88 articles
THIS WEEK, the Supreme Court will decide whether an Ohio program using vouchers at church-related schools violates the First Amendment's ban on establishing religion. The outcome in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris is hard to predict, not least because the court is narrowly divided on church-state…
WHAT'S BOTH NEW AND REMARKABLE about President Bush's plan for a Middle East settlement are two ideas that underpin his policy and have never before been applied to the Palestinians. Those ideas are regime change and democracy. Both are anathema to Bush's own State department, the Arab countries…
PRESIDENT BUSH rose to the occasion yesterday. As he did in his speech to Congress on September 20, in his State of the Union address on January 29, and in his West Point speech on June l, he rose above the morass of diplomatic double-speak and the in-fighting of his own administration, left behind…
GEORGE BUSH has a novel approach to the Middle East; he tells the truth. Yesterday's statement wasn't filled with diplomatic jargon. It didn't try to reconcile six different policies through artful fudging. Instead the statement has the ring of honest conviction. This has a number of practical…
ST. PAUL Five years ago, the Democratic mayor of St. Paul switched parties. The move was scripted to be a disaster for the party Norm Coleman was leaving. He had worked under two popular Democratic attorneys general, then was elected mayor of the state capital. Clearly a political talent, Coleman…
IT WASN'T A SPEECH you'd expect to cause an uproar. Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, addressed the winter meeting of the Republican National Committee on January 18. Looking ahead to the midterm elections, Rove suggested that the Republicans had a number of issues that resonated…
THE VILLAGE OF POUNDBURY in southwest England is a conventional real estate development, in financial terms. But its residences--ranging from spacious, detached homes to little rowhouses--are built in traditional regional styles with facades of brick, stone, or stucco. An interconnected network of…
DEMOCRATIC REP. Ronnie Shows is a pro-life populist with a moderate record. A National Rifle Association rug is ostentatiously placed at the entrance to his office on Capitol Hill. Republican congressman Chip Pickering is a smooth New South conservative who once was Senate GOP leader Trent Lott's…
ON JUNE 11, the Pentagon's number three official, Doug Feith, delivered a blunt defense of the Iraqi National Congress to four Iraqi opposition leaders dissatisfied with the INC, the U.S.-supported umbrella group of those working to unseat Saddam Hussein. According to minutes of the private…
IN A RECENT REPORT for investors in the biotech industry, the relationship between biotechnology and terrorism is described as follows: "Ugly as bioterrorism is, bringing biotech back into the headlines in the capacity of a savior has done much to stimulate the sector since its mid-September 2001…
THE PROBLEM OF THE LAW-ABIDING TERRORIST There were two civil-liberties sob stories in the news last week. The better known is the case of the "dirty bomber" and U.S. citizen Abdullah al Muhajir (ne Jose Padilla), an al Qaeda associate who was snatched up entering the country on May 8 and turned…
FROM EARLY ADOLESCENCE, I never doubted that my writerly life would lead me into a romantic European exile. I was right. Here I am! Just like Goethe, just like Henry James: standing on the edge of Lake Como, staring a mile across the water at the wall of pine-speckled, auburn-colored Alps that…
The Rise of Southern Republicans by Earl and Merle Black Harvard University Press, 442 pp., $29.95 ADVOCATES of activist government in the United States have long looked with envy at West European countries with ideologically based party systems. In 1950, a special committee of the American…
WHO SAYS YOU CAN'T have more than one good reason to do something? Of course, the proposition that disparate federal agencies with homeland security responsibilities should be combined into one massive cabinet department ought first to be judged on the contribution such consolidation will make to…
IT MUST BE MISERABLE to be on the Democratic left. For decades you've been inveighing against the evils of corporate power. For decades you've been waiting for a popular backlash against concentrated wealth, one that would finally provide momentum for the liberal economic policies you've been…
The Fifty-Year Wound The True Price of America's Cold War Victory by Derek Leebaert Little Brown, 704 pp., $29.95 A SORE LOSER is easy to find, but you don't come across many sore winners. Nonetheless, they exist--and for proof, you need look no further than Derek Leebaert, whose book on the Cold…
WHEN Mike Battles launched his long-shot bid for a seat in Congress from Rhode Island last summer, he was told to scrub his resume. The experts recommended he downplay his service as an Army Ranger and hide his years in the clandestine service. "At that point, it wasn't hip to have been a Ranger or…
THURSDAY, JUNE 20--It is National Day at the embassy of Luxembourg. I wouldn't miss it for the world. For those of you who may not know, Luxembourg is a country less than a thousand square miles in area (slightly smaller than Rhode Island) with a population of roughly 440,000. It's wedged in…
SUMMER is the season of the Hollywood blockbuster, the time of year when even the duds open to $30 million--or more. To the movie honchos, summer is a sure thing. And it shows.
