106 articles
SOME BOOKS should be read in tandem. One pair for parallel reading: William Manchester's second volume in his life of Churchill, "Alone," and Rich Lowry's fine new effort: "Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years." Manchester's book chronicles the wilderness years of the greatest man of the…
SOME DAYS, when the after party in Iraq isn't going so well--which is to say, most days--I'm put in mind of the Bush administration's admonition to be sunny-side-up journalists, to eliminate the negative, to accentuate the positive. God knows I try. I take stock in small victories, often…
THE FIRST THING I noticed coming through the doors of the 9:30 Club was a button on the shoulder bag of the woman in front of me. "Regime Change 2004," it said. Next was the long banner hanging behind blues singer Lester Chambers on stage. "Tell Us the Truth," the banner read in tall capital…
ONLY ONE THING can stall the U.S. economic recovery that is now underway: a major policy error by America's politicians. And, unfortunately, they have two such blunders in mind, namely protectionism and fiscal profligacy. The economy itself continues to grow, although not at the breakneck 7.2…
STANFORD CAMPUS BIOLOGISTS and students have teamed up in a daring new rescue effort--to save the tiger salamanders. Natives of the Stanford area, the salamanders migrate yearly to nearby Lake Lagunita to breed. The migration route takes them across the busy streets of Junipero Serra Boulevard and…
REPUBLICANS ARE GIDDY. The economy is on the verge of a sustained boom. After nearly two years of a "jobless recovery," new jobs are being created in large numbers. Iraq is a problem--a big problem--but a midcourse correction in postwar policy may curb terrorist attacks and hasten a democratic…
Editor's Note, 1/27/04: In today's Washington Post, Dana Milbank reported that "Vice President Cheney . . . in an interview this month with the Rocky Mountain News, recommended as the 'best source of information' an article in The Weekly Standard magazine detailing a relationship between Hussein…
Art of War
IF YOU'RE A POLITICAL JUNKIE, you probably have a favorite Terry McAuliffe moment--an appearance by the Democratic National Committee chairman that you think best captures his unique blend of earnestness and mendacity. There are so many to choose from. Like the night of October 6, 2003, about 24…
DEVOTEES OF PATRICK O'BRIAN'S celebrated series of historical novels are likely to be not just relieved but delighted by Peter Weir's beautiful film "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World." They had reason to be worried at the prospect of a Hollywood version of the beloved Aubrey-Maturin…
Mickey Mouse in Black and White
FEW CONVICTED MURDERERS and hijackers accept the label "terrorist." One who does--indeed, who embraces terrorism as among man's "noblest pursuits"--is a Venezuelan now serving a life sentence for murder in France. He is Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as "Carlos the Jackal." He has just…
THE RECENT DECISION by CBS to cancel a television program about President Ronald Reagan because it was "not balanced" revealed that those who had created the program reflected a belief held by the left in American politics that Reagan was not capable of governing in a responsible manner. Although I…
STROM THURMOND would have been disappointed. What happened between 6:00 P.M. Wednesday and 9:30 A.M. Friday last week in the U.S. Senate chamber was no filibuster. No one read from the telephone book, sang show tunes, or relieved herself in a trashcan. In fact, the closest the Senate floor saw to…
Long Songs You have to love Dana Gioia for what he's trying to do with the National Endowment for the Arts. Earlier this year, I watched him begin a presentation on the endowment's budget by reading one of Longfellow's poems--I think it was that classic of American sententiousness, "Psalm of Life":…
THE MOMENT when I first became conscious of the feeling of complete happiness relates to Christmas--which is weird, because I'm Jewish. I was 10 years old, and I was walking through Times Square on a cold December day in 1971. (I was an old-fashioned New York City kid, a kind that no longer…
Let's Help the New York Times On several occasions, readers of this page have sent us copies of their letters to the editor of the New York Times--letters that for some reason never got published by the Times. As these letters were invariably well written and offered compelling criticisms of some…
MANY HAVE WAXED wroth at both the CIA's purported misestimates and the Bush administration's alleged deception regarding stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But although security in Iraq is a vital concern, this WMD stockpile issue looks different in November than it did in October.…
DURING THE LAST SEVEN MONTHS the Iraqi Embassy in Washington, D.C., could have blended in more easily on the streets of Baghdad than in the nation's capital. Beneath its front door stacks of old newspapers piled on top of each other in deteriorating layers that ended in a pile of gray mush. The…
WITH ITS UNERRING EYE for what fails to matter, the Femintern seized on a PR mistake on the part of the White House to ram home a defense of its favorite project: unfettered abortion, any kind, any time. The mistake (duly noted and criticized on many conservative websites) was that the people shown…
ONE RECENT SUNNY DAY, Martin Lemke, a 28-year-old from San Francisco, stood in front of a Gap clothing store on busy Collins Avenue in South Beach, Miami, and shed all of his clothes, save for a pair of boxer briefs. Lemke's striptease, you understand, was a political act--he's a member of the…
MY BIG IDEA, the one that's going to let me to quit my day job, join the Metropolitan Club, and buy Kay Graham's old place in Georgetown, is this: A pay cable channel for kids. Think of it like HBO, but airing only kid shows, 24 hours a day. You could charge $15, $20, maybe $25 a month and parents…
A NEWSWEEK article by investigative reporters Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball about the memo linking Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein dismisses a recent WEEKLY STANDARD report as "hype" and concludes, the "tangled tale of the memo suggests that the case of whether there has been Iraqi-al Qaeda…
"THERE IS NO SUCH THING as a bad day when you have a door knob on the inside of the door," says former Navy commander Paul Galanti. Galanti, who spent six and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, is one of the 30 subjects of the photography and essay exhibit Open Doors: Vietnam POWs Thirty…
"JOHN MARSHALL has made his decision," Andrew Jackson is said to have remarked in the aftermath of a Supreme Court decision he disliked, "now let him enforce it." Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney would be well advised to ponder that line long and hard over the Thanksgiving holidays.
THE MASSACHUSETTS SUPREME COURT has legalized same-sex marriage for the first time in this country. Most suspect the U.S. Supreme Court will throw a blanket of federal constitutional protection around this precedent. Faced with the judicial deconstruction of marriage, angry conservative spokesmen…
THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT late Saturday, November 15, issued a statement that began: "News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate." The statement didn't…
THIS IS "JFK WEEK" on The History Channel, which is not the only media outlet obsessed with the 40th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination. On Thursday, ABC News has a two-hour special analyzing the circumstances of the crime--running it against CBS's "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."…
IF YOU THOUGHT the report that the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 7.2 percent was good news, wait until you see the revised estimate. I am told that the final figure will be at least 7.8 percent, and might well reach 8.0 percent. So much for the look in the rear view mirror. The more…
EVERYONE'S SEEN "The Sting," because it's a great movie. Well, I guess not everyone, but you know what I mean. And it's still a great movie. Newman and Redford are wonderful (I've always wished the two of them had made more together), and the rest of the cast is as good as it gets: Robert Shaw,…
BOBBY JINDAL'S DEFEAT in the Louisiana governor's race Saturday is a bigger loss for Republicans than just an office they've held for eight years. For now, it denies the party an impressive new national figure, a 32-year-old Indian-American who's destined to be a political star sometime--but not…
Armey's Axioms
THE OTHER NIGHT, I went to a fancy gala at the National Building Museum. As I strolled between the towering, golden Corinthian columns of the great hall, I felt sophisticated in my off-the-shoulder black dress, and chatted easily with a friendly professor about his course on the American…
THE MYSTERY WRITER Nicolas Freeling made a dreadful commercial decision--and a dubious artistic one--when he killed off his popular detective, Amsterdam police inspector Piet Van der Valk. But is that the complete explanation for why one of the most gifted and original writers of crime fiction has…
One-Car Caravan
THE FRONT PAGE of the November 7 Washington Post says it all. The first headline, in large type: "Bush Urges Commitment to Transform Mideast." Below, in slightly smaller type: "Pentagon to Shrink Iraq Force." And below that: "Iraqi Security Crews Getting Less Training." It's a jarring…
In Denial
THERE WERE SIGHS of relief in Republican circles last week when the third quarter's economic growth rate was announced as 7.2 percent. But if the central political assumption of the Bush administration is true--that we are in the midst of a world war that is far from over--the relief may prove…
LINDA TRIPP--remember her?--is back in the news, with a bit of vindication. The Defense Department will pay her $595,000. It will also give her a retroactive promotion and retroactive pay. Why? Because the Clinton Pentagon played a nasty trick on her, and violated the Privacy Act in so doing. Tripp…
IN AMERICA, IT'S A SNAP to find exiles from most of the world's worst tyrannies. Just ask your taxi driver. For everyone from Iranians to Syrians, Chinese to Liberians to Uzbeks, America serves as the Grand Central Station of democratic dissent, a crossroads for outspoken dissidents from around the…
Boston, Massachusetts
REALIGNING ELECTIONS don't occur in odd-numbered years like 2003. Nor do such elections provide foolproof signs of what's coming the next year--in this case, in the 2004 presidential and congressional races. But Republican victories in the governors' races in Mississippi and Kentucky were…
