105 articles
THESE DAYS IT IS HARD TO TELL that Berlin was a divided city. There's hardly a trace of the Wall left, save for a block strip. On Potsdamer Platz, once known as a no-man's-land with concrete barriers and barbed wire, there's a Starbucks, McDonald's, and an Eddie Bauer. In the heart of the platz is…
THE POLITICAL WORLD spent this past week analyzing Ralph Nader's decision to run for president, but lost was this nugget from Sunday's "Meet the Press" appearance:
THOUSANDS OF WOMEN parade through dusty streets, covered in blue burqas. They float around the impoverished city like ghosts, their burqas concealing their entire body, from the tops of their heads to their feet. They are chanting, "We are not political. We are widows," as they demonstrate for the…
A LOT OF PEOPLE are calling it the "forgotten war," but nearly 10,000 U.S. troops are still stationed in Afghanistan hunting after al Qaeda foot soldiers and their Taliban supporters--trudging through the craggy hills and dusty bazaars of what used to be considered the front line of America's war…
THERE ARE A COUPLE of key pieces of conventional wisdom floating downstream from Washington these days. The first is that a Bush-Kerry race will be very, very close. Bush-Gore close.
DR. LENORA FULANI, the New York-based radical activist, supports Ralph Nader's independent run for the White House in 2004. On Tuesday, Fulani told me she is "excited" about Nader's run, which he first announced on Sunday's "Meet the Press." "I think it's pretty cool," she said. "I think Nader is a…
IT HAS BEEN almost 50 years since our government decided to emblazon "In God we trust" on the nation's paper currency. That's more comforting to some than "In markets we trust," but somewhat less accurate, now that the Bush administration has abandoned the so-called "strong dollar" policy of Bill…
LUTECE, for four decades New York's premier French restaurant, is closing for good this month. The news has hit me hard. I remember Lutèce from the go-go 1980s. Giants walked on Broadway in those days--Leona Helmsley and Ivan Boesky, Keith Hernandez and Vernon Mason. My perch in the Manhattan…
OVER THE PAST YEAR, the goal of democratizing the Arab Middle East has been elevated from wooly-headed ideal to national security imperative and a key part of the war on terrorism. The Bush administration judged that political dysfunction and failing, corrupt autocracies were making Muslims, and…
Goya
THE GENERAL SECRETARY of China's Communist party could not have expected a better reception if he'd been Charles de Gaulle liberating Paris. The Eiffel Tower was illuminated in red and a Chinese cultural parade made its way down the Champs Elysées in honor of Hu Jintao's visit to France. While…
IN AN ACT OF ASTONISHING SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS and self-congratulation, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has forced the question of marriage upon the entire United States.
Stupid Professor Tricks
The Case for Israel
REMEMBER THE BEAR in the woods? It was featured in the most devastating of President Reagan's TV ads in the 1984 presidential race. An angry, menacing bear was shown prowling through a forest. "There's a bear in the woods," the narrator said. "For some people the bear is easy to see. Others don't…
GEORGE W. BUSH thinks the biggest danger to his second term comes from John Kerry, but it may come from $35 oil. His political team worries that last week's decision by the OPEC oil cartel to cut output, in order to keep oil prices up, will kill off the economic recovery. They can't forget what Dan…
Sacramento
I love to do my thing / Ha . . . and I don't need, no one else / Sometimes I feel so nice, good God / I jump back, I wanna kiss myself.--James Brown
WITH ALL THE TURMOIL SURROUNDING David Kay's comments on the failure to find stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons in Iraq, it is time to return to first principles, and to ask the question: Was it right to go to war?
"ONE MIGHT CONCLUDE, from his conduct over the past three years," John Podhoretz begins "Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane" (St. Martin's, 276 pp., $24.95), "that George W. Bush was put on this earth to do two things: First, to lead the United States…
A PERSIAN PROVERB SAYS, "He who makes the same mistake twice deserves disillusion." The British government is about to find out the truth of that saying, for once again it is wooing the mullahs of Tehran. Last week Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, was dispatched to Tehran to raise the…
THE WEEKEND OF February 6 saw yet another deadly incident in Moscow, when an explosion in the subway killed at least 39 people. Predictably, Russian president Vladimir Putin blamed the bloodshed on "Chechens." Doubts abound, however, among ordinary Russians as well as journalists. Newspaper…
ONE OF LENNY BRUCE'S most famous bits--and this is a very loose paraphrase--concerned Jewish guilt for the crucifixion. "Folks," he would say wearily, "I've gotta be honest. We did it. And I'm real sorry. But we did it. I just found the proof in our attic. Turns out it was my Uncle Lou."
