68 articles
THE SPEECH MAUREEN DOWD HATED Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a bracing lecture last week at the annual American Enterprise Institute dinner. The recipient of the think tank's prestigious Francis Boyer award, Thomas delighted conservative Washington with his remarks and appalled Maureen Dowd, who…
Talking about Bill Clinton's post-presidential office dilemma, Dan Rather said on the CBS Evening News the other night that the choice came down to "Manhattan or Harlem." Good thing a Republican didn't say that; it would have been hate speech. It's probably presumptuous of a Washingtonian like THE…
The Game of Life
One hesitates to burden entertainment with philosophical baggage. The great majority of moviegoers are wisely after the mindless pleasure of the thing. They don't want Kierkegaard's Either/Or. They want respite from worry, work, and the occasional screaming kid.
You heard it here first. Andrew Ferguson predicted a month ago in these pages that the return of Republicans to the White House would mean "the reemergence of all kinds of things we haven't seen since -- well, since the old President Bush was in the White House. Avarice and selfishness are just the…
Little Rock, Ark. TWO HIGH-SCHOOL STUDENTS are asleep in the back row of the Arkansas Supreme Court, and the rest of their classmates, the ones with their eyes open, have that slack-jawed look of the video generation under the anesthetic of a school assignment. Who can blame them? It's not easy to…
New York
WHEN MARRIAGE BUFFS (like us) consider President Bush's proposed tax cuts, we don't obsess over whether they will be good for the economy, or for certain government programs, or for the Republican party. We lose sleep over whether they will be good for the institutions of marriage and the family.…
We were under the impression, mistaken it turns out, that Mary Matalin, former host of Crossfire and now a top adviser to Vice President Cheney, is a squish on abortion. Usually identified as a GOP "moderate," which is code for pro-choice, Matalin says it ain't so and never has been. "I've always…
WHEN GARY HART was exposed as a philanderer, ending his 1988 presidential bid, Ron Dozoretz stood by him and helped arrange a much-needed respite in Ireland. When Michael Kennedy died in a 1997 skiing accident, Beth Dozoretz bought pizzas and opened her Aspen, Colorado, vacation home to the…
Pius XII and the Second World War
IN A TWIST OF FATE and legal protocol, the arguments made in an amicus brief in defense of school busing and racial quotas by Clinton-era civil rights enforcer Bill Lan Lee will soon go before the Fourth Circuit as the position of the Bush Justice Department. The case is Swann v.…
THE WHITE HOUSE doesn't quite know what to call President Bush's speech to Congress on February 27. It's not a State of the Union address. Some Bush aides refer to it as "the budget priority speech," since the president will present highlights of his first federal budget. And the next day, he'll…
My idol in matters sartorial is that great villain of American literature Gilbert Osmond, of Henry James's Portrait of A Lady, who, James tells us, "was dressed as a man dresses who takes little other trouble about it than to have no vulgar things." Searching my own wardrobe for vulgar things, I…
My idol in matters sartorial is that great villain of American literature Gilbert Osmond, of Henry James's Portrait of A Lady, who, James tells us, "was dressed as a man dresses who takes little other trouble about it than to have no vulgar things." Searching my own wardrobe for vulgar things, I…
Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a bracing lecture last week at the annual American Enterprise Institute dinner. The recipient of the think tank's prestigious Francis Boyer award, Thomas delighted conservative Washington with his remarks and appalled Maureen Dowd, who called the address…
A deliciously unexpected byproduct of the November presidential election has been the unmasking of the hypocrisy and political bias of a once respected federal agency, the United States Commission on Civil Rights. In the last three years, the commission has launched partisan attacks on New York's…
Nobody in the White House or Justice Department appears to have known who Tom Bhakta was. Not really. They didn't know where he lived, so the address boxes on all the relevant forms were left blank. They didn't even know how to spell his name; it came out "Bhatka" on both the president's executive…
London
Baltimore, MD -- As unbelievable as it seems the key to stopping many cancers has been around for over 30 years. Yet it has been banned. Blocked. And kept out of your medicine cabinet by the very agency designed to protect your health -- the FDA.