The Time Traveler's Wife
Books in Brief Common-Law Liberty: Rethinking American Constitutionalism by James R. Stoner Jr. (University of Kansas Press, 212 pp., $29.95). American law begins with the Constitution of 1787. Or so we like to think. James Stoner usefully reminds us, however, that American law also includes the…
THE PENTAGON'S "PLAN" to reduce troop strength in Iraq from the current 132,000 to 105,000 by next May is not so much a reflection of the military requirements of occupation as an expression of inadequate resources: Absent full mobilization (a new military draft or something like it), this is all…
IN THE BARRAGE OF COMMENT on the recent arrest of Yukos oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, much attention has been paid to Khodorkovsky's political activities and to Russian president Vladimir Putin's brand of crony capitalism--but the essence of the scandal lies deeper. The imprisonment of the…
More Baloney from Clark Sometime in November 2001, Gen. Wesley Clark, former NATO supreme commander and future Democratic candidate for president, visited the Pentagon. Whereupon, in conversation with "a man with three stars who used to work for me," Clark stumbled across the Bush administration's…
DEMOCRATIC FRONTRUNNER Howard Dean is going for broke. Not content merely to do respectably in Iowa, as other New Englanders seeking the White House have done in the past, he is the only one of the nine Democratic presidential candidates to have campaigned in every single county in Iowa. What's…
EARLY ONE EVENING this past March I found myself struggling for balance in the den of a well-appointed, upper-middle-class home in suburban Bedford, New Hampshire, a half-dozen miles or so southwest of Manchester. I was worried about teetering over because not ten feet away from me Howard Dean had…
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.
THE COMPARISONS of Fox's new series "The O.C." to "Beverly Hills, 90210" are inevitable. Like its predecessor, "The O.C." is an hour-long drama featuring an out-of-towner main character the show drops in the midst of the problems suffered by wealthy, attractive teens in Southern California. This…
THE IRAQI GOVERNING COUNCIL is in trouble, or so it seems as Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority chief L. Paul Bremer abruptly canceled his meetings in Iraq November 11 and headed home for a hastily arranged powwow with Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, et al, to try to put their "democratization" effort…
THE RECENT FLURRY of media attention surrounding Jessica Lynch--the NBC movie "Saving Jessica Lynch" aired this past Sunday and the former POW's "Primetime" interview with Diane Sawyer aired Tuesday--has many viewers wondering what really happened in the days leading up to April 1, 2003, when a…
SEAN HANNITY'S big scoop is not generating the headlines it ought to. The memo Hannity obtained and made public that details the plans by Democratic staff on the Senate Intelligence Committee to politicize the committee's investigations in the service of partisan politics far overshadows in…
MANY WHO SUPPORT Terri Schiavo's threatened dehydration assert that removing a feeding tube from a profoundly cognitively disabled person results in a painless and gentle ending. But is this really true? After all, it would be agonizing if you or I were locked in a room for two weeks and deprived…
HERE IN WASHINGTON, the November 2004 election is not a year away--it's now. So the Bush team is trying to figure out how fast the economy has to grow to create political capital at a rate that outpaces the mounting death toll in Iraq. Take away the economy as a stick with which the Democrats can…
U.S. POLICY IN IRAQ is haunted by Vietnam, no question about that. That's why Americans support the war and will keep on supporting it until we win. ("Win" is a verb you rarely heard in the Vietnam era.) We are haunted by the image of Vietnamese who trusted and supported us trying frantically to…
Who shall doubt "the secret hid Under Cheops' pyramid" Was that the contractor did Cheops out of several millions? . . . (Rudyard Kipling, "Departmental Ditties") THE ASSAULTS ON THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S Iraq policy grow more cartoonish with each passing day. Last week the Center for Public…
IN GUS VAN SANT'S recent film "Elephant"--at the point where a student enters the school library, dressed in camouflage gear, machine gun at the ready--another student lifts his camera and focuses. It's a chilling moment, with both poised to shoot. Of course, what's chilling about it is that a…
BEIJING'S CRITICS and supporters agree that something is wrong with the moral fabric of China. Visiting journalists and resident foreign businessmen comment on falling ethical standards. When an orgy involving 380 Japanese tourists and 500 Chinese prostitutes in a luxury hotel in Zhuhai came to…
Baghdad
New Orleans
TRY AS I MIGHT, there's no getting around it: I'm all man. I make this statement of faith not because I checked myself out in the shower before writing this article. Nor because I possess all your typical man-like properties--though I do: I can eat two hamburgers in one sitting, I hate spooning, I…
A National Party No More
YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE from West Virginia to notice that America is having a bluegrass renaissance. Call it rural renewal. It's made bluegrass pioneer Ralph Stanley, at age seventy-six, a bona fide superstar, thanks to the overwhelming success of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and its bestselling,…
IT'S HALF PAST NOON on a dreary Tuesday, and John Podesta, onetime chief of staff under President Clinton, is welcoming a crowd of several hundred Democrats gathered at a Marriott hotel ballroom in Washington, D.C. The occasion is "New American Strategies for Security and Peace," a two-day…
WHEN AQILA AL-HASHIMI was murdered on her way to work at the end of September, some people cheered. A modern Iraqi Shia woman who wore no headscarf, al-Hashimi was also a former mid-level diplomat for the Baathist regime and as such earned the fury of Iraqi extremists when she joined the…
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE Donald Rumsfeld's memo on the "Global War on Terrorism" has elicited derision and glee from many in the press and the Democratic party. The publicly upbeat, brusque secretary appears in the in-house memorandum far more pensive and tentative in his judgments about…
SUDDENLY YUKOS, Russia's largest private oil company, is in the eye of the worst political storm of Vladimir Putin's presidency. The firm's CEO and largest shareholder is sitting in a Moscow prison, charged with assorted offenses from tax evasion to fraud, its company archive and computers raided…
Books in Brief The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century by Paul Krugman (W.W. Norton, 320 pp., $25.95). Don't bother reading the newspaper columns Paul Krugman has gathered to make this volume; his preface and introduction show clearly that would be a plentiful waste of time. It's…
The Wellstone Memorial, Revisited The memorial service for Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone on October 29, 2002, is generally viewed in Washington--by both Democrats and Republicans--as the turning point in the last midterm elections. If there was any one moment that cost Democrats their Senate…
Baghdad
LITTLE MENTIONED in recent reports on the war on terror were the arrests last September of two men linked to al Qaeda. What makes these arrests particularly interesting is that they happened in Mindanao, an island in the southern Philippines. Jasem Alhasan, a Kuwaiti, was detained along with a…
WHEN PRESIDENT BUSH signed a ban on partial-birth abortion last week, it marked the first congressional rollback of Roe v. Wade since the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion was handed down in 1973. And it marked the success of an idea as well. The idea, of course, is that abortion…
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.
YES, IT'S CHRISTMAS TIME ALREADY. Today "Elf" lands in theaters. It's the first Christmas movie of the season and, while I haven't done comprehensive research on this, I believe it's the earliest Christmas release in recent memory. In case you're wondering why a movie about Santa Claus and the…
I LOVE GEORGE W. BUSH. I worship the man. I wake up every morning glad he is president. When annoyed by small things--traffic, the weather, an overcharge--I say to myself, "President Bush," and at once feel better. I like his worldview. I like his dogs and his wife and his mother. I think he looks…
"THE SIMPLE TRUTH," said Senator John McCain at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, "is that we do not have sufficient forces in Iraq to meet our objectives." President Bush disagrees. His administration has given frequent assurances that there is no need for…
I ONCE SAW Sandra Day O'Connor in my corner store, and years ago, before Justice O'Connor even sat on the U.S. Supreme Court, I used to push a stroller on the terrace surrounding the white marble temple where she works. But until Tuesday--even though the Court is only four blocks from my house--I'd…
THE VERY BEST ASPECT of the decision by CBS to cancel its network showing of the Reagan miniseries was the first paragraph of CBS's statement explaining its decision: CBS will not broadcast "The Reagans" on November 16 and 18. This decision is based solely on our reaction to the final film, not the…
WHEN WE HEAR that old saw about how local issues prevailed on Election Day, you can be sure of one thing: Republicans won. And of course Republicans did on Tuesday, capturing the governor's races in Kentucky and Mississippi. In both contests, there are important national implications that favor…
MONDAY NIGHT at the International Spy Museum, John Podesta & Co. marked the opening of the new Center for American Progress with the Washington debut of Robert Greenwald's documentary "Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War," which accuses the Bush administration of wholesale deception in…
THE INITIAL IMPULSE is to declare that "The Matrix: Revolutions" does for "The Matrix" what "Return of the Jedi" did for "Star Wars." That isn't, however, entirely fair. It would be more accurate to compare "Revolutions" with "Attack of the Clones." After all, while "Jedi" might have cast…
THE TERRI SCHIAVO CASE continues to take dramatic twists and turns. Even as Michael Schiavo attempts to have Terri's Law declared unconstitutional, pursuant to the law's requirements, a judge has appointed a guardian ad litem--Professor Jay Wolfson, of the College of Public Health at the University…