THE POWER of the religious impulse is really quite extraordinary. The sainted folks over at Opinion Journal inform us of the conniption being thrown by the American Atheists, the group founded by the late Madalyn Murray O'Hair (may God have mercy upon her soul). It seems that when the World Trade…
THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION TO ADVANCE FAT ACCEPTANCE (NAAFA) will hold its annual convention beginning August 6, in Atlanta, Georgia. According to the official schedule, the gathering will get started with an "Afternoon Sightseeing Tour of Atlanta including a stop for lunch on your own." The next…
HAVE YOU SEEN the ads for The Truth? They're the ones with the annoying, rebellious youths campaigning to expose the harmful effects of cigarettes and the wicked ways of the tobacco industry. The ads are designed to be, as they said on Madison Avenue ten years ago, edgy.
THE BLOODY TERRORIST ATTACKS on Israel this week, one killing 20 people, the other 7, should be a signal to President Bush. The State Department recently persuaded him that Palestinian conduct would improve and terrorism would cease if only Palestinians had real hope of statehood. And Bush agreed…
IT TURNS OUT that on the morning of September 11, 2001, two FBI agents were monitoring phone calls from the home of a madam of a New Orleans brothel. Yes, the prostitution supervised by one Jeannette Maier so concerned the feds, who suspected it involved drug trafficking and organized crime, that…
TED TURNER is still a moron. In the event there was any doubt about this proposition, Turner generously offered more evidence in an interview published yesterday in the Guardian. The offending passage: "Aren't the Israelis and the Palestinians both terrorising each other? The Palestinians are…
SUNDAY NIGHT, I needed a diversion to keep me awake until 2:30 a.m. so I could watch the U.S. soccer team open up a serious can of whup-ass on Mexico. So, I watched one of Clint Eastwood's classic Dirty Harry movies--1973's "Magnum Force"--on Ted Turner's "Superstation" TBS. I noticed two things…
Liberal Pluralism The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice by William A. Galston Cambridge University Press, 152 pp., $19 AMONG ACADEMIC LIBERALS and professional political theorists, William Galston is exemplary. In several fine books, he has undertaken extensive…
Stephen F. Hayes's "Uncle Sam's Makeover" (June 3) correctly identifies the vital importance of communicating America's values and policies to the Muslim world, but Hayes describes the public diplomacy programs that I direct at the State Department only partially. The important readership of The…
PRESIDENT BUSH was dumbfounded. When he visited the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, last week, he was asked by a reporter if he was "moving Iraq to the back burner," given more urgent trouble in the Middle East and South Asia. The president referred the reporter to his…
GUESS WHO'S COMING TO LUNCH We understand, especially after the last couple of weeks, that FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III's job description includes enduring any number of slings and arrows, some more outrageous than others. But he must be even more of a glutton for punishment than we imagined…
IF YOU'VE BEEN WONDERING where to find wholehearted Muslim support for the war on terrorism, consider the Balkans. Last week, the authorities in predominantly Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina took further steps to assist the U.S.-led campaign. On June 3, Bosnian police raided seven offices of the…
Stardust Melodies A Biography of Twelve of America's Most Popular Songs by Will Friedwald Pantheon, 432 pp., $27.50 THE AMERICAN POPULAR SONG was an amateur's game before the twentieth century. The only American artist to become well known exclusively as the author of lively and memorable secular…
UNLIKE many of my journalistic colleagues, I've never had much use for junkets. Being flown to an exotic locale on some interest group's dime only to be sequestered in panel discussions on European monetary policy seems a cruel tease. I'd rather do something more fun, like clean my hairbrush or…
The part of the Catholic Church's priest-abuse scandal that no one talks about.
