69 articles
ON CONSECUTIVE DAYS this week, China and France insisted that the Bush administration seek U.N. approval before sending troops to Iraq. CNN and several other news organizations described the decision by the Chinese as a "blow" to U.S. efforts to oust Saddam. Similar fretting came Thursday after…
HBO'S "Sex and the City" can be interesting and entertaining and, as often as not, crude and startling. But midway through the fifth season, as the lead characters continue to stumble through countless men and meaningless relationships, the show's vision of a modern girl-power paradise is beginning…
THERE IS new draft legislation in the works that could severely curtail Americans' rights to exchange files on the Internet or share copies of music or other forms of entertainment in digital and analog formats (you can download a PDF of the bill here). The same bill would also more firmly…
THE WASHINGTON POST'S sense of priorities has me scratching my head. Yesterday morning it ran one of the great scoops of our soon-to-be-a-year-old War on Islamism, under the headline Al Qaeda Deputies Harbored by Iran.
NEWS FLASH: North Carolina failed this week to make Islam the official state religion. Nor did it compel residents to profess that there is no God but Allah.
THE INTRODUCTION of electricity has caused the "destruction" of cultures in the third world, according to the editor of an environmental website. He says "there's a lot of quality to be had in poverty."
LAST JUNE, I wrote about how it seemed wrong for Paul McCartney to perform Beatles songs in concert. Herewith are a few reader responses, clarifications, and an update.
DURING HIS PRESIDENCY Bill Clinton vowed to mend affirmative action. The latest evidence he failed to do so comes in the form of a lawsuit filed earlier this month against the federal government. Now it's up to the Bush administration to undertake the needed reforms.
I WANTED to call your attention to the highly significant speech delivered today to the Veterans of Foreign Wars by Vice President Dick Cheney. The vice president lays out more comprehensively and forcefully than any senior administration official has so far the need for regime change in Iraq and…
WEEP NOT FOR BANKRUPT US Airways, or soon-to-be-bankrupt (so it says) United Airlines. They are not victims of the disruption of air traffic after September 11. Their difficulties began long before jihadists turned airplanes into missiles. Greedy unions, inept management, flawed government…
THE NAME Sarah Orne Jewett, for those to whom it means anything at all, evokes principally the landscape of southern Maine and the particular serenity of her 1896 novel "The Country of the Pointed Firs." Because she captured there the harmonies of undramatic lives lived out in their native place,…
Churchill's Military Histories A Rhetorical Study by Algis Valiunas Rowman & Littlefield, 202 pp., $35 NEW BOOKS on Winston Churchill continue to pour forth from the presses. Last year alone biographies by Roy Jenkins and Geoffrey Best appeared. This year at least four more special studies will be…
THE DRIVE FROM DOOR COUNTY, Wisconsin, where I am vacationing, to Green Bay takes about an hour. The trip is an early morning blur of taverns, cows, gas station-cheese shops, red barns, and lots of church signs. The Holy Name of Mary advertises its "Polka Mass." And in case the Devil himself…
WHILE THE SUPREME COURT may have recently affirmed the constitutionality of school choice, states and districts across the country are doing their level best to undermine what few options are presently available to children in failing schools. Despite a new congressional mandate that youngsters…
IN 1972, a strange young Baltimorean with a pencil-thin moustache made a cheap film he intended to be "the most offensive movie ever made." "Pink Flamingos" starred an obese drag queen who is shown eating poodle droppings, and its explicit purpose was to take every clich about conventional American…
To find them, start at the old Iron Curtain and go east.
