January 2003

THIS WEEK, the Manhattan Libertarian party launched its "Guns for Tots" campaign to protest a bill that would make toy guns illegal in New York City.

SHOWDITZ JANEANE GAROFALO told the Washington Post this week that a pro-war corporatist media encourages stars to speak out against war in Iraq in order to marginalize the peace movement. Take two: A famous comedienne, speaking out in the media against the war, discerns some ulterior motive in…

SOME PEOPLE will believe anything. Take Tom Daschle, for instance, who thinks that the president's case against Saddam Hussien is flawed.

COURSING THROUGH THE post-SOTU cable news chatter last night, I notice that most "analysts" are "struck" by the extent to which "this president," agree with him or not, has "become" a "decisive" leader. What's all that striking about it, I wonder? That Bush, even now, halfway through his first…

SO MUCH OF THE SPEECH was what we've come to expect from George W. Bush. Yet there was a freshness to it, as well as some odd moments. And you can count on this: The war will start soon.

THE CENTRAL POINT to make about President Bush's State of the Union speech is this: For the past several weeks, the American people have had growing qualms about going to war against Iraq. This speech will reverse that trend. If President Bush's speech had been a dud, it would have been cataclysmic…

A RECENT COVER STORY for Christianity Today named Rick Warren "America's Most Influential Pastor." That's a big title, but it still understates Warren's influence in the nation and the world. Warren's church, Saddleback Valley Community Church in Lake Forest, California, draws more than 16,000…

LAST MONTH, "Dateline NBC" told the story of a young couple's decision to have a baby who had been diagnosed with Down syndrome. The story, which took place in 1998, is worth recalling as the nation continues to grapple with the morality of abortion.

THE SPEECH IS DONE, but before the serious pontificating begins, let's turn to one of the most important questions: What's with the red suit? Every year the Power Women of Washington dig out their loudest red suits so that they'll stand out in the crowd when the cameras pan across the House…

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED about President Bush as he delivers his second State of the Union address and forges ahead with the second half of his presidential term? A lot, really, from White House aides and an extremely knowledgeable insider who insists on being called "a senior administration official."…

THIS WEEK BEGAN with Hans Blix's report to the U.N. Security Council, will proceed to President Bush's State of the Union message tonight, and will end with Tony Blair's visit to Camp David. Which means that talk of war and its possible economic consequences will continue to dominate the news.

I DIDN'T SEE last year's Super Bowl, but at least the reason for that gave me a pretty good column. This year, on Super Sunday, my wife took our kids over to their Super Friends and told me to stay home and do some Super Relaxing. "Watch the game," she said. "I'll take them to dinner, too, so you…

The Michigan Punt

Nashville

"THEY ORDER, said I, this matter better in France," began Laurence Sterne in his eighteenth-century travel book, "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy." Although the matter was rather a different one, my shoes in hand, I thought, they don't do at all badly in Germany, either. I had just…

Paris

IN 1983, when my sisters and I were divvying up our parents' possessions after our mother had died, I put dibs on a favorite block print of Dunedin harbor at night. Mom and Dad had bought it in the late 1950s; it had appealed to them because it looked so much like another New Zealand…

MISSISSIPPI, all too used to ranking last or near last among the states in everything from education to wealth to race relations, has just seen a black mark against it erased: It is no longer the "jackpot justice" state, notorious for huge jury awards to plaintiffs who sue corporations and doctors…

Behind Every Choice Is a Story by Gloria Feldt University of North Texas Press, 272 pp., $19.95 The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger The Woman Rebel, 1900-1928 edited by Esther Katz, et al. University of Illinois Press, 512 pp., $65 Roe v. Wade The Abortion Rights Controversy in American History…

WITH THE OPENING of the 108th Congress earlier this month, Democrat Evan Bayh, Indiana's junior senator, was rather busy. He held a press conference with Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, urging Congress to speed up the elimination of the marriage penalty tax. While fellow Democratic…

