106 articles
CONTRARY TO POPULAR BELIEF, journalists are human too. We are not merely hecklers in the human comedy, the suckerfish of tragedy. We have thoughts and feelings. We experience pain and insecurity. We suffer disappointment and sorrow. Sometimes, we just need to be held.
Dominion by Matthew Scully St. Martin's, 434 pages, $27.95 LAST SUMMER my daughter's dog, Barkley, got horribly sick. He's a small dog, a mixture of Pekinese and poodle, and he needed surgery. The animal hospital said it would cost a lot, but we didn't hesitate. When we saw Barkley after the…
THIS YEAR it's really, really bad--so bad that I'm going to admit it publicly and ask our readers for help.
[img nocaption float="right" width="410" height="261" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8832[/img] FIRST, Democrats in Minnesota used the death of Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone in an attempt to silence the Republican Senate candidate, former St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman. Then, they turned a widely…
Why did they do it?
BURIED UNDER ALL THE coverage of the snipers' capture was a news story whose sequel makes it worth retrieving.
IN THE FIRST Florida gubernatorial debate on September 27, Republican governor Jeb Bush and Democratic challenger Bill McBride scuffled over the merits of the governor's One Florida executive order, which abolished affirmative action in state contracting and university admissions. McBride said he…
THE LAST TIME I SAW Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, he blushed. It was the third or fourth time he'd been on the "Beltway Boys," the Fox News Channel show Mort Kondracke and I host, and I introduced him as our favorite liberal. Despite the insignificance of the honor, he smiled and his…
MODERN FRANCE'S love affair with Iraq was fleetingly foreshadowed in the year 803, when Harun ar-Rashid, legendary Abbassid caliph of Baghdad, sent an embassy to the equally famous emperor Charlemagne, ruler of the Franks. It seemed a promising beginning: The caliph's gifts to the emperor included…
ON OCTOBER 10--the day before the Norwegian contingent of the Nobel Prize committee gave the prize for peace to Jimmy Carter--the Swedish side of the Nobel committee named Hungary's Imre Kertész the winner of the prize for literature. How obscure is Kertész? The Contemporary Authors Index, which…
EBOLA VIRUS KILLS QUICKLY. It hails from a family of hemorrhagic fevers that trigger massive internal bleeding. Seven years ago, during an outbreak in Africa, doctors stumbled on a possible cure. Part of the idea came from a group of Russian virologists who had worked for years on even more…
The Unquiet Western Front Britain's Role in Literature and History by Brian Bond Cambridge University Press, 120 pp., $25 THE FIRST WORLD WAR was an unnecessary war. In it, brave working-class lions were slaughtered in their tens of thousands by stupid, insensate, upper-class, monocled donkeys who…
The Penguin Book of the Sonnet 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English edited by Phillis Levin Penguin, 526 pp., $18 PERHAPS IT'S NO SURPRISE that an anthology that sets out to "defy or redefine the sonnet tradition" isn't the place to go for a handy collection of the best sonnets written in…
FOR MOST OF THE 1990s, the "Hillary Factor" helped boost recruitment of students at Wellesley College, alma mater of the high-achieving first lady. Impeachment may have dampened the appeal, but not for long: Last year at the gala celebration of the college's 125th anniversary, Hillary (1969) and…
LAST WEEK, the White House announced that North Korea has admitted what critics of the Clinton "engagement" ruefully predicted eight years ago: Pyongyang retains a secret nuclear weapons program, in defiance of its 1994 pledge to forswear nukes. Since the disclosure became public, the Bush…
LOS ANGELES California is home these days to the most dismal politics in the land. The governor's race pits an incumbent with a pitiful record, Democrat Gray Davis, against a sad sack Republican, Bill Simon. The state legislature is politically correct and liberal in the extreme and may accelerate…
Dominion The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy by Matthew Scully St. Martin's, 434 pp., $27.95 AMERICANS LOVE ANIMALS. We coo over and coddle our cats and dogs as if they were children. We paste "Save the Whales" bumper stickers on our cars. We groan in empathetic…
Contra Costa, Calif.