EVERY SO OFTEN, an item on a menu that has been a constant for years will suddenly vanish. You might still be able to order it by special request, but sooner or later you will ask yourself, Whatever happened to the Waldorf salad? What happened is it became extinct. In "Kitchen Confidential," chef…
ON SUNDAY, Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and former Green party presidential candidate, announced that he is an independent candidate for president in 2004. But will a Nader run this year make a difference? Top Democrats seem to think so. Over the last few weeks, Nader has been the subject of…
HOWARD DEAN SOUNDED WORRIED. Last Wednesday in Burlington, Vermont, toward the end of his announcement that his presidential candidacy was over, Dean paused and looked directly at his audience of supporters. "Let me be clear," Dean said. "I will not run as an independent or third party candidate."…
ONE OF THE MORE DISTURBING hallmarks of the cloning debate has been the inaccurate and unscientific language used by cloning proponents to describe human cloning for biomedical research. There is a reason for this disingenuous approach to cloning advocacy. When cloning is accurately described as…
IT TOOK A LOT OF DIGGING, but my producer Duane was able to find the audio from John Kerry's 1971 appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I played the entire 19 minutes for my radio audience on February 17, and the reaction via the phones and email was uniform: Disliking John…
WHAT HAS HOWARD DEAN WROUGHT? The answer is not what he's been credited with. Sure, he raised money on the Internet, activated some previously inactive Democratic voters, and built an impressive database. Fine. But his most important legacy was pulling the Democratic presidential candidates to the…
ARIZONA SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN is among the most vociferous critics of the Bush administration's inability to rein-in nondefense spending. He recently encouraged the administration to veto the Senate's proposed six-year, $318 billion highway reauthorization bill. McCain, one of only twenty-one…
WHEN THE PRESS GROTESQUELY DISTORTS YOUR ISSUE, don't get mad, set the record straight--clearly, affirmatively, with documents and web links at the ready, so that people can check your accuracy for themselves.
ROY MOORE, you will recall, is the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who last summer defied a federal court order to remove his hefty Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the State Judicial Building. The order eventually was carried out by the associate justices of his…
"THE DAMNDEST THING JUST HAPPENED," an early morning caller who is close to the Schiavo case enthused on my voice mail. "The Second District Court of Appeal actually decided to start applying the law." That would be big news. One of the most outrageous aspects of the Terri Schiavo debacle has been…
ONE OFTEN HEARS WASHINGTON, D.C., shamed for its sartorial cluelessness. The putdown holds, more or less, that a fashionable dresser would be as out of place among the capital's armies of shabbiness as a harlequined jester in a sea of black turtlenecks.
Lessons of the Masters
What Price the Moral High Ground?
U.N.-Accountable
EXECUTIVES at MTV decided that 100 million Americans would want to watch onetime teen heartthrob Justin Timberlake violently expose the mutilated breast of the 40-ish rock singer Janet Jackson during the halftime show of last week's CBS's Super Bowl broadcast. We have no interest in disputing that…
THE PERFECT SHOWER requires very hot water and a great deal of steam. It needs extra nozzles to surround you with spray, a hot-water heater big enough to run for ages, and a place to lounge while contemplating the enormity of God's creation and placing bets with yourself about which condensed-steam…
HOW CONVENIENT that Douglas Brinkley's hagiographic "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War" should be hitting bookstores just as Kerry's star ascends in the Democratic primaries. Less convenient, perhaps, is the fact that another Kerry book is getting hot right now: "The New Soldier,"…
Nations and alliances should move early to deal with crises while they are still ambiguous and can be dealt with more easily, for delay raises both the costs and risks. Early action is the objective to which statesmen and military leaders should resort. --Wesley Clark, "Waging Modern War" (2001)…
GEORGE W. BUSH is a September 12 person. John Kerry is a September 10 person. The difference is real. A September 12 person was traumatized by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. A September 12 person believes the world we thought existed before the…
THE Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, my hometown newspaper, unintentionally broke some news on its website last Thursday after Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet defended his agency in a speech at Georgetown University.
