94 articles
WHICH DESERVES MORE ATTENTION: Arnold Schwarzenegger talking issues, or a 26-year-old issue of a "gentleman's" magazine in which the former Mr. Universe boasts how he-men and hedonism go hand in hand? Watch for the public and press to struggle with this--and other controversies from Arnold's…
CIRCLE TWO DATES on your recall calendar: September 3 and September 17. The first is a candidates' forum in Walnut Creek; the second, a candidates' debate in Sacramento. For California voters, it's their best chance at seeing the recall field up-close and personally. That is, if Arnold…
THE RECALL defies both tradition and traditional math. Recent history shows that Republicans can't win statewide races in California. But thanks to recall, they have a shot on October 7. Every poll shows the GOP with the most support on the second half of the recall, yet the front-runner is a…
JUST WHEN WE were starting to have fun in dysfunctional California, Fox News has declared a moratorium on Arnold Schwarzenegger movie puns. No more "Terminator," "Total Recall," or "Running Man" references from now to October 7, the cable network has mandated. In the contest to recall Gray Davis,…
MAHMOUD ABBAS'S and Ariel Sharon's ministerial jets passed in the Washington night recently as each man presented arguments and complaints to President George W. Bush. But, so far as is known, not a word was uttered about the 600-pound gorilla in the checkered keffiyeh, Yasser Arafat, whom Bush did…
Breaking Free
ONE ISSUE generating a lot of heat with congressmen these days is spam. (Please, hold the discount Viagra jokes.) Congress is considering nine different bills aimed at reducing the amount of junk email in America's inboxes. None of the bills would stop spam entirely. And the most popular…
THREE WEEKS AGO, Mike came home. He's the brother I wrote about on this page after he'd finished Marine boot camp and shipped out to the Persian Gulf as a helicopter mechanic aboard the USS Boxer. The whole family flew to Miramar, the Marine Corps air station in San Diego, to welcome him. He and…
THE NICENE CREED, recited by the world's more than two billion Christians every Sunday, declares that Jesus Christ "suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried." More than anything else, these ten words are the theme of "The Passion," Mel Gibson's new movie. Although not…
KARL MARX had a good line about Episcopalians. In a preface to Volume 1 of "Das Kapital," he wrote that the "English Established Church"--of which the Episcopal Church is an American offshoot--would "more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its income." Marx was…
Oxford, England
CALIFORNIA OWES a colossal debt to a Republican reformer named Hiram Johnson. He was the governor who put a recall provision in the state constitution in 1911. The idea was to allow voters to oust state officials who'd become wholly-owned subsidiaries of special interests. Along with the right to…
"[President Bush is] an engaging person, but I think for some reason he's been captured by the neoconservatives around him." --Howard Dean, U.S. News & World Report, August 11, 2003
Books in Brief The Legend of Proposition 13 by Joel Fox (Xlibris, 244 pp., $21.99). Few books about the 1970s tax revolt have been sympathetic to the reformers. But "The Legend of Proposition 13" is--and the attraction of the book goes far beyond its ideological sympathy. Author Joel Fox, who led…
In Praise of Nepotism
Wesley Clark's Imaginary Friend Does Wesley Clark have an imaginary friend? The retired NATO commander and possible Democratic presidential candidate has been muttering darkly for several months that opportunists in the White House seized September 11 as a pretext to take out Saddam Hussein. Clark…
JUST THREE DAYS before Palestinian terrorists violated the Palestinian-Israeli cease-fire with a pair of suicide bombings an hour apart, Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas denied that sources in Saudi Arabia fund Palestinian terrorist groups like Hamas. Following meetings with Saudi Arabia's…
Baghdad
IRONICALLY, Bill Simon's best day as a recall candidate was his last. Unable to raise money, generate support from his party's power players, or earn attention amidst the media circus that is Arnoldmania, Simon found a novel way to get noticed: drop out. "There are too many Republicans in this race…
DANIEL PIPES, a prominent scholar of Islam and Middle East politics, is giving the administration heartburn, but he'll have a seat on the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace before the Senate gets back after Labor Day. After the White House announced Pipes's nomination to the Institute of Peace,…
CALIFORNIA'S RECALL is Jimmy Durante's complaint: Everybody wants to get into the act. The bar at Washington, D.C.'s Ritz-Carlton now serves a "Total Recall" cocktail. The hotel calls it a "a bipartisan drink made with conservative ingredients and a liberal pour" (three parts vodka, two parts…