IT APPEARS THAT CBS has caved in to the complaints shouted by friends and supporters of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, who claim that the network's upcoming miniseries about the famous couple is more fiction than fact. Predictably, CBS's canceling of the show has led to cries of censorship and fears of a…
THE DEATH LAST WEEK of Madame Chang kai-Shek, wife of the Generalissimo who lost his battle to prevent the communist takeover of China, brings to mind the Republican accusation that communists in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were responsible for that loss. "Who lost China?" was the…
PRESIDENT BUSH has yet to set foot in San Francisco since taking office 33 months ago. Although he's visiting Southern California to inspect the wildfire devastation, the itinerary doesn't include a detour north. Which is unfortunate. San Franciscans go to the polls today to choose a new mayor, and…
I WENT LAST THURSDAY with some anticipation to the unveiling of "Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Strategy," a 19-page manifesto issued by a group of mostly centrist, mostly former Clinton administration officials. Many of them are colleagues from successful bipartisan…
AT A TIME when even nuances of Iraq reconstruction policy become flashpoints for bureaucratic infighting, causing competing leaks to spring from almost every precinct of the administration's foreign policy apparatus, the most consequential policy struggle of all is playing out in virtual silence.…
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S foreign policy has come under withering attack in recent months. Critics accuse the administration of crossing the line that separates a foreign policy strong enough to secure U.S. interests from one so muscular that it provokes other countries to block us instead. The…
Gellhorn
Editor's Note: The Nobel Committee's decision to name Iranian human-rights lawyer and activist Shirin Ebadi the 2003 peace laureate has turned her into a household name throughout Iran and the Muslim world. Moreover, the 56-year-old Ebadi has become an alternative source of moral authority in…
The Code of the Warrior
I WAS READING ALONG in a library copy of C.S. Lewis's book "The Four Loves," which, to my mild chagrin, had been underlined and sidelined by various earlier readers using different markers: both fine and soft pencils and a ballpoint pen. I'm afraid that the writing of Lewis, a wise man whose style…
LIEUTENANT GENERAL William Boykin, deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence and a highly decorated officer, has intimated that the United States is a Christian country and that he is, himself, a Christian. Journalists across the nation are shocked and horrified. Apparently the general has…
IN A LITTLE-NOTICED DECISION in a New York courtroom on September 25, 2003, a man described as Osama bin Laden's "best friend" got some good news. U.S. District Court Judge Deborah Batts ruled that Mahmdouh Mahmud Salim could not be sentenced to life in prison. Salim--who was present at the…
THE "LIVING WAGE" movement has become the latest effort to impose socialism on the United States, one city at a time. After a slow beginning in the 1990s, living wage ordinances--which impose minimum wages much higher than the federal one--have now been adopted in over 100 municipalities, from…
Doing Our Own Thing
Mercy in Florida Two weeks ago Wesley J. Smith wrote in these pages about the case of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Clearwater, Florida, woman whose husband wants her dead. Unfortunately for her, Michael Schiavo is also his wife's legal guardian, and with the help of his creepy right-to-die…
Rumsfeld
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, October 31, a low-key ceremony is to take place on the fourth floor of a pastel-pink palace in the new Malaysian capital of Putrajaya. In the privacy of his inner chambers, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad will hand over his "job manual"--a largely symbolic binder of…
AMERICANS learned from Afghanistan that neglect of impoverished, out-of-the-way places can be costly. This is especially true of Islamic Africa--where Osama bin Laden has been known to take refuge and in whose vicinity his followers have found both recruits and targets for their bombs. So it is…
IT WAS A TOUGH AND TRICKY CROWD. When Joe Lieberman took the stage, on October 17, and politely reaffirmed his commitment to the security of a Jewish state in Israel, he was booed and heckled for it. Yet the next day, when it was his turn to address the Dearborn, Michigan, candidates' forum…
The Bunker Mentality Congress throws a whole lot of money down a whole lot of holes. But there are holes, and then there are holes, and the Capitol Visitor Center was a money pit from the beginning. Back in 1991, when Congress first approved the sprawling, underground construction, Dan Glickman, a…
I WALKED A PICKET LINE THE OTHER DAY. I'm not a member of the union that was on strike, and it's not my line of work, anyway. I don't believe I've ever walked a picket line before, although I think I drink enough so that maybe I have and can't remember. (Just kidding. Sort of.) No, I never did. I…
Jerusalem