"Our biggest problem is we have people we think are terrorists. They are supporters of al Qaeda. . . . They may have sworn jihad, they may be here in the United States legitimately, and they have committed no crime. And what do we do for the next five years? Do we surveil them? Some action has to…
CARTER'S BANK SHOT Stephen L. Carter is a well-known Yale law professor, African-American moderate, and author of such books as "The Culture of Disbelief." He's also written a new mystery/thriller called "The Emperor of Ocean Park" (Knopf, 657, $26.95). Carter is used to receiving flattering…
At the End of an Age by John Lukacs Yale University Press, 240 pp., $22.95 AN EXAMPLE of the worst type of modern philosophical question is "Are human beings different from meat?" For those among us who have never been invited into Socratic dialogue by, say, a porterhouse, the question is dumb in…
THIS WEEK, nearly 300 Catholic bishops are gathering in Dallas to discuss whether parish priests who behave as pedophiles should lose their clerical collars after the first offense or be given one or more chances to repent and reform before being demoted, disgraced, or defrocked. Some bishops…
DAYTIME TV treats marriage as a division of personal crisis. The networks, meanwhile, crank out ridiculous and contrived game shows in which marriage or something like it is the unlikely and possibly unwanted prize. Both leave one asking that popular question, Where's the love? And the answer has…
Faithful readers of this column (And you don't have to have been all that faithful; there are only eleven of them. My "oeuvre.") will recall that a few weeks ago I wrote about our local T-ball league and how one of my kids is playing in it, and how we played against the bad team (boo) led by the…
THANK GOD efforts to repeal the inheritance tax failed. There is no group in American society as left wing as the inheritors of great wealth. If we had repealed the death tax, in a few years, faster than you could say MacArthur Foundation, the country would have been rife with neurotic…
You will remember, of course, that Ronaldo is the most famous athlete on the planet--much more popular and well-known than Michael Jordan.
ANY FAIR-MINDED OBSERVER would have to agree that the Democrats have been dealt the lousiest of all political hands: We are in the midst of a high-stakes war, and the Republicans control the executive branch. It doesn't get any worse than that for the opposition party. This means that President…
IF THERE WERE JUSTICE in the universe, the Middle East Media Research Institute would already have been awarded some kind of special-achievement Pulitzer Prize. MEMRI has pioneered the careful translation, and dissemination to European and American audiences, of print and broadcast news sources in…
THE MOST MEMORABLE SCENE in "Goodfellas" is the brutal killing of Billy Batts. It starts in 1970 at the Suite Nite Club where Batts, a "made" guy in the Gambino family, is celebrating his return from prison. Everyone seems to be having a grand time when Tommy DeVito struts in with his girl. DeVito…
AFTER WEEKS of embarrassing headlines about leads flubbed by the FBI and the CIA, followed by the revelation that a government loan officer had conducted a lengthy interview with chief-9/11-hijacker-to-be Mohammed Atta straight out of "Saturday Night Live"--she never got suspicious though he first…
THAT PRESIDENT BUSH has called for the creation of a Cabinet department for domestic defense hardly is surprising. Nor is such a department a bad idea, at least not on paper. Notwithstanding some bureaucratic opposition, the department will be established, probably by the end of the year.
