113 articles
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION Tuesday received further support for its claims of a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda from an important source: new Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. Allawi, who has long claimed knowledge of the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship, reiterated these beliefs in an…
PERHAPS JOHN KERRY simply made the mistake of believing what he read in the New York Times. There it was, the lead headline on Thursday, June 17: "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie." Or perhaps he read the Los Angeles Times headline: "No Signs of Iraq-Al Qaeda Ties Found." Or the Washington Post: "Al…
Amazonia
IF THERE IS ANY PLACE in America where the anti-immigration message should receive a receptive hearing, it would seem to be Colorado. Few states have been as heavily affected by the influx of immigrants over the past dozen years. The number of immigrants has nearly tripled in that time, and…
Juan Carlos
AT THE CLOSE of the recent G-8 summit in Sea Island, Georgia, sighs of relief could be heard in palaces across the Middle East where unelected leaders wield near-absolute power.
A ROMANTIC. A DREAMER. An optimist. A man of conviction. In the few short days since President Reagan left this world, both his admirers and his critics have settled on a short-list of character traits that are supposed to capture his essence. Yet neither Reagan's admirers nor his critics have…
Rocky Mountain Hijinks
THE TORRENT of commentary on Ronald Reagan's political career has tended to overlook our 40th president's cultural conservatism. It was hard to miss, however, when he captured the presidency in 1980. Writing in Commentary a month before the election, political scientist James Q. Wilson observed…
Public Enemy
The Music of the Republic
WE HAVE HEARD a great deal in recent days about how Ronald Reagan brought a spirit of optimism to Washington after his election in 1980 and thereby renewed the nation's belief in itself after a period of self-doubt, pessimism, and "malaise." President Reagan said America's best days were still…
RONALD REAGAN'S legacy as a party builder has gotten short shrift. The Republicans were able to win a majority in the House in 1994 for the first time in 40 years, and then keep that majority in 1996 for the first time since 1928, because we were close students of Reagan. When House Republicans…
A BOOK CANNOT ELEVATE a president. That's true even for a book marketed by Dan Rather for an hour on 60 Minutes, its publication treated like a show-stopping event by the media, its author's tour seen as the equivalent of a high-octane political campaign, and its importance signified by the…
Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting our Brightest Young Minds by Jan and Bob Davidson with Laura Vanderkam (Simon & Schuster, 256 pp., $24). Quick, who are the least-served American schoolchildren? Apparently, it's not those who can't read their diplomas or speak the language. According to Jan and…
IT'S SETTLED, APPARENTLY. Saddam Hussein's regime never supported al Qaeda in its "attacks on America," and meetings between representatives of Iraq and al Qaeda did not result in a "collaborative relationship." That, we're told, is the conclusion of two staff reports the September 11 Commission…
I GENERALLY don't advocate drinking whisky for breakfast. But on occasion, when necessity dictates, it does have a way of setting the world right. I was on the fifth day of a Scotches of Scotland distilleries tour, stewing in my Highlands hotel perched on a bluff overlooking Moray Firth. My cell…
AS THE NATO SUMMITEERS descend upon Istanbul, the city of Constantine, Justinian, Mehmet the Conqueror, and Süleyman the Magnificent, one hopes that in between drinking sweet apple tea and noshing on baklava while looking over the Golden Horn, the American diplomats, military men, and bureaucrats…
LAST WEEK a federal appeals court judge compared the inauguration of George W. Bush to the ascensions of both Hitler and Mussolini, his point being that all three took power legally but were / are illegitimate office holders. "That is what the Supreme Court did in Bush v. Gore; it put somebody in…
SOMEWHERE in the deep dark recesses of Burbank, Jay Leno's writers rejoice. Having received the gift that keeps giving--Bill Clinton's tell-all, spin-all biography--they now have another present in the form of the Illinois U.S. Senate race, where Republican contender Jack Ryan is embroiled in a…
LIKE FINE CHAMPAGNE, former President Bill Clinton bubbled up to the top of the front-pages this week, popping and fizzing, spilling and overflowing into segments on 60 Minutes and Oprah and Larry King Live. It was just like old times. Clinton was hawking his new book, of course, My Life, which in…
VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY said yesterday that suggestions the former Iraqi regime did not have a relationship with al Qaeda are "not accurate," and said he would like to see the U.S. government declassify some of the intelligence that supports Bush administration claims about an Iraq-al Qaeda…
CAMPAIGN '04 will spend a lot of time focusing on the war in Iraq, and its cost in American and coalition lives--as well as the billions of dollars it has taken to wage the war, and the billions more that will be required to secure the peace.
