111 articles
THE LATEST ISSUE of O magazine is a sort of feminine response to male fantasy staples like Esquire's "Women We Love" issue. Part romantic advisory, part tribute to the male sex, the issue is complete with obligatory spreads of celebrity guys who are likable but either just a bit edgy (George…
TAIWAN, now in the grip of a second outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) that has infected over 8,000 people and killed nearly 700 worldwide as of May 22, had hoped to see its bid for observer status at the World Health Organization be placed on the agenda of the organization's…
LAST FALL California Governor Gray Davis vetoed a bill the legislature had presented him--S.B. 1828. The bill would have transferred a large amount of authority over "sacred sites" to the California tribes. The definition of sacred site was broad; so too was the power that was to be transferred to…
AS FIERCE FIGHTING in southern Iraq claimed the lives of coalition fighters in early April, Ali Moh'd Kamal, the marketing director for al Jazeera, defended his network's willingness to show British and American soldiers captured by the Iraqis. "This is the first time the Arab media have had the…
AFRICANS ARE STARVING, American farmers are going out of business, and the administration says Europe's to blame. In a suit brought to the WTO earlier this month, the Bush administration alleges that the E.U.'s five-year moratorium on the approval of new genetically-modified (GM) foods violates the…
NOT THAT WE BASE OUR IMPRESSIONS on life in a German POW camp entirely on "Hogan's Heroes," but there is an understanding that life in a stalag wasn't nearly as bad as life, say, under the Japanese. Roughly 4 percent of Americans died in German and Italian camps while a staggering 27 percent died…
IN 1991, James Hunter of the University of Virginia wrote a book in which he argued that on the big moral issues of our time, such as abortion and homosexual rights, the nation divides into two groups: "the orthodox" and "the progressive." The orthodox hold conservative views that are derived from…
IT'S D-DAY in Europe again--"D" as in "dollar and in "deflation." This time it isn't American bombs that are falling with ruinous effect, but the American dollar. Some attribute this new onslaught on Europe's well being to the Bush administration's public abandonment of the "strong dollar" policy…
"THE RELEVANCE OF INTELLIGENCE" is a phrase from former journalist/political attack dog Sidney Blumenthal's just-published memoir of the Clinton administration, in which he writes that the ex-president was usually the smartest guy in the room, knowing more about any particular policy than the…
CONSERVATIVES, populists, humorists, smart alecks, men and women of good will everywhere, including even a few Blue America types--in sum, a solid majority of our fellow citizens--are enjoying the misery of the New York Times. It is hard not to relish the sight of smugness shown up, pomposity…
IT'S BEEN AN EPIC, "Bleak House"-worthy court case: 77 different plaintiffs suing 17 named defendants, thousands of pages of pleadings and motions and briefs, and more than 100,000 pages of additional expert-witness reports, deposition transcripts, and fact exhibits. On May 2, the hybrid judicial…
Hellfire Nation
The Times's Glass House The Scrapbook, a longtime connoisseur of the New York Times, can't begin to compete this week with all the johnny-come-latelies--or, indeed, with the Times itself, which printed in its May 11 edition what may be the longest newspaper correction in history: 14,171 words in…
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry
NUMEROUS HAZARDS threaten U.S. democracy-building in Iraq. They include theocratic Shia radicals, mischief and thuggery by Baath party officials, misjudgments by American officials, and--to hear some critics tell it--the presence of Christian relief organizations. Media stories over the last…
PAUL BREMER, the new civilian administrator of Iraq, arrived in the Middle East on Sunday, May 11. The same day, the front page of the Washington Post announced that Barbara Bodine, an American diplomat in charge of postwar Baghdad, would be leaving. On May 13, the controversial interim health…
TEXAS DEMOCRATS were unusually hopeful in 2002, dubbing it the Year of the Comeback. But they lost horribly--including the highly publicized races by an African American for the Senate and a Latino for governor--and Republicans now hold all 29 statewide offices. Republicans captured 57 percent of…
I DON'T KNOW how seriously to take the alarming talk about the spread of SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. For now I prefer to think of it as SAMS, or Severe Acute Media Syndrome, as David Baltimore, the president of Caltech, recently called it, suggesting that its danger has been greatly…
New York
Remembering Trauma
New York
Books in Brief Voucher Wars: Waging the Legal Battle over School Choice by Clint Bolick (Cato, 219 pp., $12). School choice is the unfinished part of the civil-rights movement--or so claims Clint Bolick in "Voucher Wars." A founder of the Institute for Justice, Bolick recounts the long battle to…
THE OTHER DAY, General Tommy Franks made a pleasing announcement: The ruling Baath Socialist party of Iraq was dead, its carcass hung upside down on a fence. After more than 30 years of torture, repression, and self-dealing, the party that had controlled every element of life in Iraq was officially…
