124 articles
WHY DON'T YOU AMERICANS mind your own business? That, in essence, is what the French thought the other day when a State Department officer took issue with President Jacques Chirac's proposal to outlaw the wearing of head scarves by Muslim girls, large crosses by Christians, and skullcaps by Jewish…
HOWARD DEAN has survived a bad month. Saddam Hussein was captured. The Democratic party appears to understand that Dean isn't electable. Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman and Congressman Richard Gephardt all have warned that Dean means certain electoral doom. They aren't exaggerating. Even the…
I hate to sound like I'm gloating, like I'm some kind of big shot, but I can practically guarantee that my "best book I've read this year" is better than your "best book I've read this year." That's because my best book may be the best book ever written--or best novel, anyway. I admit this only…
MOST ANALYSTS expected this year to end with a whimper. Instead, it is ending with a bang, and not only because Saddam Hussein was extracted from his rat hole. The economy is roaring ahead at a pace that so amazes observers they are guessing it will slow a bit in the new year. That would still mean…
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.
Like No Other Time
Human Accomplishment
PRESIDENT BUSH has gotten a bigger reelection boost in a shorter period of time than any other president ever. And that may be putting it mildly. Yes, Sherman's taking of Atlanta in early September 1864 was critical to Lincoln's reelection, and Bill Clinton's signing of welfare reform in 1996…
Newark, Delaware
WHEN SADDAM HUSSEIN was pulled from his spider hole looking like a bedraggled Walt Whitman after a month-long poetry slam, I experienced joy not just as an American, but as someone whose spirit has been knitted to those of my liberated Iraqi brothers. For a day, anyway, I felt like an Iraqi, and…
Nutcracker Nation
ARE AL QAEDA'S links to Saddam Hussein's Iraq just a fantasy of the Bush administration? Hardly. The Clinton administration also warned the American public about those ties and defended its response to al Qaeda terror by citing an Iraqi connection.
WE DON'T CLAIM to understand the mind of Howard Dean. With back-room assistance from a small army of Democratic party foreign policy brahmins, Dean recently produced a long, formal speech on "Meeting the Security Challenges of the New Century." The speech was advertised as a reassuring…
A Quagmire for Bush-bashers?
IN RETROSPECT, it should have been apparent that once Al Gore endorsed Howard Dean and his antiwar platform, and made an impassioned speech excoriating the war and the president, something big would go right in Iraq for the president, and Gore's stock would go down. After all, the last time Al Gore…
School for Scandal
AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE professor who created one of the computer rankings that determine which two college football teams will meet in the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), I find the controversy over the rankings mirrors American political culture. Indeed, it shows American character is still as…
1.
LENO USED TO HAVE A STORY he loved to tell about his early days at the Improv in New York. An older comic had started hanging around the club; he'd been out of the business for a while, and wanted to get back in. And he had material like, "You ever notice it's always the guys in uniform who get the…
HOW SOMEONE DIED can sometimes tell us more about a person than how they lived. At the very least, the events surrounding one's death can make that person more intriguing, as a new History Channel special--"The Day They Died"--attempts to reveal. The two-hour program profiles the deaths of 19…
EVER SINCE 1979, Shiite Muslim clerics have scared Americans. The trepidation is, of course, understandable. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini energized a generation of Islamic radicals. His theocratic revolution in Iran held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. His disciples directed and incited lethal…
John Clare
IN ONE CHRISTMAS MEMORY of mine all the kids and parents are finishing dessert. I light a cigarette. A particularly outspoken relative, who's been bossing the conversation all night, says he's read that cigarette smoke can damage children's hearing. I reply, "No more than the voices of opinionated…
The Colossus of New York
Act of Creation
South Central Iowa, December 7
Whose View of Life?
