93 articles
ON THE EVIDENCE of the past couple of weeks, there's one person above all on the Bush foreign policy team whom we can trust to wage the war on terrorism effectively--without debilitating self-delusions, without crippling moral confusion, without self-defeating serpentine maneuvering, but rather…
A LONG-AWAITED exhibition of Francisco Goya's paintings, drawings, etchings, and cartoons of women arrived in Washington this week. Long-awaited because of one woman in particular: the one shown in "The Naked Maja" and (in exactly the same pose) in "The Clothed Maja," which until June will hang…
SPECULATION about Condoleezza Rice as a possible vice presidential choice for the GOP ticket in 2004 has reached the proverbial tipping point. Everyone's talking about it, from Eleanor Clift on the left, to the good folks at National Review Online on the right, to Andrew Sullivan on the . . . well,…
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE published an unsigned editorial on March 1 attacking Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's ideas as "scary" and "reckless." The editorialist admitted that Wolfowitz, in an interview with the paper, had come across as "disarmingly soft-spoken and polite" and as a…
I HAD FRIENDS visiting from out of town last weekend and I gave them the grand tour of D.C. I showed them RFK stadium, St. Matthew's Cathedral, and the Mall. And as we drove past the Capitol I paused, as I always do when I look up at the rotunda these days, and said a small prayer of thanks to the…
IT'S BEEN declared so often in the past few months that it's almost become a given in discussions of public affairs. Sure, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11 were a big event, but the world has gradually slipped back to normal. The Israeli-Palestinian…
SIX YEARS AGO, I lamented the fact that, because of the pressures exerted by the dieting community, McDonald's had changed the recipe for its apple pie. What once was a deep-fried, golden crust containing generous chunks of apple in a molten-hot, syrupy sweet filling became a dried-up, baked casket…
LAST WEEK, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences sponsored a discussion at the Library of Congress on the timely issue of the selection and appointment of federal judges. I say timely, because just days before the event, the Senate Judiciary Committee split along party lines--10 Democrats…
PRESIDENT BUSH'S inclusion of North Korea in the "axis of evil" was accurate and necessary. It was also liberating. It freed us from the confines of a debate about North Korea that has unfolded along traditional hawk versus dove lines. The doves, led by South Korean president Kim Dae Jung and…
The Anatomy of Racial Inequality by Glenn C. Loury Harvard University Press, 160 pp., $22.95 AS A YOUNG professor at Harvard, Glenn Loury, the African-American economist, was an articulate exponent of the view that the persistence of racial inequality could no longer be blamed on white racism, that…
EVEN AMONG THE HOMELESS, it seems, there's a pecking order for park benches. Why dodge bullets in gang-torn Compton when you can shoot the breeze with Bill and Hill in Chappaqua? Indeed, Westchester County, New York, has a more severe problem with homelessness than anywhere else in the country.…
EXIT STRATEGIES ARE FOR LOSERS Robert Byrd and Tom Daschle have been thoroughly beat up already for decrying--Byrd explicitly and Daschle implicitly--the Bush administration's lack of an "exit strategy" in the war on terrorism. Their Democratic colleague Joe Lieberman's rebuke is the pithiest: "We…
SHORTLY AFTER she was sent to Harris County Jail to await trial for drowning her five children in a bathtub, Houston housewife Andrea Yates asked a psychiatrist to shave her head so she could see if the number 666 was still printed on her skull. That wasn't her only problem. A full month into her…
Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy by Jean Bethke Elshtain Basic, 336 pp., $28 The Jane Addams Reader edited by Jean Bethke Elshtain Basic, 432 pp., $20 JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago, intends…
ORLANDO It's impolite to notice, but notice they do on the campaign trail: Janet Reno is a lot of woman. She's 6' 11/2" barefoot, 6' 13/4" in her sensible flats. Perhaps no other Clinton cabinet member aroused such disparate passions as the former attorney general and current Florida gubernatorial…
