65 articles
Why does the Chinese premier rush to announce that President Bush will visit Beijing next fall -- even before the White House is ready to make the news public? Why do senior Chinese officials suddenly declare, after months of railing against Bush's plans to build a missile defense system, that…
We are reliably informed that a couple of details in an article in our February 12 issue ("The Minister of Ministries," by Fred Barnes) were incorrect. Stephen Goldsmith, the former mayor of Indianapolis who had been George W. Bush's first choice to head the faith-based initiative, did not ask for…
Every scandal deserves a yearbook photo, so as a public service we provide Denise Rich's at right, courtesy of irreplaceable Boston radio talkster Howie Carr, one of whose listeners faxed it to him.
Good news from Norway: Reuters reports that Norwegian farmers, fearing an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, are insisting that Gerard Depardieu be disinfected when he enters their country for a film shoot later this year. It seems the highly infectious disease can be carried not only by clothing,…
CHRISTIANITY is known for its paradoxes -- the meek shall inherit the earth, the last shall be first, whoever loses his life will save it. Here's another: Evangelicals who complain that government is too secular, suddenly fear it's getting too much religion.
Later in his life, long after he became a cinematic legend, Orson Welles was often asked to name filmmakers who had influenced him the most. "I studied the masters," Welles liked to reply, "by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford."
What can make Tom Shales of the Washington Post, Caryn James of the New York Times, conservative columnist George Will, and even more conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg swoon in unison? How about a television show chronicling New Jersey mobsters filled with graphic violence, unremitting…
"Revisionism," the Reverend Rousas J. Rushdoony wrote in The Nature of the American System, "is long overdue in American history." That was nearly forty years ago, but the fact that Rushdoony's death on February 8, 2001, was widely ignored is a sign we're still waiting to see the revisionism for…
THIS WEEK AND NEXT, the U.S. Senate will consider amendments to a piece of omnibus campaign finance reform legislation -- and then approve or reject the result by a majority vote. Nothing like this has happened for years. One or another iteration of the bill in question has haunted each of the past…
A Question of Intent
Detroit
Everyone knows about the Seven Deadly Sins -- Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Wrath, Covetousness, Sloth -- but I wonder if alongside them we ought to find a place for what I think of as Enlivening Sins. These are sins, too, but quite minor, rather sweet ones, and instead of knocking a person out of…
Last Wednesday, investors, panicky over banking troubles in Japan, drove the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 300 points in the first few minutes of trading. Bloomberg Business News reported a worldwide "flight to quality" -- from stocks into U.S. Treasury securities. But imagine if there were no…
STEM CELLS are undifferentiated "master cells" in the body that can develop into differentiated tissues, such as bone, muscle, nerve, or skin. Stem cell research may lead to exponential improvements in the treatment of many terminal and debilitating conditions, from cancer to Parkinson's to…
The Kennedy clan went into conniptions last week over the use of footage of the martyred president praising tax cuts in advertisements promoting the Bush tax plan.
A good journalistic rule of thumb is not to pick on cripples or old ladies or, if you can help it, crippled old ladies. But the uncompassionately conservative SCRAPBOOK is going to make an exception for Doris Haddock, aka Granny D, the self-described "old New Hampshire woman with arthritis and…
Kennedy Versus Lodge
Las Vegas
Barry Lynn could hardly contain himself. "This plan is sinking faster than the XFL," chortled the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State on March 12. Two days later, staffers united for getting their boss in the newspaper had produced some more punchy sound bites…
In his essay on sociobiology beginning on Page 31 of this issue, Andrew Ferguson notes that Peter Singer -- the creepy Ira W. DeCamp professor at Princeton's Center for Human Values -- has been trying to debunk "the distinction that has traditionally been made between human beings and animals." And…
MEET ZHOU JlANXIONG. A farmer in China's central Hunan province, Zhou was tortured to death by family planning officials in search of his wife, who was suspected of being pregnant without government permission. Zhou, who was 30 at the time of his death, was hung upside down, beaten with wooden…
The Clinton legacy becomes clearer each day. According to editor Justin Kaplan, the 17th edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, due out next year, will include just three entries for Bill Clinton:
SOMEONE STICKS A LOADED GUN to your head and asks for your wallet. Do you resist if you know the bullets are cheap and likely (but not certain) to be duds?