LAST WEEK, in an interview with BBC radio, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice called Saddam Hussein "an evil man," and warned of dire consequences "if he gets weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them." If? USA Today's John Diamond, in a report of the interview that ran on…
IN OUR ONGOING NATIONAL DEBATE about the use of human embryonic stem cells for research, there is one compromise position that reappears with regularity and attracts relatively wide support. This position proscribes (at least for federal funding) any research on stem cells derived from embryos…
Aliens in America The Strange Truth about Our Souls by Peter Augustine Lawler ISI, 350 pp., $24.95 THE BOOK TITLE "Aliens in America" derives from a remark that Walker Percy made about Carl Sagan. Percy wondered why Sagan was so eager to find aliens on other planets when our own planet is peopled…
"Leading Republicans from Congress, the State Department and past administrations have begun to break ranks with President Bush over his administration's high-profile planning for war with Iraq." --New York Times, August 16, 2002 WAIT A MINUTE. "Leading Republicans from . . . the State Department .…
IN LATE JUNE, the trustees of the College Board voted unanimous approval for the most dramatic changes in the history of the SAT, the venerable admissions test that is a gatekeeper of so many American colleges. Beginning in March 2005, the analogy questions that have tormented test-takers since the…
THE TALIBAN MAY BE DEAD, but its propaganda lives on in the European and Middle Eastern press--thanks in part to the tireless machinations of one hard-left professor at the University of New Hampshire and to the willingness, nay, eagerness, of some of our foreign "friends" to believe the worst…
BOOKS IN BRIEF Hotel Kid by Stephen Lewis Paul Dry, 214 pp., $22.95 Stephen Lewis's atmospheric memoir inevitably calls to mind another Manhattan hotel kid: Eloise, the tyke who lived at the Plaza in the series of children's books by Kay Thompson. But the similarity is only residential. Eloise was…
WHEN IT RAINES IT POURS There's nothing subtle about the opposition of the New York Times to President Bush's plan for military action to depose Saddam Hussein in Iraq. This bias colors not just editorials but practically every news story on the subject. Consider the front-page, above-the-fold…
The Shield of Achilles War, Peace, and the Course of History by Philip Bobbitt Knopf, 919 pp., $40 A FEW YEARS AGO there was hue and cry over the loss of academic interest in the subject of war. The complaints were premature. Philip Bobbitt's "The Shield of Achilles" will see to that. It's a book…
Clint By Patrick McGilligan St. Martin's, 612 pages, $35 The Sexiest Man Alive By Ellis Amburn HarperCollins, 411 pages, $25.95 WARREN BEATTY and Clint Eastwood are two very different types of movie star. Onscreen, Eastwood is a man's man, all gristle and guts. Beatty makes men nervous because, as…
NO ONE likes hospitals. Of course, when we need them, we thank God they're there, and we hope we, or our loved ones, are in a good one. My mother-in-law, God bless her, is in a hospital now down in Orange County, and it's as beautiful a facility as you're ever going to run into, I guess. But I…
WHEN IT RAINES IT POURS There's nothing subtle about the opposition of the New York Times to President Bush's plan for military action to depose Saddam Hussein in Iraq. This bias colors not just editorials but practically every news story on the subject. Consider the front-page, above-the-fold…
MAYBE IT'S HAPPENED BEFORE and I missed it. Maybe it's a practice that other administrations have indulged in once they've left office, only with less fanfare and visibility. But so far as I know, officials of the Clinton administration are the first to attack the policies of the next…
FOR THE PAST WEEK, a U.S.-German debate over the war on terrorism has been raging in the German press. Here, almost no one has noticed.