SIX-MONTH anniversaries are rarely noted, except for babies. Yet President Bush staged an elaborate ceremony at the White House on March 11 to commemorate the deaths of 3,000 Americans in terrorist attacks six months earlier on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Families of victims were there,…
A GOOD BARBER is hard to find. Sometimes when you do find the right guy, one of you ends up moving away. Other times, you decide the person just isn't that good and so you look for someone new. This is where it gets tricky. When you get your hair cut by the same person every few weeks, you don't…
ONE OF Catherine the Great's closest advisers was Prince Potemkin, who famously tried to persuade her that his policies were improving the life of the Russian people by constructing fake prosperous villages for Catherine to see as she sailed by on the Volga River. Today, another powerful woman,…
The Immediate Experience Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture by Robert Warshow Harvard University Press, 302 pp., $18.95 AMONG my prized possessions is a battered copy of Robert Warshow's "The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular…
LEGAL SCHOLARS, political commentators, and American elected officials have never reached a consensus on the precise meaning of the Constitution's requirement that presidents appoint cabinet officers and federal judges "by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate." The very ambiguity of the…
WE OUGHT TO FACE squarely the origins of the Palestinian descent into barbarism. In July 2000, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak made a peace offer that stunned Israel and the world: Israel would re-divide Jerusalem--would turn over large pieces of its ancient capital to the same people who had…
IT'S DIFFICULT to imagine any American of any age who has not heard the phrase "But seriously, folks." Of course, it's also difficult to imagine any American of any age who doesn't want to personally blow the head off of every prisoner in Guantanamo, but never mind that now. "But seriously, folks"…
THE FIRST AMENDMENT is alive and well at West Virginia University. Or rather, it's alive and well in two small, outdoor areas of the WVU campus that the administration has cheerfully set aside as free-speech zones. As long as students are within these zones--which are available on a first-come,…
NOT SINCE Secretary of State Warren Christopher returned from Europe with egg on his face in May 1993 has a high-ranking American official had such a bad week abroad as Vice President Dick Cheney just spent in the Middle East. At least that's the way it looks from the outside. Christopher, you'll…
THE ANIMATORS who make green ogres and one-eyed bugs come to life on the big screen should be jumping up and down this Sunday. At 8:00 p.m. EST the Academy Awards commence, and for the first time in the awards' 74-year history, the Academy will recognize the feature-length, animated film with its…
MY FAVORITE radio talk show host is Hugh Hewitt. Granted, Hugh's an old friend of mine. But personal friendship aside, one reason I like going on The Hugh Hewitt Show is that I stand a good chance of learning something new.
IN THE pre-September 11 world, the culture of correctional facilities used to rely on a certain natural order. A criminal would get busted, be sent to the joint, then along about the first time he got turned out by a guy named Fang while getting Zest-fully clean in the prison shower, he'd decide to…
HERE'S MY considered opinion of "Moulin Rouge": It sucks. There's no need to get defensive. It's no big deal. A lot of movies suck. But then again, a lot of movies don't snag eight Oscar nominations. Okay, okay, calm down. The truth hurts, I know. In fact, the movie's suckiness was, in fact, a bit…
IMAGINE if Yasser Arafat, who is no slouch at terrorism, were treated the same as Osama bin Laden, the world's foremost terrorist at the moment. Arafat would have fled Palestinian territory and would be on the run, hunted by a coalition of nations bent on apprehending him dead or alive.…
THE IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE once more is the source of bad news. The agency has a problem, all right, but it isn't as huge as some people think. Indeed, the story involving the Huffman Aviation flight school in Venice, Fla., raises issues more profound than any now facing the INS. It…
THESE ARE TOUGH TIMES for the American left. As my friend Stanley Kurtz of the Hudson Institute recently noted in a terrific piece for National Review Online, leftist intellectuals have become increasingly paranoid, and liberal politicians have resorted to foolish and desperate criticism of the…