MIDWAY THROUGH his recent budget speech to Congress, President Bush announced that he had asked attorney general John Ashcroft "to develop specific recommendations to end racial profiling." The practice, he continued, "is wrong and we will end it in America." Two days later Ashcroft held a press…
It's become commonplace to point out that of modernity's three most influential thinkers -- Marx, Freud, and Darwin -- only Darwin enters the twenty-first century with his reputation intact. But Darwin has troubles of his own. The troubles come not only from the right, where creationists and other…
On March 1, a panel of the federal government's leading number crunchers decided that it might not be such a good idea, after all, for the Census Bureau to adjust last year's nationwide tally according to the "sampling" methods of modern statistical science. It might make the enumeration's…
In her usual bracing style, former prime minister Margaret Thatcher delivered an excellent address to the Royal United Services Institute on March 1. Think of it as instruction in how not to go wobbly.
To THE SURPRISE of everyone but his speechwriters, George W. Bush has shown in the last seven weeks that he's a president who can rise verbally to the occasion, having delivered an extravagantly praised inaugural address and then a well-turned speech to Congress last month. But the note he struck…
ON THE EVENING before the vote in the House on the most important part of his most important initiative -- the $ 1.6 trillion tax cut -- President Bush watched a movie. He invited leaders of Jewish organizations and Jewish members of Congress to join him in the 40-seat White House theater for a…
A few weeks ago in these pages, Kane Webb told the story of how the land for the Clinton library in Little Rock is being financed. To avoid a referendum on Clinton by having a vote on new bonds to pay for the land, the city decided to use proceeds from already issued revenue bonds. But can revenue…
You arrive at your destination late at night.
I've never had much use for neighbors. You can't live with them. You can't smother them with chloroform and feed them through a wood-chipper when you tire of them.
This year's tax and budget debate really comes down to one essential question: Is the money going to be there? The Congressional Budget Office projects surpluses of about $ 5.6 trillion over the next 10 years. The Republicans insist that those projections are conservative, so the government can…
THE BUSH TEAM made a strong start in education, sending forth its ambitious school-reform plan early and with much hoopla, cozying up to key members of Congress, including ranking education-committee Democrats Ted Kennedy and George Miller, recruiting every Republican in sight to cheer for the…
Six weeks into a new administration is, of course, too soon to start making a definitive judgment about its foreign policy. But it is not too soon to start worrying that President Bush may be content to continue walking down dangerous paths in foreign and defense policy laid out over the past eight…
WHERE HAVE ALL the Clinton haters gone? Nowhere, really. It's just that the phrase "Clinton hater," brandished so often by defenders of President Clinton to dismiss criticism of his ethics, morals, or honesty, has been dropped from the political vocabulary in Washington and across the country.
"Various consortia of leading national and Florida newspapers are examining scores of thousands of disputed and/or uncounted ballots. It will be many weeks before the results of these tabulations are known. And it is theoretically possible that they will validate Bush's victory, just as it is…
A Coup Attempt in Washington?
It's hard to conceive of a publicity campaign better calculated to outrage polite opinion than the one that heralded this year's new football league -- the XFL, brainstorm of the World Wrestling Federation's Vince McMahon and his partner, NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol.
