58 articles
In 1926, a teenage busboy in Cleveland's Wade Park Manor Hotel opened an elevator door, stepped through without looking, and fell forty feet. A half century later, an American novelist in Spain, watching his wife change a tire, backed his wheelchair off the road and tumbled down into the ditch.…
THE DEATH OF 10-YEAR-OLD CANDACE NEWMAKER -- who was asphyxiated last year during a bizarre New Age therapy for a dubious disorder -- had all the ingredients of an O.J. Simpson-esque cause c l bre. It's not just that Candace was a particularly charming girl, although she appears to have been. It's…
JOHN DIIULIO, THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL and University of Pennsylvania professor on leave, runs President Bush,s faith-based initiative. But that,s not the half of it. He advises Bush on a range of social policy issues. He consults with White House speechwriters, and did so for Bush,s May 20…
MONTEZUMA'S REVENGE? Just when we had vowed never to use the term "political correctness" again...Last week, reports AP, "Monty Montezuma," the San Diego State mascot, got demoted by university officials "who want a more dignified portrayal of the Aztec leader." This, despite overwhelming support…
Last Monday began like any other day. I woke up, rubbed the sleep from my eyes, then let the dog and baby outside for their morning ablutions. The phone rang, and my wife answered it. I heard her say, "Oh no," and saw her eyes grow red-rimmed. Of all the sights that cause me to recoil -- a parking…
EVEN IN THE DAYS THAT HOMER SINGS OF, sightings of the gods were a rarity. By the time the Trojan War got underway, Zeus had pretty much given up making earthly appearances, and it was hard for even the wisest mortals to identify the lesser gods he sent in his stead, as Odysseus complained to…
Murder by stoning, death by shrapnel: The fallacy of moral equivalence.
Little Rock, Ark. On a postcard perfect spring day, Tim Hutchinson is in a windowless conference room at a teaching hospital in Little Rock. The senior senator from Arkansas is spending part of his Easter recess at a field hearing on the shortage of nurses. The hearing wouldn't ordinarily make…
Support for organ donation in this country is, as the clich has it, a mile wide and an inch deep. This is understandable. Most people favor the concept of giving "the gift of life" in the abstract. But when it comes to permitting their own loved ones' body parts to be "harvested" for…
MARY ANN GLENDON HOLDS A DISTINGUISHED CHAIR at Harvard Law School. Yet she has published such eloquent protests against the moral arrogance of judges and lawyers as Rights Talk and A Nation Under Lawyers. She served as the Vatican's representative to the U.N.'s major international conference on…
NEXT TO BIG TOBACCO AND THE NRA, insurance companies top the media,s list of villains. So if large life insurance companies were lobbying all-out against President Bush,s phaseout of the estate tax-a measure that would free thousands of Americans from having to buy expensive policies-you,d expect…
All presidents need a little help from their opponents, and George W. Bush's opponents in the Democratic party and the media have done him a favor. First they tried to persuade America that George Bush is an imbecile who doesn't know enough to be an effective president. But now that he's run a…
Of all the dinner-party questions that arose among the small band of conservative journalists from Europe and America who lived in Asia during the 1990s boom years, the one probed with greatest curiosity was whether Asians would need democratic reform to make their capitalism successful. We hoped…
IN COMMIES: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left, Ronald Radosh has written a sweet-tempered, thoughtful, mordantly funny account of his reluctant and protracted farewell to the Left -- a movement that provided him with girls, pot, LSD, folk songs, identity, and a hell…
HORSERACING IS A BIG DEAL IN KENTUCKY, and the Kentucky Derby is the pinnacle of the genre. The event is steeped in tradition that features the finest horses, betting, mint juleps, and beautiful women wearing absurd hats. Possessed of an abiding fondness for two of the four, I was thrilled to be…
AMERICANS WERE SHOCKED WHEN our European allies took the lead in ousting us from the United Nations Human Rights Commission early this month. Having served as a member of the U.S. delegation at the recently concluded annual session of the commission, I was less surprised. Contrary to reports in the…
IN OUR EPIC GAME WITH CHINA, the United States has just changed strategies. Our commitment to Taiwan's defense used to be based on strategic ambiguity. Recently, however, President Bush announced that the United States will do whatever it takes to defend Taiwan. An analysis of the game we play with…
NOAH WEBSTER DIDN'T JUST PRODUCE A DICTIONARY; he also wrote one of the most influential school textbooks in American history. It was called An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking, and it went through seventy-seven editions in the half century after its publication in 1785. It…
EVERY STUDENT OF AMERICAN POLITICS is familiar with the life-cycle biology of "borking," that process by which nominees for high national office are nowadays targeted for career-destroying character assassination. First there comes the insect's egg: a cartoon account, hatched by some ideological…
IT NEVER FAILS. Once several high-profile, fatal crashes of a new airplane grab the attention of the mainstream media, questions emerge about whether the effort is worth the risk. Doubts are raised about continuing the program, and a search for blame begins. That's what's happened to the Navy's new…
NICHOLSON BAKER IS BEST KNOWN FOR HIS NOVELS, but his latest volume is a lengthy rant against our major libraries and their policies regarding the preservation of old newspapers and books. Written in the warm-tapioca style of modern journalism, Baker's Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on…
