June 2003

The Bedford Boys

Naked at the Window

ACROSS THE COUNTRY Republicans and conservatives are asking each other the same basic question: Has the other side gone crazy? Have the Democrats totally flipped their lids? Because every day some Democrat seems to make a manic or totally over-the-top statement about George Bush, the Republican…

The Discovery of God

I WAS THE COMMENCEMENT SPEAKER at my son Freddy's graduation from high school a few weeks ago. The night before, my daughter Grace informed me she remembered only one thing I'd said three years earlier when I delivered the address at her graduation. That was my advice to look for courses in college…

EARLY LAST WEEK, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals here in Washington, refereeing yet another legal skirmish over the civil liberties implications of Bush administration anti-terrorism policy, handed down yet another ruling favorable to the government. This is what usually happens: With fewer…

IN RECENT YEARS there has been an explosion in empirical research on faith-based social programs. Most studies, including the most scientifically rigorous, find that faith moves social and civic mountains. Last year, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania released a report identifying over…

WHEN THE STATE OF GEORGIA hoisted a new flag over the capitol in Atlanta last month, it illustrated once again that many people in that deep South state have a powerful attachment to a symbol most Americans regard with indifference or disdain: a state flag. In most places, this item is the moral…

Reality Check Until last week, the editors of the New Republic had distinguished themselves in the liberal camp as defenders (for the most part) of the Bush administration's Iraq policy. Now, following in the footsteps of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, they've declared that the White…

DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN, during his long and illustrious public career, did not flinch from controversy. I doubt, therefore, that he would object to my having inserted him posthumously into an intriguing debate over recent history: Who was responsible a half-century ago for opening the door to…

Books in Brief The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship by David Halberstam (Hyperion, 217 pp., $22.95). Halberstam is a liberal journalist whose political writings you may dislike, but not his sports books. They've all been bestsellers for good reasons. They're knowledgeable, touching, and…

EARLIER THIS MONTH, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency announced new rules governing Saudi charities and welfare agencies. From now on, each charity must consolidate its funds in a single bank account licensed by the government, from which cash withdrawals are banned. Explaining the new rules in…

GIVE JOHN KERRY CREDIT. It takes guts to accuse someone of lying when that someone has said essentially what you have been saying for a decade. Which is what John Kerry did last week when he told a gathering of antiwar Democrats in New Hampshire that President George W. Bush "misled every one of…

That Old-Time Religion in Modern America

THE POLITICAL STARS are suddenly aligned for President Bush for a smashing re-election victory in 2004. This doesn't guarantee he'll win. And it doesn't preclude anything of political significance changing the situation between today and Election Day 16 months from now. What it does mean, though,…

TWO VERY INTERESTING economics pieces (yes, it is possible) in the New York Times yesterday. The first is a front page piece headlined Very Richest's Share of Income Grew Even Bigger, Data Show. The average income of the 400 richest taxpayers in the U.S. grew to $174 million, up from an annual $46…

THIRTEEN MONTHS AGO, Senator Hillary Clinton rose on the Senate floor to demand answers to questions about what President Bush knew about the September 11 attacks before those attacks occurred. Dick Gephardt (then minority leader in the House) echoed the demand, asking "what the president and what…

NOW THAT THE WAR in Iraq is over (the first part, anyway), Americans are trying to repair relations with our erstwhile European allies. While some of my Weekly Standard colleagues are doing the really tough work--attending lavish, well-lubricated conferences on Italy's Lake Como to discuss…

IN THE MICHIGAN affirmative action cases, the Supreme Court upheld a race-based admissions policy used by the law school while striking down the one used by the undergraduate school. The court's decisions aren't of equal weight. The more important one involved the law school. It was a 5-to-4…

THEY'VE DONE IT AGAIN. This time liberals have backed themselves into the position of defending library patrons' right to view pornography at federal expense. They've landed there by way of excoriating the Children's Internet Protection Act, which the Supreme Court yesterday upheld 6-3. This law…

HOWARD DEAN has fashioned a reputation as the straightforward Democratic candidate for president. And the media has bought the idea. Joe Klein writes in this week's Time that Dean, the former Vermont governor, has already "won the Straight Talk primary." He did this chiefly by loudly and…

