92 articles
AFTER WAITING FOR MORE than three decades, Iraqis brutalized by Saddam Hussein and his regime will begin to see justice "in the next few weeks," according to Salem Chalabi, the director-general of the tribunal system established to try regime criminals. The court proceedings themselves are not…
WHAT LITTLE Terri Schiavo has left in this life, is being cruelly stripped away. Not only has a judge ordered her to die slowly by dehydration via having her tube-supplied food and water removed, but now, her (estranged) husband and legal guardian Michael Schiavo has completely isolated her from…
Siena, Italy
ON APRIL 17, as reported in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, two American women and an American man were slain in Kosovo, and eleven people were injured when they came under armed attack by a Palestinian from Jordan. The killer was a member of the same body in which they served: the United Nations police force…
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.
AFTER TRAIN WRECKS on Meet the Press and Good Morning America, John Kerry took his tattered credibility to the friendly confines of Hardball, where a sympathetic and compliant Chris Matthews did his very best to help Kerry make it through at least one interview without wandering into bizarre…
"THE USA PATRIOT ACT gives the government sweeping authority to monitor what books we read and buy." When that flat falsehood is being peddled by a national legislator, it's no wonder bookstores and libraries are circulating petitions to amend this fearful law, and ordinary American readers are…
"ABORT BUSH IN THE FIRST TERM." A group of women on the National Mall displayed a banner with these words during last Saturday's March for Women's Lives, while a throng of fellow abortion-rights demonstrators marched by, nodding their heads in approval. The banner's message couldn't have been more…
IF ANALYSTS AND INVESTORS would listen to Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan with a degree of precision equal to that which he employs when he speaks, the world of financial markets would be a calmer place. Those who reacted in mild panic to last week's testimony just weren't listening…
The Breaking of Nations
Lewisburg, Pa.
The Nerve
PRESIDENT BUSH used last week's press conference to argue that the short-term expenditure of American blood in Iraq is justified by the long-term benefits in increased security for Americans, greater freedom for Iraqis, and the possibility of a pacified, prosperous, and democratic Middle East that…
WHY FALLUJA? Why should this relatively obscure Iraqi city of half a million have become the crucible of atrocities against the Coalition in Iraq?
I ONCE ASKED my Jewish studies teacher, a mother of eleven, why women were expected to take care of children, and not men. "Women have breasts," she said, enunciating every word slowly while gesturing vaguely at her chest, "that they use to feed the babies. Men don't." In the years since, when I…
WHEN ASKED why they entered journalism, pretentious reporters will say they did so to expose injustice. But honest ones will admit that half the fun is confirming your own prejudices. One of my deepest-held is that 80 percent of the world, outside these United States, is a dreary, dysfunctional…
For Us, the Living
IN LIGHT OF Iran's growing political role in Iraq (to say nothing of reports of unofficial activity by Iranian agents), there is cause for concern in the steady stream of anti-American and anti-Coalition propaganda, including inflammatory lies, that continues to flow from Iran to audiences in Iraq…
MY GRANDMOTHER was a Catholic Republican--which is to say, she was an Irish woman who married an old-fashioned South Dakota lawyer, and since he became a Catholic for her sake, it seemed only fair that she become a Republican for his. But like many converts, she soon outstripped her sponsor in the…
Shruggery
TO SOME EXTENT it was probably inevitable that the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States--the "9/11 Commission" lately so much in the news--would deal unfairly with those individuals and agencies who were "supposed to" defend us against the attacks in question. Modern…
"A MILCH COW with 125 million teats" is how H.L. Mencken once described the United States government, but that was 70 years and 165 million teats ago. And anyway, I think he might have been wrong. Back in Mencken's day it was still possible to imagine an American citizen who had not yet affixed…
Books in Brief Taking on the Yankees: Winning and Losing in the Business of Baseball, 1903-2003 by Henry D. Fetter (W.W. Norton, 480 pp., $25.95). Hating the New York Yankees is as American as apple pie. Thus Henry Fetter's book on how baseball teams succeed or fail uses a deceptive title to catch…
AT HIS PRESS CONFERENCE Tuesday night, President Bush eloquently made the case for staying the course in Iraq. The next day, at City College in New York, Senator Kerry agreed: "It would be unwise beyond belief for the United States of America" to cut and run, and to "leave a failed Iraq in its…
A field outside Baghdad
"OKAY. IT DOESN'T seem all right to me, but what do I know? Nothing. What do they know? Everything. So I guess everything's okay."
Si Vis Pacem, Para Woodwardum
THE MAN BEING SENT to direct the organization and training of local police and security forces in Iraq is Major General David Petraeus. His duties, the Washington Post recently reported, will include overseeing the demobilization of the various Kurdish and Shiite armed militias, and their…
HOLLYWOOD HATES BUSH. Richard Clarke hates Bush. Is it any wonder that Sony Pictures has bought the rights to Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke's indignant I-was-there-so-I-should-know polemical memoir?