A PIECE I wrote two weeks ago featuring Benjamin Franklin's anti-Semitism--alleged anti-Semitism, that is, as portrayed in a repulsive 1935 Nazi forgery lately recycled in the Egyptian government press--drew a response from an editor in Saudi Arabia. He objected to my citing the work of MEMRI.org,…
AT THE END OF THE DAY, the truest picture of the European response to the war on terror may emerge from, for example, the fact that Germany has dispatched elite special forces troops to fight alongside Americans in Gardez, Afghanistan. That a Social Democratic-Green coalition would send German…
TOM DASCHLE, Washington's most important Democrat, just can't catch a break. The Senate majority leader has been trying to figure out how to open up an effective partisan front against a wartime president for months now. Three times, Daschle has bravely taken on the president in a direct assault.…
OUR COLLEAGUE John Podhoretz came to Washington recently and made an astute observation. If you travel in conservative circles, he noticed, all anybody wants to talk about is the war. But among liberals, all anybody wants to talk about is campaign finance reform and Enron. In the large scheme of…
A PROBLEM with carrying fountain pens is that strangers use them as a pretext for conversation. Fa-miliar icebreakers include: "Say, is that some kind of fountain pen?" (meaning: Say, are you some kind of nancy boy?) and "Wow! Can I try writing something with that?" (Answer: "No.") And at the end…
DO THE Arab leaders of the Middle East think we're clever? Or to put it more politically: Do they think we can tell the difference between friend and foe? Among Arabs themselves, knowing who the good guys are has long been a devilishly difficult task, since the great divide--believer and…
Genes, Girls, and Gamow After the Double Helix by James D. Watson Knopf, 304 pp., $26 A DOCTORATE from Indiana University in 1949, the Cavendish laboratories at Cambridge University, the discovery of DNA. Thereafter, immortality. James Watson has plainly come to regard his life as a sign of grace.…
PRESIDENT BUSH'S schedule this week includes a visit to Washington by his counterpart from Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov. The strategically located ex-Soviet republic has become an important American ally in the anti-terror war, assuring our military of the availability of bases for operations in…
WALL STREET JOURNAL reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped when he went looking for the leader of a group called Jamaat al-Fuqra in the terrorist bazaar of Pakistan. At the time he disappeared, Pearl was tracking reports that Fuqra had hosted would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid at its walled compound in…
LOS ANGELES When poll results a week before California's gubernatorial primary showed political neophyte Bill Simon with a six-point lead over two-term Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan, directors of California's Field Poll suggested voters were witnessing "one of the most remarkable turnarounds in…
APPALLING RALL Don't feel bad if you've never heard of Ted Rall. Though his cartoons are peddled by the Universal Press Syndicate, Rall's bitter anti-Americanism hardly makes for knee-slappers, and the market for unfunny cartoons isn't all that great. The Rall market should shrink even further as…
ELECTED OFFICIALS loathe term limits (they're forced to retire). Special interest groups don't like them (they lose allies they've assiduously wooed). The media rarely have a kind word for them (their sources leave town). And the consensus for several years in the political community has been that…
Starr A Reassessment by Benjamin Wittes Yale University Press, 256 pp., $24.95 Final Report of the Independent Counsel Regarding Monica Lewinsky and Others by Robert W. Ray United States D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, March 6, 2002 FALSEHOOD has never been popular, exactly, but there are those who…
WHO NOW READS DICKENS? Harvard's literature professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has been much celebrated in recent weeks for his discovery, purchase, and plans to publish a 300-page handwritten manuscript called "The Bondswoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, a Fugitive Slave, recently Escaped from North…