TO SHOW how much times have changed from the days when we all talked about how to keep the inflation genie bottled up, news that core consumer prices (excluding food and energy) jumped in May brought sighs of relief from investors and policymakers. No longer spooked by fears of inflation, they were…

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THE WHITE HOUSE and House majority leader Tom DeLay went eyeball to eyeball on tax cuts, and the White House blinked. Sure, that's a bit of an exaggeration. But the truth is President Bush did back down last week from his demand that the House approve child tax credit payments to non-income…

PRESIDENT BUSH may or may not get the opportunity to name a Supreme Court Justice this summer. But if he does, who would be the right choice? Bush himself has told us. In 1999, Fred Barnes asked Bush what kind of judge he'd select. "I have great respect for Justice Scalia," he said, "for the…

"DO YOU HAVE A PASS?" asks the burly rent-a-cop, as I stand in the midst of a swirling mass of middle schoolers. No, I explain, I have come to the Capitol to acquire a press pass, so naturally I don't have one yet. "You can't get in without a pass," he replies stoutly, and crosses his arms.…

Shelby Foote

The Degaev Affair

Fairfax, Virginia

The Spoken Word Revolution

THE UNITED STATES has only begun to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. This is the core message of George W. Bush's May 31 speech in Krakow, where he announced his intent to work with like-minded states to interdict nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to carry…

Heard any Good Harvard Blonde Jokes? How many blondes does it take to write an amicus brief? Or make a decent film critic? USA Today plans to find out. In an apparent attempt to get at the finer points of tort law and pink handbags, the Gannett national daily last week had the Harvard Club of…

MUCH HAS BEEN SAID and written in recent weeks about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. As the methodical search for those weapons continues in Iraq, the back-and-forth in the United States and Europe about their whereabouts has gone ballistic--with hysterical, unfounded accusations leveled by…

Jerusalem

IN RECENT WEEKS, most Western media have reported the continuing attacks on U.S. troops in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, as tenacious resistance by defeated Baathists, aided by local Sunni Muslims enraged at the soldiers' alleged mishandling of crowds, which has led to fatal clashes. There is mounting…

ROUGHLY SIX YEARS AGO I gave a talk at a D.C. think tank complaining that it was outrageous for the conservative community (that vigorous, virile young beast) to allow New York City to subsist on the thin gruel of the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books, both left of center.…

The New Anti-Catholicism

Ankara

THE TITLE of the May 1994 Commentary magazine essay was "The Degradation of the New York Times." Written by Joseph Epstein, the article was an uncanny forecast of the disaster that befell the Times almost a decade later. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. was publisher then and now. If only Epstein could…

NO MATTER WHAT your religion or where you live, invite the PBS documentary "God and the Inner City" into your living room on Sunday night, June 22. "God and the Inner City" tells the story of three faith-based social service groups: Boston's Ella J. Baker House, which works to prevent street…

THE U.S. HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM is celebrating its 10th anniversary with the exhibit "Anne Frank the Writer: An Unfinished Story." It's a moving testament to Anne's literary talents, which go far beyond her famous diary. Some of the featured writings, what Anne liked to call her "pen-children,"…

NEWSWEEK'S media reporter Seth Mnookin handicapped the race for the job of New York Times executive editor last week, putting Los Angeles Times managing editor Dean Baquet as the 2-1 favorite, Bill Keller (runner-up to Howell Raines in the last go-round) in the second position at 3-1, and Boston…

WILLIAM H. PRYOR, the Alabama attorney general, is a nominee for a seat on the federal appeals court for Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Last week, he came to Washington for his confirmation hearing, and opponents of his nomination showed up in force. The Senate vote on Pryor could be…

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT, last week was "Transatlantic Week," in which several conferences devoted to U.S.-European relations occurred simultaneously. The Washington Post's David Ignatius covered one in Berlin where the presence of Richard Perle, aka The Prince of Darkness, probably led some to…

THE QUESTION raised by our editorial in last week's issue--whether the American Association of University Professors would "censure" the University of South Florida for having fired indicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad chieftain Sami Al-Arian--has been resolved. Sort of. Temporarily. Winding up their…

IT HAS BEEN skillfully re-engineered, all the new parts are in place, and it is now on the launching pad. All it needs for a blazing lift-off is some cheaper fuel. Such is the state of the U.S. economy. The tax cut is about to put billions into the hands of consumers. Homeowners continue to augment…

