107 articles
LAST WEEK, the Senate Judiciary Committee took up the nomination of Michael McConnell to a seat on the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Toward the end of the hearing, Sen. Edward Kennedy, who had missed much of the session and was only now engaging the nominee, thanked McConnell for counsel he…
IT ISN'T EASY being on the White House economic team these days. For one thing, the public and the pundits seem fixated on the volatile stock market, to the virtual exclusion of the steadily growing economy. For another, the public face of the team is gaffe-prone Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill,…
What follows is excerpted from "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America," submitted by the president to Congress on Friday, September 20. (The full text is available at www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html.) The document expresses so well so much of what THE WEEKLY STANDARD has…
A FEW WEEKS AGO, as I left the house I grew up in, my stepmother remembered, as she always does, that she had "some of my things." These "things" are the treasures of my youth--my first baseball glove, letters from friends now dead, my college diploma--which are fighting a losing battle for attic…
THE KIBITZER-IN-CHIEF All indications are that the Democratic party's congressional leadership will soon join forces with the Bush administration in a united proclamation of American resolve to oust Saddam Hussein's terrorist regime from Baghdad--by force, and unilaterally, if necessary. Which…
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu translated by Royall Tyler Viking, 1,174 pp., $60 LIKE HOMER and Shakespeare, Lady Murasaki occupies a place alone. Epic poetry begins with Homer. Shakespeare invented modern tragedy. Murasaki, a lady-in-waiting in the eleventh-century court of Imperial Japan,…
NEW DELHI While President Bush was meeting with Indian prime minister A.B. Vajpayee at the United Nations recently, back in New Delhi a Sikh pilot of Soviet-made fighter aircraft, sporting a turban, beard, and substantial handlebar mustache, was regaling American cocktail party guests with an…
A Great, Silly Grin The British Satire Boom of the 1960s by Humphrey Carpenter Public Affairs, 400 pp., $27.50 THE HIT REVUE "Beyond the Fringe" opened in London in 1961. Humphrey Carpenter, then fifteen, attended the show with his father, a bishop in the Church of England. Carpenter recalls that…
The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam by C. Dale Walton Frank Cass, 176 pp., $45 Steel My Soldiers' Hearts The Hopeless to Hardcore Transformation of the U.S. Army, 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry, Vietnam by David H. Hackworth and Eilhys England Rugged Land, 512 pp., $27.95 Real Lessons of…
WHILE Major League Baseball and its players' union grabbed headlines last month by successfully reaching a labor agreement, disturbing news regarding the future of the game was coming out of Switzerland. The International Olympic Committee recently disclosed that it is considering dropping a number…
AMAZINGLY, in a state that Al Gore carried in 2000 by 1.7 million votes, the gubernatorial race in New York this year long looked to be a walkover for the Republican incumbent. Not only did Gov. George Pataki benefit from public unity following 9/11, but the Democratic party started the year ready…
LIKE THE COLD WAR, the War on Terror is being defined even as it is fought, by a president who didn't expect it. In 1945, Harry Truman finished a hot war and stepped into a postwar world that seemed stable and certified: The United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China, the victorious Big Five…
EITHER SADDAM HUSSEIN will remain in power or he will be deposed. President Bush has suggested deposing him, but as the debate over that proposal has evolved, an interesting pattern has emerged. The people in the peace camp attack President Bush's plan, but they are unwilling to face the…
BOOKS IN BRIEF Shooting Straight Telling the Truth about Guns in America by Wayne LaPierre and James J. Baker Regnery, 202 pp., $27.95 Can Gun Control Work? by James B. Jacobs Oxford University Press, 288 pp., $27.50 Read these two books and you'll discover a curious thing: The case against gun…
CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA Republican Jim Leach of Iowa is the rarest of exceptions in the 2002 midterm election--a House incumbent facing a stiff challenge for reelection. In the first congressional election after reapportionment, you'd normally expect rough-and-tumble competition in House races. But 2002…
BRITS ARE MORE LIKELY to kill themselves under conservative governments, according to a report just out from the department of social medicine at Bristol University. The study's authors claim that there have been, on average, 17 percent more suicides when Tories were in power during the twentieth…
THE NOTABLE singer-songwriter Steve Earle became notorious last month when news broke that he'd written a blues ballad about John Walker Lindh--the recently convicted American Taliban fighter from Marin County, California. This week Earle's new album hits stores, and "Jerusalem" contains much else…
THE DEMOCRATIC WHINERS--who have been free to state their policy on Iraq since the president threw down the gauntlet in his Axis of Evil speech eight months ago--are misrepresenting both his recent statements and their own.