THIS IS LARRY MILLER, your Special Man On The Street, Self-Appointed Hollywood Recall Election Correspondent, reporting live from the rooftops of Universal City. Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea. I can see the lights of the explosions below me in Encino. Oh, the…
THE TERMINATOR broke his silence Wednesday, holding a press conference in Los Angeles to talk fiscal fitness and introduce his California Economic Recovery Council advisory team. As far as opening nights go, there were no signs of jitters or stage fright. The candidate was sharp, had command of his…
CONSPIRACY THEORIES are the last refuge of losers. So it's not surprising that the fast-fading governor of California, Gray Davis, would trot out such a theory as he tries to avoid being tossed out of office. The recall vote on October 7, Davis said, "is part of an ongoing national effort to steal…
THE ANNOUNCEMENT that Simon Haselock has been appointed "media commissioner" for Iraq is bad news for a free Iraqi media. I know Simon extremely well and like him, but there is good cause for considering his appointment to the country's top media administrative position a mistake. Simon Haselock…
BLAIR HORNSTINE has settled her lawsuit against Moorestown Township. Hornstine is the recent graduate of Moorestown High School who sued the town in order to remain sole valedictorian. The settlement was reached late yesterday afternoon. According to the settlement papers, Blair Hornstine will…
WHATEVER ELSE may be said about the base of the Democratic party, it most definitely is upset with President Bush. Democratic pollster Geoff Garin says that in his 25 years of polling he never has seen Democrats so angry with a Republican president. Veteran columnist Robert Novak writes that he…
LYNDON JOHNSON once admonished his White House staff: "I expect a kiss-my-ass-at-high-noon-in-Macy's-window loyalty." No one's going to mistake Gray Davis for LBJ--certainly not after the governor's address yesterday afternoon in Los Angeles, broadcast live statewide. Davis didn't demand loyalty,…
A MAJOR DEVELOPMENT in post-Soviet affairs recently occurred when Heidar Aliyev, the ailing octogenarian leader of oil-rich Azerbaijan, ceded authority to his son Ilham. Although the dynastic aspect of this transition is less notorious than Saddam Hussein's clan or Syria's Assad family, it is…
THE LATEST from the Left Coast: Bill Simon has taken out radio ads attacking Arnold Schwarzenegger, who reportedly will start running TV ads as early as Wednesday. On the Democratic side, Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, also a candidate to replace Gray Davis, claims that the governor's…
HOW MUCH would you spend to protect and expand a business with $5 billion in annual revenues and no significant local competition? Is that protection worth 2 percent of one year's income? Or 5 percent? Maybe even 10 percent? Whether California's Indian tribes spend $100 million, $250 million, or…
A FUNNY THING happened on the way to our economic recovery: The people who engineered it are coming under fire for alleged policy errors. Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan should be garnering kudos for his management of monetary policy and President Bush should be hearing applause for…
WHEN GEORGE BUSH unfurled his banner of "compassionate conservatism," most critics predicted it would not be long before the conservatism overwhelmed the compassion. They were wrong. Instead, the compassion has overwhelmed the conservatism. President Bush's compassion now impels him to give tax…
"PRESIDENT BUSH is the most pro-democracy, pro-freedom president on Cuba that we've ever had," says Emilio Gonzalez, who recently stepped down as the National Security Council's expert on Cuba. Maybe so. Bush has vowed to block any attempt to repeal the trade embargo against Cuba. He's transformed…
Black Dahlia Avenger
LAST NIGHT, strolling at dusk in the small town where I'm vacationing, I passed a half-dozen 14- and 15-year-old boys. Some were walking, some were balancing jerkily on their bikes, struggling to coast at walking speed. They all had that weird adolescent gift for remaining unintelligible while…
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary Eleventh Edition
The Book Against God
New York City
THE ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE behind the American occupation of Iraq, so advises a chorus of influential voices, ought to be the foreign policy equivalent of financially syndicating risk. America's budget deficit is too big, the costs of administering and reconstructing Iraq too high, and the killing of…
LIKE A SPORTS TEAM after a dismal season, the State Department is going through a "rebuilding process" to figure out how to win Arab and Muslim friends. As depressing statistics about anti-Americanism continue to mount, especially in the Middle East, Foggy Bottom recently announced the formation of…
What We Can't Not Know
LAST TUESDAY IN CHICAGO, for only the second time, all nine candidates for next year's Democratic presidential nomination appeared together--at an event billed as a "working families forum" by its AFL-CIO sponsors. C-SPAN broadcast the session live. Most WEEKLY STANDARD readers no doubt watched all…