TRAFICANT'S JAM Since we last spoke with James Traficant in September, when the Ohio congressman told us he was at "the zenith of my jackasshood," he's had a tough go of it. Before last fall's election, when Democrats still had hopes of gaining a majority in the House, Traficant swore allegiance to…
WHEN HOUSE EDUCATION and Workforce chairman John Boehner unveiled the president's retooled education bill two weeks ago, conservatives howled. Key provisions candidate Bush had stumped for and which Republicans were led to believe formed the backbone of his reform proposal -- school vouchers, for…
THE EDUCATION "REFORM" about to emerge from Congress is a perfect disaster. Conservatives such as William Bennett and Chester E. Finn Jr., who initially supported and in many ways shaped the administration's position on education, now argue that the proposals have been so badly distorted and…
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler a few years back. -- John Maynard Keynes As…
JOHN BOLTON, PRESIDENT BUSH'S CHOICE for undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs, is hardly a political lightning rod. His conservative views match Bush's own. He was confirmed without incident three times to second-echelon posts in the Reagan and Bush senior…
THE IDEA THAT LOS ANGELES is the Ellis Island of the late twentieth century was brought home to me a few weeks ago when Antonio Villaraigosa won the first round of voting to become the city's next mayor. Villaraigosa, the son of Mexican immigrants, who has Clinton-like charm and the backing of a…
WHAT -- ANOTHER ANTHOLOGY ON MARRIAGE? Just a year after Leon and Amy Kass of the University of Chicago produced Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying, a sophisticated six-hundred-page collection of texts from literature and philosophy, what place can there possibly be for The…
LITERARY CRITICS WHO MAKE YOU ROLL on the floor laughing are a dime a dozen; what makes Christopher Hitchens rare is that he can do so intentionally. Readers who know Hitchens through his political polemics in the Nation and elsewhere will be grateful that he brings the same stylistic toolbox to…
THE CITY. That,s what my neighbors and friends in Brooklyn call the borough of Manhattan. As in, "Are you going into the city tonight?" Or, "I had dinner with her in the city." Or, "My dentist is in the city, on 54th Street." Whenever I hear this, I cringe. I know they know full well that Brooklyn…
OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBER TIMOTHY MCVEIGH is scheduled to die by lethal injection May 16 in a federal prison in Indiana, the first person to be executed under the federal death penalty law. Another first: Families of McVeigh's victims and survivors of the attack received an invitation from federal…
BALLAD OF THE BLACK BERETS When Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki announced last October that he'd be appropriating the black berets of the elite Army Rangers in order to give them away as feel-good hats to the rest of the Army, he said it was symbolic. Not of the Peter Principle, as one might…
VIETNAM IS THE WAR THAT JUST WON'T GO AWAY. The latest flare-up of that decades-old conflict is the admission by Bob Kerrey, the former senator from Nebraska and Medal of Honor recipient, that the Navy SEAL team he led in Vietnam killed women and children during a nighttime foray 32 years ago.…
At first glance, Andrew Hurley's Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in Postwar Consumer Culture seems too idiosyncratic to tell us anything about the postwar rise of the middle class. After all, many factors contributed to the consumer culture of the 1950s and…
AS HIS REPUBLICAN COLLEAGUES WERE polishing off lunch at their weekly policy meeting last Tuesday, Vermont senator James Jeffords spoke about the importance of passing the education bill. According to a witness, Jeffords, the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee chairman, delivered one…
After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, President Bush often compared Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler. In sophisticated American and European foreign policy circles, the allusion seemed overwrought -- a historical malapropism from a president trying hard to rally his people. After all,…
PRESIDENT BUSH SEEMS to be settling into a comfortable relationship with his party over China. His handling of the surveillance plane episode met with widespread support, and his pledge to do "whatever it took" to defend Taiwan bucked up even conservatives. In late April, however, a fight broke out…
DURING LAST YEAR'S PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN, we were assured that George W. Bush's foreign policy team would be far superior in skill and experience to the much derided Clintonites. When Bush came to power, the "adults" would be in charge. Four months into the Bush presidency, the "adults" may want to…
From his prison cell, Timothy McVeigh has made a final attempt to convince America to share his vision of himself. He granted Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, reporters for the Buffalo News, over seventy-five hours of exclusive interviews, and the result -- American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the…
IN THE DIXIECRAT REVOLT AND THE END OF THE SOLID SOUTH 1932-1968, Kari Frederickson, a University of Alabama historian, offers a lively and perceptive account of the last important case when a dissident party faction played a desperate card once it had failed at the nominating convention -- bolting…
Press reports both here and in Taiwan indicate that Doug Paal, former NSC official in Bush I and Asian policy wonk, might be tapped to be the next head of the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto U.S. ambassador to Taiwan.