THE MOVIE INDUSTRY is peculiar for many reasons, among which is this: The least important and most interchangeable artists in the community (actors) are the best known and rewarded, while the most-skilled and least replaceable artists (writers and editors) are virtually anonymous. To wit: Everyone…
CALIFORNIA REPRESENTATIVE Lynn Woolsey wants the United States to sign something she refers to as CEDAW--the United Nations' Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. So she sent out a "dear colleague" letter that reads, in part: "Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, United…
ABORTION is the issue in our politics that won't go away. Consider its appearance last week in the Senate, where the Judiciary Committee held a hearing for President Bush's nominee to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Michael McConnell.
I REMEMBER the last election party I attended, two years ago. It was at the home of a colleague. When news came that Florida went to Gore, I knew it was over and asked the host (a serious mixologist) to fix me one of his classic martinis. But suddenly, news came that Florida had swung back to Bush.…
IN HIS ADDRESS to the United Nations General Assembly last Thursday, President Bush, perhaps without meaning to, used a word that always jolts Europeans like a burst of electroshock. The word--which came up towards the end of his case against Saddam Hussein's weapons buildup--is "irrelevance." That…
WHEN MAO ZEDONG set forth his designs for China's Great Leap Forward into Communist modernity, he described the Chinese people as "poor and blank." "On blank sheets of paper," he declared, "free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written, the freshest and most…
HERE'S THE MEASURE of President Bush's success in assembling support for regime change in Iraq. Following his speech to the United Nations last week, National Public Radio put together a focus group of college students at Penn State-Harrisburg. The unanimous verdict: Bush had indeed made the case…
Quick Studies The Best of Lingua Franca edited by Alexander Star Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp., $18 "THERE IS NO METHOD," T.S. Eliot once proclaimed, "except to be very intelligent"--to which the editors of Lingua Franca, the late lamented "Review of Academic Life," added another requirement:…
ONCE AT A PARTY here in Washington, I challenged a well-known political reporter--a man who makes his living covering the ins and outs of America's elections--to name the junior senator from South Dakota. After a moment's fruitless effort, he quipped, "South Dakota doesn't actually have two…
I'M A BIG TALKER. Not a boaster or a braggart, I trust, but a voluminous producer of speech. And the number of words I devote to a subject may have nothing to do with its importance. Add to this another unflattering truth, that I'm a complainer. There is hardly an inconvenience I won't turn into a…
PRISTINA, KOSOVO The evening call to prayer sails out over Pristina's September11 candlelight vigil, distant and distinct against the muffled noises of the crowd below. None of the Kosovar Albanians gathered here heeds the muezzin. All go on quietly lighting candles and writing notes. An American…
YOU CAN'T FIND WHAT YOU DON'T LOOK FOR The war against Saddam Hussein hasn't started, but the war against George W. Bush is well underway--a war of leaks, that is. The leaking is conducted by members of the president's own administration, and seems designed to undermine his policies. And as this…
Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens Basic, 208 pp., $24 GEORGE ORWELL was one of the best essayists of his time, and Christopher Hitchens is one of the best essayists of his. Orwell is famous for his intellectual honesty and his willingness occasionally to anger his allies on the left. So is…
James Burnham and the Struggle for the World A Life by Daniel Kelly ISI, 443 pp., $29.95 Principles and Heresies Frank S. Meyer and the Shaping of the American Conservative Movement by Kevin J. Smant ISI, 390 pp., $29.95 BACK IN 1994, in a much-discussed essay in the American Historical Review,…
CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRATS seem to agree on at least one aspect of the current debate over U.S. policy in Iraq: President Bush will eventually have bipartisan backing from Congress for the use of force against Saddam Hussein. "The strong presumption is that the president will get strong bipartisan…
ON NOVEMBER 11, 1920, there was a strange and moving scene in London. The king and his entourage unveiled the Cenotaph in Whitehall and laid solemnly to rest, in Westminster Abbey, an unknown soldier of the Great War. The ceremony had been carefully planned. The whole nation came to a transfixed…
BOOKS IN BRIEF Ulysses S. Grant on Leadership Executive Lessons from the Front Lines by John A. Barnes Prima, 276 pp., $22.95 This is the latest revisionist effort to bolster the reputation of Grant as a military and political leader. The book deserves far more attention than it has received. The…
AS THE ADVANCE towards war against Iraq continues, the Bush administration has started lobbing missiles at hardline liberals ever unconvinced about the threat Saddam Hussein poses to his region and the world. The administration's game presumably is to make these diehards change their minds and to…
Deep in a Dream The Long Night of Chet Baker by James Gavin Knopf, 416 pp., $26.95 AT THIRTEEN, living in Marin County, California, I worshipped Chet Baker, the trumpet star of "West Coast" jazz. I also idolized the saxophonists Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, and Lee Konitz, a sax star I saw repeatedly…
Back around 1990 some British producers started hiring American comics for shows in England at the Queen's Theater (Theatre?) in London. Every two weeks they'd pick three American comics and put them on the bill with three English comics. I did it and loved it, and who wouldn't? You fly first…
Beneath the surface, this year's key elections in Texas are all about race. The top of the Democratic ticket has been called a racial "dream team": If Tony Sanchez and Ron Kirk win in November, they will be the state's first Hispanic governor and African-American senator, respectively. Down ballot,…
THERE ARE SOME EXPERTS you treasure: Charlie Cook and Michael Barone on elections, Peter Gammons on baseball, People magazine on the best and worst dressed celebrities. For me, William H. Frey belongs on that list.
THE PREMISE of "Dr. Phil," the new talk show starring Oprah protege Dr. Phil McGraw, is that you can either come on his show and confront your problems, or you can hide in shame. One is the path of courage and change, that most celebrated of goals in talk-show television, and the other is the path…
WE HAVE JUST WITNESSED one of the swiftest and most effective exercises of presidential power ever. And while practically no one has recognized it as extraordinary and historic, it was both. President Bush and his subordinates, by laying out the case for regime change in Iraq, changed the political…
Every five years or so, I like to clean up my office. Even by disheveled journalists' standards, it's really quite a dump. Once, when I had an OSHA inspector over for an interview, he thought I was setting him up. "You trashed it on purpose," he said, before literally declaring it a disaster area.…
IN HIS ADDRESS last week to the U.N. General Assembly, President Bush reviewed in detail how Iraq, as he put it, "has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance." Whereupon he asked, "Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence?…
RELIGION IS THE PROBLEM: So say two celebrity professors--Steven Pinker and Simon Schama--opining on the 9/11 anniversary. Islamist fanatics with a murderous hatred of the West, they imply or say outright, pose no greater threat to peace than religious believers generally. To do justice to these…
THE KENNEDY MAGIC may be fading. Last Tuesday, in Maryland's gubernatorial primary, 21 percent of voters, offered a choice between Lt. Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and a retired grocery store clerk, named Robert Raymond Fustero, chose Fustero. Now Townsend faces a formidable challenger in…
BRONX, NY I met Edlene LaFrance on the worst day of her life. Or maybe it was the second worst, or the fifth, there are so many to choose from now. Two days after the Twin Towers fell, her 43-year-old husband, Alan, lay buried at the bottom of one of them. Though the city was awash in acts of…