[img nocaption float="right" width="213" height="338" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]1109[/img][img nocaption float="right" width="254" height="324" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]1110[/img][img nocaption float="right" width="239" height="264" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]1111[/img][img nocaption…
WHEN CONGRESS resumes in January, it should right a long-standing wrong in our immigration law: the punishment of hapless children whose parents brought them to America illegally, but who have never known any other land. One way is to pass the "DREAM" Act, which cleared the Senate Judiciary…
BOB BARTLEY first entered my life in the late 1960s. He was then a young journalist on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, and he wanted to interview me about The Public Interest, of which he was, he said, an avid reader. I was amazed. The magazine, then edited by Daniel Bell and…
The Miseducation of Women
IT WAS A SAD SPECTACLE: Sitting next to Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, visiting emissary from the world's largest dictatorship, President Bush last week performed a kowtow that would have made Bill Clinton blush. Following a script dictated by Beijing, and translated into English by senior national…
AL GORE'S ENDORSEMENT of Howard Dean was anything but polite. A more diplomatic politician would have praised Dean's major rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination--Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman, John Kerry, John Edwards, Wesley Clark--as esteemed colleagues and said they were all capable…
AFTER THE LATE OCTOBER arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian oil-industry billionaire indicted for fraud and tax evasion, a striking consensus emerged among American commentators: President Vladimir Putin was moving Russia toward dictatorship. U.S. intellectuals and pundits, liberal and…
DR. KHALED ABOU EL FADL'S reputation as a moderate Muslim thinker earned him a seat on the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom last May. He is an accomplished legal scholar and an expert on Islamic jurisprudence. Born in Kuwait and bred in Egypt, Abou El Fadl is a professor…
Carl Henry, 1913-2003
WHEN AL GORE endorsed Howard Dean for president last Tuesday, first in New York City and again in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Tom Harkin, Iowa's four-term Democratic senator, was working in his office in Washington. He must have felt a little left out.
LATE AFTERNOON on Christmas Eve, the year I was eleven, my father took me with him across the river. I can't remember what the urgency was, but he needed some papers signed by a rancher who lived over on the other side of the Missouri from Pierre. So off we headed, west over the bridge and north…
AMONG THE MANY FAULTS charged against George W. Bush it is probably his conservative Christian faith that most troubles the people who dislike him--or most infuriates the people who hate him. Kevin Phillips has gone so far as to argue that Bush has reshaped the Republican party into a coalition…
7.
"Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form." —Michael…
CHRISTMAS MORNING two years ago, no one at my parents' house was allowed to use the telephone. We were waiting for a rare call from my brother from the Marine Corps Recruit Depot at Parris Island. When we heard from him, Michael regaled us with his experiences at boot camp--how hard the drill…
4.
HOWARD DEAN may have jumped the shark with his declaration that "the capture of Saddam has not made America safer," but don't tell that to the online world that the Dean campaign has built for itself.
IN HIS INITIAL COMMENTS on Saddam Hussein's capture, President Bush didn't mention the main reason we went after the brutal dictator in the first place. Not that Bush needed to go into the principal justification for invading Iraq. But the matter is worth bringing up--especially since Howard Dean,…
PITY THE POOR Democratic presidential candidates. They're really in a bind: They have no choice but to join in the international rejoicing over the capture of the Butcher of Baghdad, but at the same time they can't simply offer blanket approval for President Bush's Iraq policy. With the economy…
BACK IN 2001, in the golden age of cinema, when studios routinely put out classics like "A Beautiful Mind," "Moulin Rouge," and "I Am Sam," Hollywood observers dismissed the Academy of Motion Pictures' snub of "The Fellowship of the Ring" with a wave of the hand. "Oh don't worry," the sophisticates…
NO LESS SURREAL than the details of Saddam Hussein's hideaway--the copy of "Crime and Punishment," the Catholic image headed "God Bless Our Home," the can of 7-Up--were the photographs of reporters crawling all over the compound, inspecting it minutely, and even personally trying out the "spider…
THE PRICE OF OIL has jumped about 7 percent in the past two weeks. Under ordinary circumstances, and for most commodities, volatility comes as no surprise and is of little consequence. But oil is different. For one thing, its price is affected by a powerful cartel, OPEC, that tries to lock in price…
PRESIDENT BUSH'S MESSAGE to Iraqis on Sunday was deliciously absolute: "You will not have to fear the rule of Saddam Hussein ever again." Kanan Makiya's message to Iraqis does not convey the same sense of finality, but it rings just as true: You can never forget Saddam.
ON THANKSGIVING DAY, my wife and I woke up in a hotel in New York, where we'd come en route to a festive lunch with old friends. A waiter of Middle Eastern origin brought us our breakfast--not a remarkable event by itself. But consider the rest of our day.