LAST WEEK in this space I described the Los Angeles Times's slide into mediocrity and agenda journalism. Some objected. The Nation's always reliable Eric Alterman condemned the column as "nonsensical," and then quoted one of my objections--that "columnists who deal regularly with politics outside…
IT MIGHT BE no accident that the national decline in church attendance has mirrored the rise of activism by church leadership. One religious group famous for its social agenda is the National Council of Churches. Although supposedly a nonpartisan organization, for the past 40 years the NCC's…
TEN MONTHS AGO, the man The Daily Standard called Egypt's Sakharov was sentenced to seven years in prison for his work promoting democracy. Last week, Saad Eddin Ibrahim passed through Washington a free man, and recounted his remarkable acquittal on appeal by Egypt's highest court. It's a…
IF YOU FIND Alan Greenspan's economic statements difficult to follow, you will find Treasury secretary John Snow's pronouncements on the dollar positively inscrutable. According to Snow, the administration (a) has a "strong-dollar policy . . . we've had it forever"; (b) is delighted that the weaker…
THE STRANGEST SEASON in California's long, strange political trip has begun with a declaration of candidacy for a governorship that isn't vacant, a withdrawal from a Senate campaign that hasn't really begun, and a rumor mill spinning out of control. The declaration of candidacy came from…
THERE IS SOME IRONY, though not of the pleasant sort, in the fact that last week's suicide bombing in Riyadh occurred shortly after it was announced that the remaining American troops would be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia. This move was designed to remove one of the grievances held by Al-Qaeda and…
"BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER" is the best show in the history of television.
A Death in Washington
SIX TIMES NOW Senate Democrats have blocked a vote on Miguel Estrada's nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. And twice Senate Democrats have blocked a vote on Priscilla Owen's nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Republicans are outraged by…
BRUCE COLE, the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, wants to put the "H" back in NEH. His two Clinton-administration predecessors had other priorities for the agency--a "national conversation" on diversity, and greater attention to regional and popular culture. Cole is making…
Stalin's Last Crime
Interesting Times
GUYS DON'T WATCH SITCOMS. They watch a lot of sports on TV, some news, and an occasional crime show. That's it. There's been an unheralded migration of men from sitcoms, the half-hour comedies about funny families or jobs that once dominated TV viewing. I know about this. I've participated. So has…
THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL Committee has just declared war on President Bush's first nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. But how can that be? There is no vacancy to fill and no nominee to attack. Well, that doesn't matter, according to the DNC's new website "Supreme Court Countdown," because the real…
Aid and Comfort Among the many unsung--or insufficiently sung--heroes of Operation Iraqi Freedom are the men and women of the hospital ship USNS Comfort, which was deployed to the Persian Gulf in January. The Comfort is a former supertanker turned 1,000-bed hospital with 12 operating rooms, staffed…
IN 1927, young Arnold Beichman went to Yankee Stadium to see Babe Ruth play. After the game, Beichman hung around the players' exit to get another glimpse of the Babe, who eventually emerged from the clubhouse, resplendent in a belted camel-hair coat, and climbed into the driver's seat of his big…
"And so we brought our dead man home. Flew his body back, faxed the obits to the local papers, called the priests, the sexton, the florists and stonecutter. We act out things we cannot put in words." --Thomas Lynch, "The Undertaking"
SOMEONE ONCE DEFINED a fanatic as someone who redoubles his efforts after losing sight of his objective. Based on this definition, the Bush administration is in danger of becoming fanatical on tax policy. Last fall, as the administration prepared its January budget proposal, there was a spirited…
Books in Brief Washington Schlepped Here: Walking in the Nation's Capital by Christopher Buckley (Crown, 160 pp., $16). Don't mistake this charming little book for a comprehensive guide to Washington, D.C., complete with maps and metro stops and museum hours. Instead, look here for a breezy guided…
TWO YEARS AGO, federal agents in Colorado responded to a complaint at the home of Samuel Patane, an ex-convict under a restraining order for beating his wife. Patane's probation officer had warned the agents that the convicted felon had a Glock pistol and a penchant for violence. After entering the…
Gulag
I FORGOT to get my wife a gift for Mother's Day. We, who about to die, salute you. The kids drew sweet portraits for her and made cards in school that were achingly cute; her sister sent her something nice; my sister sent her something nice. We went to the local International House Of Carbs for…
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.