OILING THE NOBEL PROCESS Two weeks ago: The Norwegian Nobel Committee awards the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize to former president Jimmy Carter--a move the committee's chairman, Gunnar Berge, says "should be interpreted" as a "kick in the leg" to current President George W. Bush's "belligerent" foreign…
Editor's Note: With the passing of Oriana Fallaci, we thought it appropriate to revisit David Harsanyi's review of her searing book, The Rage and the Pride. -JVL The Rage and the Pride
POOR BILL CLINTON. He tried so hard to be a peacemaker, and until recently it appeared that he had at least partially succeeded. Sure, Middle East peace didn't emerge from the frenzied negotiations at Camp David in July 2000. But at least he had succeeded in brokering deals to bring "peace" to…
SOME DAY SOON--if it hasn't happened already--the first American male between the ages of 16 and 45 will be fingerprinted at the border as he enters Saudi Arabia. The measure is in retaliation for the discretionary fingerprinting of male visitors to the United States from a range of Muslim…
BOOK RETURNS C.S. Lewis once suggested that every age has its advantages and disadvantages. His own youth suffered from the decline of civility, virtue, faith, and humanity. On the other hand, books were cheap. We can't say the same. I shudder every time I type into a review the fact that some…
IT ALL STARTED with the squirrels in the ceiling. They've always lived there, between the rafters over my office at home. For years, the squirrels and I got along fine, until late one night a couple of months ago, when two of them got into an argument. I don't know what the fight was about, acorns…
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AS A RULE, every political movement gets the cranks it deserves. Still, nothing the Virginia Democratic party has ever done makes it deserve Nancy Spannaus.
YESTERDAY, the White House announced the choice of the poet Dana Gioia for chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. This is the job that Mr. Gioia was born for--or perhaps that's better put the other way around: Mr. Gioia is the kind of person for whom the job of chairing the NEA was first…
POIGNANTLY, the red cover of Kurt Cobain's Mead spiral notebook says, "If you read, you'll judge." The statement contains at least one worthy, though perhaps unintended, truth. To wit, reading is not the path to nonjudgementalism. It places one on the road of evidence, which goes straight to the…
IF YOU HAVEN'T been able to read all the writing about Pius XII, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust, you needn't feel too bad. Not even scholars in the field have been able to keep up. By my count, there have been at least fourteen books on the subject in the last three years, with the threat…
WHILE PREPARING to tape a TV show recently, my colleague Mort Kondracke and I discovered Senate majority leader Tom Daschle was being interviewed in an adjacent Fox News studio. After his interview Daschle kindly agreed to come by and chat with us for a few minutes. What were Democrats proposing,…
IMAGINE A COMPANY, a very big one. It makes things athletic--running shoes, for example. The company is headquartered in the United States but has manufacturing facilities in dozens of countries.
AN ELECTION REFORM ACT in the works since the last presidential election headed to the president's desk last Wednesday after receiving approval from the Senate.
COULD A WAR with Iraq compromise America's war on terrorism? It would appear that many in the foreign policy establishment believe so. Senators Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, and Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, certainly fear the ripple effect of striking Saddam Hussein. Both have echoed…
The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor Viking, 288 pp., $24.95 WILLIAM TREVOR'S latest novel is more than a tale of colonialism and dispossession. Spanning some seventy years, from the old Ireland of the 1920s to the new Ireland of the 1990s, "The Story of Lucy Gault" begins when Lucy is "still…
AFTER 9/11, keeping plutonium out of the hands of the world's Saddams and bin Ladens (who, with only 10 pounds of this reactor-generated stuff, could flatten lower Manhattan) would seem to be an urgent task. Tell that to the federal bureaucrats in charge of plutonium disposal. The programs they…
THE BUSH ROUT of his opponents on Iraq is nearly complete. In August, President Bush was beset with dissent inside his administration and criticism from Democrats and foreign allies. Now his aides are united, he's won overwhelming congressional approval for war with Iraq, and Great Britain is no…
THANKS TO A COALITION of evangelicals, left-wing prison reformers, and human rights activists, Congress is on the verge of tackling America's most ignored crime problem, prison rape. A measure that would apply various types of pressure to shape up lax prison systems is now working its way towards…
WHAT WILL our invasion of Iraq unleash? Our greatest challenge may be not the elimination of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction but the subsequent reconfiguration of the Middle East. What happens inside Iraq on the day Saddam Hussein is gone will reveal American intentions, capabilities, and…
SOMEHOW, my ability to pay for a cab back to McCarran International airport depended entirely on the Philadelphia Eagles' beating the Jacksonville Jaguars by more than three points. The weekend wasn't supposed to end this way. Why not? Well, because I had had this "feeling." I was in Las Vegas with…
WITH ALL EYES currently focused on Iraq, the Balkans have mostly faded from view in Washington. This is unfortunate, for events are afoot in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo that starkly illustrate the rigors of nation-building. They demonstrate why, in effecting the liberation of Iraq, the United…
FOR WHOM THE NOBEL TOLLS
AMERICA should use her private sector to stop terrorist immigration by having insurance companies investigate student-visa applicants. Over 500,000 foreigners attend U.S. schools, yet bureaucratic inefficiencies prevent the government from weeding out potential student-terrorists. Indeed, six…
The Ideas That Conquered the World Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century by Michael Mandelbaum Public Affairs, 512 pp., $30 DID SEPTEMBER 11 change anything? Do the terrorist attacks and our response mark a new strategic era, or are they merely a temporary detour from a far…
IF YOU'RE OLD ENOUGH to have voted for Bella Abzug or Ronald Reagan, then you may remember the great to-do surrounding the unveiling, in 1979, of Judy Chicago's cause célèbre, "The Dinner Party." That assemblage of thirty-nine vulviform table settings was denounced and hosannahed, the standard to…
FORTY YEARS AGO this month, President John F. Kennedy was locked in a test of wills with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev over missiles in Cuba. Memorialized in both film and print, the Cuban missile crisis has come to be the ultimate symbol of presidential resolve and courage. In the 1974 movie…
BOOKS IN BRIEF The Normal One Life with a Difficult or Damaged Sibling by Jeanne Safer Free Press, 204 pp., $24 Some time into the presidency of John F. Kennedy, the public was told that his picture-book family included a retarded sister who was reared by the family to seem nearly normal. (This…
"A few weeks ago, we were doing some work on my back porch back home, tearing out a section of old stacked rocks, when all of a sudden I uncovered a nest of copperhead snakes. . . . A copperhead will kill you. It could kill one of my dogs. It could kill one of my grandchildren; they play all the…
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WE JUST GOT a new toaster. And it wasn't easy.
NOW THAT THE Anaheim Angels have reached the World Series, baseball nuts from Washington will be able to take the perfect conservative flight, from Ronald Reagan National Airport in D.C. to John Wayne Airport in Orange County.
FOR SOME DEPRESSING NEWS on the continuing struggle between art and commerce, consider this: Paul Thomas Anderson's first three movies made--in their combined total box office gross--less than "Tomb Raider" made in its first 60 hours of release.
THE BOARD of the Schumann Foundation (president, Bill Moyers) met on Thursday to settle on a strategy that would allow one of its most expensive projects--the leftish American Prospect magazine--to survive in the current political climate. Perhaps the Schumann Foundation wants to cut costs so that…
AMONG MY twenty-something peers at The Weekly Standard, I'm thought to be a bit of a premature old fogy. Perhaps it's my stuffed-shirt sartorial choices, my TV preferences (Turner Classic Movies over the WB), or my taste in music (Duke Ellington over Eminem). What can I say? I'm a cranky old man…
SOON AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, the Bush administration did things that annoyed the news media. One was to adopt a policy by which the deportation hearings of aliens the government believes "might have connections with, or possess information pertaining to, terrorist activity against the United States"…
The Anthony Boucher Chronicles Reviews and Commentary 1942-1947 edited by Francis M. Nevins Ramble House, 3 volumes, $21.95 each The Sound of Detection Ellery Queen's Adventures in Radio by Francis M. Nevins and Martin Grams Jr. OTR, 267 pp., $29.95 AFTER PRODUCING seven detective novels between…
JUST AFTER LUNCH ON OCTOBER 1, President Bush telephoned House Democratic Leader Dick Gep-hardt. Bush needed help. He wanted negotiations over a congressional war resolution to wind up quickly, so a vote could be held and pressure put on the United Nations to endorse tougher arms inspections in…
In "CAIR-Less with the Truth," by Jake Tapper (Oct. 7), an error in the translation led to the misattribution of a quotation to Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). It was not Mr. Awad but the interviewer, Sanaa Al-Said of the Egyptian newspaper…
MORE REASONS TO REMOVE SADDAM For the past two weeks, the online journal Slate has been conducting an interesting dialogue among its contributors about the merits of invading Iraq, which THE SCRAPBOOK highly recommends. But there's been one outstanding contribution, the Oct. 3 letter from New…
IN LAST WEEK'S EPISODE, much of respectable Washington was aghast that the Bush White House had "politicized" the possibility of war by questioning the patriotism of congressional Democrats who opposed the president's Iraq policy. Respectable Washington was mistaken about all this. First off, war…
IT'S A RARE POLITICAL MOMENT when Terry McAuliffe says no comment. Yet McAuliffe, the garrulous chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said just that last Wednesday at the Brookings Institution after a speech by Al Gore. Asked about the trip to Baghdad taken by three of his fellow…
The Courage to Be Catholic Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church by George Weigel Basic, 208 pp., $22 FOR NOW, at least, the media seem to consider that the June meeting of America's Catholic bishops in Dallas largely brought the priestly abuse scandals to a close--which, for the bishops,…
IN THE PAST 20 minutes I have seen 4 1/2 acres of pelvic skin. I'm sitting in a sidewalk bar called Wet Willies in the South Beach section of Miami. I'm nursing a phosphorescent blue drink in a plastic cup, and on the sidewalk in front of me there is a parade of young women with their…
BOTH THE NEW MOVIE "The Four Feathers" and the reaction to it exemplify contemporary attitudes to Anglo-Saxon imperialism and the Victorians who practiced it. The film itself--the sixth cinematic version of the A.E.W. Mason novel first published in 1902--is a failure as motion-picture…
MAUREEN DOWD'S New York Times columns used to be fun. Whether you agreed with her or not, they were witty and incisive. Sometimes they were even insightful. But recently, many readers are asking the same question as a letter writer to the Denver Post: "What has happened to Maureen Dowd lately? . .…
BOOKS IN BRIEF Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk Doubleday, 260 pp., $24.95 In Palahniuk's stories, there usually seem to be two kinds of people: suckers who believe in widely accepted moral codes, and anti-social rebels asserting their own idiosyncratic philosophies. His latest effort is therefore a…
Blackpool, England
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, it seems, the status of marriage now depends on who amends the Constitution first. Marriage either will be radically redefined through a gay-rights strategy of litigation, or it will be preserved as we have known it through legislative deliberation and a formal amendment…
WHEN IT ALL boiled over that day in September--with a red-faced Tom Daschle denouncing the president from the Senate floor--George W. Bush had already given the Democrats two very bad years. Two years of predictions that never quite happened. Two years of gotchas that never came through. Two years…
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
HAS ANYONE had a better six weeks than George W. Bush? Just before Labor Day, the American people were uncertain about the need to act soon to remove Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration itself seemed to be in disarray. Senators and House members were objecting to a broad grant of authority to…
SOMEONE TELL Jimmy Carter to give back the Nobel prize. Since the million-dollar Peace Prize was awarded to the former president as an expression of anti-American pique, Carter should politely decline.
IT'S A SIGN of how bad things have gotten for the anti-war left that at yesterday's "Prominent Citizens Oppose War with Iraq" press conference, a large placard sat next to the panelists at the front of the room that read: "UN Inspections--Not U.S. War." A little free marketing advice: "Make Love,…
IN THE OPENING SCENES of "Igby Goes Down," the title character (Kieran Culkin) gets the boot from the first of a series of East Coast religious prep schools. He has passed only one course, and that just barely, but Igby, despite his failings, has an inquiring mind.
A GREAT GUY and publicist I work with, Michael Hansen, tracked down the manager of blink-182. They were the band who said all those things about President Bush and his Iraq policies. Their manager confirmed that they said them and, also, that this was followed by huge boos, which didn't upset the…
ON September 30, I wrote a column where I recounted a story my friend Jack Burditt told me. He had been to a punk rock concert in Los Angeles with his teenage daughter and, while there, one of the punk bands had said some nasty things about President Bush and his Iraq policy. The crowd, Jack told…
MAYBE it's all Christie Whitman's fault. After all, it was under her stewardship as governor of New Jersey that the idea of a state poet laureate was first hatched. But how could she have known in April 2000 that the innocuous role of poet laureate would fall under intense scrutiny? Back then, the…
IF YOU WANT to get an idea of what kind of emotionally draining season it's been for the St. Louis Cardinals, you need look no further than last week as they prepared to play the Arizona Diamondbacks in Game 2 of the National League Division Series. In Phoenix to watch the team play was Flynn Kile,…
AS CONGRESS settles in to debate the confrontation with Iraq, one truly terrible policy option is off the table: Virtually no one is calling for a mere resumption of old-style U.N. weapons inspections as a way to contain Saddam Hussein. Suddenly, even outside the charmed circle of President Bush,…
THE NEW YORK TIMES has lately come under a barrage of media criticism, not all of it from "the right," about the extent to which editorial bias has infected the paper's hard news columns. And already some of that criticism has been directed specifically against the paper's A-section reporting on…
YOU DON'T HAVE TO FOLLOW the debate over war against Iraq for long without noticing the recurrence of a certain term: "clear and present danger." In fact, if you do a Nexis search for the past six months for "clear and present danger" and "Iraq," you'll find more than 600 mentions. Do the same…
THERE'S GOOD NEWS and bad news for Republicans in the New Jersey Senate race. The good news is GOP candidate Doug Forrester isn't the stiff he's been cracked up to be. Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," he was feisty and disciplined. The bad news is that with the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal yesterday…
ARCHITECTURE is politics by other means--at least some of the time. An emerging architectural story in Jerusalem is, in part, wonderful news; in part, a tragic missed opportunity. Recently the Jerusalem Post ran a story on a project that is bound to attract plenty of attention before long: the…
A FEW WEEKS AGO a nice woman who lives in my building asked if I would be interested in teaching two morning sessions devoted to Montaigne to her book group. They would be meeting in Starved Rock, Illinois. My and my wife's expenses would be paid, and I would be given a $600 fee. The setting was…
"IT'S NOT ENOUGH for you to say, 'I will follow the law, Senator.' We need to be convinced that nominees aren't far out of the mainstream," snarled Chuck Schumer, chairing last week's confirmation hearing for Miguel Estrada before the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Clarence Thomas came before this…
ME TOO, SAYS GEPHARDT Al Gore having made the argument that really important issues like war should somehow be above politics, and Tom Daschle having seconded Gore's motion, it was perhaps inevitable that Dick Gephardt would want to chime in, too. And sure enough, there in Friday's New York Times…
BACK IN THE EARLY 1950s I would occasionally lunch in New York with Jay Lovestone, the onetime secretary of the American Communist party. Joseph Stalin had ousted him in the 1930s, and Lovestone had subsequently become an anti-Communist strategist with an office at the International Ladies Garment…
Killing Monsters Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence by Gerard Jones Basic, 261 pp., $25 THE OTHER DAY, Joe--my fiancee's five-year-old nephew--decided to let me in on something. "Can I tell you a secret?" he asked. "My grandma bought me a special present." He paused.…
BERLIN German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has been getting help from the heavens lately. On the last Saturday of the tightest election campaign in the history of democratic Germany, Schroeder chose the Baltic port of Rostock as the backdrop for his closing speech. The idea was to advertise his…
MR. DURBIN: As I return to Illinois, people tell me over and over again: Senator, when you go back, please go to the floor of the Senate and express our feelings that we do need a coalition of force, not just for the principle and value of it, but for the military significance of it . . . MR. REID:…
AUSTIN, TEXAS If Democrat Ron Kirk wins a Senate seat in Texas this fall, it will be a defeat for Republicans with dire implications far beyond Texas. Yes, it will signify the end of the GOP's short reign--less than a decade--as absolute ruler of Texas politics. Texas will be politically…
Across the Sabbath River In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel by Hillel Halkin Houghton Mifflin, 394 pp., $28 THE CENTURIES-OLD search for Israel's "lost tribes" has been experiencing a revival. Last May it was reported that a group of businessmen, scholars, and rabbis had joined forces to raise the…
Tom Stoppard A Life by Ira Bruce Nadel Palgrave Macmillan, 384 pp., $29.95 TO WRITE ONE BRILLIANT and very funny play is an accomplishment. To write two or three, as Oscar Wilde did, is extraordinary. To write five or six, as George Bernard Shaw did, is prodigious. So think what that says about Tom…
IS IT POSSIBLE for two top 2004 Democratic presidential candidates to knock themselves out of contention on consecutive days some two years before the election? Probably not. But as Washington last week descended into a sour partisanship not seen since the last presidential election, both Al Gore…
IRANIAN WOMEN can't dance in public, convert from Islam, travel without their husbands' permission, or wear makeup. But they can blog--that is, create weblogs, online journals of news, opinion, or whatever random thoughts tickle the blogger's fancy. And Iran's blogs are the leading edge of an…
I have some good news for you. In fact, some great news. When I heard it, I laughed out loud (hooted, in fact), clapped my hands, closed my eyes, and felt a tingle all the way down to my toes, as if I had just swallowed a blast of whisky. Wait a minute, maybe it was a blast of whisky. No, that was…
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LAST NIGHT on "Survivor," 14 unattractive exhibitionists tussled and jockeyed for position, all hoping to last 39 days on an island and win $1 million. This Saturday night, on "Surviving West Point," seven young kids will work together, all hoping to last four years at the famed military academy…
IF YOU'RE GOING to remake a movie, you'd better have a good reason. In 1995, Harrison Ford did a remake of "Sabrina" because, at 53, he wanted to see if he could transition from action roles into romantic comedy (by way of an answer, his next two films were "The Devil's Own" and "Air Force One").…
The New Jersey Supreme Court yesterday stood up for the principle of "full and fair" electoral choice. Or so the court said. In truth, the New Jersey Supreme Court yesterday upheld the authority of Tom Daschle, senator from South Dakota and majority leader of the U.S. Senate, to overturn the…
AS STEPHEN HAYES pointed out a few weeks ago, there was once a time when Bill Clinton understood the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
AS THE DISGRACED Andrew Fastow makes his way into court this week to explain his wheeling and dealings as chief financial officer of the Republican-connected Enron corporation, there will be plenty of Republicans urging Americans not to lose their focus on the Democrat-connected telecom group…
OUR ESTEEMED web editor Jonathan Last asked me the other day to explain why I think the Braves, who open the divisional playoffs today against the Giants, will win the World Series this year. He asked me to do it since I'm a Braves fan, having followed the team since it played in County Stadium and…
THE POSSIBILITIES are endless. In California, it's said any Republican could defeat Democratic governor Gray Davis--except the guy who won the GOP primary, Bill Simon. So if Simon drops out, Republicans could install The Terminator, a popular GOP figure better known as Arnold Schwarzenegger, as…
DAVID AIKMAN is back from three months in China, having taken more than 800 pages of notes, and he reports a religious awakening that could have enormous political implications.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US. It's been exactly a year since we re-launched weeklystandard.com, and to celebrate the occasion we've made some improvements. (No, we have not added a blog.)
THE LAW OF AVERAGES dictates that if you spend enough time writing for a living, you will eventually make embarrassing disclosures about yourself. Here is mine: Of all the crank left-wing groups I am paid to periodically encounter, I've always harbored a secret soft spot for my friends at the…