January 2001

Bush cabinet nominees Gale Norton and John Ashcroft are running a humiliating gauntlet, forced to explain that their support for federalism in no way implies an endorsement of slavery or Jim Crow. The demagogic nature of the allegations against two honorable officials, however, should not blind…

In art museums throughout the world hang hundreds, maybe thousands of important paintings with mysterious gaps in their ownership histories for the years 1933 to 1945. Any number of these paintings might have been stolen from Jewish families by the Nazis during those years -- and subsequently…

In his column last Tuesday, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen vented spleen about how there aren't any Jews in President Bush's cabinet, a fact he found "dismal." And no, Cohen went on, anticipating objections, Bush's selection of Robert Zoellick to run the U.S. Trade Representative's office…

Liberal organizations lobbying the Senate against John Ashcroft's confirmation as attorney general fixed on an interview the nominee gave in 1998 to Southern Partisan, a magazine of unabashed Confederate irredentism. We thought it worth reading the interview in the unabridged original, just to make…

Philip Kaufman came up with an ingenious bit of casting for his latest film, Quills, when he selected the dark and handsome twenty-six-year-old Joaquin Phoenix to play an eighteenth-century Frenchman named Francois Simonet de Coulmier. Of course, in real life, Coulmier was a seventy-two-year-old…

On January 5, the British philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe died in England at the age of eighty-one. Elizabeth Anscombe, as she was known, was a leading member of what, in retrospect, proves to have been a marvelous regiment of women -- the antidote to the antic male irrationality of twentieth-century…

Football, for better or worse, is America's dominant spectator sport. In much of the country -- certainly throughout the South and Midwest -- it inspires a frenzied devotion that baseball, with its loose pace and long summer season, never achieves.

A Jan. 3 AP wire story by reporter Hope Yen analyzed how President Bush might fill eight vacancies on federal courts in Pennsylvania. Among those vacancies are two judgeships on the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. And among the experts Yen asked for predictions about that court…

Like Tom Cruise, I have a need for speed. It's a primal instinct reawakened every time I get behind the wheel of a car. I may not have my Navy wings, but I pilot my compact sedan the way Chuck Yeager rode the wild blue.

TWO WEEKS AGO, the largest coalition of activist groups ever assembled declared holy war on George W. Bush's attorney-general nominee, former Missouri senator John Ashcroft -- arch-conservative, abortion foe, and Assemblies of God congregant. The campaign flouted American constitutional practice.…

Two Faces of Liberalism

THOSE LONG feature columns on the left and right side of the Wall Street Journal's front page are known inside the paper as "leaders." For many years, reporters at the Journal joked that if you had a fact, you had a leader, and if you had two facts, you had two leaders. Washington journalists seem…

January 9 -- It is eleven days before George W. Bush's inauguration, and already the protesters are enough to make one nostalgic for 1999. Back then, everyone from the Greens to the anarchists commandeered Seattle streets to protest the World Trade Organization and kick in Starbucks windows. It was…

THE CONTEST wasn't really close: Political sentimentality whipped historical fidelity in a Washington main event. The occasion was the dedication at the FDR Memorial on the Mall of a statue of Roosevelt -- in a wheelchair. The victory was celebrated by Bubba himself on his farewell tour: Bill…

WHEN GEORGE W. BUSH met privately with Senate Republican leaders a few days after Al Gore conceded, he vowed to pursue the same agenda he'd touted in the presidential race: sweeping tax cuts, a defense buildup, education reform with vouchers, faith-based programs, overhaul of Social Security and…

Oakland, California

There was a curious exchange in the Nov. 28, 1999 Our Sunday Visitor (OSV) between letter-writer Jack Ferguson and M. Francis Mannion, who's been writing the Q&A feature in OSV. Ferguson complained that certain of Mannion's answers are "fuzzy." Indeed! For example, Mannion said that "God . . . may…

Last May, Claudia Winkler reported in these pages how Mark Silverman, publisher and editor of the Detroit News, had purged Thomas Bray, director of the paper's universally respected -- and conservative -- editorial page (see "Jackasses Release Bray," May 15, 2000). Silverman claimed it was Bray's…

George W. Bush's inaugural address showed a man plain-spoken, secure in his faith, and confident in his ability to lead the nation. It also suggested that, as president, Bush may be capable of elevated sentiment and dignity of purpose.

