of Wall Street and risible to freshly IPO'd software wizards. The political appointees and the permanent departmental helots in the nation's capital, however,…
Concord, N.C.
Summer houses are like time capsules. I remember this every June when we go to Maine, to the same place I've gone most of my life. My wife has been going with me every summer since we were in the 10th grade, so it always feels a bit like waking up back in high school when we arrive. In a dresser…
Conservatives are gloomy: Congressional Republicans seem to be losing yet another budget battle to Bill Clinton. The president vetoed their tax cut and paid no political price. So the Republicans turned around and adopted his priorities. Instead of insisting on a major tax cut, they are proposing…
Henry M. Jackson
Hong Kong
In the middle of its Olympics ratings fiasco last week, NBC at least got some free publicity by pulling a Nike ad they had run for the first few days of the games. The offending ad featured dishy Olympic distance runner Suzy Favor Hamilton as a classic B-movie scream queen, being pursued by a…
On Tuesday of last week, the Senate voted 85-15 to approve China's permanent low-tariff access to U.S. markets (PNTR). With the House having already approved the measure, the way is now clear for China to become a member of the World Trade Organization. Among the "highlights" of the week-long…
In an effort to promote the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a racially diverse campus, university officials digitally inserted a black student's face into a photograph of white Badger football fans that was used on the cover of their new undergraduate application . . .
AFTER an embittered and byzantine debate last July, the Washington, D.C., city council unanimously approved a bill requiring health insurance plans sold in the District to cover contraceptives. Every religious employer in the city -- not exempting the National Conference of Catholic Bishops or even…
FOR THE PAST COUPLE of months, Planned Parenthood has been beating the PR drums on behalf of a class-action suit it has filed against Bartell Drug, a Seattle-based chain that doesn't cover contraceptives in its health plan. The "historic lawsuit," as People magazine dubs it, argues that the policy…