TO REASSESS ABRAHAM LINCOLN on his 195th birthday is to learn a lost truth: During much of his political career, Lincoln focused not on the moral issue of slavery but on economic policy. Yet slavery and economic policy were tightly linked in his worldview.
AS FASCINATION with Shakespeare's dramas and poems endures, the desire to know more about the inner life of the greatest literary figure in the English language intensifies--though scholars have always failed to satisfy it, because "there is no evidence, you know." That was the pithy response of…
Books in Brief
FOR THE LAST WEEK, much of Britain has borne witness to an outpouring of grief the like of which has not been seen since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. When Baron Hutton of Bresagh, knight of the realm, Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, a hitherto rather inconspicuous retired member of the…
BOTH ZEALOUS CRITICS and supporters of President Bush's war against Saddam seem finally to have agreed on one thing--the Central Intelligence Agency goofed. The president's own Iraq weapons sleuth, David Kay, now asserts that our intelligence on Iraq was simply wrong, that Saddam didn't have…
Remembering Paco
Editor's Note: On February 9, the New York Times reported the existence of a memo allegedly from terrorist and al Qaeda affiliate Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi to al Qaeda leaders, in which Zarqawi asks for assistance in fomenting a "sectarian war" in Iraq. The memo, which was discovered in Baghdad on…
ISTANBUL
RATHER THAN SPEND 24 HOURS celebrating love and romance tomorrow, some politically correct feminists would prefer we spend Valentine's Day pondering rape, incest, and domestic violence. Inaugurated in 1998, "V-Day"--the term a coalition of feminist groups use to describe their new version of…
IN 1989, Walker Percy sent a letter to Bruce Springsteen. Percy was a not-exactly famous Southern Catholic writer. Springsteen was a rock megastar and cultural icon. Their correspondence, you can imagine, was unexpected.
WITH LESS THAN 38 WEEKS until the November 2nd vote, radio hosts have got to sharpen the message. That's less than 200 broadcast days, and even with 15 segments per three hour show, that's only 3,000 opportunities to present a four- to twelve-minute segment that focuses on some aspect of John…
LAST MONTH, a federal judge in Harlingen, Texas, sentenced Juan Carlos Soto, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, to 23 years in prison. That is the longest allowed under the sentencing guidelines. Any lesser sentence would have been incomprehensible.
WHEN WESLEY CLARK formally bows out of the race later today, it's won't be because, as his son has recently charged, the media did him in. It will be because the man, by some accounts a decent fellow who served his country well, was not ready for prime time.
FROM THE LOOKS OF THE PRESS RELEASE accompanying the review copy, I thought I was in for yet another harsh critique of America's Iraqi "quagmire."
THERE ARE PLENTY OF GOOD THINGS to say about "Sex and the City," the HBO comedy now in its last two episodes. It can be funny. It can be fun to watch. And there is the occasional great one liner, especially from the cynical Miranda, played by Cynthia Nixon: "Don't talk to me about…
EVEN CONSERVATIVES WHO ARE RESIGNED, more or less, to the president's "big government conservatism" get a little giddy when the White House releases its budget each year. Perhaps, they whisper among themselves, this will be the year that the president gets out the machete and truly clears some…
LAST FRIDAY, Richard Lawless, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, told a congressional commission that Taiwan faces a significant military threat from China, and that Taiwan consequently needs to improve its defenses. Regarding the referendum that will be held on March 20 on whether Taiwan…
IT IS AS IF the media elite is daring moviegoers to dislike Sofia Coppola and the Best Picture-nominated film she wrote and directed, "Lost in Translation." Teasing a feature article in which directors of last year's Oscar-likely movies talk with each other, Newsweek--the coolest of the…
"IT'S CLEARLY A BUDGET. It's got a lot of numbers in it," George W. Bush told a reporter during his run for the presidency some four years ago. After examining the budget that the president submitted to Congress last week most of Washington is saying, "It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of lies…
ON JANUARY 16, Taiwan's president, Chen Shui-bian, announced the wording of the referendums he intends to put on the ballot in March, when the people of Taiwan go to the polls to elect a president. The referendums will ask whether, in the face of the missile threat from the mainland, Taiwan should…
NATURE ISN'T, as they used to say in the 1960s, my bag. I've known this for some time but realized it afresh recently when, on a non-matrimonial trip to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, I found myself not unimpressed--no one could ever be that--but a bit repelled by the scene before me. Niagara…
IT HAS ALREADY BECOME conventional wisdom that President Bush's proposed mission to send a man to Mars will cost a trillion dollars--even many trillions of dollars. At that cost, it's no wonder public support for the White House space vision is wavering. But is that number credible? Where does it…
Tour of Duty
OVER THE WEEKEND of January 10-13, 300 leaders from the United States and 38 Muslim countries convened in Doha, Qatar, for a "U.S.-Islamic World Forum." Jointly sponsored by the government of Qatar and the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, the forum proved the…
CLOSE YOUR EYES on some days, and you can almost believe it: You're back somewhere in the mid-1980s, 1984 to be precise. At least from the Democrats' side of the aisle. There it all is: The Republican president denounced as a dunce and a dangerous cowboy; the left on a tear against corporations and…
THE COME-FROM-BEHIND triumph of John Kerry in Iowa and New Hampshire does more than make the Massachusetts senator a prohibitive favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination. It marks the defeat of Howard Dean's antiwar, left-populist rebellion by the quintessential candidate of the…
Wired
WHEN JOHN KERRY SPOKE to a rally after winning the New Hampshire primary, he employed the language of populism. Kerry is well educated, well-to-do, and wedded to an heiress. But in his speech he positioned himself as a champion of the common man. America, he said, doesn't belong to "the…
VIRTUALLY SINCE this magazine started eight years ago, we have argued that the American military, and especially the U.S. Army, was too small. We agreed with most defense experts that American troops need new technologies to "transform" their operations and maintain their tactical prowess. But we…
LET'S SAY you're a Republican strategist. It's around 10 P.M. on Tuesday, January 26, and you're watching Senator John Kerry, Democrat from Massachusetts, deliver his valedictory speech to supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire. Kerry has just been declared the winner in the New Hampshire primary.…
Books in Brief Storms, Ice, and Whales: The Antarctic Adventures of a Dutch Artist on a Norwegian Whaler by Willem van der Does (Eerdmans, 391 pp., $29). Whaling, writes Willem van der Does, is "probably the most adventurous work that has ever existed," and few readers of his account of a 1923…
The New York Times's "Conservative Beat"
THE IMMENSELY POPULAR "Lord of the Rings" movies follow Frodo Baggins on a journey to rid Middle-earth of a ring that is compelling, powerful, and evil. The ring has destroyed countless lives, but each person who possesses it in turn believes himself immune to its malevolent force and is…
I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, but I'm one hundred percent behind a newer, bigger space program. I just have one question: Exactly what have we gotten from the old one besides Velcro and Tang?
THE IDEA of John Le Carre playing around with the arguments and headlines of the war on terrorism promises immense fun. If any sane editor were given God-like powers to sic a writer on the spy games of Iraq, al Qaeda, and the Bush-Blair clandestine warriors, Le Carre would be the man, no contest.…
SAY THIS about John Kerry: At least his grandfather wasn't a Nazi. For all the oppo research that will be done on him, having a Fascist relative is something that probably won't come up. Which is not the case for some politicians in Germany, where 60 years later, questions about a family's past…
ONE OF THE TOUGHER DAYS in the life of a book section editor must come when he or she receives a review of a book by one of the paper's own writers that the reviewer finds not up to par. Thus, it was especially brave of the Washington Post last Sunday to run a review of "The Perfect Wife," a book…
WITH JOHN KERRY far ahead of the pack and almost certainly the nominee, the digging into his record has begun. Kerry hasn't made it difficult to unearth troubling stances when it comes to his positions on national security matters.