FORMER VICE PRESIDENT Al Gore recently told an audience that "the [Bush] administration did not hesitate to heighten and distort public fear of terrorism after September 11th, to create a political case for attacking Iraq." With this in mind, I would to like draw your attention to a Project brief…
LATER THIS WEEK, the leaders of the Western world will gather in Istanbul for the NATO summit. There at the classical gateway between Europe and Asia as many as 60 heads of state will wrestle with the great problems of our time: the persistence of war and terror and the hope for democratic change…
THE WASHINGTON POST reported yesterday morning that an Iraqi present at a key al Qaeda summit may not be the same Iraqi listed on lists of officers of the Saddam Fedayeen captured in postwar Iraq.
LAST WEDNESDAY, the September 11 commission issued a staff "statement" that further complicated an already confusing issue: the nature of the relationship between the former Iraqi regime and al Qaeda.
BILL CLINTON'S book release is giving him more chances to take shots at the man who spent five years investigating him, Kenneth Starr. Starr resigned in 1999. That same year the independent counsel law, under whose authority he worked, was allowed to expire.
WHEN MARKETS TALK, politicians would do well to listen. The oil markets are doing more than mere talking--they are shouting for the attention of policymakers who seem determined not to listen.
EVEN AS THE LAST OF THE TRIBUTES to Ronald Reagan straggle out, there's an elementary fact about his presidency that anyone who didn't live through it might not have picked up from the coverage. It's the fact that, after years and years of frightening drift, suddenly you could tell that someone in…
Unflacked
AFTER THE COLLAPSE of communism in the early 1990s, visionaries foresaw a new global consensus. After the "end of history" came, logically, the end of sovereignty. Why would the world need independent governments when everyone agreed on fundamental questions?
IN EARLY JUNE, partisans of democracy in China commemorated the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre of June 3-4, 1989--one of the events of a remarkable year that dramatized the accuracy of Ronald Reagan's description of communism as evil. In retrospect, the killing of students and workers…
Flesh in the Age of Reason
RONALD REAGAN would be proud of George W. Bush. The president so many Americans are now so fondly remembering had to face down a contemptuous foreign policy establishment for years, when the received wisdom was that his policies were a failure. Reagan didn't win the Cold War without setbacks; Bush…
IT'S BEEN A ROUGH FEW MONTHS for the Saudi embassy in Washington. First there were the money embarrassments. On April 4, the Washington Post noted: "A federal probe has turned up $36 million in unreported withdrawals [from Riggs Bank] by Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington and his wife,…
The Smoking Diaries
JOHN DANFORTH is back in the public eye. He was Nancy Reagan's longstanding choice to preside at her husband's funeral, which was held on Friday, just a week after President Bush nominated Danforth to represent the United States at the United Nations. To understand why this former senator who…
RONALD REAGAN was the most popular American president since FDR. He was also the most hated president since FDR. The reason he was hated was that his policies were often trans-partisan in bewildering ways. The reason he was popular was that his policies worked. This fact is still a puzzle to most…
MY FAVORITE BOOK TITLE of all time is Sukarno: An Autobiography As Told To Cindy Adams, which was published by Bobbs-Merrill in the 1960s and later, so I've heard, reissued as Me and Sukarno by Cindy Adams. Not even Sukarno and Me. Ms. Adams, of course, is as highly respected a gossip columnist as…
The "Alleged Beheading" of Nicholas Berg
NINE MEN ran for president in 1980. Nine big issues would be decided by whoever won: taxes, monetary policy, the air traffic controllers' strike, deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe, missile defense, Soviet communism, anti-Communist wars of liberation, tax reform, national spirit. Ronald…
THE DEATH OF RONALD REAGAN brings to a close the most surprising political life of the 20th century. A century that through 1979 was notable for world wars, ideological mass murder, and the relentless advance of statism had a happy final act no one but he expected. If he had not lived and…
Law of Return
WE HAVE LOST a great president, a great American, and a great man. And I have lost a dear friend. In his lifetime Ronald Reagan was such a cheerful and invigorating presence that it was easy to forget what daunting historic tasks he set himself. He sought to mend America's wounded spirit, to…
Editor's Note: Natan Sharansky was born in Ukraine in 1948 and studied mathematics in Moscow. He worked as an English interpreter for the great Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, and himself became a champion of Soviet Jewry and a worker for human rights. Convicted in 1978 on…
FOLLOWING the long-ago apocalypse of World War I, the world seemed like a shellshocked battle-casualty remolded by surgeons into something new and terrible. For generations afterward, into the Second World War and out the other side, most people were afraid to look; nearly everyone was scared to…
WITH SAVED! having gone wide last week, the rest of America now has a chance to see Brian Dannelly's satire of life at an evangelical high school. Or, as the film's producer, Michael Stipe, put it: Saved! is "like those monster vampire high school kind of movies, only here the monsters are…
THE BRUTAL MURDER of Paul Johnson was just the latest atrocity by terrorist Wahhabis--extremist acolytes of the hate cult that's rooted in the heart of the Saudi state. And the lessons are simple:
MY INTRODUCTION to conspiracy theorist Mike Ruppert came at the Take Back America conference in early June, when I met Steve, a bearded man in a lumberjack shirt and worn jeans who runs Creative Spirituality booksellers, a roving book mobile that specializes in stocking book sales at meetings of…
WHEN WILL George Smiley and Karla begin to blog?
WHILE ALL EYES are focused on enemies who present clear and present dangers, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan, and North Korea, another country whose military was a chief concern during the '90s has faded to the background.
NEWT GINGRICH has been leading a secret life. Night after night for years he's been slipping out of the headquarters of the vast right-wing conspiracy, wolfing down spy novels and then reviewing them for Amazon.com. So prolific and proficient has he been at this pursuit that he has attained the…
IT IS HARD TO BELIEVE that it has been only one week since the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the D-Day invasion that liberated France from the Nazis. A lot has changed in a mere seven days.
IN THE FALL of 1981, Ronald Reagan placed a phone call from the Oval Office to a lawyer named Jesse Eschbach. Reagan had decided to nominate Eschbach to the federal bench and was calling to ask him to serve. Would he serve! Of course! Judge Eschbach later wrote Reagan to express "my deep…
HE PROMISED he'd be back. But much like his Terminator 2 liquid metal nemesis the T-1000, the question is: in what form.
IN LATE APRIL, a Beaumont, Texas, jury voted to award $1 billion to the family of a plaintiff who allegedly lost her life as a result of taking fen-phen, a drug combination popular among dieters in the 1990s before it was linked to heart-valve damage. The woman, who was morbidly obese and whose…
THE WHITE HOUSE, the Treasury Department, congressional Republicans, President Bush's reelection campaign--in unison, they rushed forward last week to tout the new job growth numbers. What's most striking is the economy is now on pace to create 2.8 million jobs in 2004, more than offsetting job…
ISRAELI JEWS prefer not to talk about the so-called demographic problem--the challenge of maintaining a Jewish majority in their country while honoring the rights of its large and growing Arab minority. Which is understandable. The very term conjures up illiberal images of a government classifying…
LAST SATURDAY I saw a movie so inept, so stupid, so generally and particularly wrong that I felt justified in not having paid much attention to movies over the past decade or so, but it also gave the peculiar kind of pleasure that only a genuinely bad movie can sometimes give. The movie is called…
American Gulag
Less is Moore
Evanston, Ill.
BENJAMIN CLARY--pale, spindly, and 18 years old--is on message. It's late in the afternoon on Thursday, June 3, in a dim corner of the Wardman Park Marriott hotel, a few miles from downtown Washington, D.C., and Ben is working the Wellstone Action booth at the Take Back America conference, an…
IF THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BLACKSMITHS AND BUGGYWHIP MANUFACTURERS had held a convention in 1910, in those last sullen moments before the Horseless Carriage put them all out of business, then this is what it must have felt like--the same forced cheerfulness laid over the same defeated air, the…
SOMETIMES WHEN I am deer hunting and futilely following a track, I come across the remains of an old stone wall at the top of one of Vermont's small mountains, a mile or more from the nearest road or cleared ground. It is always a melancholy sort of moment. Somebody, you think, once farmed this…
The Affair of the 39 Cufflinks
Letters to a Young Catholic
Books in Brief Myself and Strangers: A Memoir of Apprenticeship by John Graves (Knopf, 235 pp., $24). In a quiet way this memoir is very touching--and very American as well. John Graves, its author, is eighty-four. In going through old journals he'd kept from the late 1940s into the 1960s, prior to…
NELSON ROCKEFELLER is alleged to have described the artwork of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, famously difficult classics painted shortly after the Second World War, as "free-enterprise painting." And there, in microcosm, we find the conundrum that has bedeviled certain conservative intellectuals…
George W. Bush is going to win. He'll win the war, and he'll win the election. How do I know this? Needless to say, I don't. And, God knows, the Bush administration often seems to be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. But I've spent much of the last two weeks abroad, which (perhaps) gives…
Profiles in Chutzpah
IT WAS ABOUT SEVEN YEARS AGO when I first learned of my relationship with Charles R. Laster. Laster was delinquent on his Maryland state income taxes between January and December of 1992. He owed the state $588.55. The state put out a lien on him.
"Yet more than a year later, American troops still have not found any weapons of mass destruction (unless a single artillery shell, produced in the 1980s, that possibly contained sarin nerve gas, counts)." SO SAID Ivo Daalder and James M. Lindsay in the Los Angeles Times, on May 31, 2004. Such…
OF THE REASONS GIVEN for why the United States hasn't penetrated the anti-American mindset of the Arab and Muslim world, the Arab press has been among the more prominent. One might even say that al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations seem to have done a far better job of using Arab television…
PART Dune, part MacBeth, and part Plan 9 from Outer Space, The Chronicles of Riddick may be the most expensive B-movie ever made. Budgeted at $120 million, Riddick is director David Twohy's sequel to his 2000 effort, Pitch Black, which was budgeted at $23 million. Money, like power, often corrupts.
AT THE CAPITOL Wednesday at five, two hours before President Reagan's body is due to arrive at the Rotunda for the state funeral, buses of Marines and Navy sailors are pulling up near the Senate-side entrance. Staffers are pouring out of nearby House and Senate office buildings into the 90-degree…
"PEOPLE NEED A FAIRY TALE," Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, told Washington Post reporter Rick Weiss, explaining why scientists have allowed society to believe wrongly that stem cells are likely to effectively treat…
"RONALD REAGAN was great because Ronald Reagan was right." So declared Gipper speechwriter Peter Robinson, author of How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life, on my radio program Monday. Robinson's right, too, of course. There have been many gifted orators whose cause was evil; many "communicators" who…
TOM BROKAW and Dan Rather believe too much media attention has been heaped on Ronald Reagan after his death at 93 last weekend. And it's true Reagan, a modest man with much to be proud of, might have been embarrassed by so many glowing testimonials about him. But he was a strong believer in…
"WE THINK it's premature at this point to discuss any changes to currency," Anne Womack Kolton told the New York Times on Tuesday. Like most Americans, she was reacting to the death of Ronald Reagan, albeit in her own particular way. Kolton is a spokeswoman for the Treasury Department. The currency…
AFTER CATCHING the Michiko Kakutani review in the New York Times last week, I had to experience the simpering, moronic, cutesiness myself. Sheer disbelief drove me to it. And curiosity, myself always being interested in what one writes if one's a bankable writing franchise. And masochism. Did I…
THERE'S NO QUESTIONING the importance of covering the passing of Ronald Reagan--a man whose impact on America and the world was profound. Plus it's been more than 30 years since the capital has seen a presidential funeral. But such historic moments have a habit of overshadowing news that, under…
SAUDI ARABIA, in which Wahhabism is the state form of Islam, has a long history of vandalizing and demolishing historical monuments. Wahhabi doctrine holds that raising gravestones or tombs or maintaining graveyards constitutes idolatry, known in Arabic as shirk, a grievous sin. So does preserving…
SO NOW WE KNOW. The U.S. economy created 248,000 non-farm jobs in May, OPEC decided to increase output only slightly, consumers reined in their spending a bit despite the better jobs market, perhaps because the value of their homes increased a mere 1 percent in the first quarter, and the Economist…
SENATOR JOHN KERRY issued a respectful and respectable statement in response to the news of President Reagan's death on Saturday. "Ronald Reagan's love of country was infectious," he said. "Even when he was breaking Democrats' hearts, he did so with a smile and in the spirit of honest and open…
Paris
OF THE MAKING of literary anthologies, there is no end--and no visible end, as well, to the routine disappearance of such volumes. The critical intelligence required to compile meaningful selections is rarer than is commonly thought, though it need not be. Back in 1929, exactly seventy-five years…
GIVEN ALL THE CONFUSION and frenetic American behavior surrounding the June 30 transfer of sovereignty in Iraq, it is hard not to believe that the Bush administration is winging it day by day. At one moment, the U.N. envoy to Iraq, former Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi, is following…
IN HIS POEM "Esthétique du Mal," Wallace Stevens speaks of "the lunatic of one idea." Melvin J. Lasky might be thought such a person. He had the energy of a lunatic, and, though widely read and interested in everything, he could nonetheless be described a "one idea" man.