Faced with mounting pressure from within his own Labour party, as well as from other European leaders, British prime minister Tony Blair last week courageously and forcefully made the case for regime change in Iraq. Here are excerpts from Blair's remarks during his 90-minute press conference on…
Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams are gone -- but at least Chip Hilton is back. That's good news for sports-loving boys desperately in need of someone to admire in this age of steroids, rampant drug use, and pro stars with rap sheets as elaborate as their tattoos. If you don't remember Chip, then you…
THE PRESIDENT mulls a strike against Iraq, which he calls an "outlaw nation" in league with an "unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers and organized international criminals." The talk among world leaders, however, focuses on diplomacy. France, Russia, China, and most Arab nations oppose…
The Emerging Democratic Majority by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira Scribner, 224 pp., $24 Working-class Americans typically vote Republican -- and that creates a terrible dilemma for Democrats. The party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt still sees itself as representing the common people, the salt of…
SOMETHING DISTURBING is happening in the Florida elections this fall. No, not the chance that Janet Reno will be the Democratic candidate for governor. A state initiative has qualified for the ballot letting voters decide whether to grant constitutional rights to pregnant pigs.
THE SPECTACLE of some 100 heads of state and 50,000 conferees gathering these past two weeks in Johannesburg for a fractious and even raucous U.N. summit on sustainable development may have left the impression of healthy intellectual ferment in the world of development economics. Alas, on the big…
Doha, Qatar THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION will get no help from most Arab nations in a war against Iraq. The Arab League not only opposes an attack, but last week lauded the Iraqis for opening talks with the United Nations about reviving arms inspections. The Saudis won't let American warplanes fly…
So I'm on a tennis court, trying to improve my game. The Catskill mountains tower over the clay surface, their inanimate majesty making a mockery of my all-too-human effort at athleticism. I've traveled 100 miles from my home in Brooklyn to a rather Spartan facility called Total Tennis for a…
LAST MONTH, as schools were preparing to open their doors, a heated debate erupted in the media over how students should observe the anniversary of September 11. According to the Washington Times, a lesson plan on the National Education Association's website was urging teachers to use the occasion…
When It Raines It Pours, cont. When is a correction not really a correction? Several weeks ago, THE SCRAPBOOK took note of the New York Times's increasingly strident campaign against the coming war on Iraq. The Times had reported, on its front page (August 16), that top Republicans had begun to…
The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land by Conevery Bolton Valencius Basic, 384 pp., $30 We often envision frontiersmen and settlers mostly as impoverished immigrants who went west to find wealth, cheap land, or escape from the law, creditors, and…
1 Who is Steven J. Hatfill?
Not the New York Review of Books From 1982 until its demise in 1988, the Claremont Review of Books was an important publication, particularly for conservatives who had few other venues in which to present their ideas. Returning to print in November 2000, the revived quarterly has just put out its…
Columbia, South Carolina THE PECULIARITIES of Republican Mark Sanford's bid for governor of South Carolina are piling up. Sanford has no statewide campaign organization or ancillary groups like Veterans for Sanford. His wife Jenny is his campaign manager. When the state Republican chairman wanted…
"Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said today that the authorities should examine whether the spread of the West Nile virus in this country is a result of biological terrorism."