Bill Clinton has left office essentially unchanged: now, as always, a man convinced that no criticism of him can ever have justice, no fact that wounds his pride can ever be true -- and convinced, as well, that any who see things differently are dishonorable. This is a personality disorder, one…

For many years now, the U.S. Army has enforced a highly successful "don't ask, don't tell" policy. To wit: The Army has long privately acknowledged -- and accepted -- the fact that some of its recruits are individual human beings, while officially and publicly discouraging the individualist…

Last August, Radio Netherlands reported that Amsterdam's Artis Zoo would begin conducting lectures and tours designed to "show off its homo- and bisexual beasts." THE SCRAPBOOK is not making this up -- and apologizes for not passing it along sooner.

On January 7 at Washington's Foundry United Methodist Church, Bill Clinton gave a short speech expressing his deepest, sincerest, most heartfelt gratitude to all us little people who've showered him with love and respect these past eight years. And what better way to cap off this bit of ersatz…

The Kaiser Aluminum plant in Mead, Washington, is a power-hungry smelting operation that draws cheap electricity from 29 federally constructed hydroelectric dams run by the Bonneville Power Administration. Thanks to vast federal investment, Kaiser pays only about $ 22.50 per megawatt-hour (mwh) to…

Augustus Carp, Esq.

From a January 10 Associated Press dispatch: "President-elect Bush has decided not to include a poet at his inauguration. A spokeswoman for the Presidential Inaugural Committee, Natalie Rule, cited no reason for his decision. John F. Kennedy started the tradition of having a poet speak at the…

Lawyers for Indonesian businessman James Riady last week reached agreement with federal prosecutors on a plea bargain by which Riady will avoid serving time in prison. Instead, Riady will pay hefty fines and admit guilt in a scheme to make felonious financial contributions to the Democratic party…

A Democratic operative named Marc Farinella managed the late Missouri governor Mel Carnahan's successful bid to unseat then-senator John Ashcroft in last November's election. Now Farinella has made opposition research he collected in that campaign available to interest groups attempting to block…

President-elect George W. Bush's aides often compare their boss to Ronald Reagan. Some of the time, this is just a defense against the widespread perception that Bush knows little about foreign policy. Reagan, they suggest, didn't know the details either, and look how well he did. More recently,…

PC, M.D.

Fighting Poverty with Virtue

She's talking again. She's sitting behind me, a few seats to my left, and for the third time in the first few minutes of the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away, she's exchanging gossip with her companion at a normal conversational level.

The Virtue of Prosperity

OF ALL THE SURVIVORS of the Clinton era, the most unlikely may be AmeriCorps, the administration's "national service" program. The idea of enlisting an army of young people to devote a year or two to community betterment for minimal compensation had been around for close to a century, with little…

GEORGE W. BUSH has gotten off to a strong start, with a formidable cabinet and a firm idea of what he wants to do as president. But conservatives thirsty for change must remember that to use political power, we must maintain that power. Idealists on the right need to be hard-headed and realistic.

BACK IN 1992, when asked how he would deal with Iraqi aggression, Bill Clinton said he would have voted with the congressional majority to authorize a military response, but he remained personally opposed to military action. A decade later, as he prepared to leave the White House, President Clinton…

THERE'S A STORE in the wealthy Washington suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, that calls itself "Three Dog Bakery." I read about it the other day. In addition to offering "pooch pretzels," "mini beagles," and other "all-natural pet pastries," it throws birthday parties for dogs. Rich dog owners (I mean,…

THE FULL PLATE for which Bill Clinton is famous usually consists of a jumbo order of McDonald's fries. The full plate that he has left for George W. Bush may prove less easily digestible.

THIS TIME LAST YEAR many conservatives wondered aloud whether George W. Bush was genuinely committed to his own tax cut proposal. Now it seems that Bush is the only supply-side tax cutter left in town. He has been heroically unwavering in support of the $ 1.3 trillion tax cut, but the media, many…

TO HIS CREDIT, George W. Bush made national defense an issue in his campaign. By raising the problem of military preparedness and, now, choosing a forceful defense secretary in Donald Rumsfeld, the incoming president has put himself in a strong position to follow through on an important policy…

PRESIDENT BUSH has pledged to send his first education bill to Capitol Hill within hours of his inauguration, a symbol of the priority he assigns to the issue that garnered so much campaign attention and looms so large in his Texas record of accomplishment.

WHEN a home schoolers' organization offered to summon its members -- hundreds of thousands of them -- to rally behind John Ashcroft, aides of George W. Bush said forget it. Later, with Ashcroft's nomination for attorney general under fire from liberals, David Keene of the American Conservative…

Louis Armstrong was a great trumpet player, a major jazz innovator, and a widely beloved entertainer. But was he the Second Coming? This is the hardly exaggerated implication of Ken Burns's Jazz documentary, and it's one well worth pondering -- not for what it says about the great Satchmo, but for…

THEY'RE BACK. Like geese that instinctively fly south for the winter, liberal lobbyists are coming out of an eight-year hibernation just as a Republican is set to move into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Hardly heard from since the jihad against Clarence Thomas, these activists have begun whining about…

We seem to be entering a period of competent conservatism and reactionary liberalism. George W. Bush has put together a cabinet long on management experience and practical skills. But liberal commentators and activists, their imaginations aflame, seem to be caught in a time warp, back in the days…

The best reporting on the Clinton administration is appearing only as the president prepares to depart. For example, the morning of New Year's Eve, the Washington Post's lead story was a superb review, by White House reporter John F. Harris, of the unprecedented extent to which the Clinton…

"Kings live in park enclaves," Thomas Jefferson said, in one of his Jeffersonian moods, "presidents live on streets." Not nowadays. Nowadays the American president lives in a very nice house on a two-block stretch of abandoned roadway in downtown Washington, D.C., with imposing concrete blockades…

A WEBSITE CALLED esoterism.com, which is dedicated to "bringing to everybody the understanding of Nostradamus's writings," currently features a "last-minute" bulletin. "Following Quatrain is a HOAX," the bulletin declares, "and is not from Nostradamus: 'Come the millennium, month 12, / In the home…

A Bishop's Tale

Arriving unbidden on THE SCRAPBOOK'S desk last week -- who knows how many layers of forwarding removed from its original and unknown recipient -- was a most interesting copy of an e-mail recently sent by White House staff ideologist Sidney Blumenthal. The actual message in that e-mail is for…

I have a friend who scored heavily early in life and became a venture capitalist. Over lunch one day he entertained me by recounting the nutty projects that people brought to him for financing: a geriatric dog food, an electric fountain pen, cell-phone implants. I wish he were still capital…

To watch Bill Clinton flit around the world these past few months, desperately and in some cases dangerously seeking some final "accomplishment" to add to his legacy, has been to see with stunning clarity a fundamental truth about this president's foreign policy: It has been mostly about him.

The Mystery of Capital

For its Jan. 5 issue, the Chronicle of Higher Education, industry newsletter of eggheadery, asked a number of "scholars and writers" to predict how future historians will view the Supreme Court's recent election-deciding ruling. The result, the Chronicle's headline on this feature promised, was "9…

Skin and Other Stories

Jerusalem

YOU'VE HEARD IT many times and you'll hear it many more: Whatever his flaws, President Clinton is indisputably the greatest political talent of his generation. This accolade is a common theme of media obituaries on his presidency. "Even his sharpest critics bow to his mastery of politics," said…

BILL CLINTON came to Washington riding the early stages of a recovery from a mild recession, and he leaves at what appears to be the end of the phenomenal era of economic growth that characterized his eight years in office, during which the real net worth of American households increased by upwards…

"Naderites comfort themselves with the notion that Al Gore will win anyway and that a Green Party vote will push him to the left. And here is where they make their biggest error of all. For how did Clinton and his administration come by their achievements? By the skin of their teeth. Clinton never…

As the sun sets on Bill Clinton's presidency, it is easy to give in to sentimentalizing, to legacy-assessing, to speculating about his future: Will he run for Senate or host his own talk show? Will he putter around his rutabaga garden in fuzzy house slippers? Where will he take his first date?