Ninety Feet From Fame
FROM MASSACHUSETTS mill towns to Southern California suburbs, local police, fire, and emergency management agencies are using a cascade of new federal homeland security grants to go shopping. They've bought some $6 billion worth of chemical weapons suits, emergency command centers, laser-assisted…
Ancient Greek Athletics
Power and Weakness
Allies at War
MY WIFE is due to give birth any day now to our first child (thank you, and yes, we are registered) and I would like to take this occasion to make a request of all fathers: Please don't give me any more advice about the first year of the baby's life.
IF YOU WANTED TO, you could easily make the case that America is retreating in Iraq. Under relentless attack in the press, with a nasty campaign fight on its hands, the Bush administration has moved from its natural defensive crouch to a position that at times looks fetal. The president's stout…
THE DOG BARKS, but the caravan moves on. This Arab saying has been used privately by Bush administration officials to characterize the progress that continues, despite all difficulties, in Iraq. There's some truth to it. The turnover of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government--a measure of…
Buy The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America
Plan Ten from Outer Space
SINCE COLIN POWELL first brought Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the world's attention as "an associate and collaborator" of Osama bin Laden in February 2003, we have witnessed firsthand his rapid rise to the top of the terrorist heap. He has left his mark on attacks around the world, from Iraq to Turkey…
Books in Brief The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations by James Surowiecki (Doubleday, 320 pp., $24.95). James Surowiecki, business columnist of the New Yorker, explores a big idea broached by the…
Los Angeles
HERE IS HOW the June 6 Washington Post covered the death of Ronald Wilson Reagan, the fortieth president of the United States and arguably the most significant American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt:
BILLIONAIRE AND INTERNATIONAL FINANCIER George Soros, who is bankrolling the campaign against Bush, yesterday compared the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal to the attacks of September 11. "I think that those pictures [of prison abuse] hit us the same way as the terrorist attack itself--not quite…
THE GOOD NEWS is that at no point during Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban do Harry and Ron head out to the Hogwarts swimming pool.
SADDAM HUSSEIN "always had links with international terrorist organizations."
PRESIDENT BUSH last week called elections the "most important step" in a five-point plan he outlined for Iraq's transition to self-rule. If successful, elections can supply the ingredient so far lacking in its post-Saddam governing arrangements--popular legitimacy.
WHEN THE IRAQI GOVERNING COUNCIL announced the appointment of British educated neurologist and anti-Saddam dissident Iyad Allawi as Iraq's new Interim Prime Minister on May 28, you would think that many Iraqis would have approved of the choice, or at least seen Allawi's selection as a sign that the…
ON TUESDAY NIGHT Democrat Stephanie Herseth narrowly won a special election in South Dakota. Herseth's victory coupled with the special election win of Democratic Rep. Ben Chandler in February in Kentucky's sixth district might give Democrats reason to argue that the results are a rejection of…
OLD-LINE POPULISTS and left-leaning politicians are fond of setting "Main Street," where the votes are, against "Wall Street," where the money is. The latter, inhabited by fat cats, price gougers, insider traders, and assorted corporate felons, enriches itself by overcharging the doughty denizens…
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.
IT HAD ALL THE TRAPPINGS of an international summit. By the time Ralph Nader visited Senator John Kerry at the Democrat's campaign headquarters on May 19, the meeting had been hyped for days. Washington salivated in anticipation. Reporters huddled outside Kerry HQ looked as though they had been…