TODAY THE NATION REMEMBERS Pat Tillman, a standout safety for the Arizona Cardinals who was killed in action yesterday during a firefight in eastern Afghanistan. The national press considered Tillman something of an enigma. His decision to leave a lucrative career in the NFL in favor of enlisting,…
YOU WOULDN'T THINK Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has a lot in common with Haley Barbour, Mississippi's Republican governor. And you'd be right: One's a liberal, the other a conservative; one's a Northerner, the other a Southerner. One's been a senator for almost 20 years, the other a…
IMAGINE IT IS THE SPRING of 2006, John Kerry is president, and the Democrats hold the same number of Senate seats as the Republicans do today--51. President Kerry has made dozens of nominations to the bench, but he is frustrated because the Republican minority has used the filibuster to block floor…
THE GIGANTIC BUDGET DEFICIT in Maryland has prompted lawmakers to introduce a host of new taxes. A flush tax has been passed to pay for sewer upgrades and a car registration fee has been imposed to pay for transportation. A better way to fill the state's coffers would have been to eliminate the…
AIRING TONIGHT on PBS is the latest installment of Frontline, featuring an hour-long interview with Abdurahman Khan, a self-proclaimed "Son of Al Qaeda."
OVER AT JohnKerry.com's campaign blog, they're referring to Kerry's appearance on Meet the Press as a "home run." If that was a home run, I'd hate to see Kerry strike out. On question after question, Kerry managed to turn under-armed softballs into high and tight strikes, and the damage from his…
JUST WHEN MCDONALD'S finally gets its act together--its stock price went from $16 to $30 and same-store sales experienced positive earnings for 11 consecutive months--the man responsible for the miraculous turnaround, 60-year-old CEO Jim Cantalupo, died of an apparent and sudden heart attack on…
Baghdad
HIS ONE-YEAR "paper" anniversary isn't for another seven months, but yesterday Arnold Schwarzenegger got a piece of paper he's long coveted. The Governator signed a workers' compensation reform bill that's as much a testament to his political skills as his promise to improve California's business…
BY THE DREARY STANDARDS of America's airlines, things are looking up. The six biggest carriers cut their 2002 losses of $7.4 billion to a mere $5.3 billion last year, and some may actually be in the black this year--if we ignore pension obligations. United Airlines remains a bankrupt, US Air…
BOBBY JINDAL led polls in the Louisiana governor's race last fall right up to Election Day. And for good reason: He was one of the most impressive candidates either party had fielded in any election in any state in recent years. Then he lost. A 32-year-old Republican from Baton Rouge, Jindal is the…
I DIDN'T SEE The Nick and Jessica Variety Hour on ABC last Sunday night, but according to Nielsen, about 11.4 million other viewers did. An hour of musical numbers and comedy sketches performed by husband-and-wife team Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson, the show won its time slot. It drew most of its…
IT IS INTERESTING TO NOTE that in the five films which he has directed, Quentin Tarantino has shot not a single love scene. It's not that he has an aversion to sex, per se. There's the sodomy forced on a bound and gagged Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction; there's the momentary Clinton-style copulation…
RICHARD BEN-VENISTE threw a knife at John Ashcroft and hit Jamie Gorelick between the shoulders. Thus did the most irresponsible member of an increasingly irresponsible commission finally draw some blood, even though his victim was unintended.
AMERICAN CATHOLICS now find themselves having to think about a question that concerns their church and the Democratic party's presumptive presidential nominee, John Kerry. The question is: Can Kerry be a good Catholic and yet take positions as a lawmaker that contradict the teachings of the church…
Nashville
WATCHING PRESIDENT BUSH'S PRESS CONFERENCE Tuesday night, you could see why he drives the press crazy. No matter what they asked, his answer was invariably the same: We're staying the course in Iraq. It's important to gaining freedom for Iraqis and winning the war on terror.
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.
THEY SAY that a week is a long time in politics, and we've just had proof of how true that is. It now seems hard to remember that just a few weeks ago George W. Bush was considered to have a sure winner in his Iraq policy, and an equally sure loser in his no-new-jobs recovery. With Iraq now in…
THE SIMILARITY struck everyone right away: Mogadishu, October 3, 1993--Falluja, March 31, 2004. But we cannot permit these two outrages to be similar in their effect. At this key moment, the Bush administration has to ensure that the reactions to Falluja and Mogadishu go down in the history books…
FIREFIGHTERS love John Kerry, and the Massachusetts senator loves them back. The International Association of Firefighters endorsed the presumptive Democratic nominee in September 2003, when other unions had flocked to Howard Dean's banner. When the Bush campaign aired commercials featuring…
Things Worth Fighting For
Jerusalem
IN THE LITANY OF CRITICISM of American foreign policy, one refrain is constant. Americans are accused of showing contempt for international law and the international community by challenging the newly ratified International Criminal Court. Nongovernmental organizations in particular have accused…
I'VE HAD A NONPARTISAN grudge against John Kerry for 18 years. This seems an appropriate time to air it.