THE COMMITTEE TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS reports that "most journalists who die in war zones are murdered." That is, they don't die from playing hopscotch through a mine field or getting dinged by a stray bullet, but are deliberately targeted and killed. The current war in Afghanistan is no different.…
WE OUGHT TO FACE squarely the origins of the Palestinian descent into barbarism. In July 2000, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak made a peace offer that stunned Israel and the world: Israel would re-divide Jerusalem--would turn over large pieces of its ancient capital to the same people who had…
A COUPLE OF weeks ago I wrote a piece on how George W. Bush, who doesn't possess stellar academic credentials, has nonetheless made a series of extremely wise decisions while leading the war on terror. I pointed out that Bush's brilliant performance challenges our conventional definitions of…
JUST FOR FUN, fellow students of journalism, let's count up all the mistakes New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas D. Kristof has recently made about Sami Al-Arian, that University of South Florida computer engineering professor The Weekly Standard has been following on and…
ON JUNE 20, 2001, Andrea Pia Yates killed her five young children and set off a wildly huge news story. As the whole English-speaking world surely knows by now, Mrs. Yates and her defenders claimed she had murdered her children during a psychotic episode of postpartum depression. On Tuesday a Texas…
FOR THE RECORD, I've never thought that the Internet would change the world. And now that blogging has come of age, I'm even more sure of it, because this "revolution" is a reactionary force. Blogging is returning us to a time when the written word was supreme and for that we should be grateful to…
IN 1978, Congress first passed the statute we know as the independent counsel law. Congress reauthorized it in 1983, 1988, and 1994 but declined to do so in 1999, having decided enough was enough. The wisdom of that decision was confirmed afresh last week when Robert Ray, who succeeded Kenneth…
THE WORD "censorship" has been tossed around with abandon lately--applied to everything from Bill Maher losing sponsors for his failing political comedy show to robust criticism of creepy left-wing cartoonist Ted Rall. Below you'll find an example of what the real thing looks like. Last month…
LAST NOVEMBER, during the heady days of Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S. military dropped a 15,000-pound bomb known as a Daisy Cutter on Taliban positions in Afghanistan. The bomb flattened everything in sight for roughly 600 yards. But while the Daisy Cutter's blast occurred above ground,…
Alexander Hamilton & the Persistence of Myth by Stephen F. Knott University Press of Kansas, 344 pp., $34.95 Writings by Alexander Hamilton edited by Joanne B. Freeman Library of America, 1,108 pp., $40 IN 1987, the Yale historian Paul Kennedy published a book called "The Rise and Fall of the Great…
JERUSALEM TO UNDERSTAND WHY Ariel Sharon's first year as Israel's prime minister may not be followed by a second, one need look no further back than February 21. After months of virtual silence, Sharon addressed his people in a nationally televised address following the worst week of violence in…
Ambling Into History The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush by Frank Bruni HarperCollins, 224 pp., $23.95 The Big Enchilada Campaign Adventures with the Cockeyed Optimists from Texas Who Won the Biggest Prize in Politics by Stuart Stevens Free Press, 298 pp., $25 SOMETHING STRANGE has happened to…
CAN THREATS ALONE tame the axis of evil? In his State of the Union speech, President Bush promised to take preemptive action against Iran, Iraq, and North Korea if they don't abandon their efforts to foment terrorism and perfect weapons of mass destruction. The United States could inflict horrific…
Debrett's New Guide to Etiquette & Modern Manners The Indispensable Handbook by John Morgan St. Martin's Press, 384 pp., $27.95 "THERE ARE lots of us," Sebastian said of his aristocratic family to commoner Charles in "Brideshead Revisited." "Look them up in Debrett." He meant "Debrett's Peerage and…
I HAD NEVER visited Germany--at least not until last week. That's no accident, as I do travel hundreds of thousands of miles every year to a wide variety of destinations, but is instead a choice rooted in history. World War II was the dominant theme in my house when I was being brought up on the…