OVERESTIMATES OF ARAB OIL POWER are an important and harmful influence on policy toward the Middle East. The following myths, or outdated facts, support the world's misjudgment of the power of the Persian Gulf oil producers--especially Saudi Arabia, but also Iran, Iraq, and the Gulf states. (1)…
THERE COMES A TIME in the history of every oppressive state when the need for change is suddenly and widely understood to be imperative. Inevitably, an incident occurs that illuminates the government's misrule and undermines the legitimacy of the regime. For the government of Saudi Arabia, such an…
What Derrida Is Saying Gerald Owen, writing in Canada's National Post, recently reminded us that back in May a major intellectual event took place--and it went nearly unnoticed outside Europe. It was the merging of the modern with the postmodern, in which a philosophical movement that began as a…
Ashcroft Vindicated Again The campaign to "free Mike Hawash" sputtered to a halt last week. Hawash is a former Intel engineer who has been widely portrayed as the victim of a Bush administration anti-Muslim witch hunt ever since the FBI picked him up in a parking lot outside his Oregon workplace…
IS PRESIDENT BUSH really a conservative? When that question came up this summer, the White House went into crisis mode. Bush aides summoned several of Washington's conservative journalists to a 6:30 a.m. breakfast at the White House to press the case for the president's adherence to conservative…
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN and the E Street Band--"The Greatest Little House Band in All the Land"--were in San Francisco this weekend, playing to a sold-out Pacific Bell Park. Too bad the Garden State's favorite son didn't pull a Hillary and adopt another state as his pet cause. He would have made a great…
CRITICS OF Arnold Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial campaign argue he doesn't have the experience necessary to govern. California Democratic spokesman Bob Mulholland says his party has "real bullets" that a political neophyte like Schwarzenegger will have trouble dodging. However, what these…
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.
CALIFORNIA DREAMING has us all in a fog. The best the Democratic presidential hopefuls can do for attention is John Kerry's Philly cheesesteak gaffe, or Al Sharpton's crack about "slapping the donkey" (there's your bumper sticker: "Democrats--Dumb Asses and Proud Of It"). Not that it's hard to get…
ON OCTOBER 7, California voters will decide two questions. The first is whether Gov. Gray Davis, re-elected a year ago to a second term, should be removed from office. The second is who should replace him, if a majority votes for his removal. Whoever gets the most votes--and a plurality…
I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, but whenever I want to look inside an NBA star's pensive, brooding soul, I turn to his vanity hip hop albums. Listen to a track from any of Los Angeles Lakers' star Shaquille O'Neal's five albums, for instance, and you begin to understand how Shaq views the world around his…
WE BEGIN WITH bad news from California: Less than 1,300 hours remain until the state's historic recall election. That means only 54 more days of Arnoldmania--or, roughly 78,000 minutes until the incumbent Gov. Gray Davis finishes the year's second most remarkable political collapse (unfortunately…
WATCHING THE EAST COAST MEDIA attempt to cover the California recall is like watching Tim McCarver call a Dodgers game while Vin Scully looks on without a mike. It doesn't have to be this way. In fact, the recall is such a big story during such a slow news time that "Nightline" could relocate for…
FOR YEARS NOW Bravo has been the drama department of cable channels with its high-tone movie fare and the precious celebrity-worship of "Inside the Actors Studio" hosted by the plodding, sycophantic James Lipton. It only seems logical that its programming should now have a major gay component, but…
WITH SO MUCH RECENT FOCUS on the West Bank "separation fence," the issue that prompted Israel to build a barrier in the first place has been obscured. But as this week's suicide bombings show, the threat of continued Palestinian terror lingers. And in some cases, that threat literally lingers just…
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UNLESS WE WANT Al Jazeera to be the principal media influence on the new political culture of Iraq, the U.S. occupation needs to find its voice. In a letter to the editor of the Washington Post last week, Cold War elder statesman Max Kampelman faulted the U.S. occupation for failing to use…
FREE TRADE and free elections do not always coexist peacefully. In an economy in which workers find jobs hard to come by, employers find their pricing power sapped by foreign competition, and the 2004 election campaign is on fast-forward, free trade is likely to find itself among the badly wounded.…
Baghdad
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.