Honor Lost

Amanda Bright@home

ON THE MARGINS of the Arab world, the United States has some little noticed allies. These are ethnic or religious minorities who have never accepted the inevitability of strongman rule. Some of them have fallen on hard times--the Maronite Christians of Lebanon are scattered and defeated for now;…

All the Presidents' Children

The Real Environmental Crisis

FACED WITH RISING Medicaid costs, the states have begun to trumpet the oldest illusion about government power--that price controls can make things abundant and "affordable," in this case prescription drugs. On May 19 the U.S. Supreme Court gave the green light to a Maine program that includes…

I JUST SPENT two weeks traveling across Europe, visiting Italy, Germany, the Czech Republic, Belgium, France, and Portugal. I was on business, but (shhh! don't tell my boss) I had my share of pleasure, too. How could it be otherwise when you're in a continent-sized theme park? I gazed at the marble…

CIVIL LIBERTARIANS are in danger of debasing their cause through the partisan abuse of constitutional principle. A case in point is reaction to and distortion of the report of Department of Justice inspector general Glenn A. Fine, "The September 11 Detainees." Released June 4, the report is about…

Bear on Blair Last week, l'Affaire Blair at the New York Times finally ended with the resignations of executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd. According to Jacques Steinberg's account in the Times, "In front of dozens of reporters, editors, photographers and other newsroom…

Words to God's Music

Harsh Justice

Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip

MEETING THIS WEEK here in Washington, our nation's scholarly community, through the American Association of University Professors duly assembled, stands poised to commit an act of self-betrayal the depth of which is without obvious precedent in the history of American higher education. It's not a…

IN THE TRADEMARK MANNER of thugocracies, Burma's military government, seeking to silence its critics, sent a mob to attack the motorcade of longtime democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi on the night of Friday, May 30, as she traveled to a speaking engagement in the north of the country. The Nobel…

Books in Brief Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music by Robert R. Reilly (Morley, 351 pp., $19.95). Even the most open-minded might be surprised to see a book whose title includes both "modern music" and "beauty." One of the past century's many sad tales is how…

WE ARE GOING TO NEED a new way to think about spam, those importunate unsolicited e-mails advertising products, pandering to vices and insecurities, and bearing headers like GET LOLITA OUT OF DEBT BY ADDING THREE INCHES TO YOUR MORTGAGE! The problem is changing before our very eyes. Shortly after…

ONE OF MY OLDEST and best friends from college days (daze?) is a guy named Pete Hamilton, and we're still close. Our families are, too. We visit them, they visit us, gifts go back and forth, I'm Godfather to one of them, you get the picture. He has four daughters, each one prettier than the next,…

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WHAT HAVE WE learned in recent days about the Middle East? Not much that's new. We know Hamas will continue its terrorist attacks on innocent Israeli women and children. And we know that if Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas can't or won't confront Hamas and stop the terrorism, Ariel Sharon…

AFTER PUBLISHING a brief attack on the literary cheerleading and politically correct logic of a PSAT question recently, I myself became the object of attack from grammarians, a good share of people who think I'm stupid, and violent Toni Morrison partisans. Some days, it's just not worth checking…

WITH THE RELEASE this week of "Living History," it is worth noting that this title is not Hillary Rodham Clinton's first foray into children's literature. In 1996, came her blockbuster smash, "It Takes A Village," in which she condescended to parents as if they were children , by preaching the…

AT LONG LAST a Pulitzer Prize committee is looking into the possibility that the Pulitzer awarded to Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent whose dispatches covered up Stalin's infamies, might be revoked. In order to assist in their researches, I am downloading here some of the…

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO Alexander Solzhenitsyn delivered the address at Harvard University's commencement ceremonies. This year Ernesto Zedillo, past President of Mexico, provided the featured address at Harvard's 352nd commencement. Except he didn't. Zedillo did indeed deliver a speech: a…

I WAS GETTING some popcorn and so missed the part of last week's movie when Howell Raines resigned as executive editor of the New York Times. Not that I was surprised; they'd telegraphed the payoff in the setup scene a couple of weeks before, after Pinch Sulzberger assured Raines he wouldn't accept…

NOW THAT MATTERS IN POSTWAR IRAQ have, to put it mildly, become challenging, antiwar liberals are exhibiting a new spring in their step, and a revivified eagerness to heap scorn on the Bush administration. One of the most bizarre examples of this appears in the June 9 issue of the New Yorker, in a…

IT IS EXACTLY 100 years since the Wright Brothers took off from Kitty Hawk. Over that century America's airlines have operated at a net loss, repeatedly turning to the government for bail-outs. The most recent subsidies are dressed up as reimbursement for post-September 11 security losses and…

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.