AT THE MOSCOW news conference following his summit meeting with President Bush, Vladimir Putin highlighted a disturbing inconsistency in U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policy: How, the Russian president complained, could America keep objecting to Moscow's completing two nuclear power reactors for…
Six Days of War June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Michael B. Oren Oxford University Press, 446 pp., $30 IN "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East," Michael B. Oren gives a meticulous, blow-by-blow history of what is, unfortunately, an old-fashioned…
A CERTAIN SUSPENSE surrounds the June 8 heavyweight bout between Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson. Lewis is the defending champion, a tall, talented boxer who tends to work very fast or very slow. Against Tyson, will Lewis rush his attack, seeking a quick knockout? Or will he hang back, flicking jabs,…
SINCE THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION is ready to send George Tenet, director of central intelligence, to the Middle East in an effort to rekindle security talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, it's time to ask, Why? Haven't we gone down this road before, and don't we know--even if we…
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. The Junior Common Room at Winthrop House looks like something straight out of a Harvard admissions brochure. It's a dark room with crimson curtains, crimson carpeting, and old chairs upholstered in aging crimson leather. A portrait of Ronald M. Ferry, the first master of Winthrop…
THE TEN-DAY, four-country tour of Africa that Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and U2 lead singer Bono Vox completed last week was taken for a publicity stunt, even if the controversy it was meant to address is an important one. Bono's theory is that the billions of dollars in aid that sub-Saharan…
I ONCE LIVED across the street from Mr. Perfect. That wasn't his real name, of course. I don't think I ever knew his name. I called him Mr. Perfect because of his yard. I had moved from an apartment in the city to a house in the suburbs, and Mr. Perfect's yard was just the kind of thing a man used…
THE STATEMENTS BELOW of Goering, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Hoess, Shirach, Sauckel, and Streicher in and out of court during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial are quoted verbatim from G.M. Gilbert, "Nuremberg Diary," 1947. Goering was Reich marshal. Ribbentrop was foreign minister.…
THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT is only secondarily a person. Primarily, he is a symbol of what America thinks about itself, what it wants, and what it believes. In retrospect, we can see that for some time what America wanted was an end to responsibility. So the more recent two presidents were…
NOW WOULD PRESIDENT BUSH please appoint an independent blue-ribbon commission to investigate the government's failure to anticipate or adequately prepare for the terrorist attacks on September 11? When we offered this suggestion two weeks ago, the Bush administration, led by Vice President Dick…
THE WEATHER may be perfect for a round of golf or a nice long-distance run, but don't tell that to college athletes. In the last two months, no fewer than 14 college sports teams have given up the ghost, sacrificed in large part to campus bureaucrats' struggle to satisfy the federal requirement…
A NEW WORK OF HISTORY is published. You review the book on the front page of the book section of the New York Times, saying the author "has dispelled the darkness" surrounding an issue of significant historical interest. Turns out later the book is deeply flawed. Historical sources have been…
HEARINGS on the government's pre-September 11 counterterrorism efforts begin this week on Capitol Hill. These earliest sessions of the House and Senate intelligence committees will be conducted behind closed doors. But it is a fair bet which official lapses will principally occupy the panelists'…
BOOKS IN BRIEF Married A Fine Predicament by Anne Roiphe Basic, 285 pp., $25 Feminists appear to be having second thoughts about the institution they deconstructed, now that the woods are teeming with unhappy singles. "There is abroad in the land an acute anxiety about marriage," announces Anne…
SPIN DOCTOR, HEAL THYSELF A couple of months ago, top Pentagon flack Victoria Clarke embarrassed the San Francisco Chronicle by sending a letter to the editor with quotations from an audiotape of Paul Wolfowitz's interview with the paper and then pointing out that a critical editorial had misquoted…
Nuremberg The Reckoning by William F. Buckley Jr. Harcourt, 366 pp., $25 William F. Buckley Jr. A Bibliography edited by William F. Meehan III ISI, 250 pp., $29.95 EVEN THE NAME of Nuremberg has a frightening ring. The medieval city was home to princes, painters, and the Meistersingers. But in the…
Supreme Command Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime by Eliot A. Cohen Free Press, 272 pp., $25 EVERY SO OFTEN a book appears just at the moment when it is most needed--even though that moment was entirely unpredicted. Such a book is Eliot Cohen's "Supreme Command," a superb study of…
THE MAY/JUNE ISSUE of the Columbia Journalism Review has a sidebar that lists political magazine websites and their traffic numbers. For some reason this bit of text has been given a lot of attention as various sites bicker about the numbers and who's got more traffic and blah blah blah. (Everyone…
IF, LIKE ME, you're a voracious reader--someone who maintains a steady diet of not only novels and biographies and important new works on current affairs, but also good journalism--then you're probably familiar with a particular kind of despair: knowing that you don't have enough hours in the day…
The Modern Pillory by Pim Fortuyn The subject of pedophilia is all over the newspapers. Following the Doutroux affair in Belgium, the Netherlands has its own affairs, ripe and green, from murder to children's' mutual fondling. When I was a child, children's' explorations fell under the rubric of…
FOR ANYONE who has ever been to Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in May, the giddy, chaotic moments after the Kentucky Derby linger in the mind like the dull, bitter taste after hours of drinking bourbon and sugar water on an empty stomach. Those memories are brief, kaleidoscope-flashes of…
UH-OH! R. Kelly is in big trouble. He's been arrested for having made a dirty video with a 14-year-old girl. From the time I first heard the news on a drive-time talk show until yesterday morning, when I read about it in detail on page 1 of the New York Post, I've been unable to shake the same…
TOPPING OFF FESTIVITIES at Buckingham Palace this past weekend in celebration of Queen Elizabeth II's fifty years on the throne was a rock 'n' roll extravaganza featuring the likes of Ozzy Osbourne, Phil Collins, Rod Stewart, Ricky Martin, and Aretha Franklin, just to name a few. But no doubt the…
PLEASE, could we dispense with all the think pieces about why Americans don't like soccer and the hand-wringing over how this leaves us culturally adrift from the rest of the world? America has primary sports (baseball, basketball, football) and secondary sports (golf, tennis, hockey, soccer). The…
MAKE NO MISTAKE, I have nothing against wine. When I visit my wife's relatives in Tuscany, I drink their Brunello with an urgency that could be better addressed by an intravenous drip bag. Likewise, I have no quarrel with beer. These six-pack abs didn't build themselves. They're imported--from…
COLEEN ROWLEY is making a vital contribution to the war on terrorism, though not in the way she would have preferred.