Last week, the Brownback-Weldon bill to prohibit human cloning was introduced on Capitol Hill. And the arguments against it are . . . well, as it turns out, there really aren't many arguments against a ban on manufacturing human beings like gingerbread men from a cookie cutter.
THE SCRAPBOOK is pleased to report the publication of a fine new book by WEEKLY STANDARD contributor and weapons-technology expert Henry Sokolski. Best of Intentions is a significant work of scholarship: the first comprehensive history of American efforts to stop the global spread of strategic…
DAVID SATCHER, the United States surgeon general, has another ten months to serve in his term, and President Bush has said he'll let this particular Clinton appointee -- by all accounts a competent and inoffensive public servant -- run out the clock. Even so, all of Washington has been buzzing…
The Clinton Presidential Center's website is up and running, and while the foundation's virtual library tends to the lofty business of conflict resolution and racial reconciliation, it's also good for a couple of yucks. Take the presidential timeline. We checked out the entries for "1998." Alert…
Unfree Speech
ON APRIL 19, President Bush traveled to the Capitol to deliver what was supposed to be a routine speech. The occasion was the Days of Remembrance, an annual observance to recall the Holocaust and its victims. Bush's speech lasted only a few minutes, but it had two noteworthy sentences in which he…
IT WAS A HISTORIC MOMENT, to be sure, and carefully stage-managed for public consumption. Sunday, April 1, was the day that same-sex marriages were to become legal in the Netherlands. The occasion had to be done up right. Henk Krol, editor of Gay Krant, Amsterdam's gay newspaper, and the gay rights…
My ears are unreliable Oh, they receive sound and transmit the appropriate signals to my brain just fine, but they're undiscriminating: They don't filter out unworthy sounds. Unlike my eyes, which at least can close when something ugly appears, my ears let in just about anything. They pick up the…
Well into his forties he was largely unknown, but by the time he died -- this year, on February 18, at age ninety-two -- Balthasar Klossowski was the most celebrated artist in the world. He called himself "Balthus," a frenchified version of a childhood nickname. His parents were Poles (his mother a…
There's hockey and beer. And there's snow. And driving with your lights on in broad daylight. And that guy who painted those beautiful pictures of beavers and moose. So who says our neighbors up north in Canada have no national identity worth preserving?
A story in last Thursday's New York Times reported that President Bush intends to nominate John P. Walters to the directorship of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. By past experience and present dedication to the issue in question, Walters -- a WEEKLY STANDARD contributor whom…
The final-paragraph kicker in Robert B. Reich's Washington Post op-ed piece last Monday urged Democrats to "stand up -- loudly and clearly -- for the little guy" during forthcoming congressional debates about health care policy. Which phrase, appearing in Reich's own words, was no doubt the Post's…
Since the publication in 1993 of Peter Kramer's Listening to Prozac, innumerable books have attempted to take the measure of a national psyche increasingly awash in mood-elevating pharmaceuticals. America seems to have embraced with unbridled enthusiasm the family of drugs that interrupt the…
Few poets in this century have been at once so highly respected and so little read as Allen Tate. Born in 1899, he belonged to the second growth of modernists -- Hart Crane chief among them -- who were the epigones of the great expatriates T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein. Less gifted…
It is our goal at the Reagan Legacy Project to preserve his legacy by encouraging governors, state legislators and the general public to become involved in the process of naming at least one significant landmark or institution after Reagan in all 50 states and 3,067 countries as well as in former…
ON FOX NEWS SUNDAY a few weeks ago, Senate minority leader Tom Daschle was twice asked a simple question that he refused to answer: "What do you think the maximum income tax rate should be for any American?" This question is at the core of the debate about the structure of the tax cut, yet very few…
What is to be done about Sudan? For 18 years, a devastating war has taken a horrifying human toll in Africa's largest country. Best estimates are two million dead, four million uprooted, out of a population of some 35 million. The government in Khartoum regularly bombs clinics, schools, and food…