AT FIRST GLANCE, Eric Cantor's life story resembles the biographies of scores of other suburban Republicans in Congress. Born and raised in the South, he attended a private Christian high school, and earned his law degree before returning home to work in the family business. He began his political…

IT'S ODD, TO SAY THE LEAST--Joe Lieberman, first ever Jewish-American presidential candidate, leading the Democratic field in support from black voters. But according to a recent USA Today/Gallup poll asking black Democrats who they liked best from a list that included Al Sharpton, that's exactly…

PRESIDENT BUSH has a word for a policy he thinks isn't big enough to fight for. The word is "smallball." Bush prefers big ideas, the bolder the better. He loathes halfway measures. So instead of containment of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction, a policy that would satisfy most of…

Apauling

IN THE WAKE of the September 11 attacks, Congress passed and the president signed several laws tightening procedures for tracking the more than half a million foreign students in the United States. Two of the September 11 hijackers had entered the country on student visas; and of the 48 foreigners…

EVERY WEEK brings new evidence of al Qaeda's continuing plots against the United States and the West. Yet the 108th Congress may well shut down one of the most promising efforts to preempt future attacks, thanks to a media misinformation blitz playing to Americans' outsized Big Brother paranoia.

SOMETIME SOON--say, around Spring 2004, when George W. Bush begins spending his money--whoever becomes the Democratic nominee may have second thoughts about his attendance at the NARAL dinner in Washington on January 21, 2003. Or at least he may wish that cameras hadn't been present, for the images…

THERE'S SOMETHING IRRESISTIBLE about the anti-war poetry that's been pouring out of England. Came a Motion. Went a Motion. Came a Paulin. He went, too. Now Harold Pinter finds a printer: Something extra, just for you.

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.

THERE ARE MOVIE SNOBS and then there are movie-theater snobs. The movie-theater snob looks for big screens, high-end sound, legroom, and the newest innovation, stadium seating. If you're a movie-theater snob, chances are you worship at the altar of AMC theaters because they are the gold-standard of…

AS THE ONLY PERSON in North America with anything bad to say about "The Hours," I feel a certain obligation to speak up. Stylish and watchable, perhaps, graced even with some nice performances in the minor roles and some touching moments, "The Hours" tackles a challenging theme--mental disturbance…

January 23, 2003 The Honorable George W. Bush President of the United States Washington, DC Dear Mr. President: We write to endorse the bold new course you have charted for American national security strategy. Your administration has shown impressive leadership in recognizing new threats and…

FOR MANY, it may seem like the news of the day is "All Iraq All The Time." But don't forget the United States is still waging a fierce war against al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the globe. President George W. Bush reportedly still keeps a running tally of the 22 Most Wanted terrorists…

VENEZUELA IS NOW an abyss where there is no rule of law. A rogue government tortures innocent civilians with impunity while paying lip service to democracy and buying time at the "negotiation" table set up by the Organization of American States. Venezuela's foreign minister, Roy Chaderton, has…

"EVERYONE HAS ONE." That's what they (you know, "they") say about opinions. Also that opinions resemble a certain body part, but I'm not going to say which.

Ann Arbor

ONE OF THE CHIEF PROBLEMS with United Nations arms inspections in Iraq has now become a reality. Head inspector Hans Blix and France, Russia, and a few other countries now want the inspections to become all but permanent, dragging on for many months. That amounts to a policy switch, away from the…

EUROPE'S GREATEST NEWSWEEKLY, Hamburg-based Der Spiegel, is also one of its biggest-selling. Since the European appetite for in-depth news analysis is unlikely to be much larger than ours, you have to assume the magazine has a secret formula for attracting such a wide readership. And it does: The…

That Old-Time Religion in Modern America by D.G. Hart Ivan R. Dee, 246 pages, $24.95 TO LISTEN to the more lurid claims of the ACLU, you'd think that evangelical Protestants were dominating American culture as never before. But this is not quite so. Yes, evangelicalism is still a presence in…

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD. More precisely, now it has been told in new studies of comparative economic performance. It seems that the U.S. economic model trumps the European model, and is set fair to continue to do so.

IT'S ALL RATHER COMPLICATED. You see, there are West-coast Straussians and East-coast Straussians, and the West-coast Straussians think that the East-coast Straussians . . . except that Harvey Mansfield . . . still, back at the University of Chicago . . . in Xenophon . . . but when Allan Bloom and…

Samuel Pepys The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin Knopf, 450 pp., $30 THERE SEEMS TO BE a consensus emerging that with "Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self," Claire Tomalin has reintroduced us to a forgotten master. "Who remembers Samuel Pepys anymore?" the New York Times Sunday book-review section…

Uniforms Why We Are What We Wear by Paul Fussell Houghton Mifflin, 204 pp., $22 "All my life I have had a thing about uniforms," writes Paul Fussell. He agrees with Thomas Carlyle that appearances matter ("Society, which the more I think of it astonishes me all the more, is founded upon cloth").…

FINALLY THE DEMOCRATS have found their hot issue: The Confederate heart of George Bush, and of Bill Frist, who by virtue of their membership in the Republican party have indicated their desire to live in a slaveholding past. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi--to name just three…

Clintonus Maximus!

NO DOUBT many readers of "The Right Man," David Frum's engrossing new account of his year as a White House speechwriter, are relieved to learn that George W. Bush is much smarter than they'd been told and that political adviser Karl Rove has the brainpower and curiosity of a true intellectual. I on…

"DO WE EVER really get to govern?" asks the naive young U.S. senator of his more experienced chief of staff as they stand on the Washington Mall, staring across the Reflecting Pool at the Washington Monument.

WITH NORTH KOREA'S announcement Friday that it is withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), Pyongyang's nuclear defiance is no longer just an American or Korean problem. It is a world problem. It requires an international rejoinder, one that treats Pyongyang as a violator--not of…

READING THE AVALANCHE of op-ed articles on U.S. policy toward North Korea, especially from liberals noted for their dovishness on the subject of Iraq, you can't tell whether our leading foreign policy experts are dumb or dishonest. Why, they ask in feigned puzzlement, is President Bush not…

NORTH KOREA'S PURSUIT of a nuclear arsenal directly threatens the security of the American people, as well as our ability to shape the international order so as to strengthen the stability of Asia, defeat the global threat of terrorism, and enhance the security of the United States and our allies.…

WE LIVE IN A FREE COUNTRY, thank God, so we are each of us entitled to celebrate Richard Nixon's birthday in our own way. Out in Yorba Linda, California, at the Nixon Library & Birthplace, the hardiest of the nation's merry-makers assembled on January 9 to toast the former president's 90th birthday…

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY'S staunch, detailed, and defiant defense of the president's tax plan at the Chamber of Commerce last week was not an exercise in abstract "team dynamics." It was personal. Cheney and his staff had worked aggressively to beef up tax cuts and decimate federal aid to the states.…

An Introduction to English Poetry by James Fenton Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 144 pp., $20 IN 1798 A SLIM VOLUME OF POEMS appeared in Bristol, England, entitled "Lyrical Ballads," the anonymous work of two young and little-known poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It sold well,…

BOOKS IN BRIEF

ON WEDNESDAY, President Bush announced that his administration would file briefs in opposition to the University of Michigan affirmative action policies now before the Supreme Court. Bush apparently would be taking, as one news account put it, a "hard-line" position.

GLENN HUBBARD is the most influential chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in two decades. His job is to provide economic analysis for the White House, primarily on domestic issues such as taxes and jobs. The sudden popularity of eliminating the taxability of stock dividends--that's…

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.

SPIKE LEE is an artist, but he's like a painter who cares just a little more about his signature than what occupies the rest of the canvas.

THE EVIDENCE IS EVERYWHERE that nepotism is becoming a major issue in American life. If no one in Washington is calling it a major problem, that's only because to describe it as such would insult virtually the entire leadership of both major parties. We are in the absurd situation where our current…

THE WORD Konjic, pronounced "Konyitz," means "the little horse" in Bosnian, and the Bosnian town of Konjic, set among green mountains and virgin forests in the valley of the river Neretva, was one of the loveliest I had ever seen, when I first visited it in 1991. I was riding a bus from Dubrovnik…

YOU MAY WANT TO DROWN England's poet laureate in his butt of sack when you read his new quatrain "Causa Belli." Not that Andrew Motion is a particularly bad example of his species: Between Dryden in 1670 and Wordsworth in 1843, the laureateship went to Thomas Shadwell, Nahum Tate, Nicholas Rowe,…

[img nocaption float="right" width="738" height="377" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8834[/img] WITH NORTH KOREA AND IRAQ dominating the headlines, you might have missed the news from Cyprus. Now before you hit that back button let me explain why this matters, and not just to Greeks and Turks.

THIS THURSDAY, January 16, is the deadline for the Bush administration to file a friend-of-the-court brief in the University of Michigan race-preference cases currently before the Supreme Court. The media and Beltway conservatives have speculated a great deal recently about what position (if any)…

EUGENE VOLOKH AND JOHN EASTMAN are not household names. Both teach constitutional law, Volokh at UCLA and Eastman at Chapman University. Both arrived in the classroom after clerking for big names in the courts--Volokh for Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day…

KEITH WATENPAUGH is a peace activist. He is a professor of Middle East history at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, New York, where he is putting together a Peace and Global Studies program. His interest "in peace and the challenges of globalization" has led him to "become involved in the movement to…

SOMEONE SHOULD REMIND Parris Glendening he's already number one. The Maryland politician seems determined to burnish his reputation as the nation's least popular governor before he leaves office this week.

GOOD TAX POLICY it may be, but a stimulus package of any consequence, the president's proposed tax cut just isn't. Even if the president gets all he wants, which he assuredly won't, the best that can be said for this "stimulus" is that it might help the economy, already in fairly good shape, grow a…

DAVID FRUM, who returned to journalism after spending 2001 as a presidential speechwriter, has just published what he saw from inside the White House during that historic year. The book is titled "The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush." It is a study of the president's character,…

SOMEBODY TELL THE BUSH WHITE HOUSE that Republicans now control the Senate. And while you're at it, remind the president's men and women of three other things. One, President Bush has only one shot--now--at stimulating the economy. Anything done next year will be too late to affect economic…

SO THE RAELIANS, who maintain that human life was the product of cloning by space aliens, now claim that their for-profit corporation, Clonaid, has cloned the first human baby, a healthy female named Eve. There is no proof of any kind to verify this, and most of the world is highly skeptical. It…

IN AN INTERVIEW LAST MONTH with Britain's Sunday Times, Yasser Arafat rebuked Osama bin Laden for seeking to exploit the Palestinians' cause for his own ends. "Why is bin Laden talking about Palestine now? . . . He never helped us. He was working in another, completely different area and against…

Holocaust: A History by Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt W.W. Norton, 480 pp., $27.95 IN RECENT DECADES thousands of books and articles about the Holocaust have been published. Practically every conceivable aspect of the tragedy has been researched and analyzed, and the question arises as to…

JERUSALEM

FROM THE FOLKS WHO BROUGHT US EBONICS

THE SUBTERRANEAN SPRAWL of Washington has begun. By the presidential inauguration of 2005, ascent of the majestic stairs of the Capitol--the supreme achievement of American architecture and decoration--will be a fading memory. Instead, the public will descend to the Capitol Visitor Center, a vast…

IN A TIME OF INTERNATIONAL STRIFE, when Americans are struggling to understand an unfamiliar part of the globe, one wishes we could call on a cadre of experts who had lived in the region and were experienced in promoting American values and interests. One would think that former U.S. ambassadors to…

"CHICAGO" IS THE BEST American movie in years--restoring a moribund genre, the movie musical, to its rightful place as the most thrilling of all cinematic forms and returning the dazzling, dark, adult edge of 1970s Hollywood to American cinema.

LONDON

BOOKS IN BRIEF

LAST WEEK the machinists' union indignantly rejected the latest contract offer by bankrupt United Airlines, complaining that they were being unfairly rushed into a bad deal. One could only wonder whether the union bosses have lost all sense of economic reality. With $2 billion in debt and daily…

LAST WEEK, my favorite ailing team, the Washington Redskins, finally defeated the Dallas Cowboys, their most hated rival in the NFC. Not that you can call it a rivalry--Dallas had beaten the Redskins ten times in a row over the last five years. But still there was much to celebrate. Retiring…

Editor's Note: Robert L. Bartley, the distinguished former editor of the Wall Street Journal, died today at 66. Here are two articles about him published previously in The Weekly Standard.

ALL MEN carry specific things in their pockets, and the items and locations are as constant as the Northern Star. For as long as I can remember, I have carried my wallet in my left front pocket, and a knife, Zippo lighter, and change in my right front. The denomination of the change is always…

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.

I WON'T SEE "CHICAGO."

A CHILDHOOD HERO OF MINE, Gary Carter, has been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. And if his canonization proves anything, it's that a person can be great and good at the same time.

A FEW DAYS AGO--the night of January 1, as it happens--British television's Channel 4 aired a program about art in China that featured photographs of performance artist Zhu Yu eating the corpse of a stillborn baby.

THE 1991 AIR WAR over Iraq introduced Americans to the wonders of precision-guided munitions. Who can forget the "slam-cam" footage of television- or laser-guided bombs homing in on a targeted air duct on a specific building in the middle of downtown Baghdad--announcing its bull's-eye hit with the…

SOME POLITICIANS leave office basking in the glow of their accomplishments, loved and admired by their supporters. Not Parris Glendening. Maryland Democrats are in no mood for a love-fest with the outgoing Democratic governor. Not only did Glendening beat out Fife Symington (who was indicted for…

It's not just which taxes President Bush and Democrats are proposing to cut and how much. Just as important is when the cuts actually begin to have an impact. You shouldn't be surprised to learn that the Democratic proposal is focused entirely on 2003, after which the economy is on its own without…

THE RELIGION GAP--the tendency of religious conservatives to vote Republican and of atheists, agnostics, and non-churchgoers to vote Democratic--is large, relatively new, and systematically underreported in the media. For while half the story, the GOP activism of religious traditionalists, is…

IT SEEMS SAFE to assume that most readers of this piece have now pored over all of the economic forecasts for 2003, and decided between the doomsayers and the optimists. Or perhaps latched onto a consensus such as that of the 66 economists surveyed by BusinessWeek. That august assemblage of experts…

SINCE THE NOVEMBER ELECTION, prominent Democrats have said what prominent Democrats have said in past years--namely, that we have to do something about the much too powerful conservative media. Now, Democrats actually are doing something--or starting to. So we learn from the New York Times.

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.

YOU MAY HAVE MISSED IT in all the Raelian cloning news, but Channel 4 of British television began the New Year with a broadcast about a Chinese performance artist who eats a baby's corpse. Described by executives of Channel 4 as a "thought-provoking film about extreme art in China," the documentary…

LAST SUNDAY, the New York Times magazine published a document so amazing, I assumed that it would set off a world-wide sensation, a great cacophony of breast-beating, disillusion, and internal crisis. It was a letter Jimmy Hendrix wrote to his father in August 1965. The letter describes the…

OF ALL THE PROBLEMS IN THE WORLD, the easiest one to solve is how to use the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) to crown an undisputed champion of college football. It's simple: arrange playoffs inside the bowl game format that leave only one major team with an undefeated record. This can be done…

IT'S A NEW YEAR, which means it's time for all of us to make our usual bold New Year's resolutions--and promptly break them.