DEATH THREATS FROM THE NEW STATESMAN A young man named Mark Thomas has lately been using his column in London's left-wing New Statesman to gripe about the West's indifference to the trade-union movement in Colombia. Last month, because the general secretary of the Yumbo Municipal Workers' Union had…
PRIOR TO September 11, 2001, few would have predicted that Russia would back the United States so firmly in its response to the terrorist attacks. Now, after a remarkable show of solidarity and even crucial assistance to Washington and its allies, the question remains, why did Russia do it? Were…
EVERY DAY AT LUNCH HOUR last year, Karen Gayhart busied herself piling up the green, plastic pill trays at the health clinic of Great Neck Middle School in Virginia Beach, Va. Scooping out little, round Ritalin or Adderall pills one at a time, she and other clinic workers quickly emptied four of…
RECENT WEEKS have seen news of biotech advances all along the front: cloned cats, artificial wombs, nascent human-animal hybrids, genetic selection of embryos for implantation, fetal-tissue manipulation--and on, and on, nearly every day bringing some news item about the technology that is…
THE SENATE will shortly take up one of the most pressing moral, ethical, and scientific issues of our time: the Brownback proposal to outlaw human cloning. Two alternative proposals would ban only "reproductive cloning," which would mean explicitly legalizing human cloning but not the implantation…
THIS IS A MOMENT OF DEFEAT for Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. But he's hardly in agony. He concedes campaign finance reform, which he's been fighting in one form or another for more than a decade, will soon be enacted. Yet he struggles on. At best, he can hold up the legislation for a…
I DON'T KNOW how many sour-pussed Olympics-haters we have in our country. I don't know what percentage of Americans is unmoved by the work put in, the opening ceremonies, the personal stories, the pride in being host, and the struggle for individual and team glory. I don't know how many sneer at…
WHILE VISITING Israel week before last, I was--like most everyone else there--doing serious reviews of whether I should turn this corner or that, stay here or go there. Personal security is the big "existential" issue in Israel, and any discussion of that leads naturally to politics, the…
DO THE Arab leaders of the Middle East think we're clever? Or to put it more politically: Do they think we can tell the difference between friend and foe? Among Arabs themselves, knowing who the good guys are has long been a devilishly difficult task, since the great divide--believer and…
FOR SEVERAL WEEKS, anticipation has been building over "9/11," the documentary film of the World Trade Center disaster scheduled to air this Sunday on CBS at 9 P.M. (Eastern). The movie is the work of Jules and Gideon Naudet, two young French filmmakers who happened to be making a documentary about…
THE DEFINITIVE Bobby Knight anecdote isn't the chair toss. It isn't the videotape of him man-handling one of his players. It isn't even the farewell speech at Indiana University where he said that his critics "could kiss my ass." If you want to see the real Bobby Knight, look back to the 1984…
IF THERE IS a single symbol of media overkill, it's the crawl. Resurrected in the first hours of Sept. 11, the crawl was originally meant to get critical information out to TV viewers while major events were unfolding on camera. Six months later, the cable-news networks still use the crawl, 24…
WITH THE upset victory of businessman Bill Simon over former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan, the Republican primary in the California governor's race marks the end of an era. Not just the end of the Riordan era, but the end of an era when Republican politics seemed to follow identifiable…
THE NEWS from Israel is unremittingly grim. The process by which Israel was to give land to the Palestinians in exchange for peace has turned out to be one in which it has given land only to get war in return. To visit Israel, as I did last week, is to be aware of the real possibility of a…
THE EUROPEANS would be thrilled with America, but the war in Afghanistan against al Qaeda and the Taliban would take longer. Defense spending would be increased, though not as much as hawks want, while foreign aid would get a big boost. Iraq would be under pressure to accept United Nations arms…
GENERAL Barry McCaffrey met Fidel Castro on Saturday night, Reuters reports. It was love at first sight.