IN A PRIVATE CHAT, President-elect George W. Bush raised the issue of abortion with Colin Powell several weeks before naming him secretary of state. Bush said his administration would be pro-life. And though Powell is pro-choice, he would have to follow Bush's lead and eliminate any vestiges of the…

IN AUGUST 1986, Life magazine published a short profile of a precocious 29-year-old Democratic fund-raiser named Terry McAuliffe. It described McAuliffe as specializing in a "zany mix of sledgehammer persistence and personal magnetism," and it illustrated the point with an account of how he once…

The Cuban missile crisis is the closest the human race has come to Armageddon. Oddly though, like the moon landing -- another 1960s event of millennial importance -- it has faded from our historical imagination. For a new generation, its gravity is unappreciated. Thirteen Days, the new Kevin…

During the mad holiday rush to cease reading all things election related, THE SCRAPBOOK worries that many may have missed the 6,446-word peek behind the Gore campaign curtain by Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, who produces compelling fly-on-the-wall pieces when he isn't clucking about…

From an editorial in the December 19 San Francisco Chronicle:

Social conservatives aren't known for subtlety in pressing for what they want from their political allies. But in sinking Montana's Marc Racicot as George W. Bush's pick for attorney general and replacing him with former Missouri senator John Ashcroft, they operated deftly and quietly behind the…

The Modern Jewish Canon

Day after day the seemingly incontrovertible evidence of Israel's brutality rolls in. The snippets of videotape bounced around the world by CNN, BBC World News, and Sky TV are nearly always the same: A mob of dark-skinned teenagers armed with rocks pit themselves against phalanxes of faceless…

Hermann and Kate Field, two little-known but quintessential twentieth-century figures, addressed a small gathering at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., the other night. The occasion was a belated promotion for Hermann Field's memoir, Trapped in the Cold War:…

UNTIL VERY, VERY RECENTLY, public questioning of the social prohibition against pedophilia--to say nothing of positive celebration of child molestation--was practically non-existent in American life. The reasons why are not opaque. To most people, the very word "pedophilia" summons forth a…

III

Until very, very recently, public questioning of the social prohibition against pedophilia -- to say nothing of positive celebration of child molestation -- was practically non-existent in American life. The reasons why are not opaque. To most people, the very word "pedophilia" summons forth a…

I could hardly wait to sit down and finally get to work writing this little essay -- the deadline is fast approaching and I have a delightful subject this week that I think you'll enjoy -- in fact it's the kind of small, delicate subject that a skilled writer likes to hold up to the light as he…

There's a lesson for President-elect George W. Bush in the experience of the two other Republican presidents of the past 20 years. The first, upon arrival in Washington, was urged to give up his plan for a big tax cut. It would spur inflation, swell the budget deficit, and cause unfairness by…

For some time now we have been hearing about the gargantuan fortunes rapidly accumulated by tech superstars. Admittedly, the thought of people like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and Michael Dell having a net worth that exceeds the gross national product of small countries is staggering -- and, to…

WASHINGTON will soon be inundated with a fresh wave of political appointees. This being the first Democratic to Republican transition in 20 years, many of the new people will find themselves in the Washington pressure cooker for the first time. And quite a few are leaving corporate America with its…

In a December 22 item, part of his running feature "Bushism of the Day" in Slate, Jacob Weisberg ridiculed George W. Bush for describing himself as not a "revengeful" person. It's not an everyday usage, but Bush this time is in good company:

Last week, we carped about a New York Times story retailing Gore-camp complaints that Clarence Thomas should have recused himself in Bush v. Gore. Somehow we missed the Times's own thoroughgoing second thoughts on the story, which it printed in this December 13 editor's note:

Pop music has given us talented stylists and praiseworthy songwriters -- but only one artist. No one matters but Bob Dylan. He emerged in the early 1960s with a voice as authentic as the genres he seemed to have created. He did nothing less than upend the cultural landscape. He redefined the method…