What with all the attention given to Bill Clinton's midnight pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich, it's gone nearly unmentioned that Clinton simultaneously set free one Melvin J. Reynolds of Chicago, Illinois -- for "humanitarian" reasons, according to various (and oddly anonymous) defenders of…
Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity
Last week, I was on assignment in Berlin, courtesy of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. I'd agreed to write a piece on Berlin ten years after the fall of communism, a serious investigation into the identity crisis Berliners are suffering as they enter the 21st century.
This week has been dubbed "national security week" by the White House, as President Bush visits military installations in three states. When the events were planned, Bush's team no doubt expected a big welcome from the men and women of the armed forces and their families, who had voted…
Applications are invited for the third annual Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Journalism. The award is named for long-time New York Post editor and columnist (and WEEKLY STANDARD contributor) Eric Breindel, who died unexpectedly in 1998 at the age of 42. It is presented each year to the…
"Communazis"
GEORGE W. BUSH drafted his $ 1.6 trillion tax cut, with help from Larry Lindsey and a band of conservative economists, in the summer of 1999 and unveiled it later that year. During 2000, the proposal was zinged in the Republican presidential primaries by senator John McCain, then trashed in the…
We're sorry to report that the longest running one-man war against declining academic standards has ended in a cease-fire, as distinguished scholar and occasional contributor to this magazine Harvey Mansfield told his Harvard students on February 1 that he would henceforth give them two grades. One…
AMONG HIS FLURRY of last minute actions, President Clinton issued an order January 5 closing off 58.5 million acres of the national forests to future road building, timber harvesting, and oil and gas leasing. To put this in perspective, it will increase the area of the national forests in a…
THE SCRAPBOOK advises that its readers change whatever plans they've made for the upcoming "Presidents' Day" holiday. There being no such holiday, in fact.
ONE OF THE MOST ENDURING of Washington myths is that a "feeding frenzy" of tax cuts for business in 1981 was responsible for the deficits of the 1980s. This mythology is now being revived by those eager to derail, or at least shrink, a major tax cut this year.
The return of Ariel Sharon.
ONE COULD BE FORGIVEN for thinking that the journalists covering the opening days of the George W. Bush administration had just walked out of Being There, in which Peter Sellers plays a mentally limited gardener who stumbles from homelessness to a presidential nomination. Phrases like "don't know…
On February 3, a Penn State University student group called Womyn's Concerns -- in conjunction with that school's Women's Studies Program -- held its second annual "Sex Faire." Wouldn't you know, THE SCRAPBOOK had to study for a spelling test and couldn't go. But news reports have it that the Faire…
WHEN RACHEL CARSON wrote Silent Spring in 1962, she decried the use of chemical sprays, arguing for more benign and natural "biological" pesticides. One of her favorites was Bacillus thuringiensis, a common soil bacterium that produces a crystalline spore lethal to some insects. "Shortly after…
Remember how, during the Bush-Gore controversy in Florida, it became clear that the largest, poorest, and most urban counties in the country tend to use "antiquated" punch-card balloting machines, rather than the improved and expensive electronic voting systems developed only in recent years?…
Culture of Death
At the luncheon after George W. Bush's inauguration, senator Mitch McConnell toasted the new president as an American "Joshua," whose ability to bring people together would lead the nation to the promised land. It was a religion-filled day -- with President Bush appealing to saints and angels in…
WHEN GEORGE W. BUSH was running for president, he maintained an arms-length relationship with congressional Republicans. Today, he's aggressively courting them. During his first week in office, he met with scores of members, and late last week he attended a GOP retreat in Williams-burg, Virginia.…
Last week, the president created an Office of Faith-Based and Community Outreach. Predictably, wall-of-separation alarm clocks, set for a Republican administration, have been going off all over the place.
As if the world needed further proof that Hong Kong is faring poorly under Chinese rule, the Hong Kong government last week signaled a change in the way it will handle Falun Gong. Banned as an "evil cult" in the People's Republic of China, this eclectic spiritual movement has been mostly free to…
On October 24, 1985, 24-year-old seaman Miroslav Medivid leapt from the deck of a Soviet freighter into the Mississippi River near New Orleans. Medvid told Border Patrol agents who took him into custody that he opposed his country's Communist government and wished to defect. But for reasons that…
DICK WOLF is my new hero. Wolf produces the NBC television series Law & Order. Last week he did something people in Hollywood never do. Wolf stood up against political correctness and bit the hand that feeds him.