DENIAL IS A RIVER in Arabia, not Egypt. The proof of this axiom came Friday. In place of a serious assessment of the Saudi kingdom's increasing loss of credibility, deeply aggravated by the bombings in Riyadh this week, the oleaginous Adel al-Jubeir once again held a press conference at the grim,…
FOR SOME YEARS NOW, Time magazine has been the most liberal of America's three major newsweeklies. Still, I never thought I'd see the day when Time's editors would opt to transform their publication into a bulletin board for Democratic-wonk strategy. But that seems to have happened this week, as…
THOSE PROFESSING SURPRISE at the public collapse of credibility at the New York Times haven't been paying attention to Mickey Kaus or Andrew Sullivan. They haven't been reading the descent into fevers of Paul Krugman or the bitter stridency of Maureen Dowd. The deep sickness at the Times had many…
YOU MAY NOT remember this, but "The Matrix" earned a respectable, yet modest $27 million during its opening weekend way back in 1999. It went on to gross $171 million domestically, an impressive total. (As a rule of thumb, movies typically end up grossing about three times their opening weekend. In…
THE EDUCATIONAL TESTING SERVICE, reports the Washington Post, has conceded that a grammar question on a recent PSAT contained an unintended error--making what was the official, correct answer wrong. The question asked whether there were any errors in the following sentence: "Toni Morrison's genius…
THE ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE really didn't have a choice. Either expand or another college sports conference would enter the picture and attempt to lure the stronger athletic schools in the ACC, especially in football, into a big, new conference sure to attract the enthusiasm of fans and a huge…
IN MY CORNER of the world, there are two kinds of people I generally abhor: those who pretend they don't watch television, and those who do watch television, but pretend they don't watch reality television. To the former, I usually display awe--you can also live without Jimmy Reed albums, red meat,…
ONE CAN ONLY IMAGINE the sorts of disagreements that have taken place in the Clintons' married life. Now, however, they seem to be disagreeing in their public lives as well. It was not surprising that the Clintons made outspoken remarks about America's sluggish economy in recent weeks. As military…
IT IS FITTING that former Texas Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice John Cornyn sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee and is chairman of its subcommittee on the Constitution. Last week, Cornyn presided over its first hearing, which he framed as: "Judicial Nominations, Filibusters and the…
PRESIDENT BUSH may be interested in working out trade agreements with Middle Eastern countries that have so remained outside of the world trading system. He is, after all, a free-trader by instinct--with the occasional deviations resulting from overwhelming domestic political pressures. But his…
The Hidden Life For the poet Dana Gioia, upon his taking a public office, as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts
A Look over My Shoulder
Baghdad
Searching for Joaquin
My Sherlock Holmes
ACCORDING TO the Washington Post, a fellow you've probably never heard of named Rafik Hariri wants to build a $25 million house in Washington, D.C., a Kennedy Center-scale monument better suited to the banks of the Tigris River. Why did Hariri pay $13 million for the property on Foxhall Road back…
WHAT'S NOT IN A NAME is the question du jour at single-issue advocacy groups. First the venerable National Abortion Rights Action League (or National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League in recent years) officially dropped abortion from its name and became "NARAL Pro-Choice America." Now,…
Correctamundo The Howell Raines-era New York Times accelerated its reputational tailspin last Thursday when 27-year-old national desk correspondent Jayson Blair abruptly resigned from the paper amidst a mini-uproar over apparently faked reporting and plagiarism. Immediately at issue was Blair's…
IRAQ'S RECONSTRUCTION poses challenges to American policymakers not seen since World War II. Hardest of all is the reshaping of Iraq's political culture--that is, replacing the Baath party cult of enslavement and hate with liberal-democratic ideas. Iraqis have been fed Baathist ideology for 34…
Riyadh
Gori, Georgia
FOR CERTAIN self-important novelists and CEOs, the blue-collar biography has been a staple affectation for decades. Before writing his unreadable novel or founding his unscrupulous corporation, Joe Blow, the dust jacket or business-magazine profile tells us, "worked as a private detective, a…
OOPS. In what could go down as the Mother of All Copyediting Errors, Babil, the official newspaper of Saddam Hussein's government, run by his oldest son Uday, last fall published information that appears to confirm U.S. allegations of links between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda. It adds one more…
"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." --Winston Churchill, November 10, 1942, after the British defeat of the German Afrika Korps in Egypt
THROUGHOUT THE MUSLIM MIDDLE EAST, the Battle of Baghdad was an enormously depressing non-event. The Arab media had expected the end of Saddam Hussein's regime to be "Basra-plus"--a valiant resistance blending Mogadishu with a hint of Stalingrad. Whether in Egypt's official journal of record,…
Selected Poems
Must Reading The Bush presidency has been so eventful, it's easy to forget that its first major public-policy crisis involved biotechnology. Despite the heat it generated, that debate over federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research was actually only a skirmish in a much-larger struggle about…
BEFORE THE SUN ROSE above the hill east of my house and while the silence outside was still prayerful, I toddled over to my computer and clicked "Send & Receive." A shiver raised bumps on my arms at the anticipation of what messages the night and my 1.2 megabit digital subscriber line had brought…
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.