A LEADING DEMOCRAT on the Senate Intelligence Committee has reiterated his support for the war in Iraq and encouraged the Bush administration to be more aggressive in its preemptive measures to protect Americans. Evan Bayh, a Democrat from Indiana and a leader of moderates in the Senate, responded…
BAGHDAD IS A GIFT to the cynical. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has erected miles of concrete blast barriers along major roads. Every entrance to the "Green Zone" is barricaded behind sandbags, razor wire, and at least one parked tank. Checkpoints, fortifications, large guns--the…
Diaspora
MARK BOCCI is a personal injury lawyer in Lake Oswego, Oregon. In the 1980s, he took the case of a Filipino-American high school student who had suffered a grievous injury playing football. Kneed in the head by an all-state fullback, "Richard" suffered headaches and dizziness for two days, then…
Tolkien and the Great War
IS MARRIAGE WORTH a constitutional amendment? A fair number of conservatives think not. "Leave it up to the states!" urges John McLaughlin. George Will, with customary eloquence, calls "constitutionalizing social policy" both a "misuse of fundamental law" and "imprudent . . . at a moment when we…
ON NOVEMBER 28, the Broadcasting Board of Governors announced a decision that effectively closes down Radio Free Europe. The board eliminated practically all of the historic RFE broadcast services, leaving only a South Slavic service that was added after the end of the Cold War, during the later…
Bush's Baghdad Surprise
DEMOCRATS ROUTINELY COMPLAIN that President Bush and his political team call them unpatriotic for criticizing Bush on the war in Iraq. Democratic senator John Kerry, a struggling presidential candidate, last week went one step further. Addressing the Council on Foreign Relations, Kerry claimed to…
Books in Brief Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis (Pantheon, 224 pp., $24). Inside Laura Kipnis, there's a talented social satirist screaming to get out. Kipnis's "Against Love" attacks contemporary American ideals of love, marriage, sexual fidelity, and family life. Along the way, Kipnis…
Skopje, Macedonia
AH, SADDAM, SADDAM, SADDAM. What has it all come to, eh, my friend? All those palaces, all those solid gold toilets, all those deliciously terrified looks in people's eyes. All that hard work, and you just wind up looking like Jerry Garcia after a show.
COUNTING LAST TUESDAY'S get-together in New Hampshire, there have been eight Democratic presidential debates during the last three months. What a long, strange trip it's been, beginning in New Mexico on September 4. From there, the left-leaning field took the proverbial left turn at Albuquerque,…
LET'S BE CRASS and assess the politics of the capture of Saddam Hussein. No one is boosted more than President Bush, the beneficiary of so much good news this fall (surging economy, 10,000 Dow, Medicare drug benefit). For him, only one more thing has to fall into place to assure re-election. That's…
THE REASON I checked out of "24," the intriguing Fox network series, was that the show suffered from Sudden Supporting Character Death Syndrome. Every interesting supporting character--the policewoman with the Macy Gray hair, the girl from "Roseanne"--was dispatched, often in a grisly manner, and…
IT'S NOT EVERY DAY you see famous, brand-name American companies acting like 10-year-old girls. But that's exactly how US Airways and the Internet travel site Expedia.com are behaving in their squabble over electronic booking fees. Consider:
YEARS AGO a writer of some distinction told me that books sometimes read you. I had no idea what he meant--until a book read me.
USING "embryonic stem cell research" (ESCR) as a Trojan Horse, the authors of New Jersey Assembly Bill 2840 are trying to sneak one of the most radical human cloning legalization schemes ever proposed into law. How radical is A-2840? If the bill passes, it will be legal in New Jersey to implant…
ANTI-SPAM LEGISLATION landed on the president's desk on Monday with a loud splat. It is a patchwork of the nice-sounding, completely useless bits from the different proposals, all rolled into one.
President Bush, we suspect, is going to overrule the Pentagon's attempt to exclude from the bidding for Iraq reconstruction contracts certain countries that have opposed U.S. policy in Iraq. He might as well do it sooner rather than later, so as to minimize the diplomatic damage done by the…
THE WORLD is full of interesting theories.
Berlin
LONGTIME READERS will remember Allen Barra, formerly of the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Barra is the sportswriter who relies solely on math for his evaluation of athletics and worships at the high church of statistics. He is the bright light who, days before Super Bowl XXXVI, wrote:
GOING INTO THE FINAL DAY of the college football regular season, Oklahoma was undefeated and ranked Number 1. The Sooners had the best defense in the nation, had outscored their opponents by an average of 35 points and had a 9-game winning streak against ranked teams. "OU: Among best ever?" USA…
WEEKS BEFORE British flash mobs were quickening to the rings of their cell phones, barking furiously in the steps of President George W. Bush as he visited London, the Booker Prize committee sent its own signal regarding the United States of America. But instead of a thousand shouts and protest…
U.S.-CHINA-TAIWAN POLICY contains a host of formulations, complications, and nuances, all of which (at least most of which!) we are happy to discuss. But let's not lose sight of the forest for the trees.
WE WERE TAUGHT in graduate economics classes that if a country runs large and persistent trade deficits, the value of its currency will decline relative to the value of the currencies of its trading partners. Oh yes, other things being equal, of course. Then we entered the real world and found that…
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.
ON THE SURFACE, it might seem like a simple case of media bias. In the November 24, 2003, WEEKLY STANDARD, Stephen F. Hayes summarized and quoted at length a recent, secret Pentagon memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The memo laid out--in 50 bullet points, over 16 pages--the relationship…
"WE'RE IN REBUILDING mode," says Tony Perkins, the new president of the Family Research Council. "We're planning on bringing back the FRC." Describing himself as a "diplomat" and a "risk-taker," Perkins, a former Louisiana legislator, says he means to restore the FRC to the position of influence it…
Jefferson's Demons
"YOU FUMBLED THE BALL! You fumbled the ball! You embarrassed yourself and your team and your MOTHER!" Until you've had these words shouted directly into your ear by 100 drunken horn players in unison, you haven't really lived. Last weekend, I was lucky enough to relive this experience at the 120th…
Baghdad
THE 2003 RECIPIENT of the Nobel Prize in Literature is not a surprise choice. J.M. Coetzee appeared on many lists of likely candidates, since his nine books of fiction, as well as his critical essays, have won him worldwide attention. This is no more than Coetzee deserves: His spare, disciplined…
ON NOVEMBER 22, sometime around 5 A.M., President Bush called Rep. Steve Chabot to talk about drugs. About two hours earlier, Chabot, a conservative Republican from Cincinnati, had cast his vote against the 681-page Medicare Prescription Drug and Modernization Act of 2003, under which Medicare, the…
WANT TO CURB federal spending? Replace President Bush with a Democrat. This is not entirely a joke. With Republicans in control of the White House and Congress since 2000--except for an interlude in 2001-2002 when Democrats held the Senate--spending has risen at roughly three times the rate of the…
Strange Bedfellows It's been a Personal Lifestyle Choices theme month in the Democratic presidential contest. On November 14, for example, John Kerry opted out of the federally financed system of primary-phase "matching funds"--a decision apparently intended to shore up Kerry's image as a…
The Murder Room
The Georgetown Ladies' Social Club
Had Enough?
Paris
LESS THAN AN HOUR after hijacked jetliners hit the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, the Coast Guard called "all available boats" to the New York City waterfront. Fishing trawlers, ferries, cargo ships, and luxury yachts came in droves. By day's end, over 300,000 people had left the…
Books Worth Giving This Christmas Every year, as the passing seasons rest again in winter from their autumnal labors, and Christmas nears anew with its bright promise of friends and family, calling us to recollect for one brief moment our better selves, I realize with sudden freshness--like a…
TODAY MARKS the 23rd anniversary of John Lennon's murder by a deranged fan, an act that at once revivified the ex-Beatle's career and established his 1971 song "Imagine" as the official utopian anthem. For millions of people around the world, the song's three minutes of bumper-sticker slogans…
THE ADAGE that every generation gets the president it deserves applies equally well to popular culture. We get the TV shows, pop songs, and cinema we deserve. Movie stars, too. The greatest generation got Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, and Cary Grant. (Bogart and Tracy served stints in the Navy.)…
BY MIDNIGHT West Coast time tonight, Arnold Schwarzenegger will have solved California's fiscal mess. Well, not solved it, exactly, but he is poised to deliver on the last of his big three recall promises. The Governator wants the legislature to sign off on a $15 billion deficit bond, which voters…
[img caption="Photo by Sgt. Lisa Jendry: Stryker infantry carrier vehicles at the Rodriguez Range Complex in South Korea, Aug. 4, 2003." float="right" width="400" height="262" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8839[/img] AFTER NEARLY A YEAR in the Iraqi hornets' nest, 130,000 U.S. troops continue to…
ASKED HOW his life has changed during his first year as the junior senator from Texas, John Cornyn has a quick answer: "It's totally unpredictable." He explains: "I was used to having a schedule and keeping it. . . . But here you're subject to a calendar set by the leadership. It's very hard to…
CATHOLIC BISHOPS have been making noises about disciplining Catholic politicians who advocate for policies opposed to Church teaching. If you are an observant Catholic, don't get your hopes up.
THERE IS A BULL ELEPHANT in the living room of the Terri Schiavo case that many adamantly refuse to see. Terri's husband Michael Schiavo has fallen in love with another woman. He has lived with his "fiancé" now for many years. The couple has been blessed with two children together. By any…
THERE'S NO GAINSAYING the quality of many of the people who are risking their lives to build the new Iraq. On that score, it was gratifying to learn that Rend Rahim Francke will represent the Iraqi Governing Council in Washington. A longtime supporter of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and one who…
MEDIA BIAS is alive and well and busily promoting the brave new world. I personally experienced the phenomenon recently when I participated in an educational symposium in Frankfort, Kentucky (along with Drs. David Prentice and John Hubert). Our purpose was to provide empirical and moral support for…
HOWARD DEAN wants Osama bin Laden to get 30 years to life. No hanging by the neck until dead. No firing squad. Not even a lethal injection for being the mastermind behind the deaths of more than 3,000 Americans.