Only one false note is struck in the National Gallery's exhibition of French print-making from the late nineteenth century. It's there in the show's catalogue, where the otherwise excellent lead essay speaks of the "numerous artists, especially Bonnard," who "played a dynamic role" in Paris in the…
There has been some excellent reportage on Jesse Jackson's love child scandal, but this week's scoop belongs to Michael Sneed of Jackson's hometown paper, the Chicago SunTimes: "The Rev. Jesse Jackson likes to chill out in a bathhouse, the Division Street Bathhouse." Who knew? Who knew that Jesse…
In October 1999, during floor debate concerning a bill to ban partial-birth abortions, senator Barbara Boxer of California, responding to questions from senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, briefly let slip the startling notion that babies should not begin to enjoy constitutional and other legal…
A few news items from the first month of 2001:
SHORTLY AFTER the inauguration, Vice President Dick Cheney explained to Stephen Goldsmith, the former mayor of Indianapolis, how the new White House office of faith-based initiatives would be set up. But Goldsmith, Bush's first choice to head the office, had his own ideas, a counterproposal that…
WHEN TERRORISTS attack American embassies or kill our military personnel, the United States is relentless in bringing the criminals to justice. Right? Strangely enough, not if the crimes take place in Greece, our NATO ally.
Word Court
December 7, 1988
In order to move out of the White House in style (and not violate Hillary's Senate gift limit), the Clintons rattled their begging bowls last year, and their friends came through. The following is the itemized list attached to Schedule B of Bill Clinton's financial disclosure form, filed January…
What on earth has gotten into the liberals and the media? Perhaps affected by some sort of post-Palm Beach stress disorder, reporters and activists on the left have depicted George W. Bush as the leader of some sort of arch-conservative jihad. They've portrayed his tax plan as dangerously radical,…
IT'S HARD TO REMEMBER A TIME in recent decades when blacks as a group seemed angrier about politics. Despite the Republican party's unprecedented efforts to appeal to them in the recent campaign, a full 50 percent of black voters think George W. Bush "stole" the election (in contrast to 26 percent…
IN THE KIND OF COINCIDENCE on which Africa thrives, but which went unnoticed in most Western media, Congo-Kinshasa dictator Laurent Kabila was shot to death only a few hours before the 40th anniversary of the demise of his presumed revolutionary role model, Patrice Lumumba. Of course, given how…
Senior Airman Lenyatta Tinnelle, court-martialed at Naval Air Station Keflavik in Iceland, has been sentenced to a month's hard labor, two months of restricted activities, and a reduction in rank, the Associated Press reports. Tinnelle had written dozens of bad checks to sustain a compulsive…
New York
The proudly epicurean R. W. Apple Jr. of the New York Times's Washington bureau has eaten many a fine meal in his days as a pavement-pounding reporter. Nevertheless, THE SCRAP-BOOK bets Apple has never in all those many years tasted so perfectly prepared a dish of crow as was recently served him by…
When Prophecy Still Had A Voice
The American Regional Mystery
At underground parking garages, I like watching the "valets" gas vehicles up the spiral ramp, weaving around columns and going airborne over grates and speed bumps. But not yesterday, when I saw my own car ascending with a softball-sized patch of pistachio-colored paint next to the headlight, and…
James Salter's novel Cassada tells a story that rushes toward you with the cool hellishness of a treetopskimming jet fighter, then fills the sky overhead and is gone, leaving an unforgettable rustle of thunder uncoiling behind. It is a brilliant novel that in some ways resembles The Great Gatsby: a…
It was 1975, and I found myself in the middle of a struggle of wills between John Sears and Ronald Reagan. In retrospect, this may sound interesting, but at the time it was anything but enjoyable. Sears was the most brilliant political strategist I've ever known. Reagan was the greatest man I've…
AT HIS RECENT Senate confirmation hearing for secretary of Health and Human Services, Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson hinted that the Clinton administration's approval of the abortion pill might be revisited. Last September, the Food and Drug Administration approved the drug mifepristone,…
LATE-NIGHT COMEDIANS have done much to persuade Americans that Bill Clinton's finger-wagging "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" denial was the action that captured the essence of his presidency. But it wasn't.
Reagan, In His Own Hand
The following classified ad appears on page 50 of the latest New York Review of Books: