116 articles
THANKSGIVING WAS ALWAYS TENSE while I was growing up, and I don't know why. Christmas, now--Christmas was mostly fun and presents and carols and laughter, as I remember. But Thanksgiving was arguments and huffs and recriminations and doors slamming and one indistinguishable great-uncle or another…
DEMOCRATS ARE HAVING a nervous breakdown--needlessly. Sure, they lost the 2002 election badly, but it wasn't a catastrophic defeat. They lost for a simple reason: Voters caught on that they weren't serious about the war on terrorism, including regime change in Iraq. So the one thing Democrats need…
BLOGGER EXTRAORDINARE Andrew Sullivan noted a long, strident letter allegedly from Osama bin Laden that's been circulating on Islamist websites in Britain. The letter made the print media on Sunday, in the London Observer. The State Department hasn't pronounced on its authenticity, but one who's…
A WEEK AGO, an obscure court in the nation's capital rendered a decision that has outraged certain civil libertarian groups and their friends in the commentariat. They protest too much. The decision by the awkwardly named Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review significantly strengthens…
1700 PERCENT HYPED
TRENT LOTT, the Senate Republican leader, believes President Bush won a mandate in the midterm election. House majority leader Dick Armey says the Republican victories give Bush a realistic chance to reform the Social Security system in 2003. Sweeping free-market reform, long sought by…
EVER SINCE MY CHILDHOOD, as a traveler on hundreds of flights, I have trudged past those happy souls in the first few rows of seats, ensconced in cushioned comfort, already sipping a drink and munching on some nuts. I've watched endless times as the attendants noisily closed the curtains, which…
Climbing Parnassus A New Apologia for Greek and Latin by Tracy Lee Simmons ISI, 290 pp., $24.95 MY FELLOW CLASSICISTS will know what I mean when I say that I hate the question "What do you teach?" because I never know quite how to respond. In the past when I've answered, "classics," I've been told…
FLORENCE
A BIG THING HAPPENED in the elections that you won't read about much in the papers, and the fact that you won't be reading about it is one of the reasons it did. The big story is that the pro-choice extremists took a widespread whipping, which is the one thing the press doesn't want to acknowledge,…
Plato's Symposium by Stanley Rosen St. Augustine's, 428 pp., $32 Metaphysics in Ordinary Language by Stanley Rosen St. Augustine's, 302 pp., $24 The Question of Being A Reversal of Heidegger by Stanley Rosen St. Augustine's, 367 pp., $27 The Ancients and the Moderns Rethinking Modernity by Stanley…
ON NOVEMBER 8, just minutes after the United Nations Security Council voted to approve the latest resolution on Saddam Hussein, President Bush clarified its meaning: "[Saddam] must submit to any and all methods to verify his compliance. His cooperation must be prompt and unconditional or he will…
NEW YORK DOMINICAN BUSINESSMAN Fernando Mateo spent Election Day driving around New York City, getting out the vote for George Pataki. The Dominican community is among the poorest in New York, and it has traditionally been one of the nation's most reliably left-leaning. Still, Mateo is convinced…
They cannot fathom why voters might keep choosing Republicans, but they have some crazy theories.
CONSERVATIVES COMPLAIN constantly (and rightly) about the liberal bias of the major media. What they don't realize, however, is that this bias probably hurts liberals more than it helps them. The Republican victory this fall is a case in point. One way media bias hurts liberals is by giving them a…
Natural Rights and the Right to Choose by Hadley Arkes Cambridge Univ. Press, 288 pp., $28 HADLEY ARKES is a frustrated man. All he wants to do is to get his fellow citizens to talk with him seriously on the fundamental moral and political issue of our time: abortion. And he has been tireless in…
BOOKS IN BRIEF Ghost Image by Joshua Gilder Simon & Schuster, 350 pp., $23 Switching careers is always difficult--and moving from just about any other profession to successful novel-writing may be the most difficult of all. While it hardly qualifies as high literature, former White House…
AROUND 1:00 A.M. on Thursday, October 24, with the manhunt for the Beltway sniper entering its third week, trucker Ronald Lanz--his radio tuned to the "Truckin' Bozo" network--spotted a blue 1990 Chevy Caprice at a rest stop along I-70, a few miles from the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. He saw the…
TRAILING THE PRESIDENT across America, the White House press corps logged tens of thousands of miles this election cycle, condemned to watch Bush deliver the same stump speech several times a day. Jaded and bored, we pounced on the gaffes and yawned at the platitudes. In light of the midterm…
LAST MONDAY, twelve days after declaring victory, Alabama's Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Don Siegelman conceded the election to Republican Bob Riley. But it almost didn't turn out that way. If it hadn't been for one woman, the Republican National Committee's regional director Kelley…
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IT'S A SAD FACT of life that longevity confers respectability. If you hang around long enough, eventually, you become revered, no matter how second-rate your work is. Take, for example, Helen Thomas. If the dim, crotchety White House correspondent was in her fifth year on the job, she'd be a…
EARLIER THIS WEEK, four commissioners of the United States Commission on Civil Rights vehemently objected to a draft of a report made public by their own agency. The commissioners, Abigail Thernstrom, Jennifer Braceras, Peter Kirsanow, and Russell Redenbaugh, said they were not consulted in the…
AFGHANISTAN IS A MESS. We know that because everybody says so. Al Gore says so. But something more complicated is going on, as a fine report by Pamela Constable in the Washington Post earlier this week makes clear. The headline reinforces the conventional wisdom: "A Year After Taliban, Daily Life…
THERE WAS MORE to President Bush's wildly successful intervention in the 2002 midterm congressional election than meets the eye. The White House decision to play a large role was made many months ago (but post-September 11). It involved candidate selection and behind-the-scenes participation in…
Over the course of a 16-game season, an avid fan of the National Football League typically sees several dozen serious injuries. This is to be expected in a game that features 300-pound men running at one another--at full speed--like battering bighorns on the Animal Planet. (The difference is that…
YOU REMEMBER HIM for a sleazy character he played on screen. Or the street tough with the wise-ass attitude. Or the weasel you never trusted. He's always "that guy."
IN SOUTH DAKOTA'S Senate race, voting irregularities on the Oglala Sioux Indian reservation have made some Republicans wonder whether Democratic senator Tim Johnson's 524 vote victory over Representative John Thune was legitimate. Voter fraud, they speculate, sent South Dakota's junior senator back…
HISTORICALLY CONSIDERED, Texas politics has seen a large (as befits Texas) number of flamboyant personalities. Lyndon Baines Johnson, for one. Mark it down: Sen.-elect John Cornyn, a man not given to fancy speeches or grand gestures, isn't among them.
FOR AS LONG as there has been a Saddam Hussein, Saddam scholars have been confronted by a question with no easy answer: just what kind of crazy is he? He reigns by terror at home, while preying on anti-American sentiment among the conflict-averse abroad. So is Saddam calculated-crazy, crazy like…
IN HER LATEST succès de scandale, "The Rage and the Pride," Oriana Fallaci forebodes darkly about the fate of the West's amassed art treasures. Surely she has not been alone in extrapolating from the destruction of the colossal Buddhas of Bamiyan--to say nothing of the World Trade Center--to a…
ON JUDGES, things will be different. The wars over judges of the past two years were made possible by the simple fact that the Democrats controlled the Senate. They used their power to block an unprecedented number of President Bush's appeals court nominees. Now that the Democrats constitute the…
PERHAPS IT IS UNFAIR, but I've always regarded politicians as I regard lima beans, jazz fusion, and Dr. Phil--as unnecessary evils. For what kind of half-man/half-freak spends his entire life suppressing his true self to ask strangers to embrace a false one? Besides writers, I mean.