GIDDY WITH FAILURE, Democrats are breaking new ground in political strategy. Deep in a hole, they are digging still deeper. They have found a new method of dealing with setbacks: They find out what caused them, and do it again. Having unexpectedly lost four Senate seats in the 2002 midterms because…
ON APRIL 30, the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) of the United States of America announced that former NOW president Patricia Ireland would be its new chief executive officer. And just this past weekend, the 145-year-old YWCA moved its headquarters from New York City to Washington, D.C.…
A WEEK AFTER the start of the war in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld gave a briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee. At the time, the advance of American troops toward Baghdad was supposedly bogged down--it turned out they really weren't--and the Bush administration was facing stiff criticism. But…
IT CAME AS A SURPRISE to many when the U.S. postwar plans for Iraq were finally revealed. Like Gaul, Iraq would be divided into three parts: an American zone, a British zone, and a Polish zone. But what role did Poland play during the war? It turns out a very important one--albeit one that was kept…
THE GOOD NEWS in college athletics is the Atlantic Coast Conference is considering expanding from 9 teams to 12. The better news is that this would give the mid-Atlantic and East a premier conference to match the Big Ten, Southeastern Conference, Big 12, and PAC 10. The best news is that a bigger,…
Our political drama begins in the conference room of the AFL-CIO headquarters on 16th Street in Washington, D.C. President John Sweeney, in his eighth year of leading the 65-member union organization, is slumped in a chair, staring at the huge portrait of the AFL-CIO's first president, George…
IN A BROOKLYN FEDERAL COURT yesterday the defense wrapped up its case in a lawsuit brought by the NAACP against Smith & Wesson, Glock, and dozens of other players in the firearm industry. Cherry-picking statistics from a confidential ATF "trace" database obtained by subpoena, the NAACP argued that…
Education Secretary Rod Paige says he once had a low view of federal workers. He now thinks better of them--perhaps at least partly because of reforms he instituted within his own agency. When he arrived in Washington in 2001, he found an Education Department wracked with charges of criminal fraud,…
AH, FAIRNESS. Just when you thought the New York Times might have abandoned that quaint principle of journalism, faith is restored. Mine was, anyway, after reading this passage from Douglas Jehl's April 19 story. "Bush administration officials have long expressed concern that Syria is developing…
WHAT IS the greatest danger facing America as it tries to rebuild Iraq: Shiite fundamentalism? Kurdish separatism? Sunni intransigence? Turkish, Syrian, Iranian or Saudi Arabian meddling? All of those are real problems, but none is so severe that it can't readily be handled. More than 125,000…
PRESIDENT BUSH says the combat phase of the war against Iraq has been successfully concluded, and Alan Greenspan's doctors say the Fed Chairman's minor prostate problem has been successfully treated. So the president flew to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln to meet and thank his troops, and…
YOU WOULDN'T THINK STUDENTS in a single college class could advance the debate on a major media issue. But they have. The issue is how the press covers religion. A class in religion at the University of Rochester did a detailed study of top newspapers and concluded, based on empirical evidence,…
Malcolm Muggeridge
Newman
PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY president Yasser Arafat doesn't yield easily. He responds only to force and pressure, never to appeasement, unilateral concessions, or "confidence-building" gestures. The good news is that arm-twisting has finally been applied--by President Bush, Europeans, and Egypt--and…
IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE there is proposed legislation sponsored by Sens. Orrin Hatch and Dianne Feinstein, S.303, titled "A bill to prohibit human cloning and protect stem cell research." Despite this label--and Sen. Arlen Specter's insistence that the bill would ban "all" human cloning--the…
RELIGIOUS FIGURES who opposed the liberation of Iraq have a lot of explaining to do. Fashioning themselves prophets of peace, they caustically denounced the "rush to war." Having granted the United Nations an almost transcendent moral authority, they declared Operation Iraqi Freedom an "immoral"…
LIFE DOESN'T GET any better than this if you're a Republican. The decisive triumph in Iraq has sent President Bush's approval ratings soaring back above 70 percent, according to an April 15 NBC poll. If things go right for Republicans in '04 they could really go right. Under many plausible…
PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE agrees that Dennis Kucinich is a long shot for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. Everyone, that is, but the man himself. Kucinich, who represents Ohio's 10th District in Congress, has run for office 18 times in the last 35 years. He got started with…
WHEN THE CHINESE leadership was forced to admit it had covered up the extent of the infectious disease called severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, it responded with what many called the most serious political shake-up since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. The government sacked the…
WHILE WESTERN MEDIA and politicians peddle their alarums in the aftermath of Iraq's liberation, focusing on Syria and Iran, attention should also be paid to Saudi Arabia. Throughout the military campaign, the royal regime publicly sought to maintain its alliance with the United States without…
Editor's note, 1/30/04: On January 25, 2004, a daily newspaper in Iraq called al Mada published a list of individuals and organizations who it says received oil from the now-deposed regime. Among those listed is Shakir al Khafaji, an Iraqi-American from Detroit, who ran "Expatriate Conferences" for…
THE FIRST LEG of my trip to Costa Rica was exactly as I'd envisioned it: I ate a hearty breakfast of bacon, eggs, and gallo pinto (black beans and rice), followed by nine holes of golf at one of the premier courses in Central America. My friends and I then lunched poolside and returned to the…
Books in Brief The Morality of Laughter by F.H. Buckley (University of Michigan Press, 240 pp., $35). Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once began an opinion with, "I join the opinion of the Court except that portion which takes seriously, and thus encourages in the future, an argument that…
"PARSING RUMMY" is getting to be as common a Washington game as "Parsing Bill" used to be. The defense secretary hasn't yet asked about the definition of "is," but if he needs to wiggle out of a tough question--well, never say never. The latest rhetorical cat-and-mouse contest with the press came…
Human Rights, U.N. Wrongs The United Nations has been front and center since April 9, when U.S.-led coalition military forces took control of Baghdad and effectively ended one of the bloodiest tyrannies in recorded human history. At U.N. headquarters in New York, of course, Secretary General Kofi…
A GROUP OF foreign policy thinkers led by Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge spent much of the 1890s arguing that America needed to build up its navy and take a leading role on the world stage. The most influential expression of their views was Alfred Thayer Mahan's book "The Influence of Sea…
WITH THE MAGNIFICENCE of a backdrop that only an American aircraft carrier could offer, President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln last week. But America's deft military campaign to liberate Iraq will not be considered…
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.
FIRST THINGS FIRST: I don't know Bill Bennett, I've never even met him, and I don't have any interest in his rise or fall. That said, what's happening to him tonight is silly.
BOY AM I in a terrible mood. I watched and listened to the punditry on President Bush's speech on the USS Lincoln. The people he was standing before have been away from their families for ten months. That's mothers away from their kids, fathers away from their kids, men an women away from their…
I JUMPED AT the chance to replace my old Visa card with a Cleveland Browns Visa card. Who wouldn't want to telegraph appreciation for the Super Bowl-bound Browns with every purchase of gas? That was my first clue. "Affinity" credit cards, like specialized California license plates promoting…
HERE ARE the first few grafs of a dispatch from Baghdad yesterday by Carol Rosenberg of the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service: The Iraqi capital these days appears to be awash in gunmen waving or shouldering automatic rifles. Members of a Sunni Muslim-led exile force suddenly set up checkpoints…
TINA BROWN'S talk show on CNBC, which debuted last night, happens only four times a year. Therefore, it might compare with a daily show the way a quarterly journal compares with a newspaper, the former being deeper and less on the cusp of the latest news story. Only it's not deeper than your…
ONLY FIVE WORLD LEADERS have been invited to George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford--Tony Blair, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, Russian Premier Vladimir Putin, and Chinese president Jiang Zemin. Now there is a sixth. On May 2 and 3, Australian Prime Minister John…
WHY DIDN'T TIM ROBBINS exercise his right of free speech to defend Senator Rick Santorum from the arrows and insults directed at him after he suggested that gay sex should not be protected by the Constitution? Doesn't Robbins believe that the calls for the senator's resignation are akin to…