WESTERN EUROPE'S dominance of the United States' affections is at an end, as Eastern European countries that grew up admiring the United States are becoming dear to the U.S. foreign-policy establishment's heart. In ascendance with the Eastern Europeans are the new republics of Central Asia which,…
COME ON IN, the water's fine! Well, it's a national story now. Isn't this fun? I don't know about you, but I can't recall (so to speak) ever giggling as much about a political story. I got home yesterday, turned on the tube, and there he was, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in a really nice XXXL blazer,…
"Because of my commitment to the environment, I think I can bring Greens into voting in the Democratic primary . . . and because of my commitment to civil liberties and challenge to the Patriot Act, I bring libertarians in." --Dennis Kucinich, Congressional Quarterly Weekly, July 18, 2003
On Saturday, August 9, our own Fred Barnes will be at Fenway Park throwing out the first pitch as the Red Sox take on the mighty Baltimore Orioles. Barnes, a longtime fan, will bring his heat to the mound at 7:05 p.m. His presence will no doubt inspire the team, which is locked in a tight pennant…
ONE BENEFIT of the $1.7 billion budget deficit in Maryland is that it has forced Gov. Bob Ehrlich to slash state budgets and eliminate wasteful and inefficient projects. The proposed Baltimore to Washington "magnetic levitation train" would be a good place to start. Maryland is currently competing…
THERE WAS A TIME, not long ago, when primetime television was populated by famous people. Someone appearing on TV meant that they'd likely worked their way up through the ranks: doing school plays, regional theater, and embarrassing commercials, until finally, they honed their skills, perfected…
CHARLES CHAPUT, the Archbishop of Denver, issued a stinging rebuke to Catholic senator Richard Durbin and concluded that "a new kind of religious discrimination is very welcome at the Capitol, even among elected officials who claim to be Catholic," and the national news media barely took note. A…
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE Donald Rumsfeld can study the issue of active-duty troop strength all he wants but it won't change the obvious: U.S. land forces are two divisions short of being able to carry out effectively its present responsibilities. Winning wars is not enough. We must also be able to…
IT'S BEEN OVER A YEAR since my last trip to Sin City, which featured high-stakes blackjack, Wayne Newton, and a bachelor party for a friend who later broke off his engagement (what a deal for him!). But it's been an even longer spell since my last visit to that shining city by the sea known as…
WILLIAM PRYOR isn't going to become a federal judge. Not this year, not next. Pryor is a nominee for the appeals court that encompasses his native Alabama, Florida and Georgia. But he has become the third Bush nominee to hit the hard wall of a Democratic filibuster. Under Senate rules, you need 60…
IS QADDAFI the new Castro? For years, the Cuban dictator was the American media's favorite tyrant. High-profile television reporters like ABC's Barbara Walters and NBC's Andrea Mitchell would travel to Havana and treat Castro to the sort of gauzy profile usually reserved for celebrities like Ben…
THE ARCHBISHOP OF DENVER, Charles Chaput, has rebuked the Senate Democrats who have blocked the nomination of Alabama attorney general William Pryor in stark terms: "[A] new kind of religious discrimination is very welcome at the Capitol, even among elected officials who claim to be Catholic."…
THE SAUDI ROYAL FAMILY has decided once again to pour oil on troubled waters. Faced with a congressional report apparently criticizing it for continuing to fund the mosques and schools around the world in which the violently anti-Western, Wahhabi version of Islam is taught, the Saudis persuaded…