Jerusalem
Against the Dead Hand The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism by Brink Lindsey John Wiley & Sons, 368 pp., $29.95 John Maynard Keynes Fighting For Freedom, 1937-1946 by Robert Skidelsky Penguin USA, 608 pp., $20 THE LAMPS are going out all over Latin America. Two decades ago, there seemed hope…
THE MEDIA PUNDITS and partisan spin-doctors are nearly unanimous: President Bush and the Republicans won a big, bellwether victory in the 2002 midterm elections. Most Democratic leaders, many in obvious don't-blame-me mode, agree: Bush's post-9/11 popularity, his peripatetic campaigning and…
POT GETS SMOKED
QUESTION: What are the implications of the U.S. government's missile strike [on al Qaeda terrorists in Yemen] yesterday? . . . I'm sure many Israelis are wondering what the difference is between this and a targeted killing. And me, too. . . . STATE DEPARTMENT SPOKESMAN RICHARD BOUCHER: Our policy…
THE ELECTION NIGHT returns were not even fully revealed before liberals began handing out recriminations. Across the country, Democratic activists and deep-pocket donors were devastated by the failure of party leaders to use the sagging economy to deliver a knockout punch to the Republicans. But…
WE ARE NO LONGER an equally divided, 50-50 nation. America is now at least 51-49 Republican and right of center, more likely 52-48, maybe even 53-47. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, created a new political era, and the midterm election on November 5 confirmed it. Sure, a shift of…
Every Midget Has an Uncle Sam Costume Writing for a Living by Donald Bain Barricade, 239 pp., $22.95 Murder at Ford's Theatre by Margaret Truman Ballantine, 326 pp., $24.95 A BIZARRE PHENOMENON first observed in the 1940s became a crime-fiction epidemic by the 1990s. Famous entertainers, athletes,…
ARE THE DEMOCRATS about to go insane? Are they about to decide that the reason they lost the 2002 election is that they didn't say what they really believe? Are they about to go into Paul Krugman-land, lambasting tax cuts, savaging Bush as a tool of the corporate bosses? Are they about to go off on…
CHALK UP A BIG ONE for Priscilla Owen, an unsung winner of last Tuesday's election, and a partial architect of the Republican victory. Owen is the Texas judge who was a Bush nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She was described by the American Bar Association as "highly…
IT WAS SATURDAY AFTERNOON, 72 hours before the polls opened in Georgia, and President George Bush was in the state for the fifth time in 2002--three of them campaign swings for Saxby Chambliss. It was part of the last stage of a fierce drive that put Bush in 17 states in 15 days. The president took…
BOOKS IN BRIEF Embracing the Firebird Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry by Janine Beichman University of Hawaii Press, 340 pp., $55 Yosano Akiko has slipped under most literary radars, an oversight corrected by Janine Beichman's literary biography. A fusion of…
PRESIDENT BUSH'S resounding victory in last week's midterm elections was, among other things, a remarkable expression of national support for the course the president has steered in the war on terrorism. And, of course, that includes the president's Iraq policy. Time and again as he toured the…
JUST BEFORE THE ELECTION last week, I half-attentively watched Norman Ornstein explaining to a television interviewer that President Bush was taking an enormous risk by campaigning for so many marginal Republican candidates. The reason I was half-attentive is that it wasn't the first such analysis…
San Francisco SOMETHING went terribly wrong on the way to last week's Republican revolution: California. While the White House, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives were lining up Republican, Sacramento was looking like Washington, D.C., in reverse: The governor's mansion, the…
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HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER Dick Armey has become all the things people like about politicians but seldom get. He's candid, even downright revealing. He admits mistakes. He's forthright about the lessons he's learned in Washington after 18 years as a House member from Texas. He's clear about what he got…
THE EXPECTED ASCENSION of Democratic whip Nancy Pelosi to House minority leader has become a surprisingly important issue in another leadership race to be decided today. Pelosi's likely win has helped make the case for Robert Menendez of New Jersey to fill the opening for Democratic caucus…
WE TEND TO ASSUME that science involves demystification: Rainbows are not a sign of God's covenant with man, science tells us, but simply sunlight refracted through the prism of water vapor; thunderbolts are not products of the wrath of Zeus, but of electrical charges in the atmosphere--you get the…
THE BIGGEST CONSEQUENCE of the midterm elections may well concern judges. Because the Republicans now control the Senate, President Bush is in a far better position than he was during his first two years in office to change the confirmation process for the better and to see his nominees confirmed.
Skipping Towards Gomorrah The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America by Dan Savage Dutton, $23.95, 302 pages THE AMERICAN SODOMITES have found their defender and his name is, appropriately, Dan Savage. In his day job, Savage writes a wonderfully lewd sex column in which he…
THE SENSIBLE PEOPLE of Oregon last week voted down a universal health care scheme by 79 percent to 21 percent. But while Measure 23 deserved defeat, it shouldn't be allowed to sink quietly into oblivion. It wasn't some fringe initiative, after all: It had the endorsement of the Oregon Democratic…
TO READ Bill Moyers's latest rant about the 2002 election results, one might conclude that the biggest threat America faces is the Republican party. To wit:
LAST MONDAY, at a time when I'm normally enjoying a cup of coffee at my desk, I found myself shivering in the cold rain in Manassas, Virginia, inches away from a gun-wielding teenager, staring down the barrel of a shotgun. But don't get your hopes up. This wasn't the mugging of a foolish editor, in…
FOR DAYS, I called the campaign of Ron Kirk, the ex-Dallas mayor running for the Senate in Texas, to find out his schedule of campaign events. Or an assistant called on my behalf. We couldn't get the schedule. Only the press secretary could give out that information and, you guessed it, the press…
DEWAYNE'S WORLD Four years ago, DeWayne Wickham, whose column on the USA Today editorial page occupies some of the choicest real estate in opinion journalism, made a convincing case that the dog days of dealing diplomatically with Saddam Hussein were done. "In refusing to permit U.N. inspectors…
ON OCTOBER 20, Saddam Hussein blinked. In the face of an American president's resolve to disarm him, the Iraqi dictator opened the gates of his jails and freed his nation's thieves, rapists, and murderers. (Exempted from his amnesty were prisoners deemed American or Zionist spies.) Two days later,…
AS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION ponders how to respond to North Korea's defiant admission of having violated every nuclear nonproliferation pledge it ever made, it's worth recounting how we got into this mess. Certainly, Pyongyang--currently armed with one or more nuclear bombs and a set of uranium and…
Jesse James Last Rebel of the Civil War by T.J. Stiles Knopf, 491 pp., $27.50 LONG BIOGRAPHIES of short lives must seek subjects who did a whole lot of living in their brief spans. In "Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War," T.J. Stiles uses Jesse James's bloodsoaked thirty-four years as an…
ON OCTOBER 17, bombs killed 6 people and wounded 143 in Zamboanga, the Philippines. While press accounts mentioned in passing that the victims were Christians, few conveyed to the reader that these were people assaulted by Muslim extremists because of their religion. On September 25, militant…
IN THEIR EAGERNESS to stop a U.S. invasion of Iraq, antiwar activists have adopted an interesting argument. Containment and deterrence worked against the Soviet Union, they say, and they will work against Saddam Hussein. Now they tell us. The Left's enthusiasm for containment and deterrence was, to…
IT IS NO GRAVESIDE cliché to say that the death of Paul Wellstone leaves a gaping void in American politics. Let's be clear about exactly where that gaping void lies. Iowa senator Tom Harkin's tribute to Wellstone as a man who "made a miner up on the Iron Range know that he was as important as the…
The Prophets Who They Were; What They Are by Norman Podhoretz Free Press, 400 pp., $30 ONE FALL DAY, while I was in San Francisco, a friend took me to his favorite spot of pilgrimage--the memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. The design is impressive. A narrow path leads past a wall filled with…
"THE PAST IS NEVER DEAD, it's not even past," William Faulkner once said. He would have been right at home in the antiwar movement, where the past is now more present than ever, or at least more present than it has been since 1991. Every time war, or the threat of war, or the idea of war presents…
WHEN FACULTY MEMBERS at the Sorbonne gather to discuss who should get the prize for most evil alumnus, they probably rehash all the familiar names--Pol Pot, mastermind of the Cambodian genocide; Abimael Guzman, leader of Peru's Shining Path guerrilla movement; and Ali Shariat, the intellectual…
Max Beerbohm A kind of a life by N. John Hall Yale University Press, 284 pp., $24.95 LOVERS--no lesser word will do--of the prose, caricatures, and mind of Max Beerbohm constitute a cult. Membership in the cult requires a strong penchant for irony, a skeptical turn of mind, and a sharp taste for…
WAHHABISM UNVEILED Stephen Schwartz's "The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror" (Doubleday, 288 pp., $25) takes as its point of departure September 11 and the terrorist attacks on America. They were carried out, we now know, by nineteen Muslims who subscribed--like their…
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.
AS A LITTLE bit of celebration, we're opening all of the Articles and Features from this week's magazine to the general public (meaning even non-subscribers). Think of it as our absolutely, positively not-gloating, post-election present to you. Read. Enjoy. Do not--under any circumstances--gloat.
LAST WEEKEND'S attack by an unmanned RQ-1A Predator drone on a group of six al Qaeda terrorists was the first known strike by an unmanned aerial vehicle outside Afghanistan. The strike, which killed a top al Qaeda operative who was suspected of having been a key player in the October 2000 attack on…
"8 MILE," the movie opening today starring rapper Eminem, is a series of curiosities stacked high: Can Eminem act? Why is acclaimed director Curtis Hanson helming this roman à clef? Why is "8 Mile" being touted as a serious movie?
SINCE TAKING OVER Congress in 1995, the Republican party has proven itself mostly inept at using the power of the federal purse to pursue conservative goals. But the Solomon Amendment, the 1996 brainchild of former New York GOP congressman Gerald Solomon, is now proving to be a notable exception.…
ONE CONSEQUENCE of the shift of Senate control to the Republicans may be to nudge a Justice or two towards retirement. It's about time we had a vacancy. The last was in 1994, when Harry Blackmun stepped down and his seat was taken by Stephen Breyer. More than eight years have passed--the second…
TUESDAY NIGHT, the Texas GOP delivered for former governor George W. Bush--in grand fashion. Besides holding the governor's mansion and the Senate seat vacated by retiring senator Phil Gramm, the party refused to concede any statewide office to a Democrat, leaving the Democrats' representation at…
THE "VOTIN' MINNESOTANS" (you have to say it with the accent) have done it again. Republican Norm Coleman has squeaked by former vice president Walter Mondale in an election featuring record turnout and a few lessons in campaign strategy.
THE BIG STORY of last night's elections was that America overwhelmingly chose the Republican vision of the future over the Democratic vision (or lack of vision). The big story today is what the Democrats will do in the face of their resounding defeat. By all indications, they still don't understand…
REPRESENTATIVE BOB EHRLICH hesitated for months before announcing his candidacy for governor of Maryland. And with good reason. To run he would have to risk a safe seat in Congress to challenge Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-1. His name…
THE ERA WHEN THE PARTY that doesn't hold the White House automatically gains seats in the House and sometimes seats in the Senate as well--is over. Democrats bucked that century-old habit in 1998, winning 5 House seats while Bill Clinton was president. And Republicans, led by President Bush, did it…
AT THREE IN THE MORNING, I gave up. A rejoicing sort of giving up, you understand, as Jean Carnahan's concession speech meant the Republicans had done it--seized control of the Senate, made it work. George W. Bush has turned into a man so presidential than he can even campaign for his party without…
NO ONE should have been surprised when Terry McAuliffe, head of the Democratic National Committee, released a statement yesterday afternoon suggesting Republicans set out to intimidate minority voters. (For an excellent dissection of that statement, see Jonathan Last's analysis here.) McAuliffe…
Tim Russert: Now, you said in The New York Times last week, "Jeb Bush is gone." You want to take those words back?
WELL, I'M HUMBLED. For the past two months me and just about every other pundit under the sun have been saying the same thing: There is no theme to this election, no trend. This nation is divided down the middle.
EXACTLY TWENTY YEARS AGO, Frank Lautenberg first ran for public office. He was a sprightly 58 at the time, a successful businessman who came to the rescue of a Democratic party whose senior senator was embroiled in controversy and forced to step down. Back then, it was Senator Harrison Williams's…
THIS AFTERNOON DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe put out an alarming statement:
HOWEVER the Minnesota Senate race turns out, the voters of that state have been offered distinct alternatives on abortion. Going into Monday's debate, it was well-known that Norm Coleman is pro-life and thinks Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that announced a constitutional right to abortion, was…
FROM MAINE TO CALIFORNIA, the midterm elections surely will test the candidates. But they also will test history, for history supports the belief--held by Democrats--that they will win both houses of Congress.
Editor's Note: We'll be posting election analysis all afternoon and all night as returns come in. Be sure to check back often.
MINNESOTANS WORRIED about an anthrax attack at the Mall of America can relax. Walter Mondale is on the case.