LAST WEEK'S IRISH ELECTIONS were supposed to provide a measuring stick for the wave of right-wing xenophobia that commentators warn is sweeping Europe. Spurred by a decade of dynamic growth, the country now has immigrants--tens of thousands of Balkan refugees and African laborers--for the first…
Passionate Uncertainty
CONSIDER THE TERRORIST ALARMS issued by the Bush administration in just the last week (May 18-24). Bush administration officials leaked word of an upsurge in threats. Vice President Dick Cheney said another terrorist attack in the United States is "almost certain." FBI Director Robert Mueller…
MY EFFICIENT EDITOR at Houghton Mifflin has just sent me an e-mail informing me that finished copies of a new book I have written will come off the press on May 31, with books to be shipped to bookstores on June 6, after which I shall receive my author's shipment of--if I remember correctly--twenty…
MAY 21 WAS A TOUGH DAY for Yasser Arafat. In Ramallah, an opinion poll was released that showed most Palestinians are fed up with his leadership. According to the survey, conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research between May 15 and 18, only 35 percent of the Palestinian…
ENCINO, CALIFORNIA The skirl of the bagpipes, the Highland Claymore draped in Black Watch tartan, the men in kilts, all were incongruities in this San Fernando Valley Episcopal Church. May 15 had been clear and warm, the light breeze in the palm trees promising a perfect California night for…
PEOPLE AND PRESIDENTS do not come without weaknesses, which differ in nature and kind. Richard M. Nixon's persecution fixation, which surfaced famously in 1962 when he lost the governorship of California to Pat Brown--"you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore"--led in a straight line to…
IS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION going wobbly? Is the president preparing to back off the bold pledges he made to the American people four months ago in his State of the Union address? The president warned us then that the clock was ticking in Iraq. Saddam Hussein was working hard to acquire weapons of…
IF YOU LONG TO MEET ODD PEOPLE, it's hard to top Manhattanites who go to movies on weekdays. To be sure, I am among their number, but at least I have an excuse: I write about movies. The viewers I have in mind are the pure-hearted obsessives, overwhelmingly male and uniformly unattractive, who…
IT'S WELL KNOWN that tax-exempt organizations aren't supposed to engage in politics. Federal law says they may not "participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office."…
TYPECASTING Back in our February 25 issue, western writer Bill Croke reviewed Judy Blunt's prize-winning memoir "Breaking Clean"--regretting some of its easy feminist tropes, but praising its account of a childhood and marriage on the Hi Line in northern Montana. Like many other reviewers, Croke…
SHORTLY AFTER her confirmation as the State Department's top communications whiz last October, Charlotte Beers said she hoped to create among the world's one billion Muslims an "understanding that they don't need to kill us to get our attention." To accomplish that patronizing goal, Beers and her…
WHAT DID ROYCE LAMBERTH KNOW . . . ? For a press corps obsessing over who knew what when before September 11, there was little attention paid last week to the following revelation in Newsweek (The Scrapbook believes in crediting reporters, but there were 11 bylines on this particular piece):…
THE FOLDED NEWSPAPER sits before you on the table, competing for your attention with the morning coffee and thoughts of the busy day ahead. You snap it open and eagerly set your eyes upon . . . a long story comparing the economies of China and India, past and future. Hmmm. Then there is a piece on…
I JUST SAW the funniest thing that has ever occurred in history.