"I DON'T FAULT George Bush for doing too much in the war on terror, as some do. I believe that he's done too little and done some things that he didn't have to. When the focus of the war on terror was appropriately in Afghanistan and on breaking al Qaeda, President Bush shifted his focus to Iraq…
Crisis Control
SCIENCE POLICY-WATCHERS now have the President's Council on Bioethics in their crosshairs. As the council has Bush's ear on issues such as stem-cell research, many scientists complain that the council's membership, revised at the end of February, tilts too far to the pro-life, anti-therapeutic…
I HAVEN'T HAD MUCH EXPERIENCE shopping for women's clothing. And on those rare occasions when I've trotted off to buy a pair of slippers or a wallet, say, as a gift for my deserving wife, the mere fact of being in a women's clothing store has made me deeply uncomfortable.
AMERICA'S MOST CELEBRATED WRITERS are against . . . well, it's hard to tell what exactly they are against. War, to some degree. President Bush, to a considerable extent. But, mostly, New York's literati gathered at Cooper Union's Great Hall last Thursday to announce that they were firmly, immovably…
The New (Cold-Blooded) Democrats
THE STATE OF THE ECONOMY is looming, as it always does, as a key issue in the presidential election. The Democrats are hammering President Bush for some 2 million jobs "lost" during his tenure in office, and for the sluggish rate of job growth during the current recovery. These attacks appear to…
Baghdad
AT THE END OF FEBRUARY, the White House announced changes in the membership of the President's Council on Bioethics. Anyone who followed the resulting controversy might be forgiven for supposing that the last smidgen of diversity of opinion in the Bush administration had been crushed beneath a…
Books in Brief
THE ARAB LEAGUE summit scheduled to begin in Tunisia on March 27 abruptly collapsed in disarray. Just as most of the league's 22 leaders--including a delegation from the Governing Council of Iraq--were preparing to head for Tunis, Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine ben Ali pulled the plug. The…
Against All Enemies
"OKAY. It doesn't seem all right to me, but what do I know? Nothing. What do they know? Everything. So I guess everything's okay."
London
TO ALLOW National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify under oath before the September 11 commission today, President Bush had to stand down from a claim of executive privilege. Bush was right to do that, but let's give the privilege its due.
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.
AS "MUHANED" RECALLS, the year was 1991, and he was south of Baghdad, on a trip to visit his parents, when an Iraqi army unit seized him without explaining why.
WE MAY NOT YET have mastered a way to insure perfect babies, but researchers are hard at work improving methods to eliminate imperfect ones.
Dick Clarke: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
BILL CAIN is a classic New Deal Democrat. Eighty years old, Cain grew up and lives in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, an old steel town about 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. He graduated from Greensburg High, was drafted into the Marines during World War II, and supported his wife and six kids on the…
After the Empire
Spin Sisters
I Recently Received An Invitation to my fiftieth-year high school reunion, and am impressed with how little interested I am in attending it. For many people, their adolescence was an awkward, painful, really hellacious time. Mine, on the contrary, was so pleasing that I sometimes think that I…
Studs Lonigan
MEDITERRANEAN EUROPE, a borderland between Christendom and Islam since the eighth century, has been the scene of bloody clashes in recent weeks. The March 11 massacre in Madrid, apparently perpetrated by Moroccan Islamic extremists, had no sooner receded from the front pages than riots convulsed…
Exploitation Flick
ON FRIDAY, MARCH 19, President Bush reiterated his commitment "to encourage reform and democracy in the greater Middle East as the alternatives to fanaticism, resentment, and terror." Anyone following the American media lately might actually believe that this policy is showing signs of success in…
Baghdad
I HEAR AND READ ALL THE TIME about Democratic fury; evidently, enraged Democrats are prepared to do whatever it takes to rid the country of George W. Bush's foul presence. Somehow Republican rage doesn't seem quite as newsworthy (and when it does show up, the storyline is usually "Republicans Angry…
"DEMOCRATS ROCK! Can you feel it?" hollers Michigan senator Debbie Stabenow. It is sometime after 7:00P.M. on March 25, and Stabenow is onstage at the National Building Museum in downtown Washington, D.C., addressing countless tables of Democratic donors and politicians, who are half-listening to…
"I also welcome the hearings because it is finally a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11. To them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you. We…
THE STRUGGLE AGAINST extremist Islam is not only military and diplomatic, it is also a war of ideas. In this battle there are few more important countries than Indonesia, whose 230 million people make it by far the largest Muslim country and democracy. It is also home to the largest concentration…
Books in Brief
Wise Men and Their Tales
SOMETIMES, the safe choice is the risky choice. Hollywood has learned that, for the time being at least, comic-book movies are gold. After the disastrous performance of 1997's Batman and Robin, movie studios turned away from comics. Then Avi Arad came to power at Marvel, the giant comic publisher,…
LAST TUESDAY, March 30, about four months after reporter Jack Kelley resigned in disgrace from USA Today, the New York Daily News reported that USA Today was investigating whether Kelley could face legal action. The Daily News item was the capstone to a disturbing story. Ten days before, on March…
JOHN KERRY reminds you of someone, but you can't put your finger on it, right?
JOHN KERRY is betting much of his presidential campaign on voter anger over lost American manufacturing jobs in the industrial Midwest. Seldom does a day go by without a Kerry attack on lost jobs in battleground states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Missouri, often wrapped up in hot rhetoric about…