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A FEW DAYS AGO on this page, I posted links to some of the documents released to reporters, at an August 25 press conference, by lawyers for anthrax-investigation "person of interest" Steven J. Hatfill. I also promised to make available the remaining such documents before this week was done. And so…
IN WHAT SHOULD go down as one of the most under-discussed revelations of the war on terrorism, an unnamed "senior counterterrorism official" told the Washington Post Tuesday that the CIA is aware of credible reports documenting Saddam-al Qaeda coordination in northern Iraq, but hasn't checked them…
EVER WONDER what happens to a zoo during a war? Probably not, which makes National Geographic Channel's "Kabul Zoo Rescue" so intriguing. Media coverage of a war tends to focus, naturally, on human suffering. But it doesn't make the plight of animals--especially those in cages who depend on humans…
IN MARCH, I wrote a piece touting Michael Walzer's provocative essay, "Can There Be a Decent Left?" which appeared in the Spring issue of Dissent magazine. Walzer critiqued the most egregious responses of his fellow lefties to September 11, declaring that the left had "lost its bearings" and needed…
IN YESTERDAY'S Washington Times, Jennifer Harper reported that, since December 7, 1941, 200 books have been written about Pearl Harbor. And since September 11, 2001, 400 books have been written about the attacks on that terrible day. I don't know of any study that's been done on media coverage of…
I COULDN'T AVOID THIS. I had to write it. And there's no better title than that. I know every bonehead with a computer and a forum has held forth on this anniversary. You may be sick of it. I may be sick of it. Except that I'm not. I'm drawn to it again and again. You don't say a prayer just once,…
WHAT'S UP with the Senate Democrats and a few Republicans who have heartburn over going to war with Iraq? They've spent much of the past two weeks erecting hurdles President Bush must jump over to get Senate approval of military action against Saddam Hussein, everything from ending the…
THE WAR SKEPTICS who allege that Iraq is contained, that Saddam Hussein poses no immediate threat to the United States, and that there is no evidence the Butcher of Baghdad is willing to share his weapons of mass destruction with such terrorists as al Qaeda, should be obliged to tell us something:…
A LITTLE DOCUMENTARY appendix to my cover story about FBI "person of interest" Steven J. Hatfill in this week's issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD (The Hunting of Steven J. Hatfill). On August 25, Hatfill called a second press conference here in Washington (the first was on August 11) to deny all…
LAST SUNDAY on "Meet the Press," as Vice President Dick Cheney answered Tim Russert's questions about Iraq, Halliburton, and his political future, one thing was mentioned that deserves further exploration:
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ONCE UPON A TIME, another judicial nomination failed. It was 1987, and the nominee for the Supreme Court was Robert Bork. Some supporters came up with a button they sported on their chests. "Reappoint Bork," it said. That, of course, never was going to happen and technically couldn't have, given…
Watershed The Undamming of America by Elizabeth Grossman Counterpoint, 320 pp., $26 THE UNITED STATES Bureau of Reclamation, begun in 1902, celebrated its centenary earlier this year with a reception at Hoover Dam, attended by Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton and other political and…
DOWN ON THE RANCH in Crawford last week, President Bush had another courteous chat with a Saudi prince. The guest this time was Riyadh's ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, who had come with his family all the way from Washington just for lunch. Some Beltway spin artists, alarmed…
IN MY OLD NEIGHBORHOOD, an IOU meant something. Not the formal, lawyer-written documents that are used today, but the currency of reciprocal obligation widely in use on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It is this system that academic communitarians and other do-gooders are trying to figure out how…
JOE ARPAIO, sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, has some interesting ideas about running prisons: His inmates sleep in tents in the desert, work on chain gangs when they misbehave, wear pink underwear, and eat green baloney sandwiches that cost less than dog food. Smoking, skin mags, and coffee…
Ruling the Root Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace by Milton L. Mueller MIT Press, 332 pp., $32.95 AS THE INTERNET and its new technologies become ubiquitous, few of us recognize the control exercised by one obscure nonprofit organization in California. In "Ruling the Root: Internet…
PRESIDENT BUSH "does not support a national ID card," a White House aide says. And, contrary to popular belief, he's never proposed one, even in the form of national standards for state driver's licenses. The National Strategy for Homeland Security, issued by the White House last April, merely…