The International Olympics Committee will decide the site of its 2008 Summer Games in July. For now, an evaluation committee is carefully inspecting the five cities in the running. Four of them would make excellent and honorable hosts, we figure: Paris, Toronto, Osaka, and Istanbul, each a modern,…
As both THE SCRAPBOOK and writer Noah Oppenheim have reported here in recent issues, Harvey Mansfield, distinguished professor of government at Harvard and occasional contributor to this magazine, abandoned his long-running guerrilla war against grade inflation earlier this year. Citing figures…
I'll admit, I didn't have the highest expectations for our first Valentine's Day as husband and wife. I was afraid that with marriage would come a tapering off of certain romantic attentions. But to my delight, my husband surprised me not only with long-stemmed red roses at the office, but also…
The Abolition of Britain
Milan
HIS PERKS AND POWER GONE, CLINTON FACES STORM ALONE
WITH ALL EYES focused on the president's efforts to push his tax cuts through Congress, little attention is being paid to what we economists call microeconomic policy -- more (un)popularly known as regulation. That lack of interest in a coherent underpinning for policy proposals is already evident…
Video cassettes and DVDs are the paperbacks of cinema. Just as Penguin has been a ready supplier of literary classics, Blockbuster and the other video-rental outlets have become important purveyors of great movies and television -- and thanks to them you might, on a Saturday night with nothing to…
IF YOU LIKE WHAT California has done to deregulate electricity, you will love its plans to make college admissions "fairer."
Complete Poems
REPUBLICAN LEADERS at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue say the greatest danger the GOP faces today is that it might fail to pass a promised tax cut this year. They are wrong. An even bigger danger is that it might pass a tax cut so diluted of economic growth incentives as not to revive a sluggish…
The U.S. government is still advertising for tips that would lead to the arrest of fugitive financier Marc Rich. At the website of the International Broadcasting Bureau (www.ibb.gov/fugitives/richica.htm) you can find the wanted poster reproduced at right. It reads as follows:
THE LOVE AFFAIR between conservatives and President Bush was epitomized by the appearance of Karl Rove, Bush's chief political strategist, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. Rove was as eager to be there as the group was to have him. Often attacked by conservatives…
THE WAR ON CRIME AND DRUGS is rapidly losing ground to the war on punishment and prisons. Recently, Newsweek featured Robert Downey Jr. on the cover, along with a series of articles and essays on the drug problem with the general theme that law enforcement and incarceration don't work and that we…
HARVARD was once a great university. It may still be, but it is now even greater theater. No one knows the script better than government professor Harvey C. Mansfield, a renowned scholar of political philosophy who has a certain knack for finding trouble.
Orlando, Fla.
Wasn't it Lenin who once said: "The capitalists will sell us the fiber-optic cables by which we can hang them"? Or something like that. Yes, it turns out that the improved system of Iraqi air defenses that U.S. and British bombers have been going after, and on which the Chinese are feverishly…
Whenever we hear grumbling about George W. Bush's verbal miscues, we like to recall the peculiar gifts of his predecessor. As quoted by Reuters, here's then-still-president William Jefferson Clinton on January 11, responding to questions from reporters about his intention to abandon Socks the cat.…
For a handful of remaining stalwarts, the pardons are nothing. Next year, if security cameras capture Bill Clinton robbing a bank with a sawed-off shotgun, James Carville will no doubt go on Hardball, just as he did earlier this month, and call him "the best president we've ever had." Joe Lockhart…
There's no particular reason for you to remember it, but last April the New York Times Book Review savaged something called The Hunting of the President by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, two of Bill and Hillary Clinton's most reliable journalistic bootlickers. Reviewer Neil A. Lewis softened the blow…
Lansing, Mich.
Karl Popper
BILL CLINTON SPENT MUCH of his presidency claiming he was being persecuted with a new political attack strategy: Partisan character assassins would use the Drudge Report or the National Enquirer or the American Spectator to air charges -- on Whitewater, on the Lewinsky affair -- that didn't meet…
I got a new job a few months ago. It happened suddenly. One day, I was writing stories for THE WEEKLY STANDARD. The next day, I was doing a daily show for CNN. Virtually everything about my life changed dramatically. I did my best to ignore it. Finally, one night last week, I had to face the truth:…