SOMETIMES, we pick the worst weeks to take our vacations here at The Weekly Standard. August is usually a slow month for politics, but last week presented, a target-rich environment for conservative journalists: There was Al Gore's op-ed screed in the New York Times, the leak of the Defense Policy…
DATELINE, JERUSALEM--Okay, I'm not actually in Jerusalem, but I just returned from there, and I always wanted to start an article with something dramatic. I mean, it beats the tar out of, "DATELINE, A SHABBY OFFICE IN HOLLYWOOD WITH ONE GOOD COUCH FOR NAPS." Now that I think of it, if I ever appear…
IN A FLURRY of recent articles speculating on the nature of a potential U.S. invasion of Iraq, reporters and commentators have raised a "nightmare" scenario: that a battle for Baghdad would turn into a second Mogadishu. With virtually no chance to survive--let alone win--a force-on-force conflict…
ON TWO CONSECUTIVE DAYS last week, the New York Times advanced its crusade against military action in Iraq with page-one "news" stories--the first detailing a leaked war plan, the second predicting dire effects for the U.S. economy. While these prominently featured pieces occasioned much comment,…
BERLIN Breakfast in Berlin is brilliant. My favorite place to go is the Mokkabar, a cafe in Kreuzberg, the district where violent lefties used to blow up cars and that the city's Turks have always called home. Today, Kreuzberg, at least the neighborhood of the Mokkabar, has calmed down. It's…
STANDING IN THE MIDDLE of Room 226 in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on February 26, 2002, waiting for Wisconsin senator Russell Feingold to convene a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of a federal circuit court judge, I'm told how the choreography will work. Nan, it is…
KATHLEEN, WE HARDLY KNEW YE In last week's cover story on Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Matt Labash told you everything you wanted to know about Maryland's gubernatorial hopeful and, according to a few Kennedy-reviling readers, several things you didn't. But owing to space considerations, there were…
Manhattan Monologues
PRAGUE Mohamed Atta, the leader of the September 11 hijackers, visited Prague twice in the fifteen months before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, in June 2000 and April 2001, and met with an Iraqi agent at least once during the second visit. Czech officials say they…
AT SOME POINT ISRAELIS are likely to start asking themselves: Why should we continue to let TV reporters and news photographers take pictures of terrorist murder scenes? Of dead and maimed Israelis, shocked bystanders, grieving families, blood in the streets? Who gave TV cameras the right to be…
I don’t know if you've ever noticed the expression of a man who is about to buy a first-class barbecue grill. He walks into a Home Depot or Lowe's or one of the other mega hardware complexes and his eyes are glistening with a faraway visionary zeal, like one of those old prophets gazing into the…
Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz Norton, 282 pp., $24.95 THERE IS AN IMPORTANT BOOK to be written about the need to reexamine the international financial architecture that was erected long before currency traders in their twenties could push a button and move billions of…
EVERYONE SEEMS TO AGREE that Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen, President Bush's nominee for a spot on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, has about as much chance of getting past Judiciary Committee Democrats as James Traficant has of getting back into Congress. The reason: The…
NAMES ARE DESTINY. If you had a son in the late '60s or early '70s and named him Maximilian or Zacharia or Noah, you knew for a certainty that in 15 years he'd be in his room with his comic book collection, not making time upstairs with a girl named Brandy. If you named your daughter Brandy, at 15…
A PRINT RUN OF ONE'S OWN Roger Kimball, the critic and managing editor at the New Criterion, has a book just out called "Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity" (Cybereditions, 222pp., $17.95). Collecting his occasional essays on Roger Fry, Clement Greenberg, Paul Klee,…
The Road to Malpsychia Humanistic Psychology and Our Discontents by Joyce Milton Encounter, 310 pp., $26.95 WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE between psychology and science? Science describes things that already exist, while psychology creates things that do not have to be. In science, the words "atom" and…
ABROAD IN THE LAND, needless to say, there is plentiful criticism of the Bush administration's purported tendency to deny terrorism suspects the judicially supervised civil liberties protections of the regular criminal law. Also abroad in the land--in an Alexandria, Virginia, federal district…
HAS THE WAR ON IRAQ gone political? Already? One day before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began its hearings to discuss the coming war in Iraq, the committee's chairman, Senator Joe Biden, shared with reporters some of what was said in his consultations with top officials in the Bush…
PRESIDENT BUSH rightly recognizes that Western ideas have universal origins and application. He has said the right to "liberty and justice" is the "birthright of all people" and specifically emphasized that "all people" include Muslims. He has further said America will stand "alongside people…
AL GORE TAKES HIS STAND Last Thursday, Al Gore (who is not the president of the United States) showed up in Washington to criticize George W. Bush (who is) for--among other things--proceeding too forcefully and publicly with plans for a possible military overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi…
Algis Valiunas on the works of the Nobel laureate.