Caracas, Venezuela

1929

IN LAYING OUT HIS BATTLE PLAN for the war against terrorism in his National Security Strategy issued last September, President Bush emphasized two key elements, military force and waging "a war of ideas." The second is less tangible than the first, but no less important. Our victory in the Cold War…

Odysseus in America

An Artist Against the Third Reich

WHILE THE NATION AWAITS the Supreme Court's rulings in the Michigan affirmative action cases, the Bush administration has launched an effort designed to stimulate interest in race-neutral means of enhancing educational opportunities for racial and ethnic minorities. The project has proceeded…

Brussels

What a Real Newspaper Editor Looks Like Amid all the (admittedly delightful) hullabaloo over Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg, it's important to remember, The Scrapbook thinks, that Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd aren't the only people directing newsroom staff at a big-league American paper. New York's…

IN MID-MAY, Patricia Ireland, former president of the National Organization for Women, assumed her new position as CEO of the Young Women's Christian Association. A small flurry of protests ensued, led by pro-family and conservative groups who charged that Ireland--an avowedly secular liberal and…

JUST TO DECLARE MY INTEREST at the outset: Bill Moyers and I have a history. I wrote an article about him (PBS's Televangelist, February 25, 2002) that made Moyers mad. The gist of the piece was simple: Bill Moyers flagrantly indulges in the same conflicts of interest, Washington logrolling, and…

Evil in Modern Thought

IN A FEW WEEKS, China will further extend its control over Hong Kong. Laws on subversion, treason, and sedition, among others, will be enacted by the partially elected legislature, whose anti-democratic members hold the majority under the Beijing-drafted constitution known as the Basic Law. Indeed,…

ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL principles of American political economy during the second half of the 20th century was that Treasury secretaries from New York always produced rallies in the value of the dollar, while Treasury secretaries from Texas produced devaluations. This geographic bias was not an…

FOR BETTER or usually for worse, the Islamic Republic of Iran can always command our attention, easily reminding us, as did the wars with Saddam Hussein and September 11, that the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation isn't the cutting edge of modern Middle Eastern history. Clerical Iran's…

I ONCE PICKED UP the phone and called an author who'd submitted a piece of writing. I thought I could publish it, I said, but there was something a little off in the final line, and maybe she and I could work our way through the problem together. First there was a silence from her, then a…

Books in Brief Remembering Patsy by Brian Mansfield (Rutledge Hill, 95 pp., $14.99). Everybody likes Patsy Cline. Most of the popular country singers of the 1950s and 1960s have disappeared, known only to country music devotees. Who listens to Minnie Pearl anymore? Or Faron Young? But though Patsy…

Enough

AS THIS MAGAZINE goes to press, a controversy swirls about the head of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. He is alleged to have "revealed," in an interview with writer Sam Tanenhaus for the Manhattan celebrity/fashion glossy Vanity Fair, that the Bush administration's asserted casus belli for…

OPPONENTS of the war in Iraq must be chagrined to see pretty much all of their arguments discredited by events. The invasion did not cause greater regional unrest; instead it led to a resumption of Palestinian-Israeli peace talks. There have been no massive refugee flows or other humanitarian…

IN 1988, in the course of a trip to America, Prince Charles of Britain asked to meet not the sons of the country's leading political families, but Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr.--heir to the New York Times newspaper complex--and Donald Graham of the Washington Post. "The forty-year-old heir to the…

PRESIDENT BUSH has had an impressive and successful trip to Europe and the Middle East. But the president's June 1 meeting with President Hu Jintao of China, as described in an unnamed senior administration official's "background" briefing, makes one wonder if the bureaucracy has seized control of…

JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL is frustrated. He's the young-Blumenthal-in-training of partisan punditry, but in recent days his favorite story line can't get any traction. "It's amazing what it takes to start a feeding frenzy these days," he lamented at TalkingPointsMemo, his web log, last week. Marshall…

INTERIOR SECRETARY Gale Norton recently announced a grant of $317,000 to help preserve an aging edifice of historical importance to the nation. Whereupon Americans United for the Separation of Church and State objected. Why? Because the group sees a manifest violation of church and state in the new…

ALONG WITH FREEDOM, opinion polls have come to Iraq--opinion polls and newspapers to publish them. While admittedly not yet pretending to Western polling science, the informal survey of 620 people on the streets of Baghdad taken by Al-Mu'tamar, one of the newspapers that have sprung up in Iraq in…

I WAS FORTUNATE last week in being able to gather round the dinner table in my London flat a group of economists, media folk, geopoliticians, and foreign policy types to review where the world is, and where it is going. Whereas the heads of state convened in Evian today are bound by the stilted…

Hatred's Kingdom

ON THE COVER of the April 6 New York Times's Sunday magazine, the paper's chief art critic, Michael Kimmelman, declared, "The most influential American artists weren't Pollock or de Kooning. They were the ones who came next--Minimalists, Conceptualists, Earth artists--who redefined what art was and…

MAINTAINING RELATIONS with both Taiwan and the People's Republic of China has posed a series of challenges to American diplomacy. And things have only become more difficult as Taiwan has completed a transition from authoritarian rule to true democracy, while mainland China remains a dictatorship…

The Beginning of Wisdom

A DARK CLOUD sat low over Smith College on graduation Sunday. The venerable women's school had inexplicably decided to celebrate its 125th commencement by inviting a controversial ideologue to speak. Naturally, the campus and community shot into action. As guests filed into the quad for the…

TO WHAT DEGREE does the threat of global terror embody the Wahhabi beliefs taught by the official sect in Saudi Arabia, beliefs the desert kingdom still seeks to impose throughout the Muslim world and to spread to the non-Muslim world as well? And what role does the international network of…

GEORGE W. BUSH is astoundingly popular with the American people. His approval ratings have hovered around the mid-60s or above for nearly two years--a phenomenon whose staying power cannot be explained by an initial reaction of support for the president after September 11. He has singlehandedly…

WHILE DOZENS of world leaders have come to Washington to meet President Bush, only three have been accorded all the ruffles and flourishes of an official state visit--Mexico's Vicente Fox, Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland, and, just last week, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo of the Philippines. Besides the…

Annals of Sid Sidney Blumenthal, the Erich von Stroheim of the Clinton administration, has published a memoir of his White House days--to generally poor reviews, most of them from newspapers and magazines ordinarily sympathetic to the author's politics. Of course, no such book should be assumed…

Tampa, Florida

UPDATE, 10/4/04: During last week's debate, voters caught a few glimpses into how Kerry would conduct foreign policy. One came on an issue that had, until then, garnered scant media attention: the advisability of moving ahead with research on a low-yield nuclear deep-earth penetrating weapon to hit…

ALL THE TALK about President Kennedy and his sexual exploits with a White House intern is full of leers and jeers and smutty comparisons to President Clinton. There has been little talk, though, about how reckless behavior may have affected his ability to function as chief executive. There is some…

Books in Brief The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn by Diane Ravitch (Knopf, 243 pp., $24). Education historian Diane Ravitch laments the fact that the Department of Education, state boards, textbook publishers, and standardized testing companies do not defend free…

ALL THROUGH the Clinton administration and into the 2000 election, some said we had run out of history. It had been tapped out, like an overused resource. It had run dry, like a well. Then came September 11, and history came flooding back with a vengeance, swamping us all in a torrent of crisis and…

THE NEW YORK TIMES, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe, among others, have sounded the alarm: The Bush administration, particularly its foreign policy team, is in the grip of a coterie of neoconservative intellectuals who are themselves in the grip of the antidemocratic and illiberal teachings of…

REMEMBER "Short Attention-Span Theater"? I think we're in it, and not on the audience side. I think we're the stars. I don't believe this is just me, or a third of us, or even half of us. I think it's every American (not counting the fiercest partisans on the left and right, say, ten percent on…

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