LIKE THE Cold War, the war on terrorism is partly a battle of ideas--ideas about, for example, the tension between truth and tolerance. Some of the challenges before us are suggested in the juxtaposition of two documents relating to the American founding, one an authentic letter from George…
AMONG the announcements White House press secretary Ari Fleischer made in his daily briefing on February 15 was this: "The president believes in and will fight for the nomination of [Charles] Pickering." Pickering certainly could use the president's help. His nomination--the first judicial…
NEW YORK It's Valentine's Day, and though I'm a married man, I'm standing on the sixth-floor landing of a Greenwich Village apartment building with a box of Russell Stover candy that's intended for a woman I've never met. I'm on a journalistic suck-up safari, and my quarry has warned me that I'd…
JOSIAH BUNTING III, former enlisted Marine, former Army officer, educator, and novelist and, now, retiring superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, sounded weary and even plaintive as, once again, he tried to defend the traditions of that state-supported academy. He was reacting to a…
CONVINCED that healthy, two-parent families are best for children, the Bush administration is looking for ways to promote sound marriages among welfare recipients and clients of programs like Head Start. Its point man in the effort is psychologist Wade Horn, assistant secretary of Health and Human…
The Culture of Classicism Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 by Caroline Winterer Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 272 pp., $45 I USED TO leave graduate classes in Latin and Greek composition at Stanford on Fridays to drive home to the San Joaquin Valley to help on our grape…
Democratic Delusions The Initiative Process in America by Richard J. Ellis University Press of Kansas, 240 pp., $17.95 paper TEVYE, the conflicted main character of "Fiddler on the Roof," pondered tough choices by arguing with himself, starting each new line of thought with the phrase, "On the…
THERE ARE no more yellow ribbons. For more than 20 years, in times of travail, the yellow ribbons have come out. The Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80 called forth a nationwide flowering of yellow ribbons. And at one time or another since then--can this really all have been wrought by Tony Orlando…
THIS MORNING, out for a walk in wintry weather, I discovered a young student from the Northwestern School of Music struggling on the icy sidewalk while carrying a double bass. "Excuse me," said I, as our paths crossed, "but have you ever considered taking up the harmonica?" He took it, as the…
THE FULL SWEEP of the new Bush Doctrine was on display this past week, as President Bush traveled through North Asia delivering a consistent and powerful message: American security and global security require a determined assault not just on terrorists but on the three-headed hydra of tyranny,…
THE DCCC'S DIRTY TRICKS When J.D. Hayworth took to the House floor last week in support of a campaign-finance amendment to ban non-citizens from making political contributions, he was characteristically blunt: "Well, now my friends, here is your chance to change the system. To say, lawful citizens…
BEWITCHED AT THE BOOKSTORE Seven books on witchcraft were published in the first two weeks of January 2002. That's up from five a year as recently as the 1980s, and fewer than one a year in the first half of the twentieth century. Interest in the contemporary pagan mishmash known as Wicca is…
See No Evil The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism by Robert Baer Crown, 288 pp., $25.95 Cloak and Dollar A History of American Secret Intelligence by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones Yale University Press, 384 pp., $29.95 ACCORDING TO CIA case officer Robert Baer, who spent…
IN THE CAPITOL OFFICE of House Republican whip Tom DeLay, a special room is set aside for the White House legislative team. It isn't used much. The president's lobbyists are not a large presence in Congress these days. Bush is concentrating on the war against terrorism and the "axis of evil" and…
AN INDELIBLE impression from the September 11 attack was the unearthly look of the southern tip of Manhattan--streets, buildings, cars, and people were engulfed in gray. Almost everything about the war on terror since then has been painted in black and white. Terrorists are "evil." Countries in the…
UCLA, home to grown-up child actors and proto-Tri Delts, is a very noisy campus. There are street sweepers and leaf blowers, car alarms and lawn mowers, and a mercilessly loud game room in the student center. "That's why I actually left," says Ted Rueter.
HAS THERE ever been a bigger challenge to the American college admissions process than George Bush? Selecting the nation's future leaders, admissions committees at elite colleges insist that students have nearly flawless grades. Bush didn't. They require stratospheric SAT scores. Bush's were good…