THE CONTROVERSIAL gay Episcopal bishop-elect of New Hampshire is a founder of a group called Outright that supports gay, lesbian, or "questioning" young people 22-years-old or younger and gets them together with older gay and lesbian role models. On its website, Outright had a link to a…
LAST WEEK a friend and I made our way to Hollywood Park to watch a horserace--for the first time in our lives. Anticipating the glamour of the sport of kings, we found the charm of a littered Greyhound Bus terminal. Horseracing now is a bygone sport, a washed-up relic of the days when people…
FAYE WATTLETON, former president of Planned Parenthood, announced some "alarming" news in late June. Her organization, the Center for the Advancement of Women, had commissioned Princeton Survey Research Associates to do a major study on contemporary feminism. The result was "Progress and Perils: A…
BY EARLY SPRING, journalists and political activists had begun to notice that former Vermont governor Howard Dean had a knack for firing up crowds. He was little known and badly financed, but his issues were unfudged and easy to understand: budget-balancing, civil unions for gays, a…
AFTER GAY MARRIAGE, what will become of marriage itself? Will same-sex matrimony extend marriage's stabilizing effects to homosexuals? Will gay marriage undermine family life? A lot is riding on the answers to these questions. But the media's reflexive labeling of doubts about gay marriage as…
Boss Dingell and the Outside Agitator Ward Connerly sure knows how to get under John Dingell's skin. The point man in passing California's Proposition 209 in 1996, Connerly is supporting a Michigan initiative that would similarly ban race preferences in state hiring and university admissions. This…
Beyond Belief
"REPORT ON U.S. Antiterrorism Law Alleges Violations of Civil Rights"--so read the headline on the July 21 front page of the New York Times. It was a scoop of sorts: The report in question, prepared by the office of Justice Department inspector general Glenn A. Fine, hadn't yet been released. It…
THE KILLING of Uday and Qusay Hussein last week by American forces in Iraq has reopened the question of the deliberate targeting of enemy leaders. "Pursuing with intent to kill violates a long-standing policy banning political assassination," asserted George Gedda of the Associated Press. "It was…
"George Bush has left us less safe and less secure than we were four years ago."
Abu Gharib Prison, Iraq
"THE CHINESE have been very helpful in this North Korea problem," a senior administration official assured me earlier this week. Then he paused and thought for a minute. "Well . . . strike 'very,'" he hedged. The steady stream of Chinese vice foreign ministers passing through Washington over the…
THE $19 HOT DOG has arrived. I came into this valuable news through the Wall Street Journal, which reports that they are gussying up hot dogs in New York and Los Angeles. The $19 dog is available at a joint called the Old Homestead. A Kobe beef frankfurter, it is "parboiled and served with Kobe…
Collected Poems
GAY MARRIAGE is no longer a theoretical issue. Canada has it. Massachusetts is expected to get it any day. The Goodridge decision there could set off a legal, political, and cultural battle in the courts of 50 states and in the U.S. Congress. Every politician, every judge, every citizen has to…
ANYONE WHO THINKS Gray Davis's goose is cooked knows nothing about Gray Davis. Oh, it's in the oven, all right (his goose, that is), and it's been basted, and it's been going for a while. And the table is set, and the guests are seated, and they're all smacking their lips.
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.
AT FIRST GLANCE, you might think, as I did, that the letter from Rep. John Dingell of Michigan to a fellow American--a law-abiding American--wasn't his but a parody. Surely, someone who fancies himself a satirist wrote the letter. After all, would Dingell (or any member of Congress) actually write…