Lee Bockhorn
LAWMAKERS IN VIRGINIA have come up with a sly new way to raise taxes. Most of the state's political establishment is pushing citizens in northern Virginia to vote tomorrow for an increase in their sales tax (from 4.5 to 5 percent) to pay for new roads in their traffic-congested region. Northern…
A FEW YEARS AGO, three senators chatted amiably on the floor of the Senate about their desks. By long tradition, members have carved something in the wood, so a senator who sits there decades later will know who'd used the desk before. The first senator said his desk had once been Daniel Webster's.…
SOMERSET MAUGHAM once said, "There is only one thing about which I am certain, and that is that there is very little about which one can be certain." But that's easy for Somerset Maugham to say. He never had to go on "Connie Chung Tonight" to play an expert on the Beltway Sniper. For three weeks…
IN RECENT SPEECHES and in the newly minted National Security Strategy, President Bush has declared that he intends to prosecute the war on terrorism aggressively and to oppose the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by rogue states. U.S. actions in Afghanistan and preparations for a war…
THERE WAS A GENUINE Kodak moment last week in Game 3 of the World Series. Baseball great Willie Mays threw out the opening pitch to Barry Bonds. What made it so special was that Mays is Bonds's godfather. It made me feel warm and fuzzy inside, seeing them play catch together and afterwards fondly…
Gladly to Learn and Gladly to Teach Essays on Religion and Political Philosophy in Honor of Ernest L. Fortin, A.A. edited by Michael P. Foley and Douglas Kries Lexington, 344 pp., $75 Dissent and Philosophy in the Middle Ages Dante and His Precursors by Ernest L. Fortin Lexington, 182 pp., $22.95…
Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity The Challenge for Bioethics by Leon R. Kass Encounter, 313 pp., $26.95 WE LIVE in a very rich country (in case you hadn't noticed), and from the heaping surplus of our prosperity we have carved a number of professions that--to put it as kindly as…
The Skeptic A Life of H.L. Mencken by Terry Teachout HarperCollins, 432 pp., $29.95 IN THE FALL OF 1923, James M. Cain, a reporter then aspiring to a literary career, had lunch in Baltimore with H.L. Mencken, who was on the verge of launching a new journal, the American Mercury. Despite the fact,…
A MYSTERIOUS PHONE CALL, a fingerprint, a composite sketch, and spent ammunition from an unsolved Alabama killing finally led the police to sniper suspects John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo. In the end, all the scientific-sounding speculation offered by the bevy of professional profilers who…
No Way to Treat a First Lady by Christopher Buckley Random House, 320 pp., $24.95 A WASHINGTON NOVEL by Christopher Buckley is cause for rejoicing. So are his non-fiction essays, of course--but then, his novels are much like his essays: not novels so much as tweaks on reality, which come out much…
THE MEDIA AND THE SNIPERS
First Great Triumph How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power by Warren Zimmermann Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 544 pp., $30 American Empire The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy by Andrew J. Bacevich Harvard University Press, 320 pp., $29.95 IN THE PAST YEAR, the United States has…
Editor's Note: A defender of traditional Palestinian positions on the conflict with Israel, Rawya Rashad Shawa is also an outspoken advocate of Palestinian reform and democracy. A former columnist, Shawa was elected from Gaza in 1997 to the Palestinian National Council, where she is a leader of the…
AN INTERESTING THING happened in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia last Thursday, as the nation woke up to the news that two people thought to be responsible for the Washington area's recent wave of sniper murders had finally been arrested.
A DEFINING MOMENT isn't about reality, it's about unconscious public perception. For example: Dan Quayle will forever be remembered for his "misspelling" of the word potato, not because it was an important event, but because the public already suspected he might be a dummy. John Ashcroft will…
I'm old enough to remember Dinah Shore--"Jewish, you know," my parents would always say with a smile--closing her show by singing, "See the USA in your Chevrolet!" On the other hand, I'm apparently too young to remember the next line of the jingle. I think it was roughly like, "America is something…
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.
A musical endorsement of Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez by members of the Texas-based bands Asleep at the Wheel and Texas Tornadoes insists that The teachers and the farmers and the working folks agree / If you want someone in Austin who will stand for you and me / Tony is…
"IT LOOKED LIKE A FOREIGN COUNTRY, like one of these fledgling democracies."
CONSERVATIVES have good reasons to dislike Hawaiian politics.
A COUPLE NIGHTS AGO, I found myself in hearty agreement with James Carville, the Democratic political consultant and TV celebrity. The occasion was a debate between the two of us in Chicago. And where we found common ground was on this year's election campaign: It's dreary. There's no big issue…
BEFORE I EVEN BEGIN my review, let me preface it by saying there's no way I can avoid the occasional use of explicit sexual language that may make some readers uncomfortable or upset. "Auto Focus" is, after all, about Bob Crane, and it doesn't exactly focus on the man's acting career, but rather on…
LAST FALL, conventional wisdom had Maryland's lieutenant governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend coasting to the statehouse to succeed Gov. Parris Glendening. She had already raised a campaign war chest and her name recognition was close to 100 percent. Adding to the air of inevitability was the fact…
POLLS RELEASED LAST WEEK have Gov. Gray Davis beating the pants off Bill Simon with a double-digit lead in the race for the California governorship. But, believe it or not, a select few still believe Simon has a chance. What are they thinking?