AS THE CRISIS of U.S.-Saudi relations grows, long-hidden American grievances have begun to emerge. For many Americans the problem of Saudi abuse of U.S. citizens on the kingdom's soil is almost as disturbing as the issue of Saudi involvement in September 11. The worst cases to come to light so far…
The Greenwich Village Reader Fiction, Poetry, and Reminiscences, 1872-2002 ed. June Skinner Sawyers Cooper Square Press, 504 pp., $35 Republic of Dreams Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960 by Ross Wetzsteon Simon & Schuster, 615 pp., $35 GREENWICH VILLAGE has long been a neighborhood…
THOUGH OSAMA BIN LADEN, Afghanistan, Israel, and Iraq have commanded our attention since September 11, it is always good to remind ourselves that the most consequential country in the Muslim Middle East is Iran. This has been true, with a few intermissions, for a thousand years. And since the…
I SOMETIMES find myself in dinner party conversations with people who complain about the increasing professionalization of kids' sports. And I find that most of the people who utter these laments have one thing in common: They don't know what they are talking about. Over the past four years, and…
SOMETIMES the driest document can unintentionally highlight telling truths. That is the case of the "Arab Human Development Report 2002," published in July by the United Nations Development Program. Written by a group of Arab scholars and economists, the 168-page report has been praised as an…
EVEN AFTER its 489-point rally last Wednesday, the stock market's recent performance remains dismal. What's wrong? The economic news is good, if not great. Earnings have been better than expected, with positive surprises outnumbering negative by four to one. Interest rates remain among the lowest…
BALTIMORE On a June afternoon, the streets of Baltimore sweat like the inside of a humidifier. But the shirt-clinging stickiness does not hamper Maryland's lieutenant governor, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. As befits a member of the tribe of Robert F. Kennedy (now 51, Kathleen is his oldest child),…
TOO RICH Remember Denise Rich? The Clinton pardon scandal lady? She was born wealthy, the daughter of a shoe manufacturer. She married wealthier, to financier Marc Rich, who during their time together earned more than a billion dollars--and mug-shot status on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. But…
CORPORATE CORRUPTION endangers everything in which we have, over the past many years, invested our time, effort, and money--particularly Republican control of the House of Representatives. And our 401(k) plans aren't doing so well either. In this period of gloom--with liberals seeking to make hay…
NO ONE HAS PROVED more important to the confirmation of judges--or non-confirmation, as the case may be--than James Jeffords, who last year shifted control of the Senate to the Democrats. Had Jeffords not bolted the Republican party, we wouldn't be writing this editorial, for, as the lawyers say,…
WHEN COLIN POWELL announced last Tuesday the administration's decision to shift to other organizations $34 million earmarked for the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, the reaction was apoplectic. "Bush Denies Women Health Care, Human Rights," read one editorial headline. "The World's…
NO SOONER had a meeting of Food and Drug Administration advisers broken up in suburban Maryland on Thursday than the food-safety alarm bells began ringing on the subject of mercury in fish: "Pregnant Women Should Avoid Tuna," warned an Associated Press story on Friday. "FDA advisers urge pregnant…
BRADLEY R. GITZ writes a weekly column for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and on July 25, 2002, his thoughts turned to drug legalization. Observing that Great Britain and Canada are considering decriminalizing marijuana, Gitz applauded and launched into an argument for legalizing mary jane here in…
GEORGE SANTAYANA once observed that Americans don't solve problems, they just leave them behind. They take advantage of all that space and move. If there's an idea they don't like, they don't bother refuting it, they just go somewhere else, and if they can't go somewhere else, they just leave it in…
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN volunteers for heavy duty with his newest album, "The Rising" (Columbia Records). He pays tribute to the rescue workers who marched into the World Trade Center buildings as they tore and burned and snowed down onto lower Manhattan. He looks to capture the sorrow and shock of…
WHY DO WE want to scare ourselves? Why do we drag ourselves to a theater, first wanting to be frightened, and then acting as if someone had kidnapped us, strapped us in, and forced our eyelids open, a la "Clockwork Orange"? It's strange that the definition of "entertainment" includes being…
JUST TO LET YOU KNOW, I'm not running for president. I feel I have to squash the speculation, which I'm sure is rampant across the land, after I spoke at a political rally following Senator John Edwards and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt.
YEARS AGO, in the wake of Zoe Baird's confirmation hearings--in which our would-be attorney general was disqualified for failing to report her nanny's income--Gary Trudeau did a series of "Doonesbury" strips that pointed up the absurdity of such scandal-hunting. In the most outre of them, his…