WHEN A TV CAMERA was shoved in the face of Georgia state representative Billy McKinney on August 20--the night that his daughter, Rep. Cynthia McKinney, lost her Democratic primary race--he spewed venom like a challenged cobra. Asked about the fact that former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young had…
REP. CONNIE MORELLA of Maryland is the least typical Republican in the House of Representatives. She's pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-campaign finance reform, anti-missile defense, and that's just for starters. She voted against seven of the ten planks of Newt Gingrich's Contract With America.…
Cicero The Life And Times of Rome's Greatest Politician by Anthony Everitt Random House, 368 pp., $25.95 FOR CENTURIES the works of Cicero were models of Latin style, and even after Latin no longer served as Europe's literary language, Cicero's rotund and balanced phrases shaped the speeches and…
PARALYZED BY AN ALL-IRAQ, all-war, all-the-time fever (not to mention a desperate opposition to the possibility of said war), the media managed to miss one of the central stories of President Bush's Crawford vacation: the administration's emerging plan to remake the structure of U.S. military…
UP TO DATE IN NEW YORK CITY Back in March, the Immigration and Naturalization Service made headlines when it was revealed that the INS had sent letters to a Florida flight school indicating that Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi had been approved for student visas--visas they obviously wouldn't be…
BOOKS IN BRIEF Poems of New York edited by Elizabeth Schmidt Everyman's Library, 256 pp., $12.50 I've long thought the three great subjects for art are faith, love, and New York City, so I was eager to open Poems of New York, a small-format paperback in the revived Everyman's Library. What a…
WHEN LAURENT MURAWIEC listed the ways Saudi royals have supported terrorists, Secretary of State Colin Powell was quick to assure the Saudi foreign minister that the comments did not reflect administration policy. Never mind that Murawiec, a RAND analyst, had no affiliation with the Bush…
Martha Washington First Lady of Liberty by Helen Bryan John Wiley, 432 pp., $30 MEN COME AND GO, but spin is forever. Like all good first couples, George and Martha Washington spun incessantly throughout their lives, and were spun by others after their deaths. The first kind of spin made them…
What changed, and what didn't.
NOT TWO WEEKS AGO, the administration publicly concluded it didn't need to ask Congress' permission to attack Iraq. Now, President Bush is poised to pop the question. Capitol Hill should be pleased. For weeks, lawmakers insisted, loudly, that they expect to be part of any decision about Saddam…
Part 1 6 Let's get out of Africa. Hasn't it been established that Hatfill had experience with and access to anthrax while he was working at Fort Detrick?
THIS IS TRULY the Groundhog Day war. Everything that happened before and during Desert Storm, we now have to live through again. The same people who lost Desert Storm for us (Scowcroft, Eagleburger, Powell) now make the same arguments against deposing Saddam. And we all have to pay respectful…
PRO-BUSINESS GROUPS in California are railing against a bill that would require businesses and labor organizations to report racial and gender figures to the state every year. The bill's sponsor says it is designed to "put a little pressure" on companies and unions whose demographics don't mirror…
FINALLY we have President Bush's rationale for waging war on Saddam Hussein. It is, the president told several House and Senate leaders on Wednesday, that Saddam "has sidestepped, crawfished, wheedled out of any agreement he had made not to harbor, not to develop weapons of mass destruction." This…
AFTER A ROUGH 10 days of public squabbling sparked by Anthony Zinni's public criticism of administration policy, the Bush administration is once again on track in its effort to effect regime change in Iraq. This is due, in part, to the president's assurance that he will seek congressional approval…
OUR OLD FAMILY FRIEND Chuck Lichenstein had his 15 minutes of fame back in 1983. At a moment of high tension in the Cold War, he delivered a remark, while representing the United States at the United Nations, that precipitated headlines and inspired cartoons far and wide. All these years later, the…
A GADFLY, my dictionary advises, is "any fly that goads or stings domestic animals." Gadflies take various forms and have other targets, and one particularly good at goading and stinging a complacent educational establishment is the self-described "Education Gadfly," otherwise known as Chester E.…
A COUPLE WEEKS AGO, my colleague Richard Starr had a genius idea: On the morning of September 11, one of the networks should re-air, in full, its original broadcast from a year ago.