SENIOR BUSH ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS may be engineering a dramatic and dangerous shift in American policy toward Taiwan as a gift to the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who is visiting the United States next week. There are two elements of this proposed policy change, both of which favor Beijing at the…
BY NOW, we will have consumed the leftovers from our Thanksgiving feasts, which saw us dispose of 45 million turkeys, perhaps 200 million sweet potatoes, and at least 50 million pies of various sorts. Add in stuffing made from white bread, cranberry sauce loaded with sugar, and carrots roasted in…
DOES GEN. WESLEY CLARK SUBSCRIBE TO THE WEEKLY STANDARD? Commentary, maybe? Because he seems to know a lot about, as he puts it, the "neoconservative press." Yesterday on CNN's "Late Edition," for example, Clark said--not for the first time--that the Bush administration's war plans extend far…
The Meaning of Everything
WHEN GEORGE W. BUSH first entered the White House, the conventional wisdom was that his inexperience and lack of vision in foreign policy would be compensated for by his wise and experienced cabinet. This may or may not have been a reasonable view at the time. Right now, however, it is clear that…
Crossing the River
The Old News on Saddam and Osama Stephen F. Hayes's article last week on the history of friendly contact between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden ("Case Closed") provoked criticism from several quarters, including from the Pentagon itself--where the secret memo on Iraqi-al Qaeda links obtained by…
Tokyo
ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, acts of war were unleashed on the United States by a stateless international enemy which we know as al Qaeda. Actually, al Qaeda formally declared war against the United States during the late 1990s, but most of the American public did not pay much attention. That changed, of…
Loose Lips
LAST WEEK, the long-awaited Massachusetts Goodridge gay-marriage decision came down--hard. In a 4-3 ruling, the Massachusetts high court held that the millennia-old, cross-cultural definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman is utterly irrational. Using the lowest level of scrutiny…
AMERICAN REACTIONS to the recent bombing of a foreign workers' compound in Riyadh reveal multiple misreadings of the Arab world and--more dangerously--of both al Qaeda and the Saudis. The media seem to equate Arab with Muslim and, along with some in the administration, think that al Qaeda's war is…
MIGUEL ESTRADA, Janice Rogers Brown, Patricia Owen, and Carolyn Kuhl had their turn in the spotlight two weeks ago, at an all-night Senate debate over confirmation of judicial nominees. But a recent Democratic fundraising memo reveals that Charles Pickering--the first Bush judicial nominee to be…
THE OLD BROMIDE about generals preparing to fight the last war misses the point: What military leaders can't resist is the impulse to plan for the war they'd like to fight. The current leaders of the Pentagon seem particularly susceptible to this impulse. The idea of military "transformation" is…
THE OTHER DAY I was signing a few books, after a talk I gave at a women's club in Chicago, when someone remarked on the weather, and a very nice woman cited Mark Twain as saying, "It's heaven for climate, it's hell for company." I hesitated, then remarked, "Forgive me, but Mark Twain wasn't the…
IF PORK WERE A FUEL that could produce electricity and power SUVs, America would now be independent of imported oil. Unfortunately, the pork contained in the first new energy bill in over a decade has more to do with a desire to please Iowa corn farmers and assorted auto and energy companies than…
CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS were lining up votes last week for a compromise bill creating a prescription drug benefit for America's 40 million elderly. At the same time, Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle was waving a placard with a picture of a lemon, the letters "Rx," and a slash across both. He…
EL GRECO is an anomaly. He was the most extremely mannered of Mannerist painters--yet he lived outside that tradition, having merely bumped into it in Italy on his way from Greece to Spain. He learned to paint icons in the outmoded fashion of a dying empire, and he adapted it to the needs of a…
Books in Brief General Washington's Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming, 1783 by Stanley Weintraub (Free Press, 224 pp., $25). In 1783 the greatest military in the world had been outwitted and defeated at the hands of a popular rebel leader. Yet, at the moment of victory, when a continent…
I KNOW EVERYONE is supposed to think about Thanksgiving before it happens and be consciously grateful prior to the feast, but I always reflect on my blessings afterwards, when we've eaten our fill and must begin the hard work of getting back into the shape we were never in in the first place. This…