ON THE EVE of the 1996 election, I had a long conversation with a friend on the Dole campaign who was traveling with the candidate as he made his last-minute hopscotch across the country. I had just offered him condolences on the race when he corrected me. Speaking from an airport pay phone in the…
THE WORST THING about the collapse of the Howard Dean phenomenon is that it cuts short our acquaintance with the most appealing figure to emerge from the Democratic primaries--Dr. Judith Steinberg, as they know her at the office, and after hours, Judy Dean.
IN THE ANNALS of presidential primaries, the assessment of frontrunner John Kerry by his chief opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination, John Edwards, may be the kindest ever uttered. Kerry, he said, "is a friend of mine. I have great respect for him." Sure, he and Kerry have…
JOHN EDWARDS has a problem even if he wins the South Carolina primary today.
WHEN NEW YORK KNICKS president Isaiah Thomas announced recently that he was bringing Lenny Wilkens back to the NBA to coach in New York, people across America turned to each other with the same question: "Isn't he about 80?"
A FEW DAYS from now the finance ministers of the world's richest, industrialized countries will gather in Orlando, Florida, for still another meeting of the G7. What better place to escape the wintry weather that is making life miserable in many of their countries than the warm climate of Florida,…
The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen
Manchester, New Hampshire
WHEN JAMES ROSENQUIST'S great engulfing multipanel installation "F-111" was shown at the Castelli Gallery in 1965, the shock waves were felt throughout the art world. The shock combined visceral impact with scandal. Rosenquist, who'd gotten by during his apprentice years by painting outdoor…
SINCE JUNE, intermittent reports have suggested Riyadh was on the verge of taking firm action against terror financiers among the Saudi elite. After a series of unexplained delays, a U.S. delegation visiting the Saudi capital in December finally secured Saudi agreement to shut the offices of the al…
IN THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST, much more than in the West, history is a living force. Denominated by faith, animated by folklore and daily language rich in religious allusion, and remembered overwhelmingly through military victory and defeat, Islamic history is an emotional keyboard for even the least…
REPUBLICANS who dream of attacking John Edwards for making his fortune as a trial lawyer should know that his most famous lawsuit--the one he talks about most on the campaign trail--involved a little girl condemned to a lifetime of feeding tubes when she became caught in a powerful drain in a…
EVERY SO OFTEN I engage in an exercise in futility known as The Search for New Eyeglasses. It's not that I'm picky or that I have a hard-to-fill prescription. Rather, I just can't seem to find a pair that fits. Even before resting the glasses on my nose, I'll notice myself stretching the frame to…
EVIDENCE continues to build that the terrorist "resistance" in the Sunni Triangle, far from being a spontaneous response to new frustrations, has a history and an ideology. The correct name for the main influence inciting Sunni Muslim Iraqis to attack coalition forces is Wahhabism, although its…
HOW MUCH is worldwide access to abortion worth? What price are the international activists who cluster around the United Nations willing to pay to achieve the ability of any woman--at any place, for any reason--to have an abortion?
Clark Blindsided by Baptists
MARRIAGE IS SLOWLY DYING IN SCANDINAVIA. A majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock. Sixty percent of first-born children in Denmark have unmarried parents. Not coincidentally, these countries have had something close to full gay marriage for a decade or more. Same-sex…
Greenville, South Carolina
Sojourner
Manchester, New Hampshire
Books in Brief Loving Che by Ana Menéndez (Grove/Atlantic, 227 pp., $22). No question about it: Ernesto Che Guevara is the sexiest revolutionary of modern times. Executed October 8, 1967, by a drunken Bolivian army sergeant after he was captured while undertaking a singularly ill-organized attempt…
IF DAVID KAY is right about what his weapons inspection teams have found--or rather not found--in Iraq, it's clear the Bush administration was wrong about Iraq's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction. Kay, the former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, says there are no large chemical…
SHOULD JOHN F. KERRY--war hero, four-term senator from Massachusetts--become the Democratic party's nominee for president, he will likely appear to the nation about as thoughtful as the lines of his ponderously creased face, especially when